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I recently got into an argument regarding Israel vs Iran with a staunch "America First Isolationism Now" type. It cemented my views on the issue, not from an "Israel is righteous and Iran is not" angle but a practical weighing of the facts. The other party's opinion was "I don't want another war, and that region is bloodthirsty anyway. Let them sort it out." My thesis is simply: I cannot understand anyone who has Western or even strictly American interests in mind could think that the strikes on Iran are none of our business.
Mind you, I don't mean "United States Government" interests. I mean the interests of every single living American.
To recap the history: The current Iranian regime rose from a revolution overthrowing a US-backed monarchy, which we had previously supported economically and supplied with military technology (The F-4 and F-14 being the big examples you can still see today). Said regime hates the US with a burning passion, both for backing the monarchy and for getting in the way of a regional Islamic revolution in the entire region. This is why they back the Houthis, Hezbollah, Hamas, and insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan. Hamas and Hezbollah are strictly against Israel, but the Houthis were explicitly anti-American and attempted to strike us, luckily with no loss of life (RIP drones). I can't say the same for the militias in Iraq, which successfully killed several US service members in 2023. Nowadays that's mostly directed at Israel, but I cannot imagine these groups and their funders suddenly had a change in heart towards Americans themselves.
Even putting that all aside, even when you think the whole region is a backwater shithole that can sort itself out, a hands-off position on Iran makes no sense when they're developing nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons are a complete game changer, making your nation functionally immune to any threat to its sovereignty. It was bad enough when North Korea developed them, but I can at least understand the hesitancy there due to its Chinese backing and already-existing existential threat to South Korea (thousands of artillery pieces would reduce Seoul to rubble regardless of NK's nuclear program). 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.
This is not true of Iran. Iran has ties with Russia and China, but they've never made so bold a defense pact as China did with North Korea. They are geographically separated from their backers as well. This makes them assailable. However, they are not geographically separated from the west. Iran already has MRBMs that could be converted to take a nuclear payload right now. Those threaten our bases and our allies. They have a functional space program, and if you have put a satellite in orbit you can build an ICBM. Those threaten the continental US. 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. They will be incapable of being invaded lest you risk nuclear hellfire for the region, at absolute best. The only time you can strike them is now, before their nuclear program yields results.
I was genuinely shocked when I saw the posts from Rubio and the like denying our involvement in the Israeli strikes and implying that they were unwarranted aggression. Personally, it makes me understand why some people think Israel is simply America's attack dog, doing the dirty work we don't want to be involved in directly. Perhaps it is will be a fortuitous outcome for us simply because Israel would be in even more danger, and felt they had to attack no matter what. I wouldn't mind Iran buckling without a single American life lost.
I mentioned this in another post long ago, but it seems to me that echoes of the bygone neolib/neocon 90s and early 2000s world order have been crystallized in a really stupid way. An aversion to quagmires and wars of questionable outcome seems to make a lot of people (including Rubio - a bad indicator of the administration's position) think that any American intervention is some kind of ill fated, possibly bloodthirsty action. In the opinion of the person that spawned this post, it would be a war to continue some kind of dominion in the Middle East, which would hurt individual Americans to benefit the rich and powerful. While I don't think the US can magically fix countries in the area (see: Iraq), there is a middle zone between "Try to prop up an unwanted regime after removing the previous one" and "do nothing". Applying Iraq's sample size of one reeks of an embarrassing application of prior results to me.
At the end of the day, I can say that Israel's righteousness in this matter does not have a bit of sway as to whether or not I think these strikes are justified (or whether or not American involvement is a good thing). I do not want another nuclear power in the world, especially one so blatantly aggressive toward the West. I will admit that the odds of them cementing their own destruction via a nuclear strike against another nuclear power is low, but I worry about the insurgents they fund or political instability within leading to a device going "missing". That these are even possibilities makes my skin crawl. I find it ignorant and borderline cowardly that there are so many purportedly in favor of American interests who can plug their ears and say "let it sort itself out".
As an aside, to illustrate where I'm coming from: In political terms I am completely disinterested in the outcomes of the world apart from America. Not that I consider them lesser, or that any disasters anywhere else are unimportant; but I still must practically value my home, my life, and those of my loved ones first. As such, I strongly empathize with the "America First" sentiment. What I don't empathize with is the completely unrealistic expectation that we can simply close our borders, give people the middle finger, and not wake up to a vastly worse world for us in twenty years. The world is connected, and a collapse in one place will have follow on effects in others. See: Syria, Haiti, Somalia. You'd have to be crazy to think that every administration in every coming year would be able to or even want to hold the borders that tight and move all manufacturing to be domestic (the only way to be truly isolationist in my eyes). That's just a pipe dream. Thus America taking its hands of the reins would not be truly isolationist, and the soft power we'd be subjected to by countries filling in the void we leave would affect us at home. We already have adversaries fanning the flames of social unrest in the country (and useful idiots that play into their hands), and that's bad enough. A United States is impossible to invade. A broken one is anything but. So global affairs are our business, and if America can project its power to mitigate much worse threats downstream then I am on board with that.
This doesn't mean I blindly want a war, or to bomb every single potential threat all the time everywhere. But nuclear weapons make this entirely a different question.
Counterpoint: The US already has nuclear adversaries. If the threat of nuclear retaliation works to deter Putin (who owns the world's largest nuke stockpile), it should also suffice to deter Iran. They might be religious nutjobs, but not total religious nutjobs, like Hamas. They will not consider the glassing of all their population centers as a price worth paying to nuke New York.
Nukes work great to prevent you from being invaded or bombed, but they are not the win button for any conflict. Putin has a ton of nukes, and yet this only meant that NATO would not join the fight directly (which, to be sure, is a big deal). He did not try to nuke cities until Ukraine surrenders.
Iran has had a nuclear weapons program since 1989. In 2015, the JCPA was negotiated between Iran and the Obama administration as well as China, Russia and Europe. It limited to the amount of nuclear material Iran was allowed to produce in exchange for sanction relief. While Israel (itself a noted expert on nuclear proliferation, I might add) claimed non-compliance, the IAEA claimed compliance in 2018, when Trump decided to quit the JCPA (possibly because it was an Obama deal) and impose sanctions on Iran. Since then, the gas centrifuges have been running.
Bombing the facilities and murdering their scientists can slow their program, but is unlikely to stop it. Sure, you kick the can down the road for another year, but you also normalize bombing sovereign countries, which is likely not a good lesson to teach a soon to be nuclear power.
If you do not want Iran to have nukes, then you need an invasion and regime change. I would like to point out that about the only one to benefit from recent US-led invasions in the Muslim world was the military industrial complex. The conquest of the Taliban was undone in a heartbeat as soon as the US withdrew, and the US invasion of Iraq prepared the ground for daesh. I for one would prefer not to find out what kind of religious crazies a US-led nation building project in Iran would inevitably give rise to.
I do not contest that Iran is very anti-Israel. Basically any group which prides itself on murdering Jews is supported by them. As someone who thinks Israel has a right to exist (though no right to the West Banks), I do not like this one bit. But at the end of the day, this is Israel's problem, not the problem of the US. Israel certainly has the ability to nuke Tehran, which should hopefully stop Iran from nuking Tel Aviv.
I am also not a fan of the current Israeli government, which basically encourages illegal settlements in the West Bank because they do not feel any pressure not to maximally piss off the Arabs, as they can be sure that the US will have their back if any large backslash happens. Them getting into a cold war with Iran might not be the worst thing in the world, there.
For what it is worth, compared to Sunni countries, Iran has not shown a lot of inclination to commit terrorist acts outside the Middle East. Bin Laden was famously a Saudi national with Saudi funding. Al-Qaeda and Daesh were Sunni extremist projects. This would bode well for the larger world in face of a nuclear Iran.
I don't deny this, but it's nonetheless an insane risk that risks global consequences. If you presented me a button of "these countries may nuke each other but you can guarantee it will never affect the world outside the middle east", I'd probably press it. But such an eventuality is no more a guarantee than some zealot in Tehran sees the Israeli missiles on the way and goes "fuck it, I'll take Europe/America out with me".
I mention this in another post but I think the prolonged nation-building stuff doesn't work if you don't a. rout the actual supporters (which would include a lot of collateral damage and questionable arrests where Afghanistan was concerned) and b. Don't work with the surviving establishment to make something new. In Iraq, this would have meant letting at least some Ba'ath party members be involved in the reorganization of the party, rather than completely ousting them and making them and all their supporters de facto enemies (hence the insurgency) while propping up a bunch of previously uninvolved Sunnis (hence ISIS). In Afghanistan, this likely never would have worked, because the only existing mass establishment they had was the Taliban. There were no mid level bureaucrats who were going "I'm just in the Taliban to do city planning", the Taliban was it. You can't replace them with tribal, sometimes boy raping farmers, and declare victory.
Point being, as I said in another post, you can just gut a country's military and leave, a la Gulf War 1. There's a reason we had an even easier time rolling over their conventional army in Gulf War 2, which is that they were never able to recover to the level they were at pre-Gulf War 1. I would be fine with the same thing happening to Iran.
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I mean, the reason that deterrence works on Putin is that he’s at least semi-rational. He doesn’t want to have millions of dead Russians as a result. The concepts of Jihad and martyrdom of killing and dying in the name of Islam giving you a ticket to paradise— these negate the deterrent effect of “don’t try it, you and 3/4ths of your people will die.” Add in that there are statements in the Hadith that claim the end of days is marked by a great slaughter of Jews, and it’s not hard to imagine that they’d be willing to use it.
I question whether one can in fact rise to control of a nation-state without becoming sufficiently cynical/realist that "don't try it, you and 3/4ths of your people will die" still works. We had a whole lot of evidence that the Japanese were insanely fanatical, but in the end they were, in fact, actually sane humans. Jihadism has demonstrated that it is willing to eat notable costs, but they still have to recruit their suicide bombers very carefully from a quite-limited pool.
It is not clear to me that Jihadism is actually more insane than Communism, and MAD worked on Communism.
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