Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
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User ID: 1226
It's never 4D chess. Events just aren't predictable enough for that kind of strategy to work. If you can pull off a simple misdirection, you are doing well.
Deliberately inflicting pain on your allies isn't a clever move, it's a great way to stop having allies. If there was a buried intention here (there isn't, because it's never 4D chess, especially with Trump et al), it's that someone in the administration skimmed The Accidental Superpower and decided to become a Zeihanist accelerationist.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
3d ago
It's certainly not unique to the United States, e.g. there's a good argument that Prussia and its successors had the same basic problem, though there it was more that Prussia overestimated the ability of tactical prowess to paper over fundamental material disadvantages. Thus getting into deep shit and having to be bailed out. The same could be levied against Japan during WW2. The distinction I would draw is that these people generally had straightforward strategic goals, but their egos were writing checks their armies couldn't cash.
By contrast, I think where the US stands out is the combination of conventional dominance and confused, facile, or overly ambitious strategic thinking. America, like Prussia, keeps convincing itself it's going to get a quick decisive war. But Prussia's problem was biting off more than it could chew, while America's problem is that we have no idea what we're doing. And I don't mean that in the sense of 'incompetent'. I mean it in the sense that we think we're doing one thing when we're actually doing another.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
3d ago
I don't think the counterfactual of a more distributed insurance market (or no insurers) changes things. Any way you imagine slicing it, someone is on the financial hook for these ships.
Wars are not a tally of losses on either side. The US inflicted incredibly lopsided casualties in Afghanistan and Vietnam and still failed, because confusing tactical brilliance for strategic success is a perennial failure of American military thinking.
Also, the US hasn't destroyed the Iranian military.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
4d ago
It should be noted that traffic through the strait is a small fraction of its pre-war throughput even with recent 'upticks.' Whether or not Iran can properly close the strait, shippers clearly think the risk is high enough that they're not willing to risk it.
A couple of thoughts
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Assuming they are even honest, the negotiating points seem to far apart to mean anything. Like, the US is not paying reparations to Iran, Iran is not going to become a de facto US protectorate, etc... Iran is also clearly concerned about bad faith negotiations. All in all, it seems like we're nowhere close to progress on this front.
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This conflict seems to break a certain kind of person's brain, including a lot of people inside the Trump administration. They look at the raw power differential between the US and Iran, the difference in scale of destruction meted out on either end, and are simply baffled by the idea that Iran could still be in the fight or even in an advantageous position. It has a whiff of "that's not blood in my mouth, it's victory wine." What this fails to grasp is the difference in what this war means for the belligerents. The IRI has far more to lose and gain than the US does, far greater ability to make its populace accept suffering/losses, and an asymmetric need for force (simply put: the US needs way more force to achieve its goals than Iran does, and is operating much further away from its military base). Might-makes-right thinking habitually overestimates the efficacy of raw power and underestimates the importance of intangibles like morale and wanting it more.
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A number of people have observed that it now seems the goal of this war for the US is to re-open the strait of Hormuz, which was already open before the war. (Realistically, the goal is to extricate itself without looking stupid/weak, but that ship has probably already sailed). It's still conceivable that the US is going to try some kind of special operation to seize Iranian uranium, but I'm going to hazard to guess that US military really doesn't want to do that. I am still left with the impression that the administration really thought they were going to pull a repeat of Venezuela (we also have some indication that Netanyahu thought kicking in the door would bring the whole rotting edifice down) and all the people saying "trust the plan" are huffing pure, unfiltered copium.
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I have to wonder about the wider long-term impact of this conflict. There's going to be a lot of uninvolved countries suffering the economic consequences of the strait being closed, and I predict they're mostly going to blame the US for that. When you're global hegemon, they let you do it, but I can't help but suspect that the current administration is blindly drawing down US soft power without even realizing it.
- Sidebar: short-sighted belligerence makes the US dramatically less safe, contra the instincts of the terminally thug-brained. It riles up new adversaries and hardens old ones as well as alienating allies. More importantly, it undermines the trust of the public in US foreign policy. Huge swathes of the American public start from the assumption that whatever justification is offered for US military involvement is bullshit. This is endurable in the context of minor counterterrorism operations where the US doesn't have anything more significant than a few SpecOps on the ground and Trump can get away with a lot because of his cult of personality, but the time is going to come when the US actually faces some critical security threat that requires real cost and commitment. And we're pay a far heavier cost than we need to, because the public trust has been so thoroughly abuse that we won't be able to summon the will to act until after disaster has already occurred.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
4d ago
Nothing to do with cosmopolitanism and more to do with the fact that Britain just isn't a society divided like that. The idea that society is three meals from barbarism is not, in general, true. It is especially not true when it is coming under external attack.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
6d ago
I'm not saying this isn't happening, but I don't think I've seen a single woman in real life who fits this description. It's entirely reserved for elite conservative women in media/media-adjacent positions. All the normie-lib women I know wouldn't be caught dead getting cosmetic surgery (not saying they wouldn't get it, but it's sufficiently stigmatized that it would have to be really subtle), while all the conservative women I know are midwestern housewife types who would find cosmetic surgery to be absurd vanity. Also, regardless of orientation, a lot of them are too fat for that kind of cosmetic surgery to be credible.
(For reference, I live in Maryland and my family is from the Midwest)
Does anyone actually like this?
To me the look you are describing has extremely strong Aging Trophy Wife vibes. My gut says that this is probably the intersection of wealth and vanity. The artifice is the point - anyone can go to the gym and get fit, but not everyone can shell out a small fortune to have a doctor rearrange their face.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
6d ago
The actual answer is that you're not. Iran is not Afghanistan. Destroying critical infrastructure in Iran isn't going to turn it into a bunch of warring tribes any more doing the same in Britain would. It's just going to lead to a lot of avoidable deaths of Iranian civilians.
Are you denying that Trump I was basically a Lame Duck president
Yes. If this is a load-bearing belief of yours, we have nothing to talk about.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
7d ago
What is your standard for democracy that this system as written fails?... Iran is an illiberal democracy. They don't have free speech or freedom of expression. They have a significant dead hand problem of an entrenched set of interests which steer the country through approval of candidates.
I think the combination of the influence of the IRGC and centralized approval of candidates by a functionally self-selecting body goes beyond the dead hand of the past. Like, if every candidate for federal office in the US had to be approved by the Supreme Court (with informal but significant input from the military + IC), I would be happy to say that the US was not a democracy under those circumstances. The fact that the Iranian government is regularly required to put down massive protests with violent force that utterly eclipses any comparable measure in the US or Western Europe is strongly suggestive of a basic legitimacy problem.
(Also, the US is increasingly illiberal in its governance, so v0v)
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
7d ago
That seems like an extremely tendentious interpretation of that article. Trump associates with a bunch of Russian assets -> gets accused of collaborating with Russia -> Trump becomes obsessed with a Ukrainian conspiracy -> tries to extort Zelenskyy -> gets impeached for acting corruptly.
"Why would Hillary Clinton do this?" Donald Trump is a grown man with agency.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
8d ago
I trust the people in this forum more than I do of other forums
You shouldn't. This forum self-selects for people with outsider right-wing beliefs. This means you get exposed unusual perspectives relative to, e.g., reddit, but a lot of those perspectives are crankish or blinkered.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
8d ago
They can just rebuild it with the oil money they're getting :v
It's always hard to evaluate these kinds of statements because Trump is both a blusterer and a brute. It does kind of put the lie to any humanitarian pretense.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
8d ago
Ah, the "purist" view. So it's not a "real" strategic air win unless it comes 100% from the air
Yes. If you have to utilize ground troops to achieve your objective, it was not accomplished solely through air power. You cannot equivocate between a special operation with air support and and a pure air campaign.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
8d ago
Well, the short argument is that it worked quite well in Venezuela 3 months ago.
That argument would be very wrong, as would the analogies to Libya and Syria. The Venezuelan operation worked precisely because it put men on the ground to force the issue (and also probably because Maduro's subordinates sold him out). Syria and Libya had ongoing civil wars where western air power was merely supporting a favored faction. Gaddafi doesn't get overthrown if there isn't a massive rebellion on the ground; likewise for Assad. The Trump administration (at best) seems to be wishcasting a renewed uprising after standing by and doing nothing while the IRI massacred protestors, but available evidence is that it's not going to happen.
The US and Israel have had decades to plan this war, plus months to build up forces in the region
Which is why the US is currently rushing a couple of battalions of marines from the Pacific to (probably) seize a couple of outlying islands. The idea that this operation has been meticulously planned over the course of decades is cope.
There really isn't much a ground force could do that isn't already being done from the air
Unless you have ground forces to stop them, air power cannot stop the enemy from reconstituting once the bombing stops. There's a reason modern doctrine for the application of air power isn't "we're going to bomb until everyone's dead." The military value of air power isn't in raw killing effect, it is in the way air power allows you to precisely strike at key targets in a way that disrupts and degrades the enemy's ability to fight back. That can be an incredible force multiplier, but you still need ground forces to actually engage the enemy.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
8d ago
Greensburg, an FBI informant who was cooperating with the FBI to target Gaetz and others
The technical term for this is an "investigation".
Gaetz claims he only had sex with a 19 year old introduced to him by Greensburg
What do you expect him to say? "Yes, I did have sex with a 17 year old prostitute?"
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
9d ago
Don't they? I feel like blowing up all of their leadership and military is pretty compelling.
The record of air power in delivering conclusive outcomes is... very bad.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
9d ago
Of course, they could pass the blame by pointing out that given the evidence in the warrant application, it seemed justified
A pervasive problem of bureaucratic institutions (public or private) is that they disperse and attenuate responsibility such that almost everyone can claim to have acted reasonably given the information and responsibilities they had.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
9d ago
This is a reverse Nirvana fallacy, justifying predictable missteps with a shrug and saying 'nobody is perfect'.
People demand a credible justification, a coherent goal, and a plausible argument that the goal is achievable. Comparing OIF to OEF is illustrative, in that Bush leveraged high public confidence and made a huge effort to sell the endeavor both domestically and internationally: Saddam is developing WMDs, we can stop this by getting rid of him, and we have the military force to do that (a lot of people still called BS and it turned out they were right, but public support at the time was high). By contrast, Trump has had his officials contradict themselves and each other several times a week as to why we're doing this, the goal is pretty vague, and their plans, such as they are, seem very reactive to extremely predictable problems. And this was carried out with zero effort to build support during a time when public trust is incredibly low.
I guess that's what attracts people to socialism
The appeal of socialism is primarily that it promises free stuff economic security and remediation against exploitative elites. Nobody cares about the plan.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
9d ago
There isn't one. The plan was to pull Venezuela redux, but a) the IRI regime is made of sterner stuff than Maduro's clowns b) they appear to have killed a lot of the people they imagined stepping in to fill the void.
Okay, it's not quite right to say that there isn't a plan, but the backup plan seems to be that we (the US) are going to apply pressure to Iran until they cave. The Trump administration is stuck, because they don't want to look weak by packing up and there's a lot of pressure to resolve the crisis they started, but they don't really have a good way to compel the Iranian government. While the IRI ability to fight back is pretty limited, it's not nothing and (as demonstrated back in January) they are far more willing/able to force their populace to endure hardship than the Trump administration is.
(Also, Israel appears to have distinct goals - if I had to guess, they see the window closing on their ability to borrow strength from the US and are trying to cash that in to do as much damage to Iran as possible)
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
9d ago
I think the argument is that #MeToo accusations are strategically delayed to minimize harm to the left and maximize harm to the left's enemies.
My point is that's nonsense. These allegations most heavily impacted men in left-of-center spaces because those are the spaces where #MeToo-style accusations carried weight. Attempts to wield these kinds of accusations against right-wing figures by the left have largely been a failure.
Al Franken was a sitting senator when he resigned, but the accusations were from 2006 and didn't come out until 2017.
The allegations coming out when they did was probably what wrecked Franken's career. They were pretty tame on their own, but the Dems were presently trying to hammer Roy Moore down in Alabama and wanted to avoid the slightest appearance of being soft on sexual misconduct.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
10d ago
I'm not really sure how that's relevant to the question of whether or not left-wingers are uniquely prone to elevating sexual predators to positions of authority.
(Also, Hastert did have stuff named in his honor. Not so much any more).
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
10d ago
The trouble with comparing Soviet and Nazi atrocities is that the Soviets did what they were going to do while the Nazis were stopped. There really isn't a serious counterfactual where the Soviets do a whole lot worse than they actually did. By contrast, the Nazis plans for if they won in the East involved tens of millions of deaths on top of everything they actually did, and we have every reason to think they meant it.
Estimates are roughly 1000 Iranian civilian casualties and similar numbers of military personnel. The US and Israel are going after air defense targets, missile launchers, warships, economic targets, etc... Decapitation strikes are not new, and this is by no stretch of the imagination a war of assassins.
This is a far too personalist view of politics. Putin might be genuinely load-bearing, but the people under him are replaceable. Zelensky has largely played his part, and if you killed him he'd simply be replaced.
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