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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 9, 2025

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Iran has demonstrated that it has the intent to strike the west and US if it can. They are working on the capability, and once that's done, an active nuclear arsenal presents them the opportunity at any time.

The West? What Western country has Iran struck? France? Germany? Japan? Canada? They could bring out a bunch of drones from a shipping container and cause mayhem in any major city if they wanted.

Iran only strikes Israel and US bases right on its borders, with the US launching strikes on Iran and generally acting in a hostile fashion (sanctions, cyberattacks, proxy wars, assassinations, open threats to invade). The Houthis attacked a bunch of shipping as part of a campaign against Israel.

Iran is an American foe. But it doesn't necessarily have to be this way. It could be less of a US foe, like Venezuela for instance. Or it could be a friend. The US's biggest victory in the Cold War was swaying Maoist China away from the Soviet Union. Maoist China had actively fought and killed thousands, maybe tens of thousands of US troops in a major war. Total ideological incompatibility. They hated America and were super, duper crazy. Iran is much less of a foe than China was in the 1960s. Yet the US was able to work constructively with China and shift 1/3 or so of the Red Army into the far east, facing their former ally. Suddenly the US stopped needing to fight wars in East Asia! Diplomacy is really powerful!

There were opportunities to reopen relations with Iran during the 1990s but the US pursued an unhelpful strategy of 'dual containment' of both Iran and Iraq since neither were friendly towards Israel. Obama tried to improve relations with Iran but Trump then nixed this initiative.

Now the US is involved in yet another Middle East conflict. This is strategically foolish - China and Iran were the biggest winner of the Iraq War. China got much of the liberated oilfields and the US navy defending their shipping lanes for free! Iran got most of the country of Iraq. Terraforming the Middle East to be friendly towards Israel is extremely costly and dangerous and doesn't work. It should be much less of a priority than the primary theatre of conflict, with the great powers.

Iranian militias in Iraq wouldn't exist if the Iraqi government hadn't been demolished by America. No US troops would die if they weren't there. There's no need for them to be present, the damage is already done. Iraq has been pushed into Iran's sphere of influence (about 40% of the way to puppet state), at US/Coalition expense. It's time to take the L and depart.

China will be a winner of this war too. There is little they want to see more than US air defence stockpiles depleted by Iranian missiles, carrier groups redeployed from the Pacific to the Middle East. Russia is another winner if oil prices rise, though it's bad for China, probably evens out. There is no reason to face Russia, China and Iran at the same time when Iran could've been turned. Too late now but don't double down further on an error!

A better strategy would be to tell Israel to shut up about Iran and move on. Iran hasn't nuclearized in the last 30 years when the Israelis continuously shrieked it was going to happen in a few months or so. Barring a major shock like this attempted disarming strike, they're unlikely to nuclearize, there's a fatwa against it. Iran didn't retaliate with chemical weapons after Iraq gassed 20,000 of them to death, a more than reasonable provocation! Putting more pressure on Iran is the exact way to get them to undo the fatwa and nuclearize.

More than that, North Korea is an extremely poor country which has continuously struggled to develop a missile program. I don't think that it's outside the realm of possibility that they do, but again, at least there's some reason as to why we all sat around on it.

They already have ICBMs that can hit the US. North Korea is another example of the danger of the 'I can't even spell diplomacy' trend in DC. Sanctions and threats don't result in compliant denuclearization (certainly not after going in on Iraq and Libya when they'd complied), they end up with tens of thousands of North Korean troops fighting on Russia's side in Ukraine.