Seems to me that Iran's military strategy going forward is to build better air defenses to withstand Israel and the U.S., before restarting its nuclear program.
Which is why Netanyahu is talking "regime change, regime change."
But Israel and the U.S. for decades couldn't get enough "regime change" going among the Palestinians to prevent the arising of Hamas.
And Hamas dug 400 miles of tunnels, in secret, RIGHT NEXT DOOR. In a strip of land 41 km long by aver. 9 km wide.
Meanwhile Iran is 4x the area of Iraq, with 2 mountain ranges and 92.4 million people. So a ground invasion, even by the U.S., seems to be out of the question.
There are a lot of people in Iran who want a more "liberalized" regime, but so far they have no arms and it would be bloody.
Main danger to world oil is that marine insurance rates on tankers will go through the roof.
Netanyahu is probably still high over developments in Syria, but Iran is quite a different animal. If nothing else, Iran's rulers share their religion with most of Iran's populace.
We were warned repeatedly before last November's election about the consequences of tRump as president during a critical international event, and as you have laid out, the man's utter lack of ANY strategic considerations in executing rash actions is now put to yet another test. Once Netanyahu unleashed Israeli Air Force upon Iranian soil, it was just a question of time — "two weeks"? — before tRump would capitulate and throw his lot in with Bibi.
Two "leaders", each using warfare to boost their respective flagging popularity, have yet again used the Middle East as a battleground, as an exercise in "regime change" — despite protestations to the contrary — and unmindful of the fallout and no considerations for "the day after". Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Syria...lessons plainly available to be learned, but yet again ignored.
Nothing like a good war to distract people from domestic failures. Especially since you can do it now without even putting boots on the enemy ground, thanks to drone/stealth technology.
Right now, when no one knows what will happen next, is chaos, Trump's sweet spot. He never feels more powerful and secure than in the eye of a hurricane he created, If/when there is a response Trump will react following his showbiz instinct, probably with more easy bombing. The slag heap metaphor is a little misleading because for Trump that slag heap is an illusion. He has proven to himself it simply doesn't exist, he has no constraints other than his own will. As long as the Republican party protects him this will remain true.
Liked your hurricane metaphor. Chaos is the one situation at which everybody has to stop and look at him and try to figure out what he is doing, so he gets attention and feels in control, for now. However, even hurricanes deplete their energy when they encounter land, and they break up. The atmosphere is continually making and breaking up storm systems.
When a skater spins they feel completely centered (and must be) while the rink seems to spin around them. But if they go out of balance...down they go.
Or when a hot air balloon rises, it feels like the earth is dropping away, not the balloon going up. But balloons do come down when the fuel runs out...who knows where, since you can't steer them.
Trump seems less like a good spinner, or the calm eye of a storm, and more like an addict who has to keep coming up with new money to buy the drugs. Or, maybe like Bernie Madoff, constantly robbing Peter to pay Paul? The moment they stop, destruction.
There must be a Wizard of Oz metaphor in here too...
Seems like chaos all the way up and down, for the most part. If you did it your whole life, and got away with it, why would you stop?
You must have watched "Citizen Kane"? It wasn't a comedy.
Interesting to apply this framing to the other global emergency Trump faced, the pandemic. Judging by his current Secretary of Health, MAGA seems able to stand astride the slag heaps and proudly declare them to be lush landscapes.
I appreciate the effort to step back and tie what DJT is doing now to how DJT has operated in the past. It seems to me that his 'strategy' has several related elements:
1. An extreme short-term focus — he doesn't plan several moves ahead, he 'plans' his next move.
2. Creating instability, uncertainty, chaos, disorder — which reduces the ability of others to plan and pushes them into a react crouch.
3. Feinting, misleading, misrepresenting, denying plain facts, and outright lying.
4. Presenting himself as the mastermind around which everything revolves according to his will.
5. Bullying others, particularly by deploying the law to, tie up those who challenge his stratagems.
6. Insulating himself from any dissenting opinions by surrounding himself with sycophants and family.
7. Selling a brand that is nothing more than an image not backed by any substantial product — hence the appeal of meme-coins, golden telephones, casinos, 'reality' TV that depicts no reality, golf clubs, tacky apartment buildings and hotels, etc.
8. A belief that he 'can go it alone' and break any agreements he makes at will.
9. Depending on other peoples' money whether its his father's money, his investor's money, or the asset that was the federal government before he and Musk deconstructed it under the guidance of Project 2025.
This was his approach to business — despite the serial bankruptcies. It seems to be his approach to governing the US. And it seems to be his approach to engaging with the rest of the world.
When you are a child and cannot anticipate future outcomes, you play with your toys carelessly and break them. Then when they break you cry and get mad, as if it were somebody else's fault.
Kyu Chan: At first blush, it seems like, "The strike against Iran was actually his first good decision."
I concur.
But with considerable doubt.
The impressive feature of the strike was that the massive operation could be conducted so surreptitiously as to be totally undetected by the foe.
We managed to fly low, undetected and undeterred.
We managed massively to bomb three key sites.
But how much damage was done?
President George W. Bush flew in uniform to a carrier with banners of "Mission Accomplished."
Last night, the President did a gloating victory lap.
This morning, cream dripping from his mouth, SecDef Hedgehog effusively praised his Dear Leader, DJT, for the successful operation.
"Mission Accomplished" -- which was impressive at the time -- bogged us down in a war that, to be sure, toppled Saddam Hussein, but in destroying the Baath Party had as a necessary consequence also vacuumed and sucked in any Iraqi opposition to Iran.
As a result of the U.S wars in Iraq, the large population Shiite Iraqis became more powerful, and these powers linked with their natural spiritual brothers in Iran.
The Shiites in Iraq and Iran are closely linked.
They share holy sites and great poets, Rumi and Farid Ud-Din Attar.
So, who became more powerful in the Middle East because of the Iraqi-American wars?
IRAN.
Iran supported Bashar al-Asad in Syria.
Iran supported Hezbollah and Hamas.
So now Israel has to battle both.
I will leave out the question of the propriety of Israel's military operations in Gaza and Lebanon. (I have strong opinions about this.)
I have no love for the Ayatollah and his terrorizing of good Iranian citizens.
I hope, I hope we have destroyed Iranian nuclear capability.
Time will tell.
If not, America may become inextricably bound in Middle-Eastern battles.
It is too soon for the photo-op nurtured by Bush: "Mission Accomplished!"
Iran needs to be curtailed . It is the sole source of all the trouble in the Mideast right now. It is now time for America to correct its mistakes (Reagan / North supporting Iran with weapons , Bush Jr eliminating its arch enemy Hussein and literally handing Iraq over to Iran ).
I see your point with Iran and its trouble makers but we can’t allow just another nation to go nuclear . Especially one which openly states it wants to wipe out Israel (imagine a Mideast without Israel or biomedical research on this planet without Israel ) . The strike was impressive and extremely limited . It will go down like Trump’s killing of … what was his name … Soleimani . We didn’t attack Iran or our boots in the ground . Also, Iran is claiming nothing was damaged . Well, if nothing is damaged …? :) so what’s the big deal . They don’t need 60% enriched uranium .
It all will blow over harmlessly . They have an Achilles heel - their oil business . It would be easy to wipe that out . Europe would suffer a little , japan maybe (oil prices ) , America has its own oil (albeit the refining issue is still a problem ). But oil VOLUME wouldn’t be affected so much as Iran exports most to China . Trump is a disaster but here acted quite astutely . It is surprising to me as he could have made way more money with an under trade doing nothing - shorting oil and defense - but maybe Iranian La didn’t go along with it with any peace offer to Israel anyway . Maybe this was Trump’s first responsible , even patriotic or philosophically sound action - since his both presidencies .
Are we bombing Iran to protect Kushner Affinity's new investment of Saudi billions, and other ME Royal billions, in Israeli tech, financials, and West Bank settlement expansion? Bloomberg has done some detailed reporting on the chunk of investment risk/growth potential Jared has added to his long history of backing by Israeli insurers and brokers in his U.S. real estate ventures. Also, if you displace people from their ancestral land, limit their access to resources, steal their water, farms and homes, they're probably going to dig trenches.
We don't know. It's hard to predict safety for the Jewish diaspora. Jews might live somewhere for centuries and suddenly be hunted down and murdered or driven from their homes. It happened in Spain in 1492. It happened in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s. It happened in the Mideast in the 1960s and 1970s.
Agree. The shooting of Synagogues and Jewish citizens after Charlottesville tells the story. The Unite the Right and MAGA is oil and water to some degree. We live in strange times.
The slag heap metaphor is a useful way of bringing in the temporal dimension of policy actions. U.S. slag heaps began accumulating long before Trump 2.0. U.S. actions in Libya and Iraq, for example, seem to lowered PUTIN’s tolerance of American shenanigans in his back (or front) yard, resulting in a slag heap collapse in the form of his invasion of Ukraine. (Putin got into the slag heap business, too.). The relevant slag heap was the overthrow of Mossadegh in 1953 which slag heap collapsed in 1979 — and here we are!
"I don’t have anything useful to say about what will happen in the Middle East now that the U.S. has dived, eyes closed and head first, into someone else’s war."
Isn't it worth saying that the US bombing is a flat-out violation violation of the UN Charter, which, along with countless other American (and Israeli and Soviet) violations, have almost definitively undermined any hope of living in a world constrained by international law? We all know that the American, Israeli, and Russian governments don't care a fig for international law, but the least the rest of us can do is try to remind them that we haven't completely forgotten about it.
Rory Stewart, on the podcast "The Rest is Politics", suggested this is the end of the UN as powerful nations ignore the rules-based international order, returning to the state of geopolitics in the 19th century. It feels strange to think that the post-WWII era with the UN could now be ending after 80 years.
I think the slag heap is a lot more crumbly now than when Clinton bombed Al Qaeda in Sudan back in 1998. As others have noted here, there's a lot of history.
In all honesty, I'm on the fence about bombing Iran's nuke sites. On the one hand, we really don't want Iran to have nukes, and Israel's dismantling of Iranian air defenses opened an opportunity.
On the other hand, we don't know what the ultimate consequences will be. At this point, all we can do is stay tuned and see what happens next.
Seems to me that Iran's military strategy going forward is to build better air defenses to withstand Israel and the U.S., before restarting its nuclear program.
Which is why Netanyahu is talking "regime change, regime change."
But Israel and the U.S. for decades couldn't get enough "regime change" going among the Palestinians to prevent the arising of Hamas.
And Hamas dug 400 miles of tunnels, in secret, RIGHT NEXT DOOR. In a strip of land 41 km long by aver. 9 km wide.
Meanwhile Iran is 4x the area of Iraq, with 2 mountain ranges and 92.4 million people. So a ground invasion, even by the U.S., seems to be out of the question.
There are a lot of people in Iran who want a more "liberalized" regime, but so far they have no arms and it would be bloody.
Main danger to world oil is that marine insurance rates on tankers will go through the roof.
Netanyahu is probably still high over developments in Syria, but Iran is quite a different animal. If nothing else, Iran's rulers share their religion with most of Iran's populace.
We were warned repeatedly before last November's election about the consequences of tRump as president during a critical international event, and as you have laid out, the man's utter lack of ANY strategic considerations in executing rash actions is now put to yet another test. Once Netanyahu unleashed Israeli Air Force upon Iranian soil, it was just a question of time — "two weeks"? — before tRump would capitulate and throw his lot in with Bibi.
Two "leaders", each using warfare to boost their respective flagging popularity, have yet again used the Middle East as a battleground, as an exercise in "regime change" — despite protestations to the contrary — and unmindful of the fallout and no considerations for "the day after". Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Syria...lessons plainly available to be learned, but yet again ignored.
Nothing like a good war to distract people from domestic failures. Especially since you can do it now without even putting boots on the enemy ground, thanks to drone/stealth technology.
Right now, when no one knows what will happen next, is chaos, Trump's sweet spot. He never feels more powerful and secure than in the eye of a hurricane he created, If/when there is a response Trump will react following his showbiz instinct, probably with more easy bombing. The slag heap metaphor is a little misleading because for Trump that slag heap is an illusion. He has proven to himself it simply doesn't exist, he has no constraints other than his own will. As long as the Republican party protects him this will remain true.
Liked your hurricane metaphor. Chaos is the one situation at which everybody has to stop and look at him and try to figure out what he is doing, so he gets attention and feels in control, for now. However, even hurricanes deplete their energy when they encounter land, and they break up. The atmosphere is continually making and breaking up storm systems.
When a skater spins they feel completely centered (and must be) while the rink seems to spin around them. But if they go out of balance...down they go.
Or when a hot air balloon rises, it feels like the earth is dropping away, not the balloon going up. But balloons do come down when the fuel runs out...who knows where, since you can't steer them.
Trump seems less like a good spinner, or the calm eye of a storm, and more like an addict who has to keep coming up with new money to buy the drugs. Or, maybe like Bernie Madoff, constantly robbing Peter to pay Paul? The moment they stop, destruction.
There must be a Wizard of Oz metaphor in here too...
Seems like chaos all the way up and down, for the most part. If you did it your whole life, and got away with it, why would you stop?
You must have watched "Citizen Kane"? It wasn't a comedy.
On the other hand, consider this act, which is:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cb6NS_F5xTE
A bull, led by the ring in its nose...to the slaughterhouse.
Interesting to apply this framing to the other global emergency Trump faced, the pandemic. Judging by his current Secretary of Health, MAGA seems able to stand astride the slag heaps and proudly declare them to be lush landscapes.
I appreciate the effort to step back and tie what DJT is doing now to how DJT has operated in the past. It seems to me that his 'strategy' has several related elements:
1. An extreme short-term focus — he doesn't plan several moves ahead, he 'plans' his next move.
2. Creating instability, uncertainty, chaos, disorder — which reduces the ability of others to plan and pushes them into a react crouch.
3. Feinting, misleading, misrepresenting, denying plain facts, and outright lying.
4. Presenting himself as the mastermind around which everything revolves according to his will.
5. Bullying others, particularly by deploying the law to, tie up those who challenge his stratagems.
6. Insulating himself from any dissenting opinions by surrounding himself with sycophants and family.
7. Selling a brand that is nothing more than an image not backed by any substantial product — hence the appeal of meme-coins, golden telephones, casinos, 'reality' TV that depicts no reality, golf clubs, tacky apartment buildings and hotels, etc.
8. A belief that he 'can go it alone' and break any agreements he makes at will.
9. Depending on other peoples' money whether its his father's money, his investor's money, or the asset that was the federal government before he and Musk deconstructed it under the guidance of Project 2025.
This was his approach to business — despite the serial bankruptcies. It seems to be his approach to governing the US. And it seems to be his approach to engaging with the rest of the world.
When you are a child and cannot anticipate future outcomes, you play with your toys carelessly and break them. Then when they break you cry and get mad, as if it were somebody else's fault.
Rule #1 Do something stupidly impulsive
Rule #2 Deny everything
Rule #3 Blame someone else
Rule #4 Take credit for something that didn't happen
Rule #5 Wait two weeks for the heat to blow over
Rule #6 Repeat
Is this from Robert's Rules of Order, or Robert's Rules of Disorder?
The strike against Iran was actually his first good decision. His trade wars etc are of course “tacky” . Just not smart
Kyu Chan: At first blush, it seems like, "The strike against Iran was actually his first good decision."
I concur.
But with considerable doubt.
The impressive feature of the strike was that the massive operation could be conducted so surreptitiously as to be totally undetected by the foe.
We managed to fly low, undetected and undeterred.
We managed massively to bomb three key sites.
But how much damage was done?
President George W. Bush flew in uniform to a carrier with banners of "Mission Accomplished."
Last night, the President did a gloating victory lap.
This morning, cream dripping from his mouth, SecDef Hedgehog effusively praised his Dear Leader, DJT, for the successful operation.
"Mission Accomplished" -- which was impressive at the time -- bogged us down in a war that, to be sure, toppled Saddam Hussein, but in destroying the Baath Party had as a necessary consequence also vacuumed and sucked in any Iraqi opposition to Iran.
As a result of the U.S wars in Iraq, the large population Shiite Iraqis became more powerful, and these powers linked with their natural spiritual brothers in Iran.
The Shiites in Iraq and Iran are closely linked.
They share holy sites and great poets, Rumi and Farid Ud-Din Attar.
So, who became more powerful in the Middle East because of the Iraqi-American wars?
IRAN.
Iran supported Bashar al-Asad in Syria.
Iran supported Hezbollah and Hamas.
So now Israel has to battle both.
I will leave out the question of the propriety of Israel's military operations in Gaza and Lebanon. (I have strong opinions about this.)
I have no love for the Ayatollah and his terrorizing of good Iranian citizens.
I hope, I hope we have destroyed Iranian nuclear capability.
Time will tell.
If not, America may become inextricably bound in Middle-Eastern battles.
It is too soon for the photo-op nurtured by Bush: "Mission Accomplished!"
Iran needs to be curtailed . It is the sole source of all the trouble in the Mideast right now. It is now time for America to correct its mistakes (Reagan / North supporting Iran with weapons , Bush Jr eliminating its arch enemy Hussein and literally handing Iraq over to Iran ).
I see your point with Iran and its trouble makers but we can’t allow just another nation to go nuclear . Especially one which openly states it wants to wipe out Israel (imagine a Mideast without Israel or biomedical research on this planet without Israel ) . The strike was impressive and extremely limited . It will go down like Trump’s killing of … what was his name … Soleimani . We didn’t attack Iran or our boots in the ground . Also, Iran is claiming nothing was damaged . Well, if nothing is damaged …? :) so what’s the big deal . They don’t need 60% enriched uranium .
It all will blow over harmlessly . They have an Achilles heel - their oil business . It would be easy to wipe that out . Europe would suffer a little , japan maybe (oil prices ) , America has its own oil (albeit the refining issue is still a problem ). But oil VOLUME wouldn’t be affected so much as Iran exports most to China . Trump is a disaster but here acted quite astutely . It is surprising to me as he could have made way more money with an under trade doing nothing - shorting oil and defense - but maybe Iranian La didn’t go along with it with any peace offer to Israel anyway . Maybe this was Trump’s first responsible , even patriotic or philosophically sound action - since his both presidencies .
Are we bombing Iran to protect Kushner Affinity's new investment of Saudi billions, and other ME Royal billions, in Israeli tech, financials, and West Bank settlement expansion? Bloomberg has done some detailed reporting on the chunk of investment risk/growth potential Jared has added to his long history of backing by Israeli insurers and brokers in his U.S. real estate ventures. Also, if you displace people from their ancestral land, limit their access to resources, steal their water, farms and homes, they're probably going to dig trenches.
Has this made the Jewish diaspora safer? Has it made Israel safer?
We don't know. It's hard to predict safety for the Jewish diaspora. Jews might live somewhere for centuries and suddenly be hunted down and murdered or driven from their homes. It happened in Spain in 1492. It happened in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s. It happened in the Mideast in the 1960s and 1970s.
Agree. The shooting of Synagogues and Jewish citizens after Charlottesville tells the story. The Unite the Right and MAGA is oil and water to some degree. We live in strange times.
The slag heap metaphor is a useful way of bringing in the temporal dimension of policy actions. U.S. slag heaps began accumulating long before Trump 2.0. U.S. actions in Libya and Iraq, for example, seem to lowered PUTIN’s tolerance of American shenanigans in his back (or front) yard, resulting in a slag heap collapse in the form of his invasion of Ukraine. (Putin got into the slag heap business, too.). The relevant slag heap was the overthrow of Mossadegh in 1953 which slag heap collapsed in 1979 — and here we are!
"I don’t have anything useful to say about what will happen in the Middle East now that the U.S. has dived, eyes closed and head first, into someone else’s war."
Isn't it worth saying that the US bombing is a flat-out violation violation of the UN Charter, which, along with countless other American (and Israeli and Soviet) violations, have almost definitively undermined any hope of living in a world constrained by international law? We all know that the American, Israeli, and Russian governments don't care a fig for international law, but the least the rest of us can do is try to remind them that we haven't completely forgotten about it.
Rory Stewart, on the podcast "The Rest is Politics", suggested this is the end of the UN as powerful nations ignore the rules-based international order, returning to the state of geopolitics in the 19th century. It feels strange to think that the post-WWII era with the UN could now be ending after 80 years.
I think the slag heap is a lot more crumbly now than when Clinton bombed Al Qaeda in Sudan back in 1998. As others have noted here, there's a lot of history.
In all honesty, I'm on the fence about bombing Iran's nuke sites. On the one hand, we really don't want Iran to have nukes, and Israel's dismantling of Iranian air defenses opened an opportunity.
On the other hand, we don't know what the ultimate consequences will be. At this point, all we can do is stay tuned and see what happens next.
Only thing we can be sure of is Trump will keep on doing more Trump, until something stops him. That's the pattern of his life.
Unfortunately, that's the one certainty in all of this.
Yeah.