If Washington’s participation in Israel’s June 2025 war with Iran elevated U.S. military force to a perfectly viable instrument of the United States’ Iran policy, the success of current talks would signal the formal undoing of that logic. But should the failure of talks pave the way for another full-scale war, the United States and Israel will be fighting an Iran vastly different from June. For the Iran of today appears to have made its peace with the grim conclusion that while a decisive slog with Israel and the United States is sure to be agonizing, it is preferable to the recurring attrition of repeated wars and a chronic strategic vulnerability that only emboldens adversaries to target Iran and its regional allies.
I don’t feel gotcha’d here at all, the way I see it the most important, vital aide that can be given to Ukraine right now are missile interceptors/air defense, and it is politically awkward and costly for Trump to completely gum the works up and give nothing to Ukraine, same story repeated in other European nations harboring radical rightwing elements, so thus an easy solution for shitty people like Trump is to bomb Iran, get Iran to attack Israel and then print money for military industrial companies by utterly depleting air defense stocks for years among NATO powers while panicking about it.
Then… there is no political cost to withholding crucial air defense missiles to Ukraine because there aren’t any and the question of helping Ukraine can be turned against the need to protect the home country blah blah blah.
The logic is pretty straightforward in my mind? All that matters is that you assume Putin is Trump’s daddy, and I think we can all agree on that right?
US missile companies sure as hell aren’t going to lobby against this sequence of events either…
But this analysis requires entirely cutting out all context that might complicate your analysis.
For instance, Trump was the first US president to authorize weapons transfers to Ukraine.
Second, Iran is the last country on the list of 7 countries the US intended to invade as revealed by General Wesley Clark. That list of 7 countries was formulated under the GWBush administration, and the 7 countries that were on that list were:
So the conflict with Iran is at least 20+ years in the making and the plan has been followed not just by GW and Trump but also Obama/Clinton. The Biden administration continued the inter-administration policies in Syria, specifically the covert cultivation of the ISIS terrorist who eventually became the leader of Syria.
History didn’t start when Trump took office. The US has vested interests in the region and Trump is presiding over the administration of those interests. Just like Venezuela, the showboating may be influenced by Trump, but the development of the aggression against Venezuela started in 1999 and continued through every administration since then, Republic and Democrat.
The analysis that everything bad Trump does is because he’s really an extension of Russia is very clear example of a retreat to innocence. These are US decisions that have decades of history behind them, not idiosyncratic acts of a single president who is actually not part of US interests but actually is part of our enemy’s interests.
It’s such a reductive way of ignoring all of the years of effort that has gone in to US regime change planning and preparation and leaves us with the totally incorrect understanding that if only we elected someone else that none of this would be happening. It’s entirely possible that it wouldn’t be happening in precisely this way, with the particular PR, rhetoric, and media spin. But these operations span administrations and the president is operating, as all presidents generally do, on the basis of recommendations from the JCOS.
Yeah, you are definitely projecting it on to me that I am someone that would disagree with that, the US needing to bomb Iran is one of the more rabid devotions of US foreign policy over many decades and administrations.
That doesn’t mean Putin isn’t Trump’s daddy?
Stop trying to lecture me about a belief I don’t hold, I don’t at all think the fucked up relationship the US has towards Iran started with Trump or is the result of some Russian conspiracy.
Nope, it is just there are two shit sandwhiches here aligning in the sky above us in a total eclipse of rationality.
So if you understand the role the conflict plays in the continuity of US policy, attempting to analyze whether it will or won’t happen on the basis of Trump being owned by Putin is mostly useless. If the national security apparatus is still functioning enough to maintain this level of continuity, then how did it allow for a known adversary to take the presidency. If a known adversary took the presidency, why are his actions still continuous with the last several decades of foreign policy?
Who said the ruling class of the US are really the enemies of Russia? Like kind of, but in reality it is more about money and making deals than anything else so yeah… om my answer to the above quote is very easily, all it took was buckets of incompetence, collusion and people saying “not my problem!”.
So then are you saying Trump is a puppet of Russia or are you saying that the ruling class of the USA is and has been collaborating with Russia for some time, in which case, Trump is not a puppet but rather just another bog standard member of the ruling class?
Both to a degree.
What you are asking is how could the current situation be probable given my estimation of the motivations behind the important actors involved, relying on some kind of Newtonian perfect estimation of how one thing will bounce off another and I am saying these people are unbelievably incompetent, they absolutely would and did elect a complete traitor to have power over them. They make existentially conflicting strategic choices all of the damn time. You can’t evaluate the shitshow that is US power politics without adding in a massive dose of idiot juice, otherwise it will endlessly confound you that sometimes the decisions that are made don’t even seem to benefit the people who are in power making them.
Putin is Trump’s daddy, that doesn’t mean I am attributing the follies of US foreign policy all to some elaborate Russian conspiracy, I am just stating the obvious, Putin is Trump’s daddy, it is clear from his behavior.
Which is it? Your opinion is that Trump is pushing this war to deliberately weaken the US military establishment so that Russia can take military advantage of the situation because Trump personally has a submissive relationship with Putin personally? Or you don’t attribute the foibles of US foreign policy to some elaborate Russian conspiracy?
From the outside, your words look entirely contradictory
Both!!! The subject we are speaking of is inherently contradictory.