Posted by decimalenough 19 hours ago
Surely the resources required to build and maintain solar panels, turbines, dams, and nuclear reactors are logistically more stable than oil has proven to be.
Author's analysis, as critical as he is of American presidents breaking their promises, is completely absent of analysis of what would happen if American presidents broke their promises to never allow Iran to develop a nuclear weapon. Never mind that JCPOA had a sunset clause that would allow Iran to resume nuclear enrichment to weapons-grade after the sunset clause.
The author's analysis pretty blatantly exposes reality: the West is losing because it does not have the political stomach to win. Instead of deciding that maybe society should try to develop that political stomach, instead of paying attention to a Trump who got elected in large part on mantras about how America was losing and it needed to start winning, no, Author says this was all a horrible idea and implicitly we should just sit back while our enemies progress along the road of putting nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorists.
This does not happen even in the most insane examples like North Korea.
The more likely outcome would be that they would be able to avoid getting their schools/hospitals etc. bombed.
In your mind US should just nuke iran so there is regime change? Can you calculate how this would play out after that happens?
a. They have armed and financed their terrorist proxies (Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis, and others), who used those arms and capital to commit acts of terrorism against their regime enemies (the US and Israel).
b. Witkoff literally offered them free nuclear fuel forever for civilian purposes and they turned him down, bragging that they had enough highly enriched nuclear fuel already for nuclear weapons
c. I can put 2 and 2 together
In what universe does having nuclear weapons protect you from getting schools and hospitals bombed? Israel very likely has nuclear weapons, but Israeli schools and hospitals are getting bombed by Iranian missiles. So what?
With all this considered I think it is clear why Iran is able to bomb Israel back and Israel can't just nuke them.
I think the points you made about why Iran would give nuclear weapons to terrorists make no sense. Because Iran would, presumably, get obliterated when those terrorists use those weapons on any country.
As far as I know, full-on invasion of a country that has nuclear weapons has never occured in history so far. So Iran having nuclear weapons in a defensive capacity is obviously good for them. In fact all countries having nuclear weapons in middle east might have made it more peaceful but would have been obviously terrible for Israel/USA
Its ironic it's not even discussed anymore in the US. A year in and you can't find a political post on HN, it's all blackholed - we've gone past "I didn't vote for him" straight to posts like this from alternative reality where he doesn't exist, doesn't say or do things.
JCPOA was highly flawed, but it was a lot better than nothing, which is what Trump traded it for.
If Trump was serious about stopping Iran's nuclear program, he would have made taking Isfahan a top priority of the initial strikes.
Delaying the onset of war is not worthless, but it is not the same as arguing that war could have been avoided, which is what people who roll out that claim are really trying to argue. It's only true in a universe where Iran would have collapsed from within before the expiration of the sunset clause, and that clearly was not going to happen.
"highly flawed" implies that it's not very good at its primary goal
> it only delayed Iran getting nuclear weapons
That sounds better than no delay
That depends on what Iran does in the meantime, does it not? If Iran effectively turned their missile program into a true deterrent then negotiated delay is worse, because it would remove the ability to stunt the development through military means. Which is very much the argument being made for the “why now” of this war.
As to Trump's motivations, they don't change this calculus. Iran intended to nuke their neighbors, and Israel, not just before Trump came to power but literally before the first Bush became president. And the full situation is even worse: right after the mullah's came to power in a leftist revolution in 1979, they begged for US and Israel's help to stop Saddam Hussein from nuking them. They got that help ... and then figured that nukes are a great idea.
Here's what the mullahs are most afraid of btw. The biggest threat to their power, the biggest problem for their central-London villas:
https://x.com/NarimanGharib/status/2036761330359615897
This local opposition to them has systematically worsened over time, btw. So I wouldn't put it past the mullahs to nuke Iran itself, eventually. It also means that Iran's islamic regime is threatening everyone, for the simple reason that if they make a single concession loosening their grip on Iran, they'll be lynched, one by one, in the streets, by people they went to school with. That is how much Iran's regime is "winning".
But it's only Donald Trump that has used that as an excuse to make that danger greater.
And acoup has a great counter-point to your tweet in the article.
The Soviet Union dealt with massive internal protest quite successfully for pretty much every single one of its 70 years of existence. The Soviet Union only fell when insiders took it down.
Iran appears to be in absolutely no danger of that happening.
https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/25/06/gov2025-25.pd...
(they preliminarily reported the same stance even in 2024, before any attacks)
TLDR: Iran, despite having signed a treaty allowing access, is hiding highly enriched uranium, enough to build 9, maybe 10 nuclear devices. It is also not complying with its other obligations under the NPT treaty.
And then Iran responded to this ... by boasting of making nuclear weapons grade uranium to make bombs, to American diplomats:
https://www.i24news.tv/en/news/middle-east/iran-eastern-stat...
Now I get that American diplomacy is a shitshow since ... a certain event. However, I fail to come up with a worse attitude that Iran could have had at the time. They are openly boasting of having "the divine right" to enriched uranium that can only be used for bombs in negotiations ...
I also get that Americans (and everyone else, for that matter) feel that it's entirely unfair that they have to care about nuclear weapons in Iran. But if nobody does ... Iran's leaders have made it clear that as soon as they have the weapons, nuclear war starts. What I find baffling is that nobody cares ...
Of course, now it turns out that UAE and Saudi Arabia have since been SCREAMING at the US to do something. But the people it will affect the most are of course in Europe and Asia (everyone except Russia, Norway and Ukraine), who are effectively going to see yet another 3-4% tariff, except this one applies even on goods they produce themselves, for themselves. The EU is burning massive amounts of political goodwill trying to get a few percent savings, and now they'll have to do tell their people they're saving at least double that, in a few months time, with no real warning.
And until they do that, and until they're let out again, no amount of arguments will ever make me agree that it's just not fair. In fact, if everyone even remotely involved with them gets shot THAT I will call fairness.
You don't really care because you don't have a valid argument. Fact is Iran was complying with JCPOA, as all US intelligence agencies agreed on. It was working. But it had one flaw, Obama signed it and the orange baby couldn't deal with that, and likely Israel/Netanyahu influencing Trump back then as well as they were opposing the deal from the start.
Now I don't think Iran should have nuclear weapons, but lets be fair here, they followed the deal, but still got sanctions put on them as if they were building a bomb, why not do it then? If we're to judge them by what politicians, generals or religious zealots has said in the past, then look no further than the US and what they thought about using nukes post ww2, I would argue they were much much worse no matter what Iran has said.
Iran's government organizes massacres, inside and outside of Iran. Could you illuminate further to me which treaties that little practice follows and how unfair it is it causes bad things to happen to them?
> Iran was complying with JCPOA, as all US intelligence agencies agreed on.
??? I'm not even the one making the argument.
As an American who lives abroad and travels around the world, I've never had the slightest worry about "oh man what if Iran does something?" But I've had to adjust flight and travel plans several times, I've had cost of living surge, I've witness chaos causing terrorist splinter groups that attack countries around the world because Israel and America have started some stupid conflict and said "we had no choice bro we had to attack them because in 80 years they would've made a bomb that might've killed a civilian bro you have to trust me bro." And frankly, I'm done even taking those arguments in good faith. I simply refuse. The mess these two countries cause has caused far more death than even if Iran had a nuke, ten nukes, or one thousand nukes.
There’s this weird attitude I see where people claim “realpolitik” to give other nations colonial rights to their neighbors while denying the same to America. If you buy into “spheres of influence” as a concept it’s time to accept that the US, as the world’s preeminent military and economic power, has a sphere of influence that spans the globe.
Its sphere of influence includes Israel, Gaza (Hamas), Yemen (Houthis), Iraq (various Shia splinter groups), and Lebanon (where Hezbollah refuses to accept the sovereignty of the Lebanese government). You are being willfully ignorant.
And funny you mention Lebanon. Iran isn't the country bombing Lebanon every few years or seizing land there either. But right now another country is invading and seizing land and not accepting the sovereignty of the Lebanese government. [1] Always funny how accusations in 2026 really just are a way of confessing.
[1] https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/defense-news/article-89105...
Proceeds to not mention the Epstein files at all. No comment here mentions it either.
All that mess and all those deep connections that were unraveling... I’m not a US citizen, but has that already been forgotten? Do people not consider that they might be relevant in some way to this situation? Or is raising that possibility now generally viewed as a conspiracy theory?
>But countries do not go to war simply to have a war – well, stupid fascist countries do, which is part of why they tend to be quite bad at war – they go to war to achieve specific goals and end-states.
>Again, it is not a ‘gain’ in war simply to bloody your enemy: you are supposed to achieve something in doing so.
There are a few other passages to similar effect, but for brevity, these two will do to illustrate the point: the author seems to be subtly implying that America is a "stupid fascist nation". Actually, the way he keeps clarifying the obvious, I think he expects a good amount of his readers to be "stupid fascists".
I cannot say I wholly disagree with his assessment!
He does nothing of the sort.
I can clarify for you: the mention of fascist countries being bad at war is a link to another article by the author, which explains that fascist countries such as Mussolini's Italy and Nazi Germany were very bad at a war even while they mythologized and romanticized it, and derived their "sense of nation" out of symbolic struggle and might. The article you linked to describes many fascist or fascist-like nations, like Putin's Russia, but does not mention liberal democracies such as the USA.
I recommend you read it.
So why did the author mention that article in this context? Because he wanted to explain that countries -- unless they are fascist countries -- have strategic goals for going to war, and so does the US in this case, and therefore it's warranted to look into those goals and whether they have a chance of being met.
Again, I recommend you read the article in question (the one about fascists being bad at war) before jumping to unwarranted conclusions.
And having a stated objective is quite different from having a real objective. Hitler had various stated objectives for all his wars (Lebensraum, fostering the Ubermensch, and rescuing Germans from the supposed oppressions of the Jews, which of course never existed and was purely a fiction to justify unspeakable horrors). If you take Hitler's words at face value, they were all motivated and not at all stupid wars. But you'd be very stupid to take Hitler's words at face value, especially with the benefit of hindsight!
I think the same arguments are applicable to trump. He has stated several goals, none of which are reasonably achievable. Take trumps words at face value and the war makes sense, but he has shown himself to be a pathological liar, so you'd be an idiot to believe him, especially when his statements lack any connection to the real world. Given how he tends to argue, it wouldn't surprise me at all if trump thinks that "bloodying your enemy" is a win in a war. That's how he works. That's how he handles trade. Doesn't matter if tariffs damage America, so long as they also damage other nations, it's a win. Of course he thinks that way about war too!
The end state trump is looking for is damage to Iran. He'll have it. But the rest of the world (including USA) will suffer tenfold. He doesn't care. Because he's a stupid fascist leader.
Thus, we end up with the conclusion that America had no real reason to start this war, and starting it anyway is an action historically only done by stupid fascist countries, therefore America is a stupid fascist country. It's a fourth order implication, which admittedly is not at all clear, and might not have been intentional.
I'm severely biased of course, I generally hold last week's turd in higher regard than I do trump (turds make great fertilizer!). So grain of salt and all that...
Well there are a lot of very stupid people in this world.
Region instability had ben regularly threatening freedom of navigation in the last five years
And USA may not consider the individual country strategic, but cares deeply about freedom of navigation, because the single market is basically the pillar for their hegemony.
Sarah Paine lectures give overall better lenses to look at this engagement.
They held the threat of closing it, as a deterrent of an attack, and once attacked, they did just that.
You either live in a parallel universe, or are just spewing here propaganda.
Lol there were routine attcaks every time things weren't going their way. Whos been in a parallel universe?
And never said closed. I said ransom.
People that couldn’t place Iran or Israel or Lebanon on a map, let alone know the first thing about the rivalries in the region or have any skin in the game (beyond “the pump”) just feel like they can comment on any of this - taking cheap shots and crappy cynical takes at it. Where’s the moderation?
The author is a military historian and professor with a PhD, so not an amateur.
If you think this isn't high grade, or that it is mistaken, please explain how and why.
Especially in the heavily jingoistic american context, where all of the focus is implicitly on the military means and technology and execution, but people have lost sight of, maybe can not even state plainly, what the point of a military is, what considerations are part of deciding to use it to accomplish a goal.
If you're going to accomplish a strategic goal with a military action, that goal had better be achievable through military action and this one plainly isn't. A historian can see it, a blogger can see it, a programmer can see it. Why wasn't it seen by people whose job is ostensibly to see it?
1. If US was to replace Iran as the one to control exports of oil through the strait, then thos would gain huge leverage on China via control of energy exports from Iran, Middle East more generally, as they have already done in Venezuela.
2. Making it clear that partnership with Russia and China will not provide security, which was shown to be worthless. This counters “The East is rising and the West is declining”, a go-to Xi Jinping line.
4. Securing South America for near-shoring production, decoupling of supply chains from China. Iran, China, and Russia have lots of
5. Disrupting Iranian ability to support Russia against Ukraine via manufacturing of drones in Iran and in Venezuela.
Whether these points are actually part of the strategy, I do not know, but they have been raised by others in the space, and seemed absent in the article.