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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   5217 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 12, 2026

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Trump has given a "red line" to Iran about killing protestors, but we still aren't seeing US involvement as deaths move into the thousands, reportedly. If the regime follows through with its claims, it will be executing many if not most of the thousands it has arrested.

I have an essay on my view that the US/West/Israel should clearly intervene in the Transnational Thursday thread, but the Culture War dynamics strike me as interesting in that it's not really Culture War Classic material. Traditionally, the Left has been soft on Iran and the Right has been hawkish. Iran has tried to kill Trump and Trump officials, as revenge for the Soleimani assassination.

There's a strong anti-interventionist Right and Left. During the 12-Day War, Trump went from tweeting about regime change, to abruptly demanding cessation of hostilities, which Israel and Iran complied with. (I think had the war continued the regime would already have fallen, given how easily Israel was bombing them.) This is something that's already kicked off, unlike the Maduro rendition. My understanding is that action got more popular in the polls having succeeded, though it's an open question what Venezuela's fate will be.

The Right strongly criticized Obama for declaring a red line in Syria, and then backing off. In hindsight, I think it would have been correct to have intervened against Assad. Here, I think there's a clear cost-benefit analysis case, whether you care about the plight of the Iranian people or the amoral realist power dynamics for America First Global Superpower Edition.

Even if Trump does nothing and the Ayatollah crushes the riots, then what? Irans currency is still getting annihilated, their water situation is not unfucked, their "allies" are both faraway and incapable, their neighbourhood actively hostile. The Regimes only friend that can offer a real lifeline is MAYBE India, and thats a huge gamble to count on India. The alternative is to surrender wholly to China, which if China does will simply add another failed overseas shithole to Chinas collection of worthless foreign investments.

Even if Trump does nothing and the Ayatollah crushes the riots, then what? Irans currency is still getting annihilated, their water situation is not unfucked, their "allies" are both faraway and incapable, their neighbourhood actively hostile.

None of these indicate that they are neutralized. I can think of historical examples of countries where citizens where got used to fleeing to bomb shelters and food was rationed, and still the country was both quite resilient against changes from within and also an imminent threat to world peace.

For example, you can not just look at the North Korean GDP and declare that they are surely a military irrelevant shithole, because e.g. fielding a quarter of their population does not actually require a great GDP.

Just from its size, Iran is a big regional player. But it gets worse. Their drone designs get widely used by the Russian military, inheritors to what was once a top notch superpower. Now you can argue that this reflects more on Russia's decline than on Iran's rise, or that Iran is simply able to sell the cheapest minimum viable drone, but even then they are beating whatever the military version of temu is at its own game, which seems impressive in its own right.

The alternative is to surrender wholly to China, which if China does will simply add another failed overseas shithole to Chinas collection of worthless foreign investments.

The problem is that they never surrendered even in part. All of these shitholes are a) very Sovereign and b) would rather submit to the US/Israel than to China, partially for racial reasons I think. Foreign Policy argues this may change, though:

Contrary to much Western analysis, Iran never fully embraced China—even after Trump’s 2018 exit from the nuclear deal. As the conservative Farhikhtegan newspaper recently noted, Tehran long treated Beijing as a fallback, abandoning major proposals whenever fleeting openings with the West arose. The paper asserts that Xi Jinping offered a $40 billion investment package in 2016, but it went nowhere, while the much-touted 25-year cooperation road map remained largely symbolic for lack of Iranian initiative.

Indeed, in the brief window of sanctions relief after the 2015 nuclear agreement, Tehran handed lucrative contracts to Western firms such as Total, Airbus, and Boeing—sidestepping Chinese companies. As Hossein Qaheri, the head of the Iranian-Chinese Strategic Studies Think Tank, admitted: “Time and again, for short-term gains, we have abandoned China—and the Chinese have repeatedly said they do not have strategic trust in Iran.”

The war’s aftermath and the “snapback” of U.N. sanctions have forced Tehran to rethink its approach: If it wants China to invest in infrastructure and defense, it must start acting like a genuine long-term partner, not just turning to Beijing in times of crisis. Even many reformists now echo this view. For instance, Jalaeipour, while pressing for broader democratic reforms at home, has likewise argued that Iran must demonstrate consistency and reliability if it expects China to invest at scale.

That message framed the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit in Tianjin, China, which offered the strongest indication yet of a decisive pivot toward Beijing. For Tehran, the timing was critical. Still reeling from the 12-day war and facing the activation of snapback sanctions, it gained rare diplomatic cover as SCO leaders condemned the U.S.-Israeli strikes. At the same time, Araghchi joined his Russian and Chinese counterparts in a joint letter to the United Nations dismissing the snapback of sanctions as legally baseless and politically destructive.

Pezeshkian also used the summit to align openly with Beijing’s agenda, endorsing calls for global governance reform, de-dollarization, and new crisis response mechanisms while casting Chabahar, Iran’s Indian Ocean port, as a linchpin for China’s connectivity to Central Asia and beyond. In Beijing, Xi pledged respect for Iran’s nuclear rights, sovereignty, and dignity, and the two sides agreed on “maximum implementation” of their long-stalled 25-year pact. Most telling was Beijing’s symbolic gesture: inviting Iran—but not the United States, most of Europe, Israel, or some Gulf states—to its World War II “Victory Day” military parade, signaling Tehran’s place in China’s envisioned multipolar order. As Araghchi put it, “The president’s trip to China will go down as one of the most important in our history.”

But this is probably just Western fearmongering. There is no such thing as a Chinese puppet state, that actually advances their geopolitical goals, hosts their bases, receives their military training. It would be interesting to see.

These shitholes surrender to USA/Israel because USA actually makes demands, and China never did any Ask. China is in reality a shitty exim bank who absorbs capital shredding in exchange for EPC absorption, not geopolitical leverage. China "lends" money as a headline numbers but the drawdown is never loans to prop a regime, just project finance for builds or bridge finance for commodity offsets. That Iran snapped to Chinese supplication is itself a misread because China does not display any action that gives enough of a shit about the regime. Chinese failure to prop up their pets is a categorical misread because China does not view its debtor regimes as pets, but as fungible relationships: Gonzales or Maduro, Khan or Munir, Khamanei or Palevi, China does not care for the regime. Just keep the phone line open for discussions if anything changes.

There's a lot of ruin in a nation. They can muddle along.

"Here's how Imam Mahdi can still reappear."

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