I don't read DeBoer enough to predict what he'll say, but I know that there's a long and illustrious history of far-leftists helping the right against the center, and then being *happy* when things get worse, because the worse the better. Capitalism and/or liberalism and/or the United States are inveterately evil, and it's better for the evil to be open and unmasked in a way that wakes up the people of the world, than to be hidden and devious in a way that enables it to sustain itself.
Any decade now, there will finally be a good revolution where good socialists that will all act altruistically can rise up and lead the workers to utopia. This time jealousy or a hunger for power or a desire for retribution won't cause internal fraction and lead one person to sieze control and spawn a blood-soaked dictatorship. This time it will work.
In 1931, the KPD under the leadership of Ernst Thälmann internally used the slogan "After Hitler, our turn!", strongly believing that a united front against Nazis was not needed and that a Nazi dictatorship would ultimately crumble due to flawed economic policies and lead the KPD to power in Germany when the people realized that their economic policies were superior.[22][23]
My main worry is that we'll see a surge in antisemitism, with left and right uniting to scapegoat "the Jews" for dragging us into "Israel's war" (with the lefties making an exception for Jews who repudiate Judaism).
My understanding is that leftists mostly have a problem with the state level actions of Israel rather than disliking Judaism itself (modulo kooks on r/atheism).
Did I miss a memo where where left has a problem with the Torah or something?
This isn't about mere "criticism of (current) Israeli policies."
I'm no fan of Bibi -- in fact, I'm more a disciple of Judah Magnes, a "spiritual Zionist" who sought to make Israel a pluralist liberal democracy -- and I despise bigots like Smotrich and Ben-Gvir.
Nonetheless, the notion that Israel is "Settler/Colonial State" is antithetical to the core narrative of Exile (or Diaspora) and Return that has identified Jews throughout the world for 2,000 years. Meanwhile, the very raison d'etre for "Palestine" -- starting with anti-Jewish riots in the 1920s (long before any "Nakba") -- is "Jews not welcome here."
The left's problem with the Torah lies in regarding it (and for many, monotheism itself) as a repository of superstition -- an anachronism, at best (rendering Zionism as a fraud).
Not the Torah, but anti-semitism on the Left is a leitmotif of at least the last 150 years of history going back to Marx and certainly including such things as the treatment of Jews in Communist states.
Plus there's a lot of anti-semitism in certain communities of color that got picked up by the Left, as well as the Left's historic support of the more violent factions of the Black liberation movements in the 1960's, which included plenty of anti-semites (Nation of Islam types, for instance) and who accused the mainstream civil rights movement of collaborating with Jews.
Now TBC, there's more going into the Left's position on Palestine than mere anti-semitism, but yes, there are serious veins of anti-semitism on the Left
I also have that fear. Already on college campuses there’s an exception on the Left for Jews who identify explicitly as anti-Zionist. I don’t think they care so much about Judaism per se, but Jews are identified with Israel, even tangentially. Meanwhile, the anti-war faction on the right will surely start singling out Israel - and its Jewish supporters in the U.S. - if things get bad.
I couldn’t help but think of the folks, including round here, who offered various forms of the Trump madman theory about how the world had been and would be more stable under Trump.
Freddie is a brilliant prose stylist, and I enjoyed his takes on a) education, b) mental health, c) back in the ancient days of circa 2021, when woke nonsense seemed like a bigger problem in American society than impending Authoritarianism 2: Electric Boogaloo, I enjoyed Freddie ripping wokethought to shreds.
Also, sometimes he manages to be surprisingly poetic and tender, like in his reminiscence about the girl with whom he lost his virginity, or his magical-realist ode to his beloved cat.
A lot of this is still very true and why I still read his work - fortunately most of it is not paywalled. It's just so weird how he's a complete maniac in these comments.
He is a very good writer. His articles on standardized tests are really good and what drew me in because it's an important issue for me. Obviously, he and I are poles apart on economic issues because he's a marxist and I believe in a market based economy. I understand why people on SB don't like him but you don't have to agree with someone's politics in order to recognize his/her skills as a writer and read his other stuff.
Freddie is not to be listened to on anything other than his actual expertise - education and mental health. On every other topic, it’s doctrinaire leftist pablum and extremely little knowledge.
“1. America’s top priority in the Middle East should be decreasing our involvement in the region. President after president keeps vowing to do that, they’ve all failed, and now Trump has arguably failed most of all.”
He had his faults but gotta give it to Biden here.
I do not mean to be personal but your comment is sufficiently flippant that it does cause me to ask if by any chance you are the parent of military-age children, who may now go in harm's way for "Ayatollah up next", whatever outcome in Iran that entails, with a commander-in-chief who is a crapulent moron, so easily manipulated by Netanyahu and so gruesomely committed to making policy on the basis of personal pique that he makes the likes of Videal and Galtieri on the eve of the Falklands War look brilliant by comparison.
Yup, let’s imagine. Up next in Imagination Land we have the Bomb Iran ride where after the first big drop, Fudro, the happy Mullahs peacefully return to their Mosques to study and pray while finally the dream is realized, an an authoritarian Middle East regime dissolves peacefully into a stable democracy rather than an anarchic and bloody civil war with far reaching bad consequences.
Isn't this straightforward based on the word bloody? I mean I can't really do the math but it seems hard to contemplate a bloody civil war that doesn't result in more suffering than Iran's relatively modest adventurism.
It's not even clear to me that the violence around the world would go down that much. Maybe in some galaxy brain way you could balance the utilitarian books so that suffering goes down on some timeline but that seems distant and remote.
It's already, and always has been, bloody. Am I fully convinced that we should go all in on regime change? Not yet. But I've been open to the idea for a while that dealing with Iran might be preferable to another 45 years of playing whack-a-mole in the Middle East.
U.S. involvement in the Middle East is a function of the value of oil to the global economy. If oil is relatively meaningless, the region's regional, ethnic and religious conflicts will have little importance. The U.S. imports very little oil from the ME, but Europe, India and China have bigger stakes in what flows out the Straits of Hormuz. In that light, the U.S. investment in electrification was arguably the most important policy step in reducing our involvement.
The JCPOA didn't prevent Iran from building nuclear weapons. All it did was delay the building of nuclear weapons (which was supposed to end this year, by the way). Obama was making the same type of bet Clinton and Bush made letting China into the WTO.
It successfully convinced Iran to stop enriching uranium beyond 3% level and allowed for constant checks to keep trust in place. They only started enriching again in 2019 after Trump backed off.
Iran has wanted to destroy Israel since 1979. A ten year wait to do so is a nuisance, but it can be overcome. Believing that Iran would voluntarily give up nuclear weapons forever means believing the mullahs have been lying about their goals for 45 years.
If they were so dogmatic they would have never signed the deal, right?
It's tough to disentangle how much is rhetoric vs genuine zeal, but the best way to prevent them from getting a bomb was to ensure we have controls to see if they ever enrich beyond levels consistent with energy production.
The Israeli regime (and the Likud's ideology) has little respect for the Jewish Diaspora. They see us as living in "galut" (Exile) and think that we all belong in Israel.
To phrase it as Trump and Cruz might, it's our paramount interest because Tehran would be able to threaten our key cities like Tel Aviv and maybe even New York one day. Defending ourselves against the Iranian threat with the Iron Dome depletes resources we could use to defend our borders with Lebanon and Syria, or help Ukraine when our NATO allies' efforts aren't enough.
This is such a weird argument. Israel has nukes. It gets attacked all the time. Nukes haven't proven to be that useful. On the other hand, nukes in the hand of a failed state…that could be really dangerous
Countries with nuclear weapons are attacked sometimes (including us on 9/11!) but their existence isn't threatened. Israel has not been at risk of being destroyed by anything less than a nuclear attack since at least 1973. Pakistan is probably the least stable country with nuclear weapons and somewhat surprisingly nothing's gone horribly wrong there either, at least not yet.
This is not really responsive to his point, which I take to be that the deal was working while in effect. His point isn’t that it resolves their hostility to Israel in the long term.
In the meantime they were using Obamas sanctions relief money to build missiles capable of delivering nukes, and infrastructure that could be used to rush towards a bomb once JCPOA ended.
Well, it was their money. And there are always tradeoffs in an agreement. We got them to dismantle their nuclear program for a good long time (until you know who came along).
10 year delays are good! It’s a goal well worth aiming for!
Never understood the “it’s only a 10 year agreement!” anti-JCPOA argument…that term buys you 10 years of peace(-ish), of inspections, normalization, connections, improved intelligence…10 years to convince the regime to never resume WMD programs or maybe 10 years to work on bringing the regime down. And yes, 10 years to work on JCPOA II…
I’d take a 10 year promise by Putin to not nuke Kiev…Or a 10 year moratorium on NK missile tests…
Only accepting agreements that solve every problem, and solve them forever is the classic mistake of forgoing obtainable Good in favor of unobtainable Perfect…or however that saying goes…
I think the issue is that 10 years of relaxed sanctions without solving the core problem (Iran is governed by implacable fundamentalists) would have strengthened Iran and as a result magnified the scale of the problem.
"a 10 year promise by Putin to not nuke Kiev" is basically making the case Iran hawks have against the JCPOA. We are saying "if you don't project regional influence by having a nuke, then in exchange we'll walk back some major sanctions so you have more money to project regional influence without a nuke."
And so Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis, became more threatening proxies by Iran (until US and Israelis took deliberate action to weaken them). It is as if we offered Putin a "you can't nuke Kiev" treaty in exchange for letting him do whatever he wants in Eastern Ukraine. Obviously the Russia hawks would find this laughable, and they'd have good reason to.
And the deal probably could have been extended. And if they refused to extend it then at least they're starting from low levels of enrichment with maximal transparency to the international community.
There is a Middle East hawk “everything bagel” component to some of this debate that Matt describes, and we really never had any way of accurately predicting outcomes. Would they wind up building nukes? Could we wait and see organic regime change? I guess we’ll see how cutting the Gordian knot works out.
We would not be here. We would not have Donald Trump going to war on a whim and on Netanyahu’s timeline. In the best case we don’t go to war, in the medium case we go to war with better leaders in Israel and the US, and in the worst case we go to war on a timeline we choose and not one chosen for us by another country.
Every treaty or international agreement in the world is temporary by definition; the terms dictated by reality can always change. If you want a permanent solution you want regime change
"... If you want a permanent solution you want regime change...."
Agreed. And even then, "...the terms dictated by reality can always change."
Success is always temporary. Temporary successes are successes. The JPCOA was a success. That's why Trump wanted to tear it up -- because it was Obama's success.
Would the treatment be considered successful if, after some delay (coinciding with the duress of the "therapy"), the cancer nonetheless metastasized and killed the patient?
Often, yes. If it gave the patient ten more years of life with friends and family, when they made a difference in the world and enjoyed themself.
Death comes for us all, so delaying death from cancer by ten years is a real win, even if it’s less of a win than eliminating the cancer so that the patient gained twenty years of life before something else killed them.
More important than the sunset provision is that the JCPOA handed a bunch of sanctions relief to a country we KNEW would use that money to fund its terrorist proxies, destabilize its neighbors (including our NATO ally Turkey), and shoot at U.S. forces in Iraq. It was a bad deal, and it wasn’t just the Israelis who said so. All of our Arab allies said the same thing.
That doesn’t excuse Trump from withdrawing - if nothing else, American credibility requires us to stick to deals once we’ve made them.
I've written multiple times here that Iranian nuclear weapons are not a direct threat to America because Iran has no method to deliver them to America. The much greater Iranian threat to America is to our soldiers stationed in the Middle East, which the JCPOA allowed Iran to attack more.
Whether or not the JCPOA itself made it easier to attack American soldiers in the Middle East, one may in fact question whether having vulnerable forces in that area fits with our strategic interests. I say "no."
This seems pretty blinkered to me. In terms of overall risk I’d take funded proxies over nuclear arms any day. I’d prefer a non nuclear but more terrorist funding NK for instance. The terrorist just don’t do that much damage to us compared to how difficult nukes make the game, and how bad the tail outcomes are.
Iran's oil revenues are around $60 billion every year. Nations always find the funds for their highest priorities. It's not like absent the return of their own funds to them they would have shut down all support for their foreign policy priorities.
As SwainPDX, ten years buys you a lot. Maybe if Clinton won in 2016, we would've had a detente. Maybe we'd largely be back to where we were, but it would've bought us time.
Iran is run by complete bastards, but I don't think that they would've lasted as long as they did, if they were a suicidal death cult that can't be reasoned with. They make and stick to deals all the time.
The entire theory of “Iran will nuke Israel” is based around the theory that the entire Iranian leadership has a death wish and wants this so badly they’re willing to die in nuclear hellfire. And I guess for the sake of argument that might be true. But even if it is: the thing about aging leaders is that no matter how suicidal they are, over time they tend towards dying and being replaced by people who don’t share the same death wish.
You’re not wrong. But I’m not willing to extend the benefit of the doubt to Iran when they’ve done nothing to earn it. They have an official policy to eradicate another country (complete with a countdown clock to Israel’s destruction in Tehran) and a nuclear weapons program. The rest of the world is entitled to take them at their word. If they want to correct that interpretation, they could do so easily by changing their official policy.
Yep! And also, having a an unstable country run by a bunch of crazy people is not good, even if most of them aren't crazy enough to commit mass suicide. Someone sufficiently crazy may get sufficient access one day.
That is just a straight up lie that you are repeating.
If Iran refused to renew the JCPOA at the end of the treaty then the sanctions would have been placed back on them.
It wasn't a promise of indefinite sanction relief in exchange for a temporary delay of nuclear development. But these deals almost always have to be renewed.
The fact that the JCPOA needed to be renewed was good for the US. In 10 years the US might decide that we need the JCPOA to have a greater focus on ensuring Iran is not developing bioweapons. If we had made the original JCPOA indefinite then it would have been nearly impossible to renegotiate to have more inspections to prevent bioweapons.
Bringing a billion people out of abject poverty is a good thing. But the WTO bet was that with entry, China would be convinced liberalize politically and become a more productive member of the "international community." China has not done that. Obama bet that easing the sanctions on Iran would convince Iran to become a more productive member of the international community. They did not.
This logic suggests never making any agreement because it might not last forever. Arms control has always involved temporary agreements that get renewed or replaced - that's how diplomacy works.
This sounds like the take that vaccines don’t prevent COVID and staying at home didn’t prevent COVID, so we might as well have run out into the streets licking doorknobs in April 2020.
This logic suggests never making any agreement because it might not last forever. Arms control has always involved temporary agreements that get renewed or replaced - that's how diplomacy works.
I don’t want American money and American lives lost to try and enhance Israel’s position versus Iran. This is the worst thing Trump has done and I am sad to live in this timeline.
Dude I'm a Jew with family in Israel and this is an insane take. We can't just run our foreign policy on attacking the enemies of every country where a lot of American citizens live
There are also Americans who live in Iran and the West Bank. It would be insane to claim that we should therefore take the sides of those governments, or claim opposition means you are bigoted against Arabs or Persians!
>700,000 American citizens live in Israel and would all be killed if Iran nuked Tel Aviv.<
And many millions of Iranians would die in the ensuing nuclear counterattack mounted by Israel. Which is why it is virtually certain a nuclear-armed Tehran would never make such a suicidal move.
I'm half-Jewish and pretty livid that Trump just invited an escalation of state sponsored terrorism against Jews and Americans and you can bet your dollar against American Jews. Not to mention an invitation for both the far left and isolationist right to increase their own anti semitism here at home.
Wait, you think this action makes those people *less* likely to be injured or killed? How many of them have had their lives thrown into disaster already this week because of the war being started? How many have died?
If you can extend that argument to say that we should make a firm commitment to giving Ukraine the arms it needs to win because a good number of Americans have volunteered to fight alongside them, then yeah sure count me in.
THANK YOU for referring directly to money and lives lost, or potentially lost, and not using the offensively glib term “blood and treasure,” which glosses over the very real matters at stake.
Iran has made it very clear that its intention is to destroy America along with Israel. That they’ll go after the Big Satan after dealing with the Little Satan. They have school children recite “Marg Bar Amrika marg bar Israil” (Death to America Death to Israel) like American kids say the pledge of allegiance.
This idea that America’s interest is only to help Israel’s posture against Iran is absurd.
America’s interest is in preventing a regime sworn to America’s destruction, that has killed scores of Americans, and that seeks to eliminate it does not seek a nuclear weapon.
The purpose of having a nuclear weapon is not just being able to launch it. It’s being able to use conventional force, while having international actors being deterred from responding.
But non-nuclear countries and forces attack our troops and interests now, without apparently fearing we’ll nuke them. Israel even more so!
I’m not saying I don’t believe in nuclear deterrence, but I think it is a deterrent against existential threat. Once Iran had a nuke, we or Israel couldn’t regime-change them. But i don’t see what capability to harm the US they’d gain by having a nuke.
I don't actually imagine it's very likely we end up doing anything more in Iran militarily than we just did. Certainly the Tucker-verse WWIII ravings are deranged nonsense. It seems fine given the situation.
Now I don't particularly think we've done a very good job guiding the situation at basically any point in history. Trump absolutely got played by Bibi. But on whatever conceivable trajectory the Iranian regime ends up out of this conflict, "Fordow is no longer a piece on the board" seems like an obvious improvement.
>>>"Fordow is no longer a piece on the board" seems like an obvious improvement.<<<
It's not so obvious if (1) Fordow survives in part, or (2) they've built other facilities we don't know about, or (3) they rebuild-repair it.
And one itsy-bitsy problem with a direct US attack on Iran is it stands a good chance of strengthening the regime domestically. Remember how united we were after 911?
"Regime change quickly leading to a liberal order willing to enter into verifiable agreements with the international community" would be a wonderful outcome. It seems to me it's not a particularly likely outcome.
This is an important point. The hope has always been that the next generation of Iranians would have different opinions about the world than the current one does. I think it's unlikely that today's events, and whatever else follows, will be constructive for that outcome. You can kill a dictator or change a regime, but if you cause the people to sympathize with the regime, something like it will grow back.
Iranians HATE their regime 80/20 by the best estimates of (not even hawkish) international human rights organizations.
You don’t have to indulge in Bush-era self-delusion just to recognize the simple likelihood that THIS attack is NOT likely to galvanize them for that same regime.
It MAY unify the elites, and there’s some indication that may already have been happening in the last week, but even that is not likely to last.
The current administration and congress is one of the most despised in American history and if any country bombed the US, Trump would have 80% approval ratings. The rally around the flat effect is incredibly powerful.
Sure, but the rally around the flag effect has proven true across many different countries and cultures. Is there a reason why you think it will not impact here? If you say it out loud, does it sound like something the Bush Administration would have said in 2003 about Iraq?
Yes, that’s why they are more likely to rally around their hated regime if they get attacked and we are more likely to rally against our hated regime if we get attacked.
> Iranians HATE their regime 80/20 by the best estimates of (not even hawkish) international human rights organizations.
While this is certainly true for US based Iranians and a fair number of Iranian elites, I never know how true these things are among the wider populace. I hope you're right.
I don't doubt that it's true. But it isn't necessary to get the Iranian people to *like* the regime. They just have to see it as the lesser of two evils.
Sure, the Iranian people hate their government. But the reasons for that hate have little to do with their relations with the US. Giving the people a good reason to hate the US runs the risk of replacing the dictatorial Iranian regime that hates the US with a democratic Iranian regime that hates the US.
One of the systemic problems the US has had in the Middle East is that a fair election in most countries will bring in a government that hates the US and Israel. It's hard to say "the people in these countries hate us because we keep bombing them, they have a point and they should be governed by people that hate us" because that's against the US national interest and national security. But, if the alternative is being opposed to democracy in those countries, then you're going to get the Saudi Arabia / UAE problem, where the people generally hate their government and hate the US for propping it up. See also the Shah.
Sam Harris had an interesting pod guest the other day. His big point was that it seems like this dilemma may have been inherent to political Islam, but also that political Islam may have now run its course.
He rooted this in an awakening that happened in the late-1800s Islamic world, where defeat by Europeans threatened to discredit the entire religion. Leading theorists at the time concluded that Islam needed to embrace technological change, religious piety, and unity in order to prove that Islamic civilization still enjoyed the favor of Allah. But in the ensuing power struggles, only the pietistic faction won out, and the modernizers were rejected for modernizing too fast while the unifiers kind of just floundered under longstanding divisions.
If that’s the case, then it’s quite obvious that the pietists — like the IRI regime — never stood a chance of keeping up with technology, and it was only a matter of time until they were discredited by their inability to compete. If so, I do kind of hope that the modernizers and unifiers might be able to step in with a lighter touch this time, resolve the dilemma on their own terms, and forge the next stage of the Middle East’s history.
There certainly is a retreat to pietism in Islam as they realised the scale of the military-technological dominance of Europe - referring to the Ottoman Empire as the “Sick Man of Europe” got started during the run-up to the Crimean War - and the Ottomans, who had been technologically superior in the 15th and early 16th century and at least equal until the late 17th, absolutely understood that they were deeply behind after the thorough spankings they got from Napoleon and Russia around the turn of the 18th to the 19th century.
I’m just not convinced that this has been discredited. There certainly are plenty of liberal Muslims living in the Middle East (look at all the fights over requiring Iranian women to wear the headdress; that’s firmly a liberal v pietist battle) and I think it’s certainly plausible that they could impose a democracy somewhere - but they won’t win every election forever, and if Muslim conservatives are going to be relentlessly hostile to the West and Christian and Jewish conservatives are going to be relentlessly hostile to the Islamic world, then - unless you somehow see political change that results in both sorts of conservative becoming deeply marginal and the dominant right/centre-right position being right-wing liberalism (ie a version of American libertarianism that compromises with reality, unlike the LP) - I don’t see how the fact that a Western country with a liberal government might get on OK with a Muslim country with a liberal government will help at all. Neither government will be able to last (due to domestic dynamics) for long enough for anything useful to be achieved.
Hawks always believe if they attack a dictator the country will welcome it. That doesn't seem to be the normal outcome. You often get a rally around the flag effect:
Yes the dictator sucks but he is better than the foreigner who doesn't have our interest at heart.
I mean if I was Iranian I'd be very skeptical that Donald Trump and Bibi Netanyahu want a prosperous Iran. A prosperous Iran could quickly become the regional power.
No no, this is so wrong. You're forgetting when the outraged British people rose up to overthrow Churchill and his band of warmongers during the Blitz.
Except when they rose up against Ghadafi. Or Assad. Or the Tsar.
Yes, for every one of them, there’s a Castro or Maduro. But it should be noted that relatively few dictators die peacefully in office — I forget the recent statistic precisely, but it was somewhere between 1 in 6 and 1 in 4, IIRC. The rest either flee and die in exile, or die from coups or uprisings.
Given that they’re all brutal and cause significant damage to their societies, I don’t see as much harm in occasionally rolling the dice whenever an opportunity presents itself. If democracy has only a 1/6 chance of breaking out, but also only a 10% chance of sticking, then basically most of the world is doomed to stay under autocracy unless the dice get rolled. It turns into a volume game, just like dating or sales: most attempts fail, but you can’t win if you don’t go for volume.
They didn’t rise up against those dictators when an outside power sent in an attack to threaten those dictators - they rose up against the Tsar during a war that felt like him dragging them into a quagmire elsewhere; they rose up against Ghaddafi and Assad during the Arab spring, when uprising was spreading everywhere, and in those cases they got outside help after they started, but didn’t take an outside strike as the cue to rise up.
Ghaddafi’s downfall was very much assisted by intervention. Intervention to help the Tsar utterly failed, same as it did against the CCP.
My point is, there is no ONE single failure mode that ALWAYS goes through the path of “rally around the flag”. We’re talking about an extremely diverse set of historical examples that belies any simplistic categorization or “iron rules”. But all we’re getting in this discussion right now are “X failed so Y *must* also fail”.
As a history nerd, it’s really hard to take anyone seriously right now.
I remember the huge surge of anti-American Chinese nationalism that occurred when we accidentally bombed the Chinese embassy in Serbia. And they *liked* us back then. I can't imagine too many Iranians harbor fond feelings for us right now.
Haven’t several of the Israeli bombs hit residential buildings that housed people other than the relevant targets? Do we know the US strikes haven’t done similar? Do Iranians know which strikes are which?
That assumes the populace generally sees a big distinction between our bombing of a weapon site and Israel's raining missiles on Tehran and Iranian TV.
I wouldn’t describe Trump as getting played here. He likes winners and Israel threw some very impressive opening punches. And the ask was pretty limited - Israel cleared the Iranian skies and took the retaliatory hits, and only really needed the bunker busters for Fordo. We don’t mind helping with missile and drone interception, because that’s the future of warfare and our troops need the training.
If he got us engaged in the morass of Gaza, I’d say he got played big time.
It makes the US look like a garbage negotiating partner. For all Trump saying he was working towards a deal, and this is what we got. And if Iran eventually gets a bomb, they have plenty more incentive now to use it.
Every country in the world should be sprinting to a nuke now. That's really bad.
>And if Iran eventually gets a bomb, they have plenty more incentive now to use it.<
They'll have virtually zero incentive to use it. It's national suicide. They want it for the same reason everybody else wants it: deterrence. It's pretty obvious why that particular want is well-founded.
Citation? Yes, some of their rhetoric is obviously bluster, but Iran very much has radically aggressive goals it wants to pursue. I don't think they'd randomly bomb Israel on Day 1 (though I also don't think they wouldn't) but they'd certainly use the threat of it against all kinds of countries.
Citation? LOL. I don't have a link to the future I can provide. It obviously would be suicidal for any country to use nuclear weapons against a confirmed nuclear power like Israel and the US. Where's your citation that Iran would "certainly" threaten nuclear attacks "against all kinds of countries"?
It may end after today . . . for the time being. (We'll see if Iran responds asymmetrically, and when). But is Fordow no longer on the board? I'm sure the MOP is a powerful tool here, but it's a little hard to do battle damage assessment for something buried that deep. Maybe we took it out; maybe we didn't. How would we know?
I don't think any of this was Trump's plan. He got maneuvered into a place where this was kinda the obvious choice against his own broader instincts. He's not driving any of it. He's playing to Bibi's drum.
This seems to completely disregard Iran's agency, particularly point 7:
"But the problem with not offering Iran upside is that if Iran doesn’t get upside in a deal, then there’s no deal. You end up with either a nuclear Iran or a war."
The upside for Iran is not getting bombed! They could have dismantled their enrichment program altogether rather than continuing to push the envelope. They could have stopped funding proxies to attack the US and their neighbors. However, despite their belligerence, what has become apparent in the last few years is just how weak their position actually is. Maybe they were just counting on us being gun shy. Perhaps they'll actually engage in good faith now that they know better.
The whole "stop destabilizing the region and focus on rich" path is right there for the taking! So many of Iran's neighbors are coming around to it too.
This. Iran’s posture is ideological, not rational. There is zero reason for Iran and Israel to fight, except that Iran keeps threatening and proxy-attacking Israel. All they need to do is cut that out, stop the florid death to America crap, and be a normal ass country.
Why would Iran accept living under US military domination? The history of the US in Iran is us trying to install a dictator who will follow our orders.
Ruhollah, is that you? Iran could just choose to be a chill country.
Argue what you want about the past (I'm not denying it) but what does "US military domination" even mean? Basically everybody (including Iranians) just wants Iran to chill out and focus on enjoying its oil wealth and behaving responsibly.
Did the president claim any legal authority at all to do this, or is it just now understood that the president can attack anyone he wants and no one questions it?
I'm not a defender of Donald Trump about basically anything, but the ship sailed on bothering to seek congressional approval for anything other than full-scale ground invasions a long time ago.
I don't think it has to be congressional approval in every case, but there has generally been some kind of claimed legal basis. Kosovo was a NATO operation, so the president could say we were honoring our treaty commitments, which have the force of law. Obama cited a UN resolution to provide justification for bombing Libya. A lot of stuff got packaged into the broad post-9/11 authorization for the use of force. Sometimes a person could claim that they are responding to an imminent threat to US property or citizens.
Was anything like that claimed in this case, or is the doctrine now that the president needs no legal basis? I agree it's a slippery slope, but that would be a major slide.
Hasn’t there been a lot of bombing in the past 30 years outside of those sorts of activities? All the drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen and bombed buildings in Sudan and who knows where else. Has all of that been authorized?
Definitely not an expert but I do think a lot of stuff that was connected in some way to counterterrorism was represented as being authorized by this post-9/11 congressional resolution.
No one understands congressional dysfunction like congresspeople. If anyone had faith congress could act nimbly in the timeframe required by foreign policy they might actually be interested in doing that
You’re not wrong, but it’s been that way for ages. What was Obama’s authority to attack Libya? Or Biden’s authority to attack the Houthis? I don’t believe Clinton got congressional authorization for the Kosovo airstrikes either.
Libya was done under a UN Security Council resolution; the US is a signatory to the UN Treaty, ratified by Congress, so there's an argument that Congress delegated the war-making power to the UNSC by that ratification.
The Houthis were self-defense initially (in that they attacked US shipping) and was ratified under the War Powers Act, AIUI.
The big difference this time is that Trump offered not even a fig-leaf of a legal justification.
Yes, but I’m not sure why that would matter. Perhaps if we intervened to directly defend a NATO ally, one could argue that Congress approved it by ratifying the mutual defense treaty in the first place. But none of these operations were remotely contemplated in the NATO treaty approved by Congress.
I'm quite skeptical that this would ever be enforceable absent a Congress willing to defund the military or seriously pursue impeachment. Even a very hostile court would probably know ordering the President to withdraw troops isn't something they could expect to be followed.
Isn’t Bosnia a counterexample where air power actually *did* deliver strategic goals? And once the allies held the Marianas, couldn’t you say air power won the Pacific War?
(Side note: Argh - can ‘Foreign Affairs’ just let me read one damn article per decade for free?)
No you can't really say air power won the Pacific War. That would be to argue that the massive material and oil shortages caused by the primarily submarine-led naval blockade had relatively little impact on the war, which I don't think anyone would sign to.
And that's without even getting into historical revisionist style questions like whether it was the Soviet army invading Manchuria that REALLY led to the end of the war.
It's amazing how so long after the end of the war the narrative / our understanding of it keeps changing. I didn't know how much of a role American submarines played until recently, or how it's entirely possible the Japanese army might have kept fighting in China even if the Home Islands were captured.
The whole point of the island hopping campaign was to put air power close enough to the Japanese homeland to crush their economy and destroy enough cities (and populations) for them to sue for peace. Mission accomplished there. The blockade and the oil shortages were aimed at undermining their expeditionary capability enough to allow us to get air fields closer.
In the end, we defeated only a tiny portion of the Japanese army in the field (most were in China or in Japan itself). It was air power that defeated them and hooray, because the intended invasion of Japan would have been horrific beyond belief.
The island hopping campaign was devised at the urging of Theodore Roosevelt in 1906 in response to the US/Japan War Scare of 1906-1907 before the US navy even owned a single plane.
The island hopping of War Plan Orange was a natural result of the geography and was formally codified in War Plan Orange in 1911, before the US Navy owned any planes.
Obviously, the "whole point" of it wasn't to put air power close to the Japanese homelands.
See War Plan Orange: The US Strategy to Defeat Japan 1897-1945 from the Naval Institute Press.
Oh yes, I read that excellent book by Edward Miller. And indeed for decades the idea of an island hopping campaign was to put *naval* forces close to Japan (they needed a bunch of coaling stations for these relatively short-range ships). The goal was indeed to blockade Japan, or at least two-thirds of it (extending the loop around on the China-facing side was deemed militarily infeasible). Being operational Navy types, they weren't too clear about how that resulted in victory, but presumably there was the expectation that there would be some negotiated settlement, along the lines most wars were concluded in the period before WW2.
Starting in the 1920s, the Navy (now along with the Army with the Army Air Forces -- naval air power wasn't relevant to attacking the mainland) changed the plan to focus on getting air power close enough to the mainland to be able to force Japan to its knees, which indeed is what happened.
The reason we invaded Okinawa was not for airfields it was to stage the invasion of the home islands. Air power mattered, yes, but the island hopping campaign was originally to invade Japan because in 1942, the B29 was still a design, it wouldn't be put into production until 1943. And without the B29 there wasn't a bomber with the range or even payload capacity to seriously effect Japan.
Right. By the time we got to Okinawa we didn't need any more air fields close to Japan. The next step was to prepare for Operation Downfall, the invasion of the Japanese homeland. Hiroshima and Nagasaki rendered that moot.
I don't think this is correct; in both cases in when we bombed Serbia there was an active opponent with troops on the battlefield who we were supporting with air power.
Not really because the Croatians decide to launch a ground offensive around the same time to pressure Serbian positions. In addition the French send in ground forces to shell Serbian positions directly and force them to abandon Sarajevo.
To your second point, I mean technically yes, but it wasn't the air campaign that took the Marianas. Moreover, it wasn't the air campaign that crippled the Japanese economy and made them vulnerable to surrender, it was the submarine campaign destroying Japanese cargo shipping back to Japan. In addition the Soviets invade Manchuria at the same time. Imagine if Japan held out for another couple weeks, they would have discovered that America didn't have an unlimited supply of nukes and might think they could hold out.
Japan was really dependent on imports. The whole point of annexing Korea, invading Manchuria and then China and then ultimately their whole "co prosperity sphere" was to secure enough resources for their economy. Things like rubber, oil, and iron. But also food. Japan could not grow enough rice to feed itself and depended on imports from Korea to have enough rice. By 1944 and especially 45, most of those shipments were being sunk and Japan couldn't build ships fast enough to replace lost ones.
The US military was not depending on starving Japan out (over a year? two years?) to force them to sue for peace. The strategy for victory was to destroy all their cities and when/if that didn't work to send in vast waves of American soldiers and Marines to fight it out on the beaches.
It seems to me that you are answering the question "What was the US's theory of how to win?" and Sunder is answering the question "What were the factors that caused the Japanese to decide to surrender?"
It's entirely plausible that things the US thought were incidental (like the submarine campaign) were key factors in Japanese thinking.
Also, I would personally want to avoid flattering entire Iranian cities like we did in Japan (with nukes, or otherwise). Trump has different priorities, though.
At least in Japan’s case, they were the aggressors and were being recalcitrant to surrender. We might have the second moral cover in Iran soon enough, but certainly not the first
My first preference would have been for Iran to simply give us what we want. As they would not do that, I have no problem with the world's only superpower very publicly demonstrating what will happen to those who will not comply. I only wish we had popped the Ayatollah while we were at it.
This does seem to be how we talk about America and Israel these days, at least in our half of this totally equal partnership where both sides are completely reliant on each other and the benefits are spread more or less fairly.
Iran primarily damages western interests through its large (albeit significantly reduced by Israel over the last 2 years) proxy network. Said proxy network would likely be capable of smuggling a nuclear device. For what Iran wants to do it doesn't matter how it delivers a nuclear weapon to San Francisco or Washington or whatever, merely that it can.
You can make a nuclear weapon out of 20%-enriched uranium, but it's incredibly heavy (if you wanted an ICBM for a nuke that big, you'd need a Saturn V).
The more you enrich it, the smaller the weapon gets. They were getting into the forties, which is when you start getting down to nukes in big ICBMs (this is why early ICBMs doubled for space launch, because the early nukes were so big). Realistically, they'll want 80%-enriched uranium, at which point they can make them small enough for MIRV.
But if they want suitcase nukes, then they're going to need really high-grade U-235, and there's only really one purpose for large quantities of uranium that pure - and this isn't something you get as a byproduct of making anything else.
Israel probably doesn't have one, much as Mossad would like one.
Damn straight. Listening, Harvard? If cutting all your research funds won't bring you to heel, we have the entire DoD ready to show what happens to those who will not comply.
What was Iran supposed to comply with? Weren’t they struck by a country that had no part in the negotiations, who was then assisted by a country that claimed to be involved in negotiations, who had broken the last agreement?
According to the prime minister of Israel, Iran has been six weeks away from deliverable nuclear weapons for the past 20 years. Trump is being manipulated. And, by the way, the chicken-hawk bloodthirstiness in some quarters of this comment section is, sad to say, nauseating.
I don't think declining to drop bombs is an indication of paralysis. We are not paralyzed in our dealings with many countries -- we have very active dealings with many countries -- and yet we are not dropping bombs on them.
One of the good ways of not being paralyzed is pursuing various courses of action that do not involve dropping bombs on countries with whom you are not currently at war, have not declared war, and have no democratic authorization for acts of war.
The bombing may produce tolerable consequences for the US -- it's too early to know yet. It may even turn out that the bombing was justified, in light of facts we do not yet know. But the bombing will never have been justified by a claim that if we do not bomb things then we are paralyzed, because that's just a manifestly silly claim.
In 1787, maybe war was like Michael Scott and bankruptcy, in that you had to DECLARE it. Nobody sends a nice note anymore saying "Dear Iran, You and I are now at war" because this isn't middle school. War isn't something you declare, anymore. It's something you do, and if you do it well, you win. Iran is a bad guy, and tonight we punched a bad guy in his nose and broke it, and good on us for doing it. If they fight back, we'll punch them again.
Laws of warfare still serve useful purposes in this day and age, and they still help the strong as well as the weak. They also have important effects within a country as well as between countries. FDR asked Congress for a declaration of war not only for international purposes but for domestic purposes as well.
For thousands of years, countries have abstained from killing each others' ambassadors. They do this out of a common sense of self-interest. For many decades, now, the US has had a rule against assassinating foreign heads of state. Again, this stems from self-interest.
It's a common mistake for people enjoying a phase of prosperity to believe that they have no interest in the rule of law. Countries make this mistake, too.
I used to have your view in the early 2000s with Iraq. I’ve found that a. The government isn’t honest with their intelligence releases, b. The risks are often vastly underestimated and c. Diplomacy hasn’t been tried for a long time. Dropping the bomb is a huge move and the USA was pushed into this by Israel.
"It may even turn out that the bombing was justified, in light of facts we do not yet know."
Maybe. How would we learn those facts? If they were revealed to us by the Trump administration why should we believe them? "No, no, everything else we've said is a lie, but *this* thing is true!"
Like I said before, I feel terrible for the many Iranian immigrants in the scientific community here in the US, who didn't want and don't deserve any of this. Two of my husband's grad students are Iranian.
Also, ctrl + F "Strait of Hormuz" = nothing
How much capacity does Iran have to prevent oil tankers crossing the Strait of Hormuz, and how screwed is world economy if that happens?
Every week in Irvine there are demonstrations for “secular democracy in Iran”. I don’t think any of them wanted Trump to ban them from entering the country, like he did last week. Some of them may welcome a war that takes out the non-secular non-democracy, but I doubt any of them will be happy if this war doesn’t succeed at that and has any of the other consequences that war usually has. They don’t particularly care whether the ayatollah has nukes if he’s still in power.
Not entirely convinced. I think it's a distinct possibility, but something similar happened during the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988) which got dubbed the Tanker War, and oil still flowed even though Iran had a much freer hand in the air around its coastline and wasn't facing nearly as competent a foe as the IDF. If you want to know how that turned out, look up Operation Praying Mantis. Iran has a lot more missile tech to play around with now but Israel has spent the last week pretty comprehensively disassembling any ballistic missile launchers that show up above ground, so I just don't know whether or not that would be an effective asset. I'd also point out that the guy they're interviewing is a major figure in nonproliferation, and was a proponent of the JCPOA. Not saying he's necessarily wrong, just that I wouldn't take the word of someone who's spent much of the last decade advocating for, then defending, then mourning the JCPOA at face value without at least keeping in mind where his biases lay.
Closing the Straight of Hormuz to everyone overnight would be a global economic disaster and would also crush the economies of every Gulf state except maybe the Saudis, who have terminals on the Red Sea. So the subsequent effort to open the straight wouldn't just be Israel and the US, it would be a comprehensive beatdown of Iran by everyone in the region who would be forced to put aside ideological differences in the name of not starving to death. It would also have the support of just about every country in the world, including China, which would isolate Iran diplomatically in a way that would make North Korea look like Singapore.
Well, at least Trump will finally be able to "assert American energy dominance" or whatever Republicans are calling it once oil prices spike and fracking becomes more profitable again.
This reminds me of the famous quote from The Godfather III - “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in”. A lot has happened in the last 20 years - US has become the largest producer of oil. We don’t need oil from the Middle East anymore. What has not changed is the military industrial complex’s ability to manipulate the US leadership into wars that have nothing to do with our national security interests. When Trump made the deal with Taliban and Biden pulled us out of Afghanistan, albeit in a chaotic way, I thought it was the beginning of a new era but obviously I’m naive and powerless to stop the dangerous arseholes who decide US foreign policy.
That's the annoying thing about maps showing all the American troops stationed around the Middle East, in range of Iranian missiles - why are they there? What are we still doing in this place where any miniscule progress takes decades and costs thousands and thousands of lives, only to be undone by some dickhead general or extreme fundamentalist nutjob?
A funny meme from the mid-2010s, when the usual neocon garbage were trying to eliminate the JCPOA and start a war with Iran was “look at how threatening Iran is, they stationed their country around so many of our military bases!”
Most of those bases are standard power projection - we have resources nearby if we need them for anything. We have similar bases around Europe and Asia. (But yes, some of these are direct outgrowths of our idiotic foray into Iraq.)
Power projection to serve what ends? They're all based on working with/protecting our "allies" in the Middle East, but to what end? What are our vital national interests in the Middle East?
“Why Are US Interests Aligned with Israel in the Region?
In short, US interests are not aligned with Israel. From the beginning, Israel has been in a very difficult position, from which it had to leverage every potential element of power just to survive. This made them tough, innovative and resilient, but it also made them volatile and dangerous to work with. Israel pursues its own pragmatic interests to the end, because they have precious little room for sentimentality or error.
We have no formal alliance with Israel. Neither country has any commitments to come to each other’s aid. Our interests have been consistently at odds with Israel, a fact that was baked into US foreign policy until the Second Bush Administration. For a lot of good reasons, Americans generally like Israel and sympathize with the country’s goals, but until Bush II our government kept Israel at a careful distance.”
Israel is our ally because most of the American people like Israel and think we should do whatever we can to support and protect it. I think the American people have gone way overboard here, but it is what it is.
Isn't most of it just a holdover from before the fracking revolution changed the math on the strategic importance of Middle East oil to the US economy? Noah Smith's post today pointed out that the US economy is basically hedged against oil price increases and this is a huge difference from say 2000-2010.
I'm way out of my depth on this, but I'd guess the reason they haven't been moved/downsized is because keeping the status quo is a lot safer politicly than changing it and getting blamed for any negative consequences (eg Afghanistan withdrawal).
If you allow middle eastern oil to either be cut off or be in the hands of US enemies then Europe will inevitably pivot to supporting US enemies like Russia who can provide it. Yes the US can survive with isolationist autarky but its the same ridiculous isolationism as the MAGA people want. Keeping trade and energy flowing into democratic world is important.
Critics of the JCPOA argue that it still gave Iran a path to enriching uranium and, therefore, to constructing a bomb. Are they wrong? Procedurally, the JCPOA was clearly a treaty and should have been submitted to the Senate for confirmation.
It allowed them low grade uranium fuel that couldn't be used for a bomb but do have civilian applications with strict inspection and monitoring controls, because that's the whole structure of the global nonproliferation system, in exchange for not getting the bomb you can still get civilian applications of nuclear technology.
This is Matt's point, the Hawks in the US and Israel objected to Iran getting any upside/want regime change and so they goaded Trump into first killing the deal and now taking us to war with Iran.
You could well be right, but what I thought was the conventional interpretation of the treaty was that after an interval--which I believe would have ended around now--all restrictions on enrichment would have ended. If Obama had submitted the treaty to the Senate, as the Constitution obliges him to have done, we could have thrashed all this out in open debate.
It was not submitted because it was not going to pass. And as we see so often, what one executive does another can undo. Absolutely right it should have been submitted if team Obama wanted it to last.
Of course, they also were banking on Hillary winning.
Pretty sure the Senate also voted for a ban on TikTok with no exceptions, as well as a whole bunch of spending that’s now being impounded. The idea that sending anything to the Senate will make it stick is very 2024.
Why would a country not be interested in peaceful nuclear energy? They understand how electricity works and how good it is to have a clean and stable source of it.
Matt has some good takes on housing and governance but is clueless on foreign policy. Someone like him in charge would allow a nuclear Iran and an unstable geopolitical world. Iran is an oil rich country. They have no need for a civilan nuclear program.
Do you have any evidence Iran was building any civilian nuclear applications? Their whole death to Israel death to America vibe just makes me think it was a bit misleading
In a way this is a really uninteresting situation. If retaliation is minimal, this is totally fine, pretty good although a smaller victory than Trump is claiming since they can always rebuild things. If this blows up into a major conflict, this is bad.
And there's no way to know for a while which it will be.
Honestly this feels more like the former, I don't know what exactly Iran can do to retaliate besides a bunch of random missile strikes and bombings that hurt or kill a lot of people but don't have any strategic impact. Decent chance this turns out to be like when we bombed Libya in 1986, which seems like it was treated as a BFD at the time, but in retrospect wasn't some region-altering prelude to a massive war.
Even in the best case scenario, this further tarnishes our credibility as a negotiating partner. Was Trump lying about trying to reach a deal after all?
Every country should be sprinting towards a bomb now.
"The draft for Thursday’s resolution highlights serious and growing concerns since at least 2019 that Iran had failed to cooperate fully with the UN agency’s inspectors.
Tehran has “repeatedly” been unable to explain and demonstrate that its nuclear material was not being diverted for further enrichment for military use, the draft text maintains."
“America’s top priority in the Middle East should be decreasing our involvement in the region. President after president keeps vowing to do that, they’ve all failed, and now Trump has arguably failed most of all.”
The reason they’ve failed is because it’s not a very realistic priority. The Mideast controls critical shipping routes and energy resources (it doesn’t matter that the U.S. has achieved energy independence - prices are still set by the global market.) It exports ideologies that destabilize vast areas of the globe. Its refugee flows go straight to our NATO allies.
That doesn’t mean we ever should’ve gotten involved in something as colossally stupid as nation building in Iraq. (Which, btw, the Israelis privately told Bush was a bad idea.) Or regime change in Libya, which at least didn’t bog us down for decades. But a targeted strike on nuclear facilities is not an invasion/occupation. This is much more limited than what Bush or Obama got us into.
It’s really weird how the 2016 election and 10/7 have scrambled the foreign policy agenda of both parties: the 2016 purge of the neocons did allow the GOP to have a meaningful noninterventionist agenda come up (eg it wasn’t a complete fringe tendency as under Bush) but the latent Regan/Bush impulses do get to Trump. This meaningfully reduced the GOP’s sympathy for Israel, though I don’t think we’ve seen the full effect yet (famously, the Trump administration’s anti-antisemitism initiative, which seems more like a tacky rerun of how the szlachta used Jews to collect rent for obvious reasons). Whereas 10/7 and the response thereto absolutely lowered the sympathy of Israel among Dems.
Ugh, and this has brought out the worthless neocons from the woodwork here. One should always dismiss all accusations of antisemitism from them immediately. The lack of elite accountability in America is illustrated by every one of their ilk not being made to commit seppuku after Iraq. They left the GOP because the stormtrumpers sent them a few mean memes and have wormed their way into the Democratic Party, which hasn’t forcefed them the buckets of shit they so richly deserve. The problem with the ex-GOPers who claim to have left their former party is that they don’t have the brainpower to realize that their views and policy positions are a large part of why we’re in such a mess, and that they should just publicly abjure them.
Have never been a fan of liberals giving those folks a home after the right told them to hit the bricks. Let them be homeless. Their VORP seems really low to me.
They don’t bring much money, votes or influence. All they did during the Biden administration was bitch that he pulled out of Afghanistan. And they have the utter nerve to scream “antisemitism” whenever criticized. The fact that Trump helped saddle our “side” with them is another black mark (among so many others) for him.
I said it on the open thread, but Freddie’s “here is why Donald the Dove is better than Genocide Joe” takes are sure looking fine right now.
"...Freddie’s “here is why Donald the Dove is better than Genocide Joe” takes...."
Freddie's take, and the take of most of the occupants of Gaza encampments on university campuses over the last few years.
"Why should we care if Trump wins? He couldn't possibly be worse than Biden!"
Thanks, kids. Your clear-eyed analysis of foreign affairs is much appreciated.
I don't read DeBoer enough to predict what he'll say, but I know that there's a long and illustrious history of far-leftists helping the right against the center, and then being *happy* when things get worse, because the worse the better. Capitalism and/or liberalism and/or the United States are inveterately evil, and it's better for the evil to be open and unmasked in a way that wakes up the people of the world, than to be hidden and devious in a way that enables it to sustain itself.
"...because the worse the better...."
"Why does the proletariat support their own oppressors? The only cure for their false consciousness is their further immiseration!"
I wish I were kidding.
Any decade now, there will finally be a good revolution where good socialists that will all act altruistically can rise up and lead the workers to utopia. This time jealousy or a hunger for power or a desire for retribution won't cause internal fraction and lead one person to sieze control and spawn a blood-soaked dictatorship. This time it will work.
Any decade now...
Indeed!
The only people who consider themselves "masses" are self-serving apparatchiks claiming to speak on "the masses'" behalf.
You are correct.
In 1931, the KPD under the leadership of Ernst Thälmann internally used the slogan "After Hitler, our turn!", strongly believing that a united front against Nazis was not needed and that a Nazi dictatorship would ultimately crumble due to flawed economic policies and lead the KPD to power in Germany when the people realized that their economic policies were superior.[22][23]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifa_(Germany)
I mean, that slogan did turn out to be correct in East Germany...
Not for Ernst who was killed by the Nazis.
He died so that Walter Ulbricht might live. ;-)
This is called, "heightening the contradictions".
Poor Glenn Greenwald will now have to come up with something other than Dems are the war party takes now.
He's blaming the Jews and Israel, as if Donald Trump has ever felt beholden to keeping promises or helping frends.
My main worry is that we'll see a surge in antisemitism, with left and right uniting to scapegoat "the Jews" for dragging us into "Israel's war" (with the lefties making an exception for Jews who repudiate Judaism).
My understanding is that leftists mostly have a problem with the state level actions of Israel rather than disliking Judaism itself (modulo kooks on r/atheism).
Did I miss a memo where where left has a problem with the Torah or something?
This isn't about mere "criticism of (current) Israeli policies."
I'm no fan of Bibi -- in fact, I'm more a disciple of Judah Magnes, a "spiritual Zionist" who sought to make Israel a pluralist liberal democracy -- and I despise bigots like Smotrich and Ben-Gvir.
Nonetheless, the notion that Israel is "Settler/Colonial State" is antithetical to the core narrative of Exile (or Diaspora) and Return that has identified Jews throughout the world for 2,000 years. Meanwhile, the very raison d'etre for "Palestine" -- starting with anti-Jewish riots in the 1920s (long before any "Nakba") -- is "Jews not welcome here."
The left's problem with the Torah lies in regarding it (and for many, monotheism itself) as a repository of superstition -- an anachronism, at best (rendering Zionism as a fraud).
It is all these things... Secular Zionism did used to be a thing though.
Not the Torah, but anti-semitism on the Left is a leitmotif of at least the last 150 years of history going back to Marx and certainly including such things as the treatment of Jews in Communist states.
Plus there's a lot of anti-semitism in certain communities of color that got picked up by the Left, as well as the Left's historic support of the more violent factions of the Black liberation movements in the 1960's, which included plenty of anti-semites (Nation of Islam types, for instance) and who accused the mainstream civil rights movement of collaborating with Jews.
Now TBC, there's more going into the Left's position on Palestine than mere anti-semitism, but yes, there are serious veins of anti-semitism on the Left
I also have that fear. Already on college campuses there’s an exception on the Left for Jews who identify explicitly as anti-Zionist. I don’t think they care so much about Judaism per se, but Jews are identified with Israel, even tangentially. Meanwhile, the anti-war faction on the right will surely start singling out Israel - and its Jewish supporters in the U.S. - if things get bad.
I couldn’t help but think of the folks, including round here, who offered various forms of the Trump madman theory about how the world had been and would be more stable under Trump.
Ross Douthat come on down!
Only the finest takes in FreddieLand
Hey, thanks for confirming that I was right to unsubscribe from his Substack!
What had gotten you to subscribing in the first place?
Freddie is a brilliant prose stylist, and I enjoyed his takes on a) education, b) mental health, c) back in the ancient days of circa 2021, when woke nonsense seemed like a bigger problem in American society than impending Authoritarianism 2: Electric Boogaloo, I enjoyed Freddie ripping wokethought to shreds.
Also, sometimes he manages to be surprisingly poetic and tender, like in his reminiscence about the girl with whom he lost his virginity, or his magical-realist ode to his beloved cat.
A lot of this is still very true and why I still read his work - fortunately most of it is not paywalled. It's just so weird how he's a complete maniac in these comments.
He is akin to Ta-Nahesi Coates: Terrific writer, but a mediocre thinker.
meh.i find no redeeming qualities in communists.
While I also dislike Communists, if Pablo Neruda had a Substack I would consider subscribing.
Sounds limiting
They were right about at least one thing: Nicholas II really sucked and was holding Russia back.
I bet you would have agreed with most/all of Freddie's anti-woke takes tho
It's grounded in optimism?
He is a very good writer. His articles on standardized tests are really good and what drew me in because it's an important issue for me. Obviously, he and I are poles apart on economic issues because he's a marxist and I believe in a market based economy. I understand why people on SB don't like him but you don't have to agree with someone's politics in order to recognize his/her skills as a writer and read his other stuff.
Freddie is not to be listened to on anything other than his actual expertise - education and mental health. On every other topic, it’s doctrinaire leftist pablum and extremely little knowledge.
I think Trump, like most presidents before him, genuinely wanted no war.
And like most presidents, found that harder to accomplish than just wanting it.
Trump not having a long-term plan (even if not shared externally) about Iran just made his fuck-up all the more inevitable and costly.
They are both immoral monsters you neoliberal relativist idiot
"They're both bad, therefore the relative degrees of badness aren't important."
Yet one got us out of the Middle East and the other pulled us right back in.
But I guess if your take is “both have made mistakes before” then hey ya well put my man.
"...They are both immoral monsters you neoliberal relativist idiot...."
I may well agree with you, except I have no idea who the "both" are, and also whom you are addressing as a "neoliberal relativist idiot."
Would you mind giving the names of the targets of your opprobrium?
Oh wow, I thought this was sarcasm lol
Are you suggesting that people who subscribe to the teleological theology of Marx might be dishonest?
“1. America’s top priority in the Middle East should be decreasing our involvement in the region. President after president keeps vowing to do that, they’ve all failed, and now Trump has arguably failed most of all.”
He had his faults but gotta give it to Biden here.
Imagine how much less we can be involved in the Middle East with the Islamic regime gone?
Sadam wasn’t a part of the Islamic regime.
We will enter another quagmire, eventually get out, and in 2043 get mad at (rolls die) Syria.
I don't think it counts as a quagmire if you just bomb stuff and then go home.
I can come up with lots of other negative descriptions, but not quagmire.
We already got rid of Saddamn.
Ayatollah up next.
I do not mean to be personal but your comment is sufficiently flippant that it does cause me to ask if by any chance you are the parent of military-age children, who may now go in harm's way for "Ayatollah up next", whatever outcome in Iran that entails, with a commander-in-chief who is a crapulent moron, so easily manipulated by Netanyahu and so gruesomely committed to making policy on the basis of personal pique that he makes the likes of Videal and Galtieri on the eve of the Falklands War look brilliant by comparison.
I served in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Get REDACTED
Then man oh man you should know better. What's the operational plan for overthrowing the Iranian regime?
Yup, let’s imagine. Up next in Imagination Land we have the Bomb Iran ride where after the first big drop, Fudro, the happy Mullahs peacefully return to their Mosques to study and pray while finally the dream is realized, an an authoritarian Middle East regime dissolves peacefully into a stable democracy rather than an anarchic and bloody civil war with far reaching bad consequences.
Please specify how the bloody civil war would be worse than the Islamic regime has been.
Isn't this straightforward based on the word bloody? I mean I can't really do the math but it seems hard to contemplate a bloody civil war that doesn't result in more suffering than Iran's relatively modest adventurism.
It's not even clear to me that the violence around the world would go down that much. Maybe in some galaxy brain way you could balance the utilitarian books so that suffering goes down on some timeline but that seems distant and remote.
It's already, and always has been, bloody. Am I fully convinced that we should go all in on regime change? Not yet. But I've been open to the idea for a while that dealing with Iran might be preferable to another 45 years of playing whack-a-mole in the Middle East.
I feel like i've seen this movie before.
Go read about the Axis of Resistance and Iran’s police state.
It certainly could be worse for the regime.
U.S. involvement in the Middle East is a function of the value of oil to the global economy. If oil is relatively meaningless, the region's regional, ethnic and religious conflicts will have little importance. The U.S. imports very little oil from the ME, but Europe, India and China have bigger stakes in what flows out the Straits of Hormuz. In that light, the U.S. investment in electrification was arguably the most important policy step in reducing our involvement.
Also something that the Trump administration is attempting to slow down by any means available.
The JCPOA didn't prevent Iran from building nuclear weapons. All it did was delay the building of nuclear weapons (which was supposed to end this year, by the way). Obama was making the same type of bet Clinton and Bush made letting China into the WTO.
It successfully convinced Iran to stop enriching uranium beyond 3% level and allowed for constant checks to keep trust in place. They only started enriching again in 2019 after Trump backed off.
Iran has wanted to destroy Israel since 1979. A ten year wait to do so is a nuisance, but it can be overcome. Believing that Iran would voluntarily give up nuclear weapons forever means believing the mullahs have been lying about their goals for 45 years.
If they were so dogmatic they would have never signed the deal, right?
It's tough to disentangle how much is rhetoric vs genuine zeal, but the best way to prevent them from getting a bomb was to ensure we have controls to see if they ever enrich beyond levels consistent with energy production.
Iran has had a nuclear program for decades and has yet to produce an energy reactor.
Didn't Israel just today bomb the city where Iran's nuclear reactor is located?
https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/explosions-heard-in-bushehr-home-to-irans-only-nuclear-plant/
The sanctions were working. They couldn't fund the nukes, missiles, and terror proxies until Obama bankrolled it.
Has this made the Jewish diaspora safer? Has it made Israel safer? Asking for a friend.
The Israeli regime (and the Likud's ideology) has little respect for the Jewish Diaspora. They see us as living in "galut" (Exile) and think that we all belong in Israel.
And that is a paramount strategic interest of the United States worthy of the blood of our young men because? . . .
What blood? The only Americans killed were by Iranian proxy armies they were only able fund because America gave Iran money.
To phrase it as Trump and Cruz might, it's our paramount interest because Tehran would be able to threaten our key cities like Tel Aviv and maybe even New York one day. Defending ourselves against the Iranian threat with the Iron Dome depletes resources we could use to defend our borders with Lebanon and Syria, or help Ukraine when our NATO allies' efforts aren't enough.
This is such a weird argument. Israel has nukes. It gets attacked all the time. Nukes haven't proven to be that useful. On the other hand, nukes in the hand of a failed state…that could be really dangerous
Countries with nuclear weapons are attacked sometimes (including us on 9/11!) but their existence isn't threatened. Israel has not been at risk of being destroyed by anything less than a nuclear attack since at least 1973. Pakistan is probably the least stable country with nuclear weapons and somewhat surprisingly nothing's gone horribly wrong there either, at least not yet.
This is not really responsive to his point, which I take to be that the deal was working while in effect. His point isn’t that it resolves their hostility to Israel in the long term.
In the meantime they were using Obamas sanctions relief money to build missiles capable of delivering nukes, and infrastructure that could be used to rush towards a bomb once JCPOA ended.
Well, it was their money. And there are always tradeoffs in an agreement. We got them to dismantle their nuclear program for a good long time (until you know who came along).
Right, but that's evidence that the agreement was a poor vehicle for achieving our goals from signing it, no?
10 year delays are good! It’s a goal well worth aiming for!
Never understood the “it’s only a 10 year agreement!” anti-JCPOA argument…that term buys you 10 years of peace(-ish), of inspections, normalization, connections, improved intelligence…10 years to convince the regime to never resume WMD programs or maybe 10 years to work on bringing the regime down. And yes, 10 years to work on JCPOA II…
I’d take a 10 year promise by Putin to not nuke Kiev…Or a 10 year moratorium on NK missile tests…
Only accepting agreements that solve every problem, and solve them forever is the classic mistake of forgoing obtainable Good in favor of unobtainable Perfect…or however that saying goes…
I think the issue is that 10 years of relaxed sanctions without solving the core problem (Iran is governed by implacable fundamentalists) would have strengthened Iran and as a result magnified the scale of the problem.
Except they would not have had a functioning nuclear weapons program!
They would have a nuclear weapons program within ten minutes of deciding that they’re too big to be bullied, treaty or no.
"a 10 year promise by Putin to not nuke Kiev" is basically making the case Iran hawks have against the JCPOA. We are saying "if you don't project regional influence by having a nuke, then in exchange we'll walk back some major sanctions so you have more money to project regional influence without a nuke."
And so Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis, became more threatening proxies by Iran (until US and Israelis took deliberate action to weaken them). It is as if we offered Putin a "you can't nuke Kiev" treaty in exchange for letting him do whatever he wants in Eastern Ukraine. Obviously the Russia hawks would find this laughable, and they'd have good reason to.
And the deal probably could have been extended. And if they refused to extend it then at least they're starting from low levels of enrichment with maximal transparency to the international community.
Then we would be in this same situation in 2030
You do understand that this is the nature of the game? It never ends. Complete peace is only found in the grave.
There is a Middle East hawk “everything bagel” component to some of this debate that Matt describes, and we really never had any way of accurately predicting outcomes. Would they wind up building nukes? Could we wait and see organic regime change? I guess we’ll see how cutting the Gordian knot works out.
We would not be here. We would not have Donald Trump going to war on a whim and on Netanyahu’s timeline. In the best case we don’t go to war, in the medium case we go to war with better leaders in Israel and the US, and in the worst case we go to war on a timeline we choose and not one chosen for us by another country.
How do the attacks today not mean we won't be in the same place in 2030?
"a 10 year promise by Putin to not nuke Kiev" is essentially what Zelenskyy refused in negotiations. Because it's worthless.
Every treaty or international agreement in the world is temporary by definition; the terms dictated by reality can always change. If you want a permanent solution you want regime change
"... If you want a permanent solution you want regime change...."
Agreed. And even then, "...the terms dictated by reality can always change."
Success is always temporary. Temporary successes are successes. The JPCOA was a success. That's why Trump wanted to tear it up -- because it was Obama's success.
Yeah, this is like saying a treatment regime that saved a cancer patient's life was a failure of they died 40 years later of heart disease.
Would the treatment be considered successful if, after some delay (coinciding with the duress of the "therapy"), the cancer nonetheless metastasized and killed the patient?
Often, yes. If it gave the patient ten more years of life with friends and family, when they made a difference in the world and enjoyed themself.
Death comes for us all, so delaying death from cancer by ten years is a real win, even if it’s less of a win than eliminating the cancer so that the patient gained twenty years of life before something else killed them.
Regime change isn't necessarily permanent either.
Yep. See CIA, 1953.
More important than the sunset provision is that the JCPOA handed a bunch of sanctions relief to a country we KNEW would use that money to fund its terrorist proxies, destabilize its neighbors (including our NATO ally Turkey), and shoot at U.S. forces in Iraq. It was a bad deal, and it wasn’t just the Israelis who said so. All of our Arab allies said the same thing.
That doesn’t excuse Trump from withdrawing - if nothing else, American credibility requires us to stick to deals once we’ve made them.
I've written multiple times here that Iranian nuclear weapons are not a direct threat to America because Iran has no method to deliver them to America. The much greater Iranian threat to America is to our soldiers stationed in the Middle East, which the JCPOA allowed Iran to attack more.
Whether or not the JCPOA itself made it easier to attack American soldiers in the Middle East, one may in fact question whether having vulnerable forces in that area fits with our strategic interests. I say "no."
We have a base in Djibouti right next to a Chinese base. Is that not a strategic interest?
Pretty small potatoes Chinese base.
When it comes to blue water force projection (certainly beyond the South China Sea), the Chinese navy is far from something to keep one up at night.
This seems pretty blinkered to me. In terms of overall risk I’d take funded proxies over nuclear arms any day. I’d prefer a non nuclear but more terrorist funding NK for instance. The terrorist just don’t do that much damage to us compared to how difficult nukes make the game, and how bad the tail outcomes are.
Ships?
Iran's oil revenues are around $60 billion every year. Nations always find the funds for their highest priorities. It's not like absent the return of their own funds to them they would have shut down all support for their foreign policy priorities.
As SwainPDX, ten years buys you a lot. Maybe if Clinton won in 2016, we would've had a detente. Maybe we'd largely be back to where we were, but it would've bought us time.
Iran is run by complete bastards, but I don't think that they would've lasted as long as they did, if they were a suicidal death cult that can't be reasoned with. They make and stick to deals all the time.
The entire theory of “Iran will nuke Israel” is based around the theory that the entire Iranian leadership has a death wish and wants this so badly they’re willing to die in nuclear hellfire. And I guess for the sake of argument that might be true. But even if it is: the thing about aging leaders is that no matter how suicidal they are, over time they tend towards dying and being replaced by people who don’t share the same death wish.
You’re not wrong. But I’m not willing to extend the benefit of the doubt to Iran when they’ve done nothing to earn it. They have an official policy to eradicate another country (complete with a countdown clock to Israel’s destruction in Tehran) and a nuclear weapons program. The rest of the world is entitled to take them at their word. If they want to correct that interpretation, they could do so easily by changing their official policy.
Yep! And also, having a an unstable country run by a bunch of crazy people is not good, even if most of them aren't crazy enough to commit mass suicide. Someone sufficiently crazy may get sufficient access one day.
It’s a very unsatisfying argument though and is rather riddled with holes. Several examples in our world point to it.
That is just a straight up lie that you are repeating.
If Iran refused to renew the JCPOA at the end of the treaty then the sanctions would have been placed back on them.
It wasn't a promise of indefinite sanction relief in exchange for a temporary delay of nuclear development. But these deals almost always have to be renewed.
The fact that the JCPOA needed to be renewed was good for the US. In 10 years the US might decide that we need the JCPOA to have a greater focus on ensuring Iran is not developing bioweapons. If we had made the original JCPOA indefinite then it would have been nearly impossible to renegotiate to have more inspections to prevent bioweapons.
Have we had a war with China? Has China destroyed Japan or conquered Taiwan?
I don't think taking action to bring a billion people out of poverty is a mistake.
Bringing a billion people out of abject poverty is a good thing. But the WTO bet was that with entry, China would be convinced liberalize politically and become a more productive member of the "international community." China has not done that. Obama bet that easing the sanctions on Iran would convince Iran to become a more productive member of the international community. They did not.
And after ten years, you assess the situation and take appropriate actions. There is great value in buying time. Trump just pissed all that away.
And what if Iran backed out of the original JCPOA this year? What then?
Then we put the same punishing sanctions on them that they got relief from in the JCPOA. They're just ten years behind on developing nuclear weapons.
It took them five years after Trump pulled out and put sanctions back on. That means it would also take them five years if they started today.
This logic suggests never making any agreement because it might not last forever. Arms control has always involved temporary agreements that get renewed or replaced - that's how diplomacy works.
Nope, see Matt here https://x.com/mattyglesias/status/1935436286543778122
This sounds like the take that vaccines don’t prevent COVID and staying at home didn’t prevent COVID, so we might as well have run out into the streets licking doorknobs in April 2020.
This logic suggests never making any agreement because it might not last forever. Arms control has always involved temporary agreements that get renewed or replaced - that's how diplomacy works.
https://x.com/mattyglesias/status/1935436286543778122
I don’t want American money and American lives lost to try and enhance Israel’s position versus Iran. This is the worst thing Trump has done and I am sad to live in this timeline.
700,000 American citizens live in Israel and would all be killed if Iran nuked Tel Aviv. We get that you don’t care about Jews though.
Oh shut the fuck up, being hesitant to commit American resources to Israel's goals isn't inherently anti-Semitic.
Dude I'm a Jew with family in Israel and this is an insane take. We can't just run our foreign policy on attacking the enemies of every country where a lot of American citizens live
That is a ridiculous argument!
There are also Americans who live in Iran and the West Bank. It would be insane to claim that we should therefore take the sides of those governments, or claim opposition means you are bigoted against Arabs or Persians!
>700,000 American citizens live in Israel and would all be killed if Iran nuked Tel Aviv.<
And many millions of Iranians would die in the ensuing nuclear counterattack mounted by Israel. Which is why it is virtually certain a nuclear-armed Tehran would never make such a suicidal move.
"virtually certain"?
October 7 is just one example of the number of lives religious fanatics are willing to sacrifice for their aims.
The number of *other people's lives*
I'm half-Jewish and pretty livid that Trump just invited an escalation of state sponsored terrorism against Jews and Americans and you can bet your dollar against American Jews. Not to mention an invitation for both the far left and isolationist right to increase their own anti semitism here at home.
Wait, you think this action makes those people *less* likely to be injured or killed? How many of them have had their lives thrown into disaster already this week because of the war being started? How many have died?
If you can extend that argument to say that we should make a firm commitment to giving Ukraine the arms it needs to win because a good number of Americans have volunteered to fight alongside them, then yeah sure count me in.
THANK YOU for referring directly to money and lives lost, or potentially lost, and not using the offensively glib term “blood and treasure,” which glosses over the very real matters at stake.
Huh, I don’t find it glib. Maybe a bit overused but the first time I heard it I felt real weight from it.
Its too late for that. Over 1000 American lives were lost to Iranian IEDs. American lives were lost on October 7th .
How many American lives would be lost in a nuclear strike on Tel Aviv? Or do those not matter?
How many American lives have been lost in the non-nuclear strikes that Iran has already been doing on Israel?
Many Americans were killed on October 7, which was carried out by an Iranian-funded and trained organization
Nuclear strike is too contrived.
Imagine how the timeline feels.
Iran has made it very clear that its intention is to destroy America along with Israel. That they’ll go after the Big Satan after dealing with the Little Satan. They have school children recite “Marg Bar Amrika marg bar Israil” (Death to America Death to Israel) like American kids say the pledge of allegiance.
This idea that America’s interest is only to help Israel’s posture against Iran is absurd.
America’s interest is in preventing a regime sworn to America’s destruction, that has killed scores of Americans, and that seeks to eliminate it does not seek a nuclear weapon.
But their intention is irrelevant if they have no possibility of acting on it.
The purpose of having a nuclear weapon is not just being able to launch it. It’s being able to use conventional force, while having international actors being deterred from responding.
But what conventional force would Iran use against us? We’re over here, they’re over there, and they don’t have aircraft carriers.
The US has troops and interests all over the world.
They can also play a long game
But non-nuclear countries and forces attack our troops and interests now, without apparently fearing we’ll nuke them. Israel even more so!
I’m not saying I don’t believe in nuclear deterrence, but I think it is a deterrent against existential threat. Once Iran had a nuke, we or Israel couldn’t regime-change them. But i don’t see what capability to harm the US they’d gain by having a nuke.
I don't actually imagine it's very likely we end up doing anything more in Iran militarily than we just did. Certainly the Tucker-verse WWIII ravings are deranged nonsense. It seems fine given the situation.
Now I don't particularly think we've done a very good job guiding the situation at basically any point in history. Trump absolutely got played by Bibi. But on whatever conceivable trajectory the Iranian regime ends up out of this conflict, "Fordow is no longer a piece on the board" seems like an obvious improvement.
>>>"Fordow is no longer a piece on the board" seems like an obvious improvement.<<<
It's not so obvious if (1) Fordow survives in part, or (2) they've built other facilities we don't know about, or (3) they rebuild-repair it.
And one itsy-bitsy problem with a direct US attack on Iran is it stands a good chance of strengthening the regime domestically. Remember how united we were after 911?
"Regime change quickly leading to a liberal order willing to enter into verifiable agreements with the international community" would be a wonderful outcome. It seems to me it's not a particularly likely outcome.
This is an important point. The hope has always been that the next generation of Iranians would have different opinions about the world than the current one does. I think it's unlikely that today's events, and whatever else follows, will be constructive for that outcome. You can kill a dictator or change a regime, but if you cause the people to sympathize with the regime, something like it will grow back.
Iranians HATE their regime 80/20 by the best estimates of (not even hawkish) international human rights organizations.
You don’t have to indulge in Bush-era self-delusion just to recognize the simple likelihood that THIS attack is NOT likely to galvanize them for that same regime.
It MAY unify the elites, and there’s some indication that may already have been happening in the last week, but even that is not likely to last.
The current administration and congress is one of the most despised in American history and if any country bombed the US, Trump would have 80% approval ratings. The rally around the flat effect is incredibly powerful.
We are two very different countries and cultures. I thought that was obvious.
Sure, but the rally around the flag effect has proven true across many different countries and cultures. Is there a reason why you think it will not impact here? If you say it out loud, does it sound like something the Bush Administration would have said in 2003 about Iraq?
Yes, that’s why they are more likely to rally around their hated regime if they get attacked and we are more likely to rally against our hated regime if we get attacked.
> Iranians HATE their regime 80/20 by the best estimates of (not even hawkish) international human rights organizations.
While this is certainly true for US based Iranians and a fair number of Iranian elites, I never know how true these things are among the wider populace. I hope you're right.
I don't doubt that it's true. But it isn't necessary to get the Iranian people to *like* the regime. They just have to see it as the lesser of two evils.
Sure, the Iranian people hate their government. But the reasons for that hate have little to do with their relations with the US. Giving the people a good reason to hate the US runs the risk of replacing the dictatorial Iranian regime that hates the US with a democratic Iranian regime that hates the US.
One of the systemic problems the US has had in the Middle East is that a fair election in most countries will bring in a government that hates the US and Israel. It's hard to say "the people in these countries hate us because we keep bombing them, they have a point and they should be governed by people that hate us" because that's against the US national interest and national security. But, if the alternative is being opposed to democracy in those countries, then you're going to get the Saudi Arabia / UAE problem, where the people generally hate their government and hate the US for propping it up. See also the Shah.
Sam Harris had an interesting pod guest the other day. His big point was that it seems like this dilemma may have been inherent to political Islam, but also that political Islam may have now run its course.
He rooted this in an awakening that happened in the late-1800s Islamic world, where defeat by Europeans threatened to discredit the entire religion. Leading theorists at the time concluded that Islam needed to embrace technological change, religious piety, and unity in order to prove that Islamic civilization still enjoyed the favor of Allah. But in the ensuing power struggles, only the pietistic faction won out, and the modernizers were rejected for modernizing too fast while the unifiers kind of just floundered under longstanding divisions.
If that’s the case, then it’s quite obvious that the pietists — like the IRI regime — never stood a chance of keeping up with technology, and it was only a matter of time until they were discredited by their inability to compete. If so, I do kind of hope that the modernizers and unifiers might be able to step in with a lighter touch this time, resolve the dilemma on their own terms, and forge the next stage of the Middle East’s history.
There certainly is a retreat to pietism in Islam as they realised the scale of the military-technological dominance of Europe - referring to the Ottoman Empire as the “Sick Man of Europe” got started during the run-up to the Crimean War - and the Ottomans, who had been technologically superior in the 15th and early 16th century and at least equal until the late 17th, absolutely understood that they were deeply behind after the thorough spankings they got from Napoleon and Russia around the turn of the 18th to the 19th century.
I’m just not convinced that this has been discredited. There certainly are plenty of liberal Muslims living in the Middle East (look at all the fights over requiring Iranian women to wear the headdress; that’s firmly a liberal v pietist battle) and I think it’s certainly plausible that they could impose a democracy somewhere - but they won’t win every election forever, and if Muslim conservatives are going to be relentlessly hostile to the West and Christian and Jewish conservatives are going to be relentlessly hostile to the Islamic world, then - unless you somehow see political change that results in both sorts of conservative becoming deeply marginal and the dominant right/centre-right position being right-wing liberalism (ie a version of American libertarianism that compromises with reality, unlike the LP) - I don’t see how the fact that a Western country with a liberal government might get on OK with a Muslim country with a liberal government will help at all. Neither government will be able to last (due to domestic dynamics) for long enough for anything useful to be achieved.
That's my primary concern.
Hawks always believe if they attack a dictator the country will welcome it. That doesn't seem to be the normal outcome. You often get a rally around the flag effect:
Yes the dictator sucks but he is better than the foreigner who doesn't have our interest at heart.
I mean if I was Iranian I'd be very skeptical that Donald Trump and Bibi Netanyahu want a prosperous Iran. A prosperous Iran could quickly become the regional power.
No no, this is so wrong. You're forgetting when the outraged British people rose up to overthrow Churchill and his band of warmongers during the Blitz.
Except when they rose up against Ghadafi. Or Assad. Or the Tsar.
Yes, for every one of them, there’s a Castro or Maduro. But it should be noted that relatively few dictators die peacefully in office — I forget the recent statistic precisely, but it was somewhere between 1 in 6 and 1 in 4, IIRC. The rest either flee and die in exile, or die from coups or uprisings.
Given that they’re all brutal and cause significant damage to their societies, I don’t see as much harm in occasionally rolling the dice whenever an opportunity presents itself. If democracy has only a 1/6 chance of breaking out, but also only a 10% chance of sticking, then basically most of the world is doomed to stay under autocracy unless the dice get rolled. It turns into a volume game, just like dating or sales: most attempts fail, but you can’t win if you don’t go for volume.
They didn’t rise up against those dictators when an outside power sent in an attack to threaten those dictators - they rose up against the Tsar during a war that felt like him dragging them into a quagmire elsewhere; they rose up against Ghaddafi and Assad during the Arab spring, when uprising was spreading everywhere, and in those cases they got outside help after they started, but didn’t take an outside strike as the cue to rise up.
Ghaddafi’s downfall was very much assisted by intervention. Intervention to help the Tsar utterly failed, same as it did against the CCP.
My point is, there is no ONE single failure mode that ALWAYS goes through the path of “rally around the flag”. We’re talking about an extremely diverse set of historical examples that belies any simplistic categorization or “iron rules”. But all we’re getting in this discussion right now are “X failed so Y *must* also fail”.
As a history nerd, it’s really hard to take anyone seriously right now.
I remember the huge surge of anti-American Chinese nationalism that occurred when we accidentally bombed the Chinese embassy in Serbia. And they *liked* us back then. I can't imagine too many Iranians harbor fond feelings for us right now.
We bombed a nuclear program, not an embassy or a children’s hospital.
Haven’t several of the Israeli bombs hit residential buildings that housed people other than the relevant targets? Do we know the US strikes haven’t done similar? Do Iranians know which strikes are which?
There's still time for more strikes, this time with "collateral damage".
Iranians might be mad out of principle, but these were all remote nuclear facilities where bombing them has virtually no chance of killing civilians.
That assumes the populace generally sees a big distinction between our bombing of a weapon site and Israel's raining missiles on Tehran and Iranian TV.
I wouldn’t describe Trump as getting played here. He likes winners and Israel threw some very impressive opening punches. And the ask was pretty limited - Israel cleared the Iranian skies and took the retaliatory hits, and only really needed the bunker busters for Fordo. We don’t mind helping with missile and drone interception, because that’s the future of warfare and our troops need the training.
If he got us engaged in the morass of Gaza, I’d say he got played big time.
It will only be a clean success if Iran doesn't respond asymmetrically. We'll find out!
This is the plausible optimistic take. I hope this ends up being all there is.
It makes the US look like a garbage negotiating partner. For all Trump saying he was working towards a deal, and this is what we got. And if Iran eventually gets a bomb, they have plenty more incentive now to use it.
Every country in the world should be sprinting to a nuke now. That's really bad.
>And if Iran eventually gets a bomb, they have plenty more incentive now to use it.<
They'll have virtually zero incentive to use it. It's national suicide. They want it for the same reason everybody else wants it: deterrence. It's pretty obvious why that particular want is well-founded.
Citation? Yes, some of their rhetoric is obviously bluster, but Iran very much has radically aggressive goals it wants to pursue. I don't think they'd randomly bomb Israel on Day 1 (though I also don't think they wouldn't) but they'd certainly use the threat of it against all kinds of countries.
Citation? LOL. I don't have a link to the future I can provide. It obviously would be suicidal for any country to use nuclear weapons against a confirmed nuclear power like Israel and the US. Where's your citation that Iran would "certainly" threaten nuclear attacks "against all kinds of countries"?
Iran was at the negotiating table when Israel started bombing them, and then everyone started talking about how Iran had to be ready to negotiate.
The only way to avoid getting your shit kicked in by the West (or others, see Ukraine) is to get a bomb.
Sitting at the negotiating table does not equal negotiating. Stringing someone along to buy time and micro concessions is a tactic.
It may end after today . . . for the time being. (We'll see if Iran responds asymmetrically, and when). But is Fordow no longer on the board? I'm sure the MOP is a powerful tool here, but it's a little hard to do battle damage assessment for something buried that deep. Maybe we took it out; maybe we didn't. How would we know?
"Trump absolutely got played by Bibi"
What do you mean?
I don't think any of this was Trump's plan. He got maneuvered into a place where this was kinda the obvious choice against his own broader instincts. He's not driving any of it. He's playing to Bibi's drum.
"...his own broader instincts"
His what, now?
This seems to completely disregard Iran's agency, particularly point 7:
"But the problem with not offering Iran upside is that if Iran doesn’t get upside in a deal, then there’s no deal. You end up with either a nuclear Iran or a war."
The upside for Iran is not getting bombed! They could have dismantled their enrichment program altogether rather than continuing to push the envelope. They could have stopped funding proxies to attack the US and their neighbors. However, despite their belligerence, what has become apparent in the last few years is just how weak their position actually is. Maybe they were just counting on us being gun shy. Perhaps they'll actually engage in good faith now that they know better.
The whole "stop destabilizing the region and focus on rich" path is right there for the taking! So many of Iran's neighbors are coming around to it too.
This. Iran’s posture is ideological, not rational. There is zero reason for Iran and Israel to fight, except that Iran keeps threatening and proxy-attacking Israel. All they need to do is cut that out, stop the florid death to America crap, and be a normal ass country.
They also plotted to kill the president of the United States. No small offense, really.
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/11/08/donald-trump-iran-assassination-plot-00188498?utm_source=chatgpt.com
Trump is nothing if not vindication. But he is weirdly forgiving too. Odd dude. He may be buddies with Iran in a year.
I mean, we're also plotting to kill their leaders, so...
Didn’t some other country just attempt to kill all of their leaders?
Alternatively maybe they’ll just dig deeper bases and buy nukes from North Korea.
Why would Iran accept living under US military domination? The history of the US in Iran is us trying to install a dictator who will follow our orders.
Ruhollah, is that you? Iran could just choose to be a chill country.
Argue what you want about the past (I'm not denying it) but what does "US military domination" even mean? Basically everybody (including Iranians) just wants Iran to chill out and focus on enjoying its oil wealth and behaving responsibly.
> The upside for Iran is not getting bombed!
We're only bombing their enrichment facilities though, right?
A. Don't build enrichment. Cities don't get bombed.
B. Build enrichment. Enrichment maybe gets bombed. Cities don't get bombed.
Bombing their cities is called "war" and it's the original dichotomy: "nuclear Iran or war."
The Israeli's are bombing their cities though.
Did the president claim any legal authority at all to do this, or is it just now understood that the president can attack anyone he wants and no one questions it?
I'm not a defender of Donald Trump about basically anything, but the ship sailed on bothering to seek congressional approval for anything other than full-scale ground invasions a long time ago.
I don't think it has to be congressional approval in every case, but there has generally been some kind of claimed legal basis. Kosovo was a NATO operation, so the president could say we were honoring our treaty commitments, which have the force of law. Obama cited a UN resolution to provide justification for bombing Libya. A lot of stuff got packaged into the broad post-9/11 authorization for the use of force. Sometimes a person could claim that they are responding to an imminent threat to US property or citizens.
Was anything like that claimed in this case, or is the doctrine now that the president needs no legal basis? I agree it's a slippery slope, but that would be a major slide.
Hasn’t there been a lot of bombing in the past 30 years outside of those sorts of activities? All the drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen and bombed buildings in Sudan and who knows where else. Has all of that been authorized?
Definitely not an expert but I do think a lot of stuff that was connected in some way to counterterrorism was represented as being authorized by this post-9/11 congressional resolution.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/107th-congress/senate-joint-resolution/23
Congress really needs to rein that in
(Liked, but…lol)
No one understands congressional dysfunction like congresspeople. If anyone had faith congress could act nimbly in the timeframe required by foreign policy they might actually be interested in doing that
>>or is it just now understood that the president can attack anyone he wants and no one questions it?<<
If by "just now" you mean "for decades" sure.
You’re not wrong, but it’s been that way for ages. What was Obama’s authority to attack Libya? Or Biden’s authority to attack the Houthis? I don’t believe Clinton got congressional authorization for the Kosovo airstrikes either.
Libya was done under a UN Security Council resolution; the US is a signatory to the UN Treaty, ratified by Congress, so there's an argument that Congress delegated the war-making power to the UNSC by that ratification.
The Houthis were self-defense initially (in that they attacked US shipping) and was ratified under the War Powers Act, AIUI.
The big difference this time is that Trump offered not even a fig-leaf of a legal justification.
It’s called the War Powers Act.
Weren’t most of those joint operations with NATO?
NATO holds no privilege to either violate the UN Charter or the Constitution.
Yes, but I’m not sure why that would matter. Perhaps if we intervened to directly defend a NATO ally, one could argue that Congress approved it by ratifying the mutual defense treaty in the first place. But none of these operations were remotely contemplated in the NATO treaty approved by Congress.
The Constitution is buckling under the strain of its age
It’s called the War Powers Act.
I'm quite skeptical that this would ever be enforceable absent a Congress willing to defund the military or seriously pursue impeachment. Even a very hostile court would probably know ordering the President to withdraw troops isn't something they could expect to be followed.
Isn’t Bosnia a counterexample where air power actually *did* deliver strategic goals? And once the allies held the Marianas, couldn’t you say air power won the Pacific War?
(Side note: Argh - can ‘Foreign Affairs’ just let me read one damn article per decade for free?)
No you can't really say air power won the Pacific War. That would be to argue that the massive material and oil shortages caused by the primarily submarine-led naval blockade had relatively little impact on the war, which I don't think anyone would sign to.
And that's without even getting into historical revisionist style questions like whether it was the Soviet army invading Manchuria that REALLY led to the end of the war.
It's amazing how so long after the end of the war the narrative / our understanding of it keeps changing. I didn't know how much of a role American submarines played until recently, or how it's entirely possible the Japanese army might have kept fighting in China even if the Home Islands were captured.
The whole point of the island hopping campaign was to put air power close enough to the Japanese homeland to crush their economy and destroy enough cities (and populations) for them to sue for peace. Mission accomplished there. The blockade and the oil shortages were aimed at undermining their expeditionary capability enough to allow us to get air fields closer.
In the end, we defeated only a tiny portion of the Japanese army in the field (most were in China or in Japan itself). It was air power that defeated them and hooray, because the intended invasion of Japan would have been horrific beyond belief.
The island hopping campaign was devised at the urging of Theodore Roosevelt in 1906 in response to the US/Japan War Scare of 1906-1907 before the US navy even owned a single plane.
The island hopping of War Plan Orange was a natural result of the geography and was formally codified in War Plan Orange in 1911, before the US Navy owned any planes.
Obviously, the "whole point" of it wasn't to put air power close to the Japanese homelands.
See War Plan Orange: The US Strategy to Defeat Japan 1897-1945 from the Naval Institute Press.
Oh yes, I read that excellent book by Edward Miller. And indeed for decades the idea of an island hopping campaign was to put *naval* forces close to Japan (they needed a bunch of coaling stations for these relatively short-range ships). The goal was indeed to blockade Japan, or at least two-thirds of it (extending the loop around on the China-facing side was deemed militarily infeasible). Being operational Navy types, they weren't too clear about how that resulted in victory, but presumably there was the expectation that there would be some negotiated settlement, along the lines most wars were concluded in the period before WW2.
Starting in the 1920s, the Navy (now along with the Army with the Army Air Forces -- naval air power wasn't relevant to attacking the mainland) changed the plan to focus on getting air power close enough to the mainland to be able to force Japan to its knees, which indeed is what happened.
The reason we invaded Okinawa was not for airfields it was to stage the invasion of the home islands. Air power mattered, yes, but the island hopping campaign was originally to invade Japan because in 1942, the B29 was still a design, it wouldn't be put into production until 1943. And without the B29 there wasn't a bomber with the range or even payload capacity to seriously effect Japan.
Right. By the time we got to Okinawa we didn't need any more air fields close to Japan. The next step was to prepare for Operation Downfall, the invasion of the Japanese homeland. Hiroshima and Nagasaki rendered that moot.
I agree with your analysis, and lord, don’t even get me started on that revisionist Manchuria invasion crap…
I don't think this is correct; in both cases in when we bombed Serbia there was an active opponent with troops on the battlefield who we were supporting with air power.
Not really because the Croatians decide to launch a ground offensive around the same time to pressure Serbian positions. In addition the French send in ground forces to shell Serbian positions directly and force them to abandon Sarajevo.
To your second point, I mean technically yes, but it wasn't the air campaign that took the Marianas. Moreover, it wasn't the air campaign that crippled the Japanese economy and made them vulnerable to surrender, it was the submarine campaign destroying Japanese cargo shipping back to Japan. In addition the Soviets invade Manchuria at the same time. Imagine if Japan held out for another couple weeks, they would have discovered that America didn't have an unlimited supply of nukes and might think they could hold out.
I don't think Japan surrendered because they were getting less cargo shipping back to Japan. Burning up all their cities may have mattered a bit more.
Japan was really dependent on imports. The whole point of annexing Korea, invading Manchuria and then China and then ultimately their whole "co prosperity sphere" was to secure enough resources for their economy. Things like rubber, oil, and iron. But also food. Japan could not grow enough rice to feed itself and depended on imports from Korea to have enough rice. By 1944 and especially 45, most of those shipments were being sunk and Japan couldn't build ships fast enough to replace lost ones.
The US military was not depending on starving Japan out (over a year? two years?) to force them to sue for peace. The strategy for victory was to destroy all their cities and when/if that didn't work to send in vast waves of American soldiers and Marines to fight it out on the beaches.
It seems to me that you are answering the question "What was the US's theory of how to win?" and Sunder is answering the question "What were the factors that caused the Japanese to decide to surrender?"
It's entirely plausible that things the US thought were incidental (like the submarine campaign) were key factors in Japanese thinking.
No, I think it was pretty much the atomic bombing and the USSR's entry into the war.
Good book on this:
https://www.amazon.com/Japans-Decision-Surrender-R-Butow/dp/0804704619
Also, I would personally want to avoid flattering entire Iranian cities like we did in Japan (with nukes, or otherwise). Trump has different priorities, though.
At least in Japan’s case, they were the aggressors and were being recalcitrant to surrender. We might have the second moral cover in Iran soon enough, but certainly not the first
"...avoid flattering entire Iranian cities..."
There is no need for such a thing. The Mossad knows where everybody is and the US has submarines.
Mossad is a side project of Santa, knowing whose been naughty or nice and where everyone is to deliver "presents" to...
Also previous Israeli air strikes against Iraqi nuclear facilities
At horrific humanitarian cost
My first preference would have been for Iran to simply give us what we want. As they would not do that, I have no problem with the world's only superpower very publicly demonstrating what will happen to those who will not comply. I only wish we had popped the Ayatollah while we were at it.
For leverage and bargaining purposes, much better to leave Khamenei alive but let him know we could have killed him and chose not to.
Who is "we?" Israel?
Iran has no hardware to get a bomb remotely close to us.
This does seem to be how we talk about America and Israel these days, at least in our half of this totally equal partnership where both sides are completely reliant on each other and the benefits are spread more or less fairly.
Iran primarily damages western interests through its large (albeit significantly reduced by Israel over the last 2 years) proxy network. Said proxy network would likely be capable of smuggling a nuclear device. For what Iran wants to do it doesn't matter how it delivers a nuclear weapon to San Francisco or Washington or whatever, merely that it can.
These nukes fit in a briefcase. Or a drone. They don’t need ICBMs.
The first-generation ones don't.
You can make a nuclear weapon out of 20%-enriched uranium, but it's incredibly heavy (if you wanted an ICBM for a nuke that big, you'd need a Saturn V).
The more you enrich it, the smaller the weapon gets. They were getting into the forties, which is when you start getting down to nukes in big ICBMs (this is why early ICBMs doubled for space launch, because the early nukes were so big). Realistically, they'll want 80%-enriched uranium, at which point they can make them small enough for MIRV.
But if they want suitcase nukes, then they're going to need really high-grade U-235, and there's only really one purpose for large quantities of uranium that pure - and this isn't something you get as a byproduct of making anything else.
Israel probably doesn't have one, much as Mossad would like one.
They don't have ships?
Damn straight. Listening, Harvard? If cutting all your research funds won't bring you to heel, we have the entire DoD ready to show what happens to those who will not comply.
What was Iran supposed to comply with? Weren’t they struck by a country that had no part in the negotiations, who was then assisted by a country that claimed to be involved in negotiations, who had broken the last agreement?
No problem right now… but there are a lot of what’s ifs here that could be huge problems.
According to the prime minister of Israel, Iran has been six weeks away from deliverable nuclear weapons for the past 20 years. Trump is being manipulated. And, by the way, the chicken-hawk bloodthirstiness in some quarters of this comment section is, sad to say, nauseating.
Replied to the wrong post. I agree with yours.
There are always what-ifs. We can't be paralyzed by what-ifs.
"... We can't be paralyzed by what-ifs...."
I don't think declining to drop bombs is an indication of paralysis. We are not paralyzed in our dealings with many countries -- we have very active dealings with many countries -- and yet we are not dropping bombs on them.
One of the good ways of not being paralyzed is pursuing various courses of action that do not involve dropping bombs on countries with whom you are not currently at war, have not declared war, and have no democratic authorization for acts of war.
The bombing may produce tolerable consequences for the US -- it's too early to know yet. It may even turn out that the bombing was justified, in light of facts we do not yet know. But the bombing will never have been justified by a claim that if we do not bomb things then we are paralyzed, because that's just a manifestly silly claim.
In 1787, maybe war was like Michael Scott and bankruptcy, in that you had to DECLARE it. Nobody sends a nice note anymore saying "Dear Iran, You and I are now at war" because this isn't middle school. War isn't something you declare, anymore. It's something you do, and if you do it well, you win. Iran is a bad guy, and tonight we punched a bad guy in his nose and broke it, and good on us for doing it. If they fight back, we'll punch them again.
"...War isn't something you declare, anymore...."
Laws of warfare still serve useful purposes in this day and age, and they still help the strong as well as the weak. They also have important effects within a country as well as between countries. FDR asked Congress for a declaration of war not only for international purposes but for domestic purposes as well.
For thousands of years, countries have abstained from killing each others' ambassadors. They do this out of a common sense of self-interest. For many decades, now, the US has had a rule against assassinating foreign heads of state. Again, this stems from self-interest.
It's a common mistake for people enjoying a phase of prosperity to believe that they have no interest in the rule of law. Countries make this mistake, too.
I used to have your view in the early 2000s with Iraq. I’ve found that a. The government isn’t honest with their intelligence releases, b. The risks are often vastly underestimated and c. Diplomacy hasn’t been tried for a long time. Dropping the bomb is a huge move and the USA was pushed into this by Israel.
"...I used to have your view...."
Joseph's view or dys tread's view?
I will stipulate to all of these things. Furthermore, I am ok with it.
Once a war starts, Americans tend to support it by rallying around the flag and it's really hard to turn it off.
But it can't be that just one guy decides to start a war unprovoked by our target, but just because he wants to.
*That's* why it needs to be declared by Congress. Trump went rogue and now we're all stuck and in it for the ride, to success or failure.
A president should have completely unilateral, uncheckable authority to commit the military abroad because it's not 1787?
If Congress doesn’t like the President’s War, Congress doesn't have to pay for it. Wouldn’t that be something?!
"It may even turn out that the bombing was justified, in light of facts we do not yet know."
Maybe. How would we learn those facts? If they were revealed to us by the Trump administration why should we believe them? "No, no, everything else we've said is a lie, but *this* thing is true!"
Jesus Christ.
Like I said before, I feel terrible for the many Iranian immigrants in the scientific community here in the US, who didn't want and don't deserve any of this. Two of my husband's grad students are Iranian.
Also, ctrl + F "Strait of Hormuz" = nothing
How much capacity does Iran have to prevent oil tankers crossing the Strait of Hormuz, and how screwed is world economy if that happens?
A lot of Persians in America do want this. They left Iran for a reason.
I wouldn’t put it past Trump to deport them/revoke their visas forthwith, as citizens of an enemy nation, and then their scientific careers are over.
They sure hate the Islamic Republic. But I bet they have mixed feelings about their country of origin being bombed.
Every week in Irvine there are demonstrations for “secular democracy in Iran”. I don’t think any of them wanted Trump to ban them from entering the country, like he did last week. Some of them may welcome a war that takes out the non-secular non-democracy, but I doubt any of them will be happy if this war doesn’t succeed at that and has any of the other consequences that war usually has. They don’t particularly care whether the ayatollah has nukes if he’s still in power.
Noah Smith released an article on the Strait of Hormuz this morning: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-economic-consequences-of-a-war?r=pqwhd&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
https://open.substack.com/pub/popularinformation/p/what-will-happen-if-the-united-states?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=gct1o
Seems like they could?
Not entirely convinced. I think it's a distinct possibility, but something similar happened during the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988) which got dubbed the Tanker War, and oil still flowed even though Iran had a much freer hand in the air around its coastline and wasn't facing nearly as competent a foe as the IDF. If you want to know how that turned out, look up Operation Praying Mantis. Iran has a lot more missile tech to play around with now but Israel has spent the last week pretty comprehensively disassembling any ballistic missile launchers that show up above ground, so I just don't know whether or not that would be an effective asset. I'd also point out that the guy they're interviewing is a major figure in nonproliferation, and was a proponent of the JCPOA. Not saying he's necessarily wrong, just that I wouldn't take the word of someone who's spent much of the last decade advocating for, then defending, then mourning the JCPOA at face value without at least keeping in mind where his biases lay.
Closing the Straight of Hormuz to everyone overnight would be a global economic disaster and would also crush the economies of every Gulf state except maybe the Saudis, who have terminals on the Red Sea. So the subsequent effort to open the straight wouldn't just be Israel and the US, it would be a comprehensive beatdown of Iran by everyone in the region who would be forced to put aside ideological differences in the name of not starving to death. It would also have the support of just about every country in the world, including China, which would isolate Iran diplomatically in a way that would make North Korea look like Singapore.
Thanks for sharing! From the link: closing off the Straits of Hormuz would “cut off one-fifth of the world’s oil supply overnight”
So the only ones who would win this war is The Groups who would revel in the success of the "keep it in the ground" strategy.
Or in this case spread it out over the waters at the strait of hormuz.
Well, at least Trump will finally be able to "assert American energy dominance" or whatever Republicans are calling it once oil prices spike and fracking becomes more profitable again.
This reminds me of the famous quote from The Godfather III - “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in”. A lot has happened in the last 20 years - US has become the largest producer of oil. We don’t need oil from the Middle East anymore. What has not changed is the military industrial complex’s ability to manipulate the US leadership into wars that have nothing to do with our national security interests. When Trump made the deal with Taliban and Biden pulled us out of Afghanistan, albeit in a chaotic way, I thought it was the beginning of a new era but obviously I’m naive and powerless to stop the dangerous arseholes who decide US foreign policy.
That's the annoying thing about maps showing all the American troops stationed around the Middle East, in range of Iranian missiles - why are they there? What are we still doing in this place where any miniscule progress takes decades and costs thousands and thousands of lives, only to be undone by some dickhead general or extreme fundamentalist nutjob?
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/06/21/world/iran-israel-trump/there-are-about-40000-us-troops-in-the-middle-east?smid=url-share
Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE, Oman, Kuawait, and Iraq? Like what the fuck?
A funny meme from the mid-2010s, when the usual neocon garbage were trying to eliminate the JCPOA and start a war with Iran was “look at how threatening Iran is, they stationed their country around so many of our military bases!”
Most of those bases are standard power projection - we have resources nearby if we need them for anything. We have similar bases around Europe and Asia. (But yes, some of these are direct outgrowths of our idiotic foray into Iraq.)
Power projection to serve what ends? They're all based on working with/protecting our "allies" in the Middle East, but to what end? What are our vital national interests in the Middle East?
Israel isn’t even our ally.
https://www.politicalorphans.com/a-pocket-guide-to-mideast-politics/
“Why Are US Interests Aligned with Israel in the Region?
In short, US interests are not aligned with Israel. From the beginning, Israel has been in a very difficult position, from which it had to leverage every potential element of power just to survive. This made them tough, innovative and resilient, but it also made them volatile and dangerous to work with. Israel pursues its own pragmatic interests to the end, because they have precious little room for sentimentality or error.
We have no formal alliance with Israel. Neither country has any commitments to come to each other’s aid. Our interests have been consistently at odds with Israel, a fact that was baked into US foreign policy until the Second Bush Administration. For a lot of good reasons, Americans generally like Israel and sympathize with the country’s goals, but until Bush II our government kept Israel at a careful distance.”
Israel is our ally because most of the American people like Israel and think we should do whatever we can to support and protect it. I think the American people have gone way overboard here, but it is what it is.
I mean the USA doesn’t have a formal alliance with Israel, the same way we have a formal alliance with Germany, South Korea and Australia.
Isn't most of it just a holdover from before the fracking revolution changed the math on the strategic importance of Middle East oil to the US economy? Noah Smith's post today pointed out that the US economy is basically hedged against oil price increases and this is a huge difference from say 2000-2010.
I'm way out of my depth on this, but I'd guess the reason they haven't been moved/downsized is because keeping the status quo is a lot safer politicly than changing it and getting blamed for any negative consequences (eg Afghanistan withdrawal).
>...why are they there? What are we still doing in this place where any miniscule progress takes decades...<
Several factors, but the importance of the evangelical vote is the single biggest one.
If you allow middle eastern oil to either be cut off or be in the hands of US enemies then Europe will inevitably pivot to supporting US enemies like Russia who can provide it. Yes the US can survive with isolationist autarky but its the same ridiculous isolationism as the MAGA people want. Keeping trade and energy flowing into democratic world is important.
US is not doing this to keep oil flowing into the Democratic world, neither is Israel. Most of Iran’s oil exports currently go to China.
Critics of the JCPOA argue that it still gave Iran a path to enriching uranium and, therefore, to constructing a bomb. Are they wrong? Procedurally, the JCPOA was clearly a treaty and should have been submitted to the Senate for confirmation.
It allowed them low grade uranium fuel that couldn't be used for a bomb but do have civilian applications with strict inspection and monitoring controls, because that's the whole structure of the global nonproliferation system, in exchange for not getting the bomb you can still get civilian applications of nuclear technology.
This is Matt's point, the Hawks in the US and Israel objected to Iran getting any upside/want regime change and so they goaded Trump into first killing the deal and now taking us to war with Iran.
You could well be right, but what I thought was the conventional interpretation of the treaty was that after an interval--which I believe would have ended around now--all restrictions on enrichment would have ended. If Obama had submitted the treaty to the Senate, as the Constitution obliges him to have done, we could have thrashed all this out in open debate.
It was not submitted because it was not going to pass. And as we see so often, what one executive does another can undo. Absolutely right it should have been submitted if team Obama wanted it to last.
Of course, they also were banking on Hillary winning.
Pretty sure the Senate also voted for a ban on TikTok with no exceptions, as well as a whole bunch of spending that’s now being impounded. The idea that sending anything to the Senate will make it stick is very 2024.
Treaties are supposedly the highest law in the land after the constitution - much higher than duly passed laws or executive orders.
At least, if you believe what it says in the constitution.
"Treaties are supposedly the highest law in the land after the constitution - much higher than duly passed laws..."
That's not right. See Whitney v. Robertson, "The duty of the courts is to construe and give effect to the latest expression of the sovereign will."
https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/us-supreme-court/124/190.html
You think Iran was ever interested in peaceful nuclear energy? How dumb are you people?
Why would a country not be interested in peaceful nuclear energy? They understand how electricity works and how good it is to have a clean and stable source of it.
https://x.com/mattyglesias/status/1935436286543778122
Matt has some good takes on housing and governance but is clueless on foreign policy. Someone like him in charge would allow a nuclear Iran and an unstable geopolitical world. Iran is an oil rich country. They have no need for a civilan nuclear program.
He's written extensively on these matters for 20 years, I think it's the hawks who have their "heads in the sand" as it were: https://www.amazon.com/Heads-Sand-Republicans-Foreign-Democrats/dp/B005EP2NIS
Do you have any evidence Iran was building any civilian nuclear applications? Their whole death to Israel death to America vibe just makes me think it was a bit misleading
"No Kings!" (unless it's Obama)
cute, but ultimately stupid
In a way this is a really uninteresting situation. If retaliation is minimal, this is totally fine, pretty good although a smaller victory than Trump is claiming since they can always rebuild things. If this blows up into a major conflict, this is bad.
And there's no way to know for a while which it will be.
Honestly this feels more like the former, I don't know what exactly Iran can do to retaliate besides a bunch of random missile strikes and bombings that hurt or kill a lot of people but don't have any strategic impact. Decent chance this turns out to be like when we bombed Libya in 1986, which seems like it was treated as a BFD at the time, but in retrospect wasn't some region-altering prelude to a massive war.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1986_United_States_bombing_of_Libya
Iran is a more militaristic country then Libya was.
Even in the best case scenario, this further tarnishes our credibility as a negotiating partner. Was Trump lying about trying to reach a deal after all?
Every country should be sprinting towards a bomb now.
Having consequences doesn't hurt negotiation credibility. The credibility problem occurred when Trump ruined the JCPOA
I think it's different to say "new administration, new policies" and "we're negotiating with you jk here's some bombs"
What was the violation that these consequences are consequences for?
https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/06/1164291
"The draft for Thursday’s resolution highlights serious and growing concerns since at least 2019 that Iran had failed to cooperate fully with the UN agency’s inspectors.
Tehran has “repeatedly” been unable to explain and demonstrate that its nuclear material was not being diverted for further enrichment for military use, the draft text maintains."
Basically, Iran cheated first
Iran had 60 days to get in line. They chose their path.
“America’s top priority in the Middle East should be decreasing our involvement in the region. President after president keeps vowing to do that, they’ve all failed, and now Trump has arguably failed most of all.”
The reason they’ve failed is because it’s not a very realistic priority. The Mideast controls critical shipping routes and energy resources (it doesn’t matter that the U.S. has achieved energy independence - prices are still set by the global market.) It exports ideologies that destabilize vast areas of the globe. Its refugee flows go straight to our NATO allies.
That doesn’t mean we ever should’ve gotten involved in something as colossally stupid as nation building in Iraq. (Which, btw, the Israelis privately told Bush was a bad idea.) Or regime change in Libya, which at least didn’t bog us down for decades. But a targeted strike on nuclear facilities is not an invasion/occupation. This is much more limited than what Bush or Obama got us into.
"the US and Israel are different countries with different interests"
We sure don't act like that's the case!
It’s really weird how the 2016 election and 10/7 have scrambled the foreign policy agenda of both parties: the 2016 purge of the neocons did allow the GOP to have a meaningful noninterventionist agenda come up (eg it wasn’t a complete fringe tendency as under Bush) but the latent Regan/Bush impulses do get to Trump. This meaningfully reduced the GOP’s sympathy for Israel, though I don’t think we’ve seen the full effect yet (famously, the Trump administration’s anti-antisemitism initiative, which seems more like a tacky rerun of how the szlachta used Jews to collect rent for obvious reasons). Whereas 10/7 and the response thereto absolutely lowered the sympathy of Israel among Dems.
Ugh, and this has brought out the worthless neocons from the woodwork here. One should always dismiss all accusations of antisemitism from them immediately. The lack of elite accountability in America is illustrated by every one of their ilk not being made to commit seppuku after Iraq. They left the GOP because the stormtrumpers sent them a few mean memes and have wormed their way into the Democratic Party, which hasn’t forcefed them the buckets of shit they so richly deserve. The problem with the ex-GOPers who claim to have left their former party is that they don’t have the brainpower to realize that their views and policy positions are a large part of why we’re in such a mess, and that they should just publicly abjure them.
Have never been a fan of liberals giving those folks a home after the right told them to hit the bricks. Let them be homeless. Their VORP seems really low to me.
They don’t bring much money, votes or influence. All they did during the Biden administration was bitch that he pulled out of Afghanistan. And they have the utter nerve to scream “antisemitism” whenever criticized. The fact that Trump helped saddle our “side” with them is another black mark (among so many others) for him.