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.
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
Trump is a senile lunatic, of course the nonsense spewing out of his brain is contradictory. Nothing he is doing makes any rational sense on any level. People are just trying to play idiot-whisperer to sus out what random two malfunctioning brain cells are going to form his next policy choice (foreign or domestic). Of course what they’re saying is contradictory, the random-bad idea generator running the country is a contradiction factory.
Again. Trump is not operating with a blank canvas. The JCOS present him with specific options after heavy bureaucratic deliberations and he is choosing between those options.
The country, including the military, is still a bureaucracy. Electing a president to preside over that bureaucracy, while certainly subject to individual differences in leaders, is predominantly driven by that bureaucracy and not by the individual in the oval office
Both!!! The subject we are speaking of is inherently contradictory.
You call it contradictory. I call it over determination. Everything the US government is doing it would do even if Trump wasn’t acting at the direction of Putin. We’ve seen proxy wars before. We’ve seen how the US manages them. Ukraine is entirely explainable through the calculus of historical US proxy wars, and particularly proxy wars with Russia/USSR. The conflict with Iran is explain able without an appeal to Russian conspiracy.
This is over determination at it’s most essential. It becomes contradictory and irrational when you add in the puppet conspiracy. Without that conspiracy, it’s all explainable with what we know about the US bureaucracy, military strategy, and geopolitical conditions.