5 ms·

How times have changed when a neoliberal institution (not quite as bad as The Economist) openly says this: > Even the threat of terrorism from the region was a

by jmyeet 7mo ago

How times have changed when a neoliberal institution (not quite as bad as The Economist) openly says this: > Even the threat of terrorism from the region was a consequence of American involvement, not the reason for it. Had the United States not been deeply and consistently involved in the Muslim world since the 1940s, Islamic militants would have little interest in attacking an indifferent nation 5,000 miles and two oceans away. Contrary to much mythology, they have hated us not so much because of “who we are” but because of where we are. In Iran’s case, the United States was deeply involved in its politics from the 1950s until the 1979 revolution, including as the main supporter of the brutal regime of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The surest way of avoiding Islamist terrorist attacks would have been to get out. This is absolutely correct and it's wild we now live in a time when mainstream media just comes out and says it. I agree with two general themes of this article: 1. This administration has done more to destroy American's global power than any other in history and it's not even closer. We live in a time when Europe is questioning its position of being America's dog. The Gulf states are questioning what they get out of America's security guarantee if America can't or won't protected them; and 2. Russia and China are huge winners here. China simply has to do nothing and not interrupt the US while they're making a historic and unprecedented mistake. And Europe and the US will likely make peace with Russia over Ukraine because of spiralling energy costs thanks to America's reckless misadventure in the Gulf. This is going to end very badly for the US and it will (IMHO) go down as the biggest own-goal in American history.

bamboozled 7mo ago
China has played much much better chess so it's not surprise they're benefiting. However, I don't really see how China will benefit from Iran being in ruins. Can you elaborate on how China benefits ? From what I can tell, The USA is either going for force a regime change or it's going to ruin Iran. Where will China get oil from then? You might say Russia but that's a precarious situation for them to be in.
- monknomo 7mo ago
  china benefits from America eroding its global power is what the thesis is, I believe. Iran being a quagmire that erode's America's global power.
  - bamboozled 7mo ago
    They're gambling basically, if it works and they do topple the regime, I think it will work for the USA, and if it turns into a prolonged quagmire, then yes, it will probably not be successful and very detrimental. I do sympathize with those who just wanted cheaper eggs.
- bestouff 7mo ago
  They become a serious partner for many countries disillusioned by the US.
- jmyeet 7mo ago
  The US cannot ruin Iran short of the widespread use of nuclear weapons. Air power has never resulted in regime change. Never. It takes boots on the ground and one just needs to look at a map. Iran is surrounded on 3 sides by mountains and the Gulf on the fourth. Iran's drones and ballistic missiles are incredibly cheap, well-defended and impossible to meaningfully disrupt. The interceptors used to stop them are running out and increasingly ineffective. I think I read that the ballistic missile strike rate on Israel is now over 50%. What does it take to launch drones or even a ballistic missile? A cheap modification to any truck, basically. The US cannot forcibly open the Strait of Hormuz because that would put them in close range to Iranian drone and missile strikes that the US doesn't have the weapon systems, interceptors and munitions to defeat. It's suicide. Any escalation will end up much worse for Iran's neighbors than Iran because Iran is already built for economic isolation and self-reliance, thanks to years of criminal economic sanctions. You want to hit Iranian desalination plants? Well, that'll invite a hit on desalination plants in other Gulf states and that's going to end up much worse for them. Why? Remember those mountains I mentioned? They're covered in snow. Iran has ski resorts. Many people don't realize that. What does that mean? Just like California, they get significant freshwater from snow melt. A ground invasion of the Iranian mainland has no staging ground. For Kuwait, we used Saudi Arabia. You can't stage across the mountains so you need an amphibious landing, much like D-Day. And it would need to be probably as complex and large. We simply don't have the ships, the soldiers or the logistics for that. Basically, we have no options. This was unwinnable before we even started. This is why every president since Reagan refused Israel's attempts to start a war with Iran. Until Trump. I honestly think he'd been fooled into thinking he could do a decapitation strike on Iran like Venezuela and get a friendly regime. That was never going to work. Iran has almost 50 years of hardening and maintaining a regime to resist US interference. The one thing this administration seeems to care about is gas prices. This is why Iranian exports haven't been blocked. China is still getting oil from Iran. In fact last week the US lifted sanctions on Iranian oil, which was previously being sold below market. In January, Iran was selling oil for $48/barrel. Now they're selling it for >$100. China has a massive reserve (~1.4 billion barrels) and has suspended exports of refined oil products. Countries friendly to us in the region are in for a world of hurt, most notably the Phillipines and Vietnam (Japan seems to have significant reserves like China, at least for now). This war of choice on Israel's behalf has alienated and weakened Europe, the Gulf states and Asia. Iran is being smart about all this and allowing non-US oil to traverse the Strait, further putting a wedge between those countries and the US. The US started it, has no path to victory and doesn't even know what victory is. It's up to Iran when this ends now and they're going to exact a price that will put them significantly ahead of where they were before this started. Ending of sanctions, tolls on ships traversing the Strait and/or reparations. IMHO it's the biggest geopolitical mistake in US history and it's not even close.
- exceptione 7mo ago
  > China has played much much better chess so it's not surprise they're benefiting. They didn't play chess at all, but unlike the USA, they didn't poop on the board and didn't smudge the other players with their drool. We are forgetting now that the belt and road initiative, as well as the wolf warrior diplomacy, had put China on the lowest rankings in global perception. China had to do literally nothing to "play better", and they were smart enough to do so. The USA committing suicide--yeah, what can you do about it?
  - jbm 7mo ago
    Somewhat hilariously, the US adopted the same Wolf Warrior diplomacy. Maybe public diplomacy is simply adjacent to local politics to the US. I still think this will backfire spectacularly over the medium term.
  - tim-projects 7mo ago
    Real life is not chess, and inaction is a valid move for the Chinese. Look up Wu Wei 'action without action'
  - bamboozled 7mo ago
    Let's say the USA does gain control over the Straight of Homuz, wouldn't that be quite an issue for China though? Where would it get it's oil from? I don't agree with what's going on in Iran, I'm just thinking that regardless of whether or not it's a good idea, if the USA is basically in control of all meaningful oil exports, then it's game over for any significant Chinese military action because, they won't have the oil to run their aircraft carriers etc (they don't have nuclear carriers). I think I understand their logic, but I might agree with others who say this is going to be an extremely bloody / unpopular war with very little justification for it's existence.
    - Ostrogoth 7mo ago
      China buys Russian oil via pipeline and tanker, so they’re not entirely dependent on Gulf crude. They also have more levers to pull at the state level to reduce civilian demand on petroleum. Along with current electrification/alternative energy efforts, that could be a significant reduction in demand. Finally, China has operated nuclear subs for decades, and is actually building a nuclear aircraft carrier. China likely does not think it can compete head-to-head with the US in a conventional naval confrontation, and has invested heavily in missile and drone technology, along with other asymmetric capabilities. It would certainly be painful if the US took over the Persian Gulf, but likely not debilitating. I did find it interesting that in both Venezuela and Iran, Chinese radar and air defense did not hold up so well, but they’re at least getting a lot of real world test data from it.
- adolph 7mo ago
  > The USA is either going for force a regime change or it's going to ruin Iran. Where will China get oil from then? A positive story for China might be: a.) building port complexes and other industrial facilities is something China export as construction, engineering and financial services; b.) oil is a global commodity and a rising price everywhere doesn't create a relative disadvantage.
- anakaine 7mo ago
  The Belt and Road initiative gets a shot in the arm. No tarrifs, free trade, lower cost finance with fewer encumbrances. Efforts to establish the Renminbi as a second reserve currency have been quiet, but these trade alliances and alternate banking arrangements are already making it a possible reality. US perception is that belt and road was unpopular and a failure, but its little different from US economic imperialism. The amount of money flowing through BRICS and the rise of China as the world's largest creditor is testament to this. Cheaper weapons have shown to be effe tive in holding off a technologically superior force, and China is both great at producing them and happy to sell them to spec. The US not being able to produce weapons at a fast enough cadence to refill the stockpile is an indicator that US weapons manufacturing is currently unsustainable, and prohibitively expensive. Both are weakness. The US has shown that it cannot maintain moderate effort on two fronts. Not only is it financially almost unable to do so, only by the good graces of being the reserve currency, it would significantly struggle to maintain distributed engagements - this is military intelligence if an adversary wanted to engineer multiple conflicts requiring US attention globally to spread the US thin.
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
- Hfuffzehn 7mo ago
  I'll give you a small scale example for that. A year ago, when discussing AI adoption in an European business, the idea of looking at Chinese providers or Mistral was not seriously considered. The obvious answer was Microsoft/Azure and OpenAI. That has changed nowadays. As a direct consequence of the behavior of the American government towards its "allies". You can extrapolate from that. This isn't about short term oil supply problems when the whole world (lead by China) is moving to renewables anyways. It is about long term strategic consequences.
  - bamboozled 7mo ago
    I don't think it has just changed to "China is ok" though, it seems to be more like, Europe has decided to build more of it's own infrastructure and military capability. I think the over-reliance mistake won't be made again for a long time. I don't disagree that it's beneficial for China, likely in the short term, but I also don't think a lot of countries are just happy to go full Communist party either.
    - raven12345 7mo ago
      I'm curious why countries do business with Communist will let them go full Communist party
WarmWash 7mo ago
Maybe it will finally get a critical mass of people to realize how much oil and gas sucks.
- kelnos 7mo ago
  I think in the US we already have that; it's just that our current leadership is in love with oil and gas and thinks renewables are "woke" or something. The number of renewable energy projects that have been cancelled or stalled here in the past year+ is gross. It is nice that some Trump supporters are seeing prices at the pump and are having second thoughts about their Dear Leader. But a) it's disappointing that that's what it takes, and b) he still has a rabid base of people who love him despite his policies being the exact opposite of what they need to prosper (not to mention many of his policies being the exact opposite of what he campaigned on). So we can only assume that renewables will continue to be kneecapped in the US at least for the next ~3 years. Hopefully European countries are fast-tracking renewable projects, but those things take time to build and bring online. (Hopefully they've been doing so since the Ukraine war started, really. The current Iran-related energy crisis is bad, but it's not like Europe had been sitting pretty with energy resources a month ago.)
exceptione 7mo ago
Good points, except this one: > And Europe and the US will likely make peace with Russia over Ukraine because of spiralling energy costs thanks to America's reckless misadventure in the Gulf. MAGA is investing hard in trying to kill the EU from within by exporting conservative dipshit organisations, blue-printed from the USA. I see al kinds of recruitment going on here. If they succeed there is a small chance Europe will betray Ukraine, but right now the momentum is going into the other direction. What events have shown is that criminal games are incompatible with civil society, and European leaders are finally learning to understand that you can't play with autocrats like Trump, Putin and Orban, because for the latter, their only modus is to exploit, to loiter, to steal, to create conflict, to escalate, to play the victim, to up their game. End game: everything ends in ruin. Crime knows only one game: zero sum. People are starting to understand it.
- jbm 7mo ago
  It's not just the EU, you can see these organizations in Canada and in Japan. For example, I watch youtube channels ostensibly created to discuss Japanese Real Estate (I'm thinking about Rakumachi) which suddenly pivot to posting American right wing talking points in Japanese on their shorts channel. (Their long form RE content is usually interesting)
slim 7mo ago
1. your conclusion is based on a remark by one hardly representative american journalist. you said yourself this has been going on since the 40s. it's cycles of "oh no, crazy republican goes to war", then reasonable democrat continues the war. we know the drill.
applicative 7mo ago
The American presence was in opposition to the Soviet Union. There was a Cold War. It is very easy to show that the Soviet role in the production of Islamisant terrorism is infinitely greater. It is a universal feature of 21st c anti-yankee claptrap that it simply memory holes the Soviet Union. Unlike Uncle Sam, the Soviet Union no longer exists, so the Economist, written by well-heeled 30-something media class types, sees nothing to blame.

by jmyeet 7mo ago

bamboozled 7mo ago

China has played much much better chess so it's not surprise they're benefiting. However, I don't really see how China will benefit from Iran being in ruins. Can you elaborate on how China benefits ? From what I can tell, The USA is either going for force a regime change or it's going to ruin Iran. Where will China get oil from then? You might say Russia but that's a precarious situation for them to be in.

monknomo 7mo ago
china benefits from America eroding its global power is what the thesis is, I believe. Iran being a quagmire that erode's America's global power.
- bamboozled 7mo ago
  They're gambling basically, if it works and they do topple the regime, I think it will work for the USA, and if it turns into a prolonged quagmire, then yes, it will probably not be successful and very detrimental. I do sympathize with those who just wanted cheaper eggs.
bestouff 7mo ago
They become a serious partner for many countries disillusioned by the US.
jmyeet 7mo ago
The US cannot ruin Iran short of the widespread use of nuclear weapons. Air power has never resulted in regime change. Never. It takes boots on the ground and one just needs to look at a map. Iran is surrounded on 3 sides by mountains and the Gulf on the fourth. Iran's drones and ballistic missiles are incredibly cheap, well-defended and impossible to meaningfully disrupt. The interceptors used to stop them are running out and increasingly ineffective. I think I read that the ballistic missile strike rate on Israel is now over 50%. What does it take to launch drones or even a ballistic missile? A cheap modification to any truck, basically. The US cannot forcibly open the Strait of Hormuz because that would put them in close range to Iranian drone and missile strikes that the US doesn't have the weapon systems, interceptors and munitions to defeat. It's suicide. Any escalation will end up much worse for Iran's neighbors than Iran because Iran is already built for economic isolation and self-reliance, thanks to years of criminal economic sanctions. You want to hit Iranian desalination plants? Well, that'll invite a hit on desalination plants in other Gulf states and that's going to end up much worse for them. Why? Remember those mountains I mentioned? They're covered in snow. Iran has ski resorts. Many people don't realize that. What does that mean? Just like California, they get significant freshwater from snow melt. A ground invasion of the Iranian mainland has no staging ground. For Kuwait, we used Saudi Arabia. You can't stage across the mountains so you need an amphibious landing, much like D-Day. And it would need to be probably as complex and large. We simply don't have the ships, the soldiers or the logistics for that. Basically, we have no options. This was unwinnable before we even started. This is why every president since Reagan refused Israel's attempts to start a war with Iran. Until Trump. I honestly think he'd been fooled into thinking he could do a decapitation strike on Iran like Venezuela and get a friendly regime. That was never going to work. Iran has almost 50 years of hardening and maintaining a regime to resist US interference. The one thing this administration seeems to care about is gas prices. This is why Iranian exports haven't been blocked. China is still getting oil from Iran. In fact last week the US lifted sanctions on Iranian oil, which was previously being sold below market. In January, Iran was selling oil for $48/barrel. Now they're selling it for >$100. China has a massive reserve (~1.4 billion barrels) and has suspended exports of refined oil products. Countries friendly to us in the region are in for a world of hurt, most notably the Phillipines and Vietnam (Japan seems to have significant reserves like China, at least for now). This war of choice on Israel's behalf has alienated and weakened Europe, the Gulf states and Asia. Iran is being smart about all this and allowing non-US oil to traverse the Strait, further putting a wedge between those countries and the US. The US started it, has no path to victory and doesn't even know what victory is. It's up to Iran when this ends now and they're going to exact a price that will put them significantly ahead of where they were before this started. Ending of sanctions, tolls on ships traversing the Strait and/or reparations. IMHO it's the biggest geopolitical mistake in US history and it's not even close.
exceptione 7mo ago
> China has played much much better chess so it's not surprise they're benefiting. They didn't play chess at all, but unlike the USA, they didn't poop on the board and didn't smudge the other players with their drool. We are forgetting now that the belt and road initiative, as well as the wolf warrior diplomacy, had put China on the lowest rankings in global perception. China had to do literally nothing to "play better", and they were smart enough to do so. The USA committing suicide--yeah, what can you do about it?
- jbm 7mo ago
  Somewhat hilariously, the US adopted the same Wolf Warrior diplomacy. Maybe public diplomacy is simply adjacent to local politics to the US. I still think this will backfire spectacularly over the medium term.
- tim-projects 7mo ago
  Real life is not chess, and inaction is a valid move for the Chinese. Look up Wu Wei 'action without action'
- bamboozled 7mo ago
  Let's say the USA does gain control over the Straight of Homuz, wouldn't that be quite an issue for China though? Where would it get it's oil from? I don't agree with what's going on in Iran, I'm just thinking that regardless of whether or not it's a good idea, if the USA is basically in control of all meaningful oil exports, then it's game over for any significant Chinese military action because, they won't have the oil to run their aircraft carriers etc (they don't have nuclear carriers). I think I understand their logic, but I might agree with others who say this is going to be an extremely bloody / unpopular war with very little justification for it's existence.
  - Ostrogoth 7mo ago
    China buys Russian oil via pipeline and tanker, so they’re not entirely dependent on Gulf crude. They also have more levers to pull at the state level to reduce civilian demand on petroleum. Along with current electrification/alternative energy efforts, that could be a significant reduction in demand. Finally, China has operated nuclear subs for decades, and is actually building a nuclear aircraft carrier. China likely does not think it can compete head-to-head with the US in a conventional naval confrontation, and has invested heavily in missile and drone technology, along with other asymmetric capabilities. It would certainly be painful if the US took over the Persian Gulf, but likely not debilitating. I did find it interesting that in both Venezuela and Iran, Chinese radar and air defense did not hold up so well, but they’re at least getting a lot of real world test data from it.
adolph 7mo ago
> The USA is either going for force a regime change or it's going to ruin Iran. Where will China get oil from then? A positive story for China might be: a.) building port complexes and other industrial facilities is something China export as construction, engineering and financial services; b.) oil is a global commodity and a rising price everywhere doesn't create a relative disadvantage.
anakaine 7mo ago
The Belt and Road initiative gets a shot in the arm. No tarrifs, free trade, lower cost finance with fewer encumbrances. Efforts to establish the Renminbi as a second reserve currency have been quiet, but these trade alliances and alternate banking arrangements are already making it a possible reality. US perception is that belt and road was unpopular and a failure, but its little different from US economic imperialism. The amount of money flowing through BRICS and the rise of China as the world's largest creditor is testament to this. Cheaper weapons have shown to be effe tive in holding off a technologically superior force, and China is both great at producing them and happy to sell them to spec. The US not being able to produce weapons at a fast enough cadence to refill the stockpile is an indicator that US weapons manufacturing is currently unsustainable, and prohibitively expensive. Both are weakness. The US has shown that it cannot maintain moderate effort on two fronts. Not only is it financially almost unable to do so, only by the good graces of being the reserve currency, it would significantly struggle to maintain distributed engagements - this is military intelligence if an adversary wanted to engineer multiple conflicts requiring US attention globally to spread the US thin.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
Hfuffzehn 7mo ago
I'll give you a small scale example for that. A year ago, when discussing AI adoption in an European business, the idea of looking at Chinese providers or Mistral was not seriously considered. The obvious answer was Microsoft/Azure and OpenAI. That has changed nowadays. As a direct consequence of the behavior of the American government towards its "allies". You can extrapolate from that. This isn't about short term oil supply problems when the whole world (lead by China) is moving to renewables anyways. It is about long term strategic consequences.
- bamboozled 7mo ago
  I don't think it has just changed to "China is ok" though, it seems to be more like, Europe has decided to build more of it's own infrastructure and military capability. I think the over-reliance mistake won't be made again for a long time. I don't disagree that it's beneficial for China, likely in the short term, but I also don't think a lot of countries are just happy to go full Communist party either.
  - raven12345 7mo ago
    I'm curious why countries do business with Communist will let them go full Communist party

WarmWash 7mo ago

Maybe it will finally get a critical mass of people to realize how much oil and gas sucks.

kelnos 7mo ago
I think in the US we already have that; it's just that our current leadership is in love with oil and gas and thinks renewables are "woke" or something. The number of renewable energy projects that have been cancelled or stalled here in the past year+ is gross. It is nice that some Trump supporters are seeing prices at the pump and are having second thoughts about their Dear Leader. But a) it's disappointing that that's what it takes, and b) he still has a rabid base of people who love him despite his policies being the exact opposite of what they need to prosper (not to mention many of his policies being the exact opposite of what he campaigned on). So we can only assume that renewables will continue to be kneecapped in the US at least for the next ~3 years. Hopefully European countries are fast-tracking renewable projects, but those things take time to build and bring online. (Hopefully they've been doing so since the Ukraine war started, really. The current Iran-related energy crisis is bad, but it's not like Europe had been sitting pretty with energy resources a month ago.)

exceptione 7mo ago

Good points, except this one: > And Europe and the US will likely make peace with Russia over Ukraine because of spiralling energy costs thanks to America's reckless misadventure in the Gulf. MAGA is investing hard in trying to kill the EU from within by exporting conservative dipshit organisations, blue-printed from the USA. I see al kinds of recruitment going on here. If they succeed there is a small chance Europe will betray Ukraine, but right now the momentum is going into the other direction. What events have shown is that criminal games are incompatible with civil society, and European leaders are finally learning to understand that you can't play with autocrats like Trump, Putin and Orban, because for the latter, their only modus is to exploit, to loiter, to steal, to create conflict, to escalate, to play the victim, to up their game. End game: everything ends in ruin. Crime knows only one game: zero sum. People are starting to understand it.

jbm 7mo ago
It's not just the EU, you can see these organizations in Canada and in Japan. For example, I watch youtube channels ostensibly created to discuss Japanese Real Estate (I'm thinking about Rakumachi) which suddenly pivot to posting American right wing talking points in Japanese on their shorts channel. (Their long form RE content is usually interesting)

slim 7mo ago

1. your conclusion is based on a remark by one hardly representative american journalist. you said yourself this has been going on since the 40s. it's cycles of "oh no, crazy republican goes to war", then reasonable democrat continues the war. we know the drill.

applicative 7mo ago

The American presence was in opposition to the Soviet Union. There was a Cold War. It is very easy to show that the Soviet role in the production of Islamisant terrorism is infinitely greater. It is a universal feature of 21st c anti-yankee claptrap that it simply memory holes the Soviet Union. Unlike Uncle Sam, the Soviet Union no longer exists, so the Economist, written by well-heeled 30-something media class types, sees nothing to blame.