It's a shame, too, because they are right about the hydrocarbon input price effects, but speculative in a bizarre way elsewhere. Germany had a selection of strategic hydrocarbon options in the 2000s and fumbled by picking the option that would later prove to launch revisionary wars that interrupt their export capability.
Even if we lived in an alternate timeline where the US was completely supportive of the 2022 invasion at the time, Germany would still be surrounded on all sides by countries with a vested interest in pointing nuclear deterrents at Moscow and lose their energy feed in the same way.
Having seen a few of these, they tend to get exponentially worse at self-evaluation with the number of hours in operation. What successes and failures have you noticed with regard to this?
In defence of the claim that everything is political: fish live their whole lives with water. If fish could have discourse with each other, they'd have a great controversy over whether everything is wet. Everything humans live with is political.
Apolitical tech, if it is to succeed, must eliminate the human features, like art, emotion and stories. It can be done on a technical level, but it's an open question as to whether it could avoid the problem of users voting with their feet and staying in the "politics".
Iran is unlikely to target food and water without being further backed into a corner, since the escalation would mean reciprocal strikes (possibly independently by the KSA air force) on the Kharg and Bandar Abbas export terminals, which have so far avoided being targeted.
Israel will not tolerate an economically developed or at all democratic Iran. They want Iran to be where Gaza is and Libanon is heading. It's not just the leaders who have nothing to lose.
You would think the hebrew population is just exhausted and hardened and driven a little crazy by several generations of 'deathtoisrael' 'deathtoisrael' drilled into the brains of millions of schoolchildren every year - each /year/'s school intake of impressionable brains is larger than the total world Jewish population. In the end the hebrew-speakers' response will not be simply rational as they are as much mentally affected as the iran citizenry, which is orders of magnitude larger.
It's typical the world community has put up with the naked genocidal intent of the Iran government - which is by now in a sense woven into its constitution and mystical-apocalyptic self-conception - as if it were a musical curious style -- as they build militias saying the same on every border, financing the bizarre suicide campaigns of early 2000s etc. to stop a 2 state solution and keep the party going.
With 'deathtoamerica deathtoamerica' noblesse oblige requires us to pretend it is merely comical. But the 'uppity, arrogant' jewish state is microscopic by comparison with titanic Persian Empire. The disproportion (80x) is far more extreme than even USSR or USA v Afghanistan or USA v Vietnam (30x.
You're talking about Iran's genocidal intent as if Israel has not just finished actually committing one. And their supposed exhaustion from hate from their neighbors - The truth is they are gleefully hyper aggressive and hyper violent and ultra racist as well.
"Until these reasonable conditions are met, the war will go on." :) :)
You seem to have a much more imperative and concise view than either Trump or Hegseth, are you secretly the one in charge of everything?
I loathe Iran regime, but not much of that is going to happen.
The first response would be:
"We stop threatening Israel when they stop taking Palestinian lands and killing them"
"The US moves all troops out of the Middle East"
"Stops trying to overthrow our government"
"Stops sanctioning us"
"Stops and interfering in our domestic affairs"
"Returns $100B dollars stolen / frozen since 1979"
And that would literally put that truly bad regime on almost the moral high ground.
The impossible imperative that you've written I think helps us understand the 'Chock A Block' log-jam of the situation, and why this is so thorny.
The most plausible outcome is nothing.
The second most plausible outcome is descent into massive factional civil war.
Maybe somewhere down the line, there is a 'Shah Installed by the US' and then I'm afraid to tell you that we 'Already Did That' and look how it turned out.
There are no decisive answers and no decisive options on the table.
Idk why you’re getting downvoted, the U.S. is looking for a quick win if it can have it. One of the destructive streaks in the Iranian regime (and among its proxies) is their glorification of martyrdom over pragmatism. It’s cost them historically and it’s costing them now.
"the U.S. is looking for a quick win if it can have it."
?? What is a 'quick win' ??
Serious question.
- Ayatollah dead, next Ayatollah?
- 10 years of civil war?
- Installation of US-backed Shah, with no real power base, which will lead to ongoing insurrection, which is what led to ... Islamic Revolution ... because we already tried that?
- Faux acquiescence at the negotiating table ... while they dig their HQs further under ground?
What else?
A quick win is possible, but one of the most narrow scenarios.
It looks at the moment like everyone is losing, some worse than others.
An Iranian Delcy Rodriguez. Someone who waives a white flag, accepts Trump's terms and then gets left alone for the most part.
Even if it's a bluff to buy time to rebuild, I'm not seeing the strategic rationale for refusing to negotiate. (I do see Iran's leaders being internally constrained to keep fighting. We saw a similar dynamic in Japan during WWII.)
> My understanding is that they were actively negotiating
The only parties I’ve seen say this are Iran and Oman. Practically every other source, including non-English, concedes taking three weeks to come close to hashing out a framework isn’t serious.
> Trump was not authorized by Netanyahu to win that negotiation
This is nonsense. Netanyahu was pushing Trump. But if the Tehran team had capitulated, Trump would have taken the win. Hell, the capitalization could have been bullshit.
> outcome was foreordained
Of course it wasn’t. Ford wasn’t scrambled until weeks ago.
If you can read translated European, Indian, Chinese and Arab reporting on this, I’d strongly suggest it. The English-language stuff has inherited America’s obsession with Israel. That’s obviously germane here. But it isn’t as controlling as we like to make it seem.
Honest question, posed with all possible respect to a longtime HN user whom I am certain isn't a bot, an idiot, or a shill. Does Trump sound, to you, like a guy with a plan of his own, who can be trusted to execute that plan? Like someone who deserves the benefit of the doubt?
We're told that "Biden gave everything to Ukraine and didn't bother to replace it," but "Fortunately, I rebuilt the military in my first term," and now we have a "virtually unlimited supply, stocked and ready to WIN BIG!!!"
Where do you, personally, draw the line? What could he say to convince you that he isn't acting in our country's interests, or even his own?
I’m doing nothing of the sort. I’m carrying water for the evidence.
Iran was not negotiating in good faith regarding giving up their nuclear program. Israel was encouraging but not boxing in American decision making. Witkoff and Kushner were (a) genuinely trying to strike a deal and (b) against kinetics when they started. These are each supported by the preponderance of evidence, far more than their inverses.
> Where do you, personally, draw the line?
Where the evidence does. If that winds up being pro- or anti- whatever party, I’ll look at that second. Facts aren’t partisan.
I’m doing nothing of the sort. I’m carrying water for the evidence.
Unfortunately I don't feel that I have access to the "evidence" you're referring to.
Everything I know about the attacks on Iran, I learned from people who lie a lot. That's pretty much all they do. They begin lying shortly after they wake up in the morning but before they get out of bed, and then they don't stop lying until they enter the alpha state that night. After that they probably lie in their dreams, but to be fair I guess I don't have evidence of that either.
Facts aren’t partisan.
Are your non-partisan facts more like Kellyanne Conway's "alternative facts," or the kind that are actually true?
Trump wants the things I listed -- he has expressed them time and again for anyone remotely willing to listen.
If one is trying to negotiate while maintaining a theocracy, then Trump won't listen, but ending the theocracy is one of the listed points, so it's logically consistent.
You're not making sense. There's no reason to strike a deal with the US as the US can't be trusted to uphold their deals as they have demonstrated directly to Iran previously and to their own "allies".
I mean, the Germans and Japanese and Iraqis probably couldn’t have trusted the U.S. either. They still surrendered because it was better than fighting a futile war.
Same here. Iran’s security chief (and, I’m assuming, de facto leader) messaging he’s ready to concede on those points certainly doesn’t put him in a worse position than he is now.
See the link I posted in the other reply. The people we've elected to lead the US are snakes. Even some of the more fanatical Iranians look sane, intelligent, rational, and trustworthy in comparison.
Hyperbole aside, that's irrelevant. Iran doesn't have the option of negotiating with someone else. Their options are to attempt diplomacy or face incremental anihilation as a modern state.
I don't consider it hyperbole. I grew up with those sorts of people. They are capable of beliefs you wouldn't believe.
As for Iran, about all they could have done, in retrospect, was to actually develop nuclear weapons rather than just hemming and hawing and bluffing and stalling for 40+ years. It's amazing that the country that invented chess could blunder that badly.
> about all they could have done, in retrospect, was to actually develop nuclear weapons
There were so many mis-steps.
Iran could have rejected autarky. Constrained the IRGC’s corruption. Not funded proxies that pissed off every one of their neighbors (except for, maybe, Turkmenistan).
Not supported Hamas when they decided to deputize a lobotomy ward. Not drip fed Hezbollah’s rockets into Israeli air defenses. Not fired at Israel in a symbolic move in 2024. Not half assed their retaliation in 2025. Not assumed, with full faith, Trump was bluffing and thus not (a) seriously negotiate in Geneva nor (b) bother scattering their navy and air force in anticipation of strikes.
I’d actually argue an indigenous nuke was a strategic blunder for Iran. It cost them their economy and moral standing. Maybe pursuing Russia’s nuclear umbrella would have been a smarter move.
Since WW2 maybe, with a very, very small sample. But historically, if you have a minority religion/heresy, you better live under a Muslim caliphate than a Christian monarch not that it's great by any mean, but the moors are a great example, they got what, a generation after the reconquista? Two? Hussites and especially cathares are probably the first religious genocide, with public rape of one of their leader and her daughters, and the destruction of all Cathare littérature and religious text.
Even if we lived in an alternate timeline where the US was completely supportive of the 2022 invasion at the time, Germany would still be surrounded on all sides by countries with a vested interest in pointing nuclear deterrents at Moscow and lose their energy feed in the same way.
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