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Trump has bombed Iran's nuclear sites, using B2 bombers dropping 30,000-pound massive ordinance penetrators. All aircraft have successfully cleared Iranian airspace, and Trump is claiming that all three nuclear sites were wiped out. No word that I've seen of a counter-attack from Iran, as yet.
AOC has concluded that a president ordering an airstrike without congressional approval is grounds for impeachment. Fetterman thinks it was the right move. Both are, I suppose, on brand.
My feelings are mixed. I absolutely do not want us signing up for another two decades of invading and inviting the middle east, and of all the places I'd pick with a gun to my head, Iran would be dead last. I do not think our military is prepared for a serious conflict at the moment, because I think there's a pretty good likelihood that a lot of our equipment became suddenly obsolete two or three years ago, and also because I'm beginning to strongly suspect that World War 3 has already started and we've all just just been a bit slow catching on. That said, I am really not a fan of Iran, and while I could be persuaded to gamble on Iran actually acquiring nukes, it's still a hell of a gamble, and the Israelis wiping Iran's air defense grid made this about the cheapest alternative imaginable. I have zero confidence that diplomacy was ever going to work; it's pretty clear to me that Iran wanted nukes, and that in the best case this would result in considerable proliferation and upheaval. Now, assuming the strikes worked, that issue appears to be off the table for the short and medium terms. That... seems like a good thing? Maybe?
I'm hoping what appears to me to be fairly intense pressure to avoid an actual invasion keeps American boots of Iranian soil. As with zorching an Iranian general in Iraq during Trump's first term, this seems like a fairly reasonable gamble, but if we get another forever war out of this, that would be unmitigated disaster.
I'm surprised how much political capital he was willing to spend on this. No clear evidence that their nuclear program is knocked out, a pretty strong incentive now between the outcomes of Libya, North Korea, Israel and Iran for any country that doesn't want to be a colony of either the eastern or western bloc to develop nukes. Meanwhile half his base is in open rebellion against him and his biggest source of support right now are Mark Levin type republicans which all of the younger "joe rogan" base despises.
You could almost draw a straight line between the republican party being overthrown by the populists and the Iraq / Afghan wars. Of all the mental gymnastics the base will commit to polish up his obvious faults I don't think he will get a pass here. He's pretty much lost the republicans Joe Rogan viewership numbers of votes. It does make the claims of Israel having compromising intel on him seem more likely.
Can add to that this kills Tulsi Powell, Rubio, and maybe even Vance's future prospects as well. George W. Trump pictures being spammed all over his x posts.
This would be true regardless of whether the US conducted this strike or not. One might argue that allowing Iran to acquire nuclear weapons without any sort of kinetic response would have encouraged state actors to pursue nukes even more rigorously.
Nope. Sticking to the agreed upon nuclear treaties and having IAEA continue to monitor things like they have which led to Iran not developing a nuke the last 20+ years despite neocons and Netanyahu fearmongering it would've made it less likely.
The IAEA declared Iran out of compliance in the runup to the bombings.
I'm a big fan of "stick to the treaties or else the freedom dorrito levels all your facilities" as having the right incentive gradient.
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This is predicated on Iran not developing a nuke in the next few years without the most recent conflict. It's impossible to know with only public information, but at least the US and Israel believed Iran was close enough to one to warrant an attack.
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I don't actually think a few airstrikes on Iran are worth that much political capital.
Trump was never a dove, and MAGA was never pacifist or pro-Iranian. At most, hit platform was a bit isolationist, but more in a "us playing world police is a bad deal" than "let us downsize our military to what we would reasonably require to defend our country" way.
Assassinating a few enemies or weddings with drone strikes or dropping a few bombs on countries your constituents could not find on a map is very in character for any president.
I mean, sure, if he announced that he was invading Iran, his base might get deja-vu, but if he spends a smallish fraction of the defense budget on personal pet projects like military parades or bombing Iran, I doubt any of his voters will care much.
He's already testing the waters for regime change
https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/114729009239087163
Israel's goal was never the nuclear program. Most people realize this is unlikely to end here that's why it's costing him so much. At best it'll be a frozen conflict until new made up intel comes out. Israel is already saying they have an idea where the enriched Uranium was shipped. Other people are pointing out that Iran has other bases under other mountains.
And I mean, the president that ran on getting out of the middle east and America First is now posting to make Iran great again? How can that not cost you.
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Obama ran on anti-war, tax payer financed medical care and reduced income inequality. Obama did the exact opposite and the left reinvented itself with woke.
We could see republicans doing the same and forgetting about reducing the deficit, America first, American industrial policy and instead finding an equivalent of the trans issue to channel their energy.
The US people will never be allowed to vote on immigration, billions to Israel, warmongering, Medical insurance companies extracting wealth and the surveillance state. It doesn't matter America elects or what the polls show, those issues are settled by the elite for the elite.
Republicans have forgotten about the deficit and American industrial policy.
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It's interesting to note that on this specific question, obamacare was an attempt to reach a continental European style universal healthcare system. It just doesn't work. It has the same bones- strictly mandatory employer provided health insurance, welfare-funded healthcare for the poor and old, a subsidized exchange system for everyone else. It just doesn't work as well. There's a lot of reasons for this, but the median Frenchman or German pays for health insurance- and spends less than the US consumer does.
I find it somewhat amusing that the US has state-run education, and we regularly talk about how the $17k spent annually on the median K-12 student is too low (but is still higher than peer nations). But healthcare is (mostly) privately run, and we spend more than peer countries and in this case it's obvious that we should save by switching to a more centrally-run model. I'm not sure those positions really square with each other.
They don't really have to. Public and private solutions can fail for different reasons (though worth noting that both education and healthcare in the US are, like most developed countries, hybrid systems).
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What do you think he got elected for this time, looking sexy in swimming trunks? I think stopping illegal immigration, deporting illegals and so on was the number one issue with his voters, and so far he is making a good show of this actually being a priority for him.
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Other than that, I can only advise you to give that system called "proportional representation" a try. It will allow multiple parties to compete. Sometimes, you will have an issue where (n-1) parties are leaning towards one side, but one party canvases with being on the other side and wins big in one election. Often, this will cause the other parties to flip.
Sadly, this often happens with opinions which I do not share. For example, a single state victory of the green party after Fukoshima was enough to kill nuclear power. More recently, the anti-immigrant AfD has won big in the federal elections. While they are not yet in power,
Merz has taken to personally drown a migrant child in the Mediterranean sea each morning before breakfastthe CDU/CSU/SPD coalition is basically trying to enact the AfD program, as far as migrants are concerned.He's taco'd pretty hard on immigration. He paused deportations for hotel and farm workers, then revoked that, and is now talking about some kind of weird visa but not calling it visa system for them. We still aren't even deporting at a fast enough pace to undo the damage Biden did, let alone get rid of the 10s of millions of illegals already here.
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Mass deportations are on the table? This is news to me. Anything in particular you’d recommend I follow to learn more?
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The trans issue, but on the other side.
The difference is 'my opponents literally, not a misuse of figuratively but actually do want to let men and boys in your daughter's locker room and discipline her for being upset about it' is a winning issue for Republicans.
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"Kamala Harris is for they/them. Donald Trump is for you."
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I agree tbh. The thing is the imperial core is nearly completely hollowed out by this and the gains on the frontier are no longer outpacing the decay at home. So eventually their system will simply collapse and they'll face the same fate as elites in all the other dying empires.
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The Joe Rogan base will either forget about this in a month or write it off as 'Trump is no Bush, he drops bombs and leaves, no ground war'. The strike is probably insanely popular among everyone else- nuclear nonproliferation and boo Iran are both pretty popular, and there's no boots on the ground here.
I’m lodging my prediction that there will be American boots on the ground within five months.
I am deeply and profoundly confident that while America might airstrike them many more times, US infantry/Marines (special forces who knows) will not touch Iranian soil in 2025.
That would be an unbelievable strategic blunder. The amount of weapons China and Russia would pour in... It would be so foolish.
We'll find out in 5 months!
If the American empire isn't inevitably heading for its end already... Getting stuck in Iran would really do the trick. Putin would be cackling to himself.
It's such a stupid idea, there's no way they will
I said the exact same thing loudly and confidently about Russia going into Ukraine though, so...
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Do you mean special forces or regular ground troops?
Because it takes ages and ages for the latter to even arrive. Back in 1990-1991 it took about 6 months for the US and Coalition ground forces to get ready to go and in many respects America had a much freer hand back then, along with more naval transport capacity. Airmobile assets won't cut it for a ground campaign in such a large country, you'd need the bulk of the US army.
Whereas I could believe that there are already special forces on the ground, just like in Ukraine.
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I'd be cautious there that a middle option is technically possible: Obama ordered airstrikes on Syria against ISIL, and there have been American boots on the ground there since (unclear on exact deployment dates and current status), but they've remained in a limited capacity as such without being a full-blown invasion a la 2003. It's possible the exact wording of your prediction may matter quite a bit.
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Feel free to make money on polymarket.
That’s too anonymous; I’m opening myself to embarrassment if I’m wrong.
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I'm not sure who is in a bubble as I can't find a single place where this is popular outside of say /r/neoliberal or the neocon talking heads on twitter. Even /r/conservative it seems to go 50/50 from thread to thread. Israel is intensely disliked by the younger generations, there is a reason the US suddenly decided to ban tiktok after Israel started the Gaza genocide. If you're basing it off of opinions here I think this place has gotten pretty out of touch on it's political views.
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I'd like to hear the case that this was actually significant political capital. Democrats were already flipping out (Fetterman excluded) over Trump's failure to stop Israel from bombing Iran and continuing to conduct effective operations in Gaza. So they are already on team Hamas/Iran and not on team Israel/MidEast stability. This strike was just a logical move along the route of letting Israel win all the wars we'd otherwise have to fight if they got wiped out, and from time to time we lend some aid.
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I think you are dramatically overestimating the cost of this strike.
I saw the news of the strike and thought of you (<3)
Fair point from our discussion the other day.
I'm surprised to be saying this but Trump threaded the needle well. A bunch of MOPs and ~40 Tomahawks/whatever?
Small strike, big effect. Well played!
I was surprised it happened without any leaks, but pleased with the result. It's what the bombs are good for.
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I’m rather impressed because of the political capital used. This isn’t the kind of decision one should make with an eye to what the people will think about it. If you need to prevent an enemy from getting too powerful to deal with, you need to act even if it is unpopular. An Islamist state with a history of supporting terrorism is not a state that should be allowed to have a nuclear weapon. It’s beyond crazy to me that everyone is worried about poll numbers here when the issue was Iran with access to a weapon that could kill millions.
That's incredibly short term thinking. If you win a battle but lose the ability to fight the war it's a bad move strategically. Even if this strike wiped out all the mentioned bases it doesn't mean Iran will never be able to make a nuke ever again. Lose the midterms as is incredibly likely and he'll be even more impotent then he is now for any of his domestic policy. This does nothing to reverse Israel's already rapidly declining status in the west. It won't be long before people start questioning why we send them 4 billion a year, how it benefits us to have a rogue parasite state that manipulates our government into war.
No, if Iran with a nuke is dangerous, letting them have it because you don’t want to lose a midterm is short sighted. A nuke detonated anywhere on earth would kill millions. That would certainly be worse than losing a midterm. Especially if that nuke hits an American or allied city, an American military base, or some high value target in the Middle East.
Israel is Israel and they’re frankly not part of my analysis here. If Israel didn’t exist, I think the history of Islamic radicalism would make an Islamic nuke a danger to world stability. A religion that says those who kill for God with a weapon that can obliterate a city is not something that would improve my insomnia.
and if you lose the next few terms and the government is full of college campus pro-palestine types and Iran gets the bomb anyways, what then? This isn't a one and done. Iran still exists and has more incentive than ever to develop nukes. There are likely more facilities, new facilities can be built, etc.
If bombing Iran buys us five or ten years, it’s probably worth it. I don’t think they can restart a program we just blew up and have a bomb in two years.
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Certainly not. Hiroshima and Nagasaki together killed maybe a quarter-million. Bigger bombs' damage doesn't linearly scale with kilotonnage (which is one reason many small bombs became more fashionable). Tel Aviv and Haifa together have less than a million people, and while nukes are big, nothing Iran would be likely to build could wipe out an entire metro area.
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No, everybody hates Iran. Trump won't lose the midterms over this unless he does something dumb like trying to invade by ground.
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This will happen only in ground war with Iran. Serbia bombings didn't hurt clinton. And let's be clear - MAGA americans love those kind of display of american might mic drops. As long as the bodycount is 0 and the involvement short - it may even net him votes.
I'm old enough to remember the chest-thumping that happened when Trump dropped a MOAB on ISIS (we do love our acronyms, don't we folks?).
Also when he iced Soleimani.
And when they spent like a week celebrating that dog that helped kill an ISIS leader.
He damn well knows that inflicting a black eye on international opponents without getting your own people killed plays well.
Even OBAMA knew this, hence the fanfare around taking out Bin Laden.
And he's also making a number of his opponents run cover for Iran directly.
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Maybe, it's hard to tell these days with online spaces often being echo-chambers. I know quite a few normie republicans in meatspace that are now sitting the midterms out and won't vote for him though, but that is just a single anecdote. The polling for involvement in Iran was incredibly bad, worse than Ukraine. It'll be difficult for the dems to capitalize on given their shift to liberal interventionism and continued support for the Ukraine war at least.
The midterms are far away. Prolonged involvement will tank trump. But a no-fly zone over iran that is manned by Israel, funded by Saudi Arabia and US just selling fuel and munitions and repairs to Israel probably won't.
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