Goodguy
16hr ago
As a NATO member, almost certainly much more, including the entirety of NATO actively joining the conflict rather than just providing intelligence and materiel.
Goodguy
20hr ago
But wasn't deal to fight the USSR together, not for Europe to support American geopolitics all over the world?
Goodguy
20hr ago
Their preference for welfare over weapons can be seen as rational, since the only country they have any realistic chance of fighting a major war with in the foreseeable future is Russia, and Russia is not strong enough to seriously endanger anything more than the Baltic states. I'm not sure that the Russia of January 1, 2022 could have even conquered Poland in a 1-on-1 war, and now Russia is bogged down on another front. Essentially, the EU is already militarily strong enough to effectively deter Russia even without increasing military sizes or spending. Despite the occasional claims by EU politicians that Russia is an existential threat, the reality is that the current war in Ukraine is not an existential war for the EU, it is a war that is being fought for ideological, moral, and sphere-of-influence reasons. Even if Russia conquered all of Ukraine, it still would not have the power to existentially threaten the EU.
Goodguy
20hr ago
I don't think that theory is likely to be true because:
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Not opening the Strait of Hormuz gives Iran leverage, and it seems to me from observing their utterances that the people in charge genuinely and emotionally, not just performatively, hate the Iranian government.
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Not opening the Strait of Hormuz hurts the Gulf Arab states. Keeping those states dependent on the US is geopolitically important to the US. Also, Saudi Arabia's leadership has personal connections to the Trump family.
Goodguy
1d ago
Can you provide more information about "Things are going especially bad in Israel according to some of the voices sitting behind the MSM"?
Goodguy
2d ago
At this point non-leftists have so many discussion forums that it's possible there are no longer enough non-leftists lacking a home to cause a non-censored Reddit to be swamped by them.
I think the two complications for Russia in helping Iran are as follows:
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The Russian government's actions over the course of the last decade show that it values having friendly relations with Israel and the Arab Gulf States even while having hostile relations with the United States. I don't know to what extent this policy is motivated by geopolitics and to what extent it is motivated by shady financial interests of the Russian elite. In the case of Israel, the friendly relations are also probably motivated in part by the fact that just like America, Russia has many Jewish elites, and that Israel has many Jews from a Russian background.
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Russia can ship things to Iran across the Caspian Sea without the ships being attacked. However, the US/Israel have very good surveillance and spying capacity, so they can probably accurately target that stuff as soon as gets into Iranian hands. This is similar to how things work in the Ukraine war, where the Russians don't bomb supplies while they are in NATO countries (with the possible exception of some alleged sabotage operations), but as soon as the supplies cross the border into Ukraine, Russia feels free to target them.
Goodguy
2d ago
Got it. To be fair, I did see negative consequences of wokeness. Just not in my career. I saw it in changing attitudes to police work that, I imagine, probably explain why one of the pharmacies in my neighborhood closed and another has almost every item locked up.
Goodguy
2d ago
Amadan is a self-proclaimed leftist? Are you sure? I kind of feel like I would have picked up on that after years of being here.
True. That said, wasn't the whole HR-mandated woke stuff kind of exaggerated to begin with? I've worked for over ten years in tech, an industry that is often considered to be a hotbed of progressive activism, and I have almost never seen it. Yes, I would get fired if I started saying ethnic slurs at the office. But I've seen almost no woke propaganda at my jobs. If I recall correctly, the closest has been some very minor but not coerced options to have custom pronouns and maybe one brief computerized inclusivity training that I think pretty much everybody just ignored and clicked through. And that's in over ten years.
Goodguy
2d ago
Oh, I agree with all that. I think that drugs should be legal but that society should strongly police things like antisocial use of public spaces. And I agree that it is good to have a conversation about the tradeoffs that both the lax or the strict approach to drugs have. I just think that the fundamental issue of individual liberty to consume substances vs. use of government force to limit individual consumption of substances is not rationally arguable.
Goodguy
2d ago
Agreed. I just saw your post as an opportunity to share some related thoughts.
I'm a socially libertarian, economically moderate, tough-on-street-crime, race realist, pro-choice but can understand where pro-life is coming from, moderate-on-immigration classical liberal.
I don't post here as much as I used to because it gets boring to argue with the same few conservatives about the same few topics over and over again.
Not only that, but many of my disagreements with conservatives boil down to matters of preference that can't really be argued about on rational grounds. For example, take the matter of whether drugs should be legal. This topic can often boil down to a question of whether individual liberty is or is not more important than the government taking steps to keep society physically and mentally healthy. But that is not an answerable question. It really is just a matter of taste, odd as that might seem.
I do still find interesting ideas here pretty regularly though.
I notice that my comments often get upvoted much more than the actual written replies to them would make it seem. Which indicates that either people here are actually pretty good at upvoting for reasons other than agreeing with the material and/or that the people who post the most on the site are not actually a representative sample of all the people who vote on the site.
Goodguy
5d ago
So much for what theory?
For Iran there are no soft targets in Israel, but Iran still feels compelled to use some weapons against Israel in order to try to establish at least a bit of deterrence to prevent Israel from feeling like it can attack Iran completely without consequence. I'm not sure this strategy actually makes sense, since Israel is willing to absorb minor casualties and economic hits, but it can at least be argued for.
Goodguy
6d ago
Residential apartment buildings are probably a bit softer than airports since it makes sense to concentrate air defense capacity on airports (easier to protect a few airports than to spread the same air defense with uniform density over all residential areas).
I don't think Iran really has any soft targets in Israel at all, it's too far away and has too good of an air defense. Some targets in the UAE are maybe what I'd call soft, but even those are pretty well defended.
Goodguy
6d ago
In theory, yes for any decent military. With Iran's limited military capabilities and its adversaries' elite military capabilities including in the field of air defense, probably not.
Goodguy
6d ago
Anything that is relatively easy to hit, whether because it does not require accurate weapons or because it is not well defended.
For Iran, Netanyahu is a very hard target. Civilian apartment buildings in a minor town in the UAE is a relatively soft target.
Goodguy
7d ago
That they're not completely insane. They have very different values than I do, and they are in many ways irrational, but their track record of staying in power for decades shows that they are clearly rational enough to understand that there are much better ways to use limited and expensive missiles (even US missiles are not infinite in number) than to blow up random apartment buildings. They'd love to kill Netanyahu, so I'm sure they would try to target him unless they were worried that this would trigger nuclear retaliation (a reasonable concern). After Netanyahu there are all sorts of other targets in Israel that make more sense to attack than random apartment buildings.
It's not that I think they wouldn't deliberately kill Israeli and Saudi civilians. Sure they would. But they could easily think of more impressive and consequential targets.
Goodguy
8d ago
The Gulf states are much closer to Iran than Israel is. And Iran has very limited means to target any US forces that are not located inside the borders of one of the region's countries. Many of the weapons Iran has are much more likely to successfully do damage in the Gulf states than to successfully do damage to Israel or to US forces that are outside of Gulf stats. This is simply because of range. Some of Iran's weapons do not have the range to reach beyond the Gulf states. As for the ones that do, to some extent the longer they fly the more likely they are to be intercepted.
So Iran did not have the option to use its full military capability against Israel and the US. It was either fire against the Gulf states or not use some of those weapons at all except as a deterrent.
This doesn't mean that firing against the Gulf states was necessarily a good idea. I'm just pointing out that the calculation is a bit more complicated.
The Russian government benefits from high oil prices and has already committed itself for several years now to withstanding economic difficulties in service of a geopolitical objective. I think they're fine with the Strait of Hormuz being completely closed. I suppose the Chinese government might pull some strings with the Russian one to get them to change their minds, but I wouldn't count on it. The Chinese must be getting a lot of schadenfreude from watching their geopolitical opponents seethe over the Strait, especially given that those opponents would rush to try to cut China off from its naval access to overseas oil if a conflict broke out.
Goodguy
8d ago
The governments of those countries have no sympathy for Iran. I'm not disputing that, I'm just disputing the idea that Iran started bombing "uninvolved" countries.
Goodguy
8d ago
Azerbaijan is a decent example. And even Azerbaijan is a close Israeli partner.
Lebanon is more murky. However, Iran targeting anti-Iran forces in Lebanon would just be the same kind of thing the US and Israel do when they target anti-US forces in countries that have sectarian conflicts.
US military bases open your entire country to bombing.
What's odd about that standard? Would the US government not bomb all sorts of targets in a country that has a government that allows Iranian military forces to operate on its soil, even targets that are not actually Iranian military? It absolutely would, after all the US has spent two decades considering it standard to bomb any target in almost any country in the Middle East at any time. And that's not even when the US government was engaged in an existential war, as Iran's government is now.
The preference for efficient soft targets, to the extent that one exists, is probably largely caused by the inaccuracy of Iran's weapons. If they had US/Israel-tier military technology, they would have preferred to use it to kill Netanyahu, Mohammed bin Salman, and other enemy elites rather than to waste it on blowing up random apartment buildings.
I think that after the experience of the last 4 years, Russia would not risk attacking say Poland even if NATO was dissolved, and no matter how much in doubt EU unity was. There would be just too much risk of getting drawn into a direct war against the entire EU, which has 3 times Russia's population, 7 times its GDP, and two nuclear-armed countries. So while being attacked by Russia would be very painful for, say, Poland, the actual risk that Russia would decide to do something like that is very small.
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