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Are we in a new age of hyperpower?
OK, this war in Iran is only 2 days old, and as we all know "truth is the first casualty of war." So this is very much a hot take, and we'll need a lot more time and thoughtful analysis to see how this plays out.
But right now, as an American watching the news, I'm feeling a bit drunk on national power. I can only imagine how Trump and other leaders must be feeling, let alone the actual soldiers who drop the bombs. Already this year we've fought and- it seems- won two wars! The first one with absolutely no losses, and this one also seems quite low casualty. This was done purely with American military (and help from Israel), no NATO help necessary. Iran has spent the last 40 years building up a gigantic military, and now it all just looks like an absolute joke. All their leadership is dead within the first day, and the US has massive air superiority over most of the country. It's now basically just a choice of what targets we want to bomb.
I took this chance to go check back in on Venezuela. I couldn't find many good sources there, but so far it seems... basically fine? There's no civil war or hardline Maduro loyalists fighting to the death. The new president has taken over with basically no issues, and she seems to be cooperating quite well with the US. Lots of Venezuelans are happy that this happened. Of course there are still many problems with the country, but it's fair to chalk that war up as a win.
But what about China? We're supposed to be in a new "multipolar" age, right? The US can't just go throwing its weight around wherever it wants because there are other powers to stop us. Iran was heavily involved in selling oil to China, and was a military ally of them through the Shanghai Cooperative Organization. Well, so far all China has done is say mean things about us. They can't even say it openly, they have to do it in phone calls to Russia. So apparently they're not much of a counter at all.
I think we've reached a tipping point where US air power just crushes all of its adversaries with no counter. It's not any one weapon, but a combination of factors- more satellites, better human intelligence, more stealth aircraft, better radar, more JDAMs and stand off munitions, cyberattacks, and now AI to help us identify targets. The US can completely devastate most countries, even large ones like Iran, without putting a single boot on the ground, unless we want to send special forces to arrest someone like we did to Maduro. And we've got 100 next-gen stealth bombers currently in production, plus... whatever the hell the F47 next-gen fighter can do, so I expect this dominance to increase over the next decade.
But what about nukes? Soviet nukes held the US in check throughout the cold war, surely those also put a break on US imperial ambitions? Well, to some extent they still do, but the US has made some very impressive progress in missile defense lately. THAAD is now hitting its targets with an impressively high success rate, and was recently used to help defend Israel against Iran's missile barage. The main limiting factor there is just building more interceptors, and Trump is pushing for massive funding there as part of his Golden Dome project. That also opens up some intriguing options in space- and, oh hey, would you look at that, the US also has SpaceX utterly dominating LEO launch, and it will likely get even more dominant there if/when Starship becomes practical. Meanwhile China has a relatively small nuclear arsenal, and Russia's is just leftover Soviet junk that might not even work anymore. I think we are rapidly reaching a point where the US has overwhelming nuclear dominance.
The question then becomes- what do we do with this power? Trump used to always preach the merits of isolationism, and he made a big splash early in the Republican primary by being the only candidate who strongly denounced the Iraq war. He clashed heavily with Marco Rubio over that issue. But now he has Rubio as his Secretary of State, and he seems to have rapidly "evolved" to favor military interventions. But, being Trump, he still makes speeches about "taking Venezuela's oil" and other me-first boasting. So far no such boasts about Iran, but I can only assume there will be some.
My guess? He keeps doing this. Cuba is an obvious target, they're pretty much falling apart already. Next would be Panama, where he always talked about wanting the Canal back. After that... I have no idea. Colombia? Mexico? Somalia? Cambodia? He could potentially attack all of those places, if each one is as fast and decisive as this current Iran war seems. I... don't think Trump would actually invade Greenland, or attack China, but... who can say? If he chose to do those things, who could stop him?
They had a big war with Iraq in that period and the higher spending during that time would have largely attritted away during the fighting. Since 1990, their military spending dropped to ~2% of their GDP, which is lower than US spending both as a percentage and much more so in actual money. They also had trouble with spending that money optimally due to the sanctions.
Are you sure that this is not affecting your assessment of Iran as some amazing military power?
The power to devastate is a great power in some ways, and quite weak in other ways. The Taliban is back in charge in Afghanistan.
Well, as long as the Taliban minds their own business and no longer harbors massive training camps for terrorists, I suppose they can handle Afghanistan as well as anyone.
Also, a big part of why they were able to return to power was that their leaders set up a safe governmemt in Pakistan. ...Perhaps the time has come to do something about that Pakistan situation? They're almost as bad as Iran in terms of "countries that shouldn't be allowed to have nukes." It would be a good demonstration for the world, that just having a few crappy nukes doesn't suddenly render your country invincible. With some forward bases in Iran on one side, and cooperation from India on the other, we could knock out Pakistan's delivery systems before they have a chance to fire anything.
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People thought the same thing in 2003-2004 when the United States mowed down Saddam.
See this Capitol Steps lyric for reference to tune of Help Me Rhonda:
These exact same conversations were had back then. The US was so strong it could impose its will with no limitations. It was able to bulldoze the vaunted Iraqi army way ahead of schedule, with no meaningful resistance. That proved incorrect.
The United States is in its Chip Kelly (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chip_Kelly#Philadelphia_Eagles_(2013%E2%80%932015) era. We're running trick plays and full time hurry up offenses and it's working. Maybe the magic will run out, maybe it won't.
Yes, I'm aware of that. I was actually a hardcore liberal back then, who saw a lot of my classmates suffer from long deployments in what seemed a never ending, pointless war.
But as the saying goes... when the facts change, I change my mind. I think the War on Terror bought us a lot of skill in fighting this source of war, and I also think new technology has opened up new options we didn't have before. Just as "not every war is WW2," we shouldn't assume every war is Vietnam/Iraq/Afghanistan. Sometimes watt really does change
And in Iraq we said "see, every war doesn't have to be Vietnam! We can just turf out the dictator in a couple weeks and we're done!"
If the US had taken out Saddam, picked another senior Baathist and told them to be a little nicer to the Shiites, and kept the Baathist army mostly in place, that could indeed have happened.
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No, this isn't true. I mean, their missiles might not work, but the Russians have been constantly modernizing their nuclear arsenal. At this point, I think it is newer than the American nuclear arsenal (although that might not account for maintenance and regeneration with new parts). We haven't replaced the Minuteman yet and the Russians are operating a number of ICBMs fielded after the Cold War.
I'm reminded that the US finally phased out floppy disks in the nuclear launch systems in 2019.
We're not talking 3 1/2" floppies. Not even 5 1/4", but big ol' 8" floppies.
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New age of hyperpower, and hyper oops.
Three US fighter jets accidentally shot down by Kuwaiti air defenses, military says
When your greatest losses during large war are caused by your ally, you know you are the real hyperpower.
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Remember that thou art mortal; remember that thou may die. And remember Afghanistan.
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First time?
Give it a bit.
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The kidnapping of Maduro and the murder of the Ayatollah went fine for the US, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.
The longest US op in recent memory was Afghanistan. In the end, it was a failure of comical proportions, with the Afghan army -- painstakingly trained and equipped by the US taxpayer over two decades -- surrendering to the Taliban the moment you were out of the picture.
So as much fun as the mental image of Trump gracefully playing with the globe might be for some, let's wait a bit before we declare the New American Century 2: This time We Mean It.
I am also rather bearish on nuke interception. Israel's Iron Dome works reasonably well (though they did require the cooperation of a lot of neighbors to get through the Iranian barrage unscathed). But Israel is a tiny country which spends a lot of its GDP (and some of America's GDP) on defense. The US is significantly larger, with lots of big cities on the coasts. I am frankly doubtful that you have the tech or production advantage over China to protect LA from sub-launched nukes.
And the real power of the US lies in its coalition. For countries such as Australia, Japan, Germany etc, being allied to a mostly peaceful US has been a great deal. But as some Gulf states recently found out, it also paints a bit of a target on your back for anyone who wants to strike back at the US but can't.
So the outcome of a nuclear war with China after you spend 5% of your GDP on missile defense might be that you manage to H-bomb all of China's big cities, and they only manage to nuke LA from subs and NYC by smuggling in a nuke in a container ship. So instead, China decides to nuke Japan, South Korea, Australia plus any other countries in the Pacific which host US military. Which then motivates your remaining allies in Europe to swiftly kick you out before you get them nuked when you repeat that game with Russia.
At the end of the day, you might have thrown China back a decade (because for a regime change, you would need an invasion, and I simply do not see that happening) while only having lost your empire and tanked the global economy. Do you think Trump would win the mid-terms under these circumstances?
Edit: And as far as LEO is concerned, it should be noted that it does not take a lot to make orbits unusable to anyone. A single 5mm bearing ball hitting your satellite at some km/s relative velocity is likely to turn it into space junk. Even if your price to LEO is 100x that of SpaceX, that would not stop you from getting rid of their sats, which will be the obvious strategy once they weaponize their satellites.
Re. Iron dome:
It is not a technology that could intercept any serious missile; it is designed to shoot down cheap drones and back yard specials with cheap(ish) interceptors.
The current state of the art for intercepting an ICBM from any of the major missile powers is: Every target that is assigned a nuke gets at least one.
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Iron dome mostly works because Israel is a fairly small country, and therefore it’s plausible to shoot down the missiles coming into most major cities simply because you don’t have much land area to defend. Along range missile shot at Israel is only able to hit Israel by going along a limited range of latitude and longitude. The USA can’t do it even with a lot more money because the USA is a large country— larger than continental Europe— and the range of available targets is much larger.
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Did it? It seems like they were barely damaged by this at all, despite Iran launching everything they could. The US missile defense tech held strong, and now they've had a major regional threat removed. It seems like being a US ally is a great deal for them! Soon, virtually all of the Middle East will be firm US allies, which rather amazing when you think about what it was like a few decades ago.
I would simply not go to war with China, but continue to topple every other tinpot dictatorship around the world, to create a worldwide network of US aligned states while completely isolating China. Meanwhile, we continue to increase our space tech advantage, and utterly starve them of fossil fuels. In that case, yes, I think Trump and future Republicans would easily win elections.
Meanwhile Europe keeps asking us for more military aid in Ukraine to deal with Russia. Well, it's obvious that we could destroy the Russian conventional forces if we wanted to, it's only really a question of how we manage their nuclear threat. So this provides us a convenient excuse to increase our nuclear defense.
This is Paradox-brain. These "states" are comparably worthless whether aligned or misaligned, just painting them in your colors does little.
The most important fossil fuel for China is domestic coal. They can make liquid fuel from it too, btw. Hell, they're so far ahead in renewable power generation that they can make methanol from direct CO2 capture. This isn't 1940s Japan.
You're clinging to the idea of dominance that's only fit for dealing with shitholes behind you in economy, industry and scale, you have no theory of victory against a superior opponent. These clever schemes negligibly change your position wrt China.
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Do remember that a significant chunk of the Democratic base is located in LA and NYC, and thus would not be voting in this scenario. It is not immediately clear that the swing would outweigh that.
(Yes, the incentives on Trump may in fact be perverse!)
Hold on, are we considering WW3, a full nuclear exchange, global economic collapse and megadeaths on US home soil in relation to the mid-terms? Huh?
I know it's him that brought it up... but the midterms really don't matter. Elections do not matter at all in comparison, you could have a military coup and it would barely make the top 10 most important details about this situation.
I mean, I Noticed a long time ago that nuclear war means victory for the Red Tribe in the culture war (at least in the USA, and possibly in other Western nations hit). I happen to think that tearing the Blue Tribe from power isn't actually worth that, but I suspect there are some among the Trumpists sufficiently mindkilled to disagree - at the very least, my noting this factual point has been mistaken for such Posadism on three separate occasions.
(I will cop to being more of a China hawk than I might otherwise be due to the AI issue; not due to the culture war, though.)
I would predict that in this specific scenario the mid-terms would at least still probably happen, although you are correct that it's a footnote (the broader CW point less of one, but still relatively minor).
Do not be so sure.
After The End, what would "red and blue" mean anymore, what recognizable "red culture" would still exist in Fallout universe?
Big cars, big houses and giga consumption lifestyle would be out for the foreseable future, and so will be sport obssession and religion promising prosperity and worldly success.
The Fallout universe makes little sense. I expect, though, if it has an equivalent of Blue Tribe it's based in the NCR capital. The Mojave (outside the Strip proper) is obviously Red, as is the Capitol Wasteland.
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We'll always have Liberty Prime.
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So would be humanitarianism, public welfare, gender-anything, social justice, climate and pretty much every last thing valued by leftists. The American blue tribe won't have much to do anymore.
In other words, the outcome of nuclear war is everyone loses.
Well, @Eetan was specifically referring to a "Fallout" scenario, in which civilization-as-we-know-it is thoroughly scrubbed.
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I'm afraid this jingoistic intoxication will get worse when the US proceeds to topple some other incompetent country (probably Cuba next). This is all fine and good so long as the actual decisionmakers are sober and don't infer they can start anything with China, but will they be sober? Currently you're burning through interceptors and, if this is not AI fog of war slop, even losing F-15s (alledegely to friendly fire, I presume due to lack of relevant training. Should have called upon Ukrainians to teach you guys air defense). But long term, Iran is poised to lose the war, of course, so the sense of invulnerability will be restored.
First of all Iran was not a "military ally" to China in a way that matters, this is just cope to inflate the sense of achievement, just like hyping up Iranian "gigantic military built over 40 years" (I see you double down on it). For reference, India, Kazakhstan and Pakistan are also there, are they Iranian allies too? Are India and Pakistan allies? They've just had a war. "Heavily involved in selling oil" just means that due to sanctions their oil was selling at a discount, which the Chinese opportunistically exploited. Here's what Foreign Policy had to say last September about the nature of the relationship:
That's diplomatic; on a personal level, Chinese consider Iranians worthless backstabbing third worlders. So, their lack of direct involvement is quite understandable. The article lists some symbolic gestures (Beijing inviting Iranians to Victory day parade, agreement on implementation of the 25 year investment pact) but that was transparently a panicked reaction to a crisis. Objectively they're given about the same treatment as Starmer, Macron, Carney and other foreign dignitaries. I don't want to say there's nothing to multipolar agenda, obviously China prefers Iran to remain a thorn in the US/Israeli side and also to buy cheaper oil. But that's a benefit of bounded and not great value, and ineptitude and duplicity of the mullah regime qualifies it further.
No, Iran is only about Iran and Israel, not China. Except psychologically (I'll return to this).
I think what we're learning is not so much that the US is a supreme military power but that it's been a very reluctant hegemonic empire indeed. Why do these shitholes even exist? Venezuela, Cuba? Seriously? The former is a pure petrostate that had failed to keep its oil rigs running due to decades of mismanagement and populism (and also sanctions). The latter is a country famous for sugarcane that's importing sugar now because Communists have ran the industry into the ground. Just months ago, Iran had almost collapsed due to a drought, not to mention that it's deeply infiltrated by Mossad. Why does the US tolerate such enemies instead of giving them a push? Why does it just allow the hostility to persist? Well, Trump has been asking himself just this, it seems. The answer is, there's no good reason. The US can afford to crush them, because it'll be pretty cheap (especially given the fixed costs of US military power).
The problem comes with assuming that China is anything like them. I get it, too – Communists, enemies of America, poor, theoretically allies (though China has no real allies except for North Korea and informally Pakistan, to counter India). But it's dangerously delusional. At the end of the day, the reason America can do this, the reason it has all those stealth jets and satellites and AI and smart munitions and everything else is that it has a large, productive, complex, technologically advanced economy. Even the industrial sector, for all the talk of hollowing out, is the world's second largest (though it depends on how you treat value-added figures – in physical output, it might be closer to Japan than to China). And these guys are so far down the line they barely have an economy.
I like the measure called Economic Complexity Index, maintained by Harvard Growth Lab. In intention, it tracks how capable a nation is of mainitaining industries that generate globally competitive products, though in reality is just measures export diversity. It's not pefrect – for example, Australia and the US get punished by the predominance of a few commodities in their export basket – but it's a decent proxy if you keep that in mind. Say, in 2024, Venezuela was ranked #133 out of 145 countrires. Cuba is #122. Afghanistan is #110. Iran is #87. Russia is #67. Canada (commodity exporter) is #35. USA is #20, between Hong Kong and France. The top 10 all have negligible commodity endowment. The list is as follows: Japan, Switzerland, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, Germany, Czechia, Israel, Slovenia, China (climbed 7 points in the last 16 years; the US has fallen down by 7 again). Discounting the fraction of the economy involved in fossil fuels and agriculture (a generous choice), I'd say the US would end up roughly as complex as China. They have a nice visualisation, you can click through it, eg here's the structure of American imports from China, and here are exports. Or, here are Chinese exports to Japan which as we know is number 1. And the other way around. It's quite clear to me that the ranking is directionally aligned with reality. And it's a ranking of complexity. In terms of volume or human capital employed in militarily relevant fields, it's not close. China doesn't need "allies" because it surpasses the entire Western bloc in scale.
Reminder that China is already testing two 6th generation jets in the open, and given that you haven't resolved the issue of launching 5th generation from Ford in over a decade (their EMALS works flawlessly btw), there are hardly any grounds to expect the gap to widen (or even to exist).
How's that working out? I see Iranian ballistic missiles hit Israel online. Reminder that it's a barely functional theocracy, these aren't some fancy MIRVs or HGVs. Forget THAAD, actually, you're struggling wtih Shaheds.
Starship is a real argument for interception, but the gap in rocket technology is likely smaller than it seems. We'll see over 2026 if China can begin landing their boosters, and they won't need Starship unit economics to scale up production.
Currently estimated at 600 warheads, vs American stockpile of 3700. It's a completely sufficient deterrence. You glibly dismiss 50-90 million dead Americans, I suspect that's a lowball but the point is that you're unlikely to destroy China either, for all the memes about Three Gorges Dam. Their cities are denser but made of concrete far more resilient to nuclear flash than your suburbs, for starters. That said, we're all far from the genocidal peak of Cold War, and these assets on both sides would be used on counterforce strike.
What I want to say is that this isn't just a funny hypothetical. "How do we fight China" is the question on the mind of American planners, and the answer is "we don't, not really". China is your only rival and pacing threat, China is likely to take Taiwan in years, and there are no adequate answers sans praying to AGI and Elon Musk to bail the US out. Accordingly this showboating in hostile shitholes, while inflating their alleged capability to proportionally inflate American dominance, to the extent that it's not executing on prior plans and commitments – is best understood as procrastination in the face of unsolvable strategic dilemma, with a nice bonus of inciting this feverish national pride and maybe improving the GOP's chances in the midterms.
I don’t think in the end that there will be war with China. The Chinese are more rational than the Iranians or Cubans, and the Taiwanese are not as hostile to unification as many imagine. “The plan” for Taiwan (gradual rapprochement under the KMT or successors) is still viable. The US did not nuke the Soviet Bloc in the Cold War. Iran and Cuba are actually more internationalist than China, much moreso, they both even had Leninist ideas about exporting global revolution.
We don’t. You semi-dispute that answer but I think you discount it as a full possibility. At the least it is far from certain. Ideologically the zeal is not there. China is a rival in grand terms but not in local ones. China lacks even America’s ideological mission. If the Taiwanese accept peaceful reunification in a moment of crisis for America, what happens? A broken, fractured American government sends an expeditionary force to Taiwan? That is ridiculous.
The Middle East is the grand arena for Anglo civilization, as it has been for centuries, arguably for a millennium; the English were after all among the most zealous crusaders. Taiwan doesn’t have an influential diaspora preaching war (Jensen Huang would rather a peaceful, quick reunification so that he can resume frontier GPU sales to China), it doesn’t have a hundred million Americans who believe its fate portends the eschaton.
The heart of American warmongering simply isn’t in conflict with China. Nobody really cares about the Chinese. The racial insults are about as bland and unprovocative as “cracker”. They are not some terrifying martial enemy. You can read Islamic propaganda about a global caliphate. A Chinafied America just looks like America with longer working hours and less visible homelessness. What is scary there? Social credit? We have it at home. Even being responsible for the pandemic didn’t move the needle, not really.
The only reason to fight China is out of boredom.
It looks like about 7% of Taiwanese support unification. Support for unification is trending down over the decades; about 20% supported unification in 1994. Most Taiwanese either want to maintain the status quo indefinitely (about a third), kick the can down the road (about a quarter), or move towards independence without burning any bridges right now (about one-fifth).
A lot of people have convinced themselves that the longer things go on the stronger China will become. I tend to think the opposite. Allowing the United States and its allies half a decade to prepare for a Taiwan contingency might render all of the squabbling over whether or not aircraft carriers are survivable with a ballistic missile threat essentially moot; the US will plausibly be able spam so many antiship missiles from every corner of the first island chain that it will be the Chinese who are having interceptor shortfalls.
This would all be moot, of course, if Taiwanese were more interested in unification in five years, but right now I have no reason to believe that will be meaningfully the case.
The US has a pretty normal national interest in preventing China from gaining hegemony over the most valuable parts of the world (measured by GDP), for a couple of reasons. One of them is just preventing rival economic/geopolitical entities from forming. One of them is to avoid triggering a nuclear arms race.
And if I was Taiwan, I would be building a lot of cheap anti-shipping drones like Ukraine has used very effectively.
Correct, and in fact I believe they have started testing those types of weapons.
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Within a decade it's more likely that both sides have directed energy interception, which introduces its own problems. You're still living in this popular dream scenario where the opponent is static but the US is constantly improving. (Hence also all the embarrassing stuff about "not letting China win in robotics/industry" when they're like a century ahead.) It's not just a matter of buildup, they're not just an assembly floor, you're improving slower than them technologically.
Taiwanese might be more interested or, rather, less opposed to unification because the US is rapidly depleting their Silicon Shield in preparation for vacating the island, also coercing them into undesirable investment plans and imposing unfair tariffs.
Too late, too much main character syndrome.
The US and likely China already have this to a limited degree.
No, not at all. The problem for China is that amphibious assaults are fundamentally difficult. The problem of the United States and Taiwan is that they haven't taken advantage of that. It's infinitely easier to procure for a Taiwan contingency than it is to change Taiwan's geography.
I'd say if anything, you're the one in the fantasy dream scenario where the opponent is static but China is constantly improving. It seems to me you have a habit of taking relatively minor things as data points that build towards US comparative decline.
For instance, here you cite the fact that the US hasn't launched the F-35 using EMALs as a US L. Now, launching their stealth fighter off of their electromagnetic catapult system is certainly a W for the Chinese but if you lurked online in the right places you'd know the Navy has been happy with the F/A-18E/F and have not been in a rush to procure the F-35, which they are less happy with. The Navy's been skeptical about the effectiveness of stealth against Chinese systems and seems to be dissatisfied with their relationship with Lockheed. As I understand it, the Ford hasn't launched the F-35 because it hasn't gotten the necessary upgrades and it will at some point when the Navy does a refit on the ship. And while it's very typical to be wowed by "5th gen fighter" you of all people should be skeptical of Lockheed Martin's marketing: the truth is that your "aircraft generation" doesn't matter all that much, and Rhinos are perfectly capable of shooting down F-35s (including in beyond-visual-range combat) and will likely be capable of shooting down whatever 6th generation aircraft the Chinese push out, because air combat is more complicated than "numbers go up, higher numbers better."
(This cuts both ways, btw, nobody should think that the Chinese will be a pushover because Iran bought one of their radars and "it didn't work.")
Yeah, because the Chinese are operating from a technological inferior position and are converging on the position of the United States. They're likely decades behind in some very important areas, such as submarine quieting, and as they get data en masse from Russia or the United States via industrial espionage their technological level will improve (and has improved) very quickly. Extrapolating these trend lines out to infinity isn't the proper way to evaluate the situation.
Do let me know when that shows up in the polling data.
I've screamed on here since forever that pushing Russia and China together was a bad idea but it seems to me that the United States remains better at coalition-building than China.
Not really. Maybe against drones, but even HELIOS is underpowered for intercepting realistic incoming missiles. You need to get to 1MW level lasers. The US is in the lead in this research, admittedly.
Finally, geography is also much less of a factor than commonly assumed when you can have barges letting you disembark on virtually the entire coast (ofc there's the obvious objection that barges will be destroyed by brave defenders, I'll let you think through counterpoints). "Taiwan only has 2 suitable beaches" is a hypothesis fit for a shithole without shipbuilding industry, pardon my French.
No, I'm being realistic. The advantages of Chinese industry are compounding very quickly, they've reached escape velocity of sorts. The US definitely can improve but the gap is likely to get wider over the next decade or two.
it's illustrations.
I really don't share popular skepticism with regard to F-35, but this isn't just about planes. Ford EMALS is just an older, less reliable system, Ma Weiming's MVDC architecture is superior from first principles, it builds on common civilian Chinese advantages in electrical engineering that are expressed in their grid and battery dominance. This is also why they can put EMALS on 076, on some trucks, on trucks stacked on a container ship, basically play with it like LEGO. This again is illustrative of the disparity in industrial capacity and diversity and prospects for military procurement in the years to come.
this is dubious because the core feature and design principle of J-36 is overpowered electric generation and radars (again building on their civilian advantages) so at the very least they can be expected to notice your Rhinos first. I won't engage in spiderman vs batman analysis, none of this will be about 1 on 1 dogfights of course.
Maaaaaybe you can say this in aggregate, but there are many domains where you're behind and the gap is growing because they are still improving faster.
I mean, how hard can it be? Americans did it. Broke-ass Communist Russians with inferior metrology did it. I've known people who did similar things for the Soviet Union, they're not some John von Neumann geniuses shooting lightning out the arse, just normal engineers; there's not much to all this Cold War magic by modern standards, it's likely less g-loaded than CATL battery process engineering or TikTok recommender algos. China is crushingly dominant in materials science now, they author like 50% of top papers. We'll see soon if Type 09V reaches Virginia levels of quieting, probably it comes close, reducing the gap by 20+ years.
you overestimate the role and misunderstand the nature of industrial espionage, that's a popular cope. Eg recently there's been a big brouhaha about them stealing ASML IP and building a EUV prototype. The leader of the project is Lin Nan, head of light source technology between 2015 and 2021, "Light source competence owner for metrology in ASML research". They have been advancing Western research until recently, and can do as well at home.
For one thing, prediction markets say it's almost certain that KMT wins the next elections, and everyone knows they're pro-cooperation with the Mainland; their representative insists on Chinese identity, is friendly towards Xi and opposes Taiwanese independence. Abuse from Trump and Lutnick is not very good alliance-building, Beijing barely needed to do a thing. Here's one perspective. There are such polls to drive the point home but I am not sure about it.
Things can change fast.
It seems this way.
As Colby points out in Strategy of Denial, blockade compulsion strategies rarely compel surrender. Now, I am not sure if the historical inferences hold given the modern necessity for energy but on the other hand if you're going to insist the historical record shows that amphibious assaults often work, I'm going to remind you that blockades and bombardments (by themselves) often do not.
Yes, I also think that an air assault is a viable strategy in addition to landing at pretty much any point across the island. This doesn't change the fundamental problem(s) with an assault on Taiwan. The barges are nice but they don't magically overcome the advantage of interior lines. And so forth.
So far the Chinese appear to be behind the United States (alone, and Australia, Japan, and South Korea are also relevant players here) in submarine manufacturing (quality and tonnage), space-to-orbit launch tonnage, aircraft manufacturing (quality, possibly still airframes as well, particularly considering US exports), directed energy weapons, and, if it matters, oil production and artificial intelligence. They do build a lot of boats, but the US and its allies can build antiship weapons faster and cheaper than China can build boats.
It's illustrative of your tendency to take something innovative and cool the Chinese have done (in a mock-up, mind you), not look for and therefore not find a comparable US example, and then declare the war over in favor of China. The US doing actual procurement such as putting lasers on their submarines (publicized 2020), flying next-gen fighter aircraft (also 2020), or flying a secret stealth electronic attack aircraft for over a decade (likely spotted 2014) - not interesting, nothing to see here.
You haven't thought through the implications of what you are saying. Now, there's doubtless a lot of secret sauce when it comes to the fine details of these things and how they work, but the laws of physics presumably still apply, and due to the inverse-square law, we should expect radar-warning receivers to detect emitters before the emitters detect a radar signature. I'll let you work out the implications of turning on that overpowered radar in a world of air-to-air antiradiation missiles.
This doesn't mean the J-36 is useless, by the way.
No they did not. The Russians were genuinely ahead in speed which is impressive in its own right, but they still haven't caught up to American quieting in nuclear submarines.
Not really "cope" so much as "a good idea" - the US government just launched copies of a Shahed at Iran and I think that's smart. I'm genuinely curious, while we're on the topic, to get your assessment of how the recent accusation by Anthropic that Deepseek used data harvesting to build their model.
Look, my position on the whole US v. China thing has not been US triumphalism. It's a war we could lose. But Chinese triumphalism rankles me the same way. It's very wrong to extrapolate from Venezuela and Day Two of Iran and conclude China would be a pushover too. But it's also very wrong to extrapolate from Chinese civilian shipbuilding numbers and conclude the US of A would be a pushover.
Going entirely off of this Wikipedia article, one could just as easily say that she opposes CCP rule over Taiwan, supports the status quo (the mainstream view), and wants closer relations with the United States.
This is almost certainly the best position for Taiwan to take, by the way, there's no point in provoking the mainland without material gain.
Yes.
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The prediction-market volume on Taiwanese elections is way too small to take seriously. It means jack shit. The KMT is very unlikely to win.
For starters, Taiwan’s presidential election is plurality-wins. You can take office with under 50% as long as you get more votes than everyone else. Chen Shui-bian, the first DPP president, won with 39% in 2000 because the KMT split. Song Chu-yu, a former KMT politician, ran as an independent and carved up the KMT vote (he got 36%). The official KMT candidate, Lien, got 23%. If the KMT hadn’t fractured, they very likely would’ve won in 2000 and I think the situation today would have been better had KMT not let their collective brainworms take over. The DPP has been dominant ever since except the Ma years. Right now the anti-DPP vote is split between the KMT (more seniors) and the TPP (more young people), which in some ways rhymes with 2000.
And KMT just does not have charisma whatsoever. It's the lame party. Arguably since the DPP is the ruling party for a decade it start to be the lame party now and young people are moving away from it, but KMT is associated with Chiang, with old KMT soldiers speaking mandarin with Shandong accent, with the Chinese communist party who is equally not charismatic. It'll be a miracle for them to regain power, sans dramatic happenings.
My view is obviously that Taiwanese identity is nonexistent beyond not Chinese. And since Taiwanese people speak Chinese and can (and will because of the gravitational pull) view Chinese media contents, cultural osmosis makes eventual reunification a matter of time (hence the ban on Xiaohongshu and other Chinese social media in Taiwan). Anecdotally late Gen Z and Gen Alpha already seem less pro-independence than millennials and early Gen Z who are the current major voting blocks. But in the short term I don’t think things are going to get meaningfully better.
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The thing that worries me the most is that American decision makers are increasingly just randos on the internet, instead of some cooler head master schemers who have a lot more tolerance to vain glory and low time preference.
My people have too much respect for the Americans to dare to think them as frothing-at-the-mouth barbarians. They are Romans and should be treated with dignity and respect. I hope we’re not wrong, or it’ll be a deadly mistake for all of us.
I don’t know whom to strike for our show of force though. No one in America cares about Myanmar. Maybe philipino shacks on SCS islands? Idk.
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What F-15s were lost? Is this something Russian or Chinese media is saying? Everything I've read says that the US has lost absolutely zero planes so far, just a few unfortunate men on a base in Kuwait that was struck by a missile. But other than that one incident, US missile defense in this conflict has been outstanding.
Sure, I never claimed that there's some great love affair between China and Iran. It was always just a partnership of convenience. Nonetheless, it was a real partnership, and I'm not how China is going to deal with the loss of this oil supply, on top of the loss of Venezuela. I suppose they'll just become even more dependant on Russia, just as Russia is dependant on the money they get from selling oil and gas to China. But if that link is broken, both nations fall apart.
Why do you discount fossil fuels and agriculture? Both of those fields are actually quite technologically advanced in the US. We're not some 3rd world nation doing subsistance agriculture or relying on foreign companies to drill oil for us. Those are some of the most crucial and high-tech fields in the economy! Meanwhile, the areas which China exports to us are in manufacturing, which is something we are actively trying to increase. Many Americans would consider it a great boon to have more manufacturing jobs and less imports from China. But if the US stops exporting food and oil to China, I don't see how China replaces those.
No I don't glibly dismiss it at all, I simply recognize the reality that the US now has far more relative power in nuclear weapons than it had at any time in the Cold War, when the USSR generally had more warheads. It's not about fighting China directly, it's about gaining operational freedom to act in other areas, as I wrote here . If China wants to invade Taiwan, they must be terrified that it would end up in a nuclear war with the US. The US can freely act against other countries with no such worry about China.
America has many planners, who can plan a great deal of actions. That's how we fight Venezuela, and Iran, and aid Ukraine, and perhaps take down Cuba, and who knows what else, all simultaneously. Because we are a world power with global concerns. That is rather different from the state of China, which has to spend 50 years worrying about how it can take over some small offshore island because it represents a huge political threat to the legitimacy of their government. But sure, we can also plan for how to win a war against China, that's a fun hypothetical for our military planners to consider :). Starving them of oil seems like a good first step.
Idk about the serial numbers, but three? Well, in fairness, Kuwaiti defense forces seem to be at fault, so it's no great slight on the American hyperpower, and if anything goes to show the power of your air defense.
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/03/02/middleeast/us-kuwait-aircraft-crash-iran-intl-hnk
Why do you presume they will lose any oil supply? Why do you think you get to just tell countries to stop exporting to China? They're broke and need some income. You're an oil exporter. Oil is a global commodity, more oil on the market mechanistically reduces prices. Trump has already said he won't stop Venezuelan exports to China. This is just more capeshit to rationalize actions compelled half by unilateral Israeli decision and half by procrastination as part of your competition with China.
Because I'm generous and as I've explained massive commodity sectors depress a nation's ECI. It is fair that on the physical level there's plenty of complexity in fracking (the Chinese think it's one of three impressive American industries) but the volume of exports dilutes your technological value-add.
Yes but it's hopeless for basic reasons of economic development and the tremendous success of American system. Every American with half a functioning brain is already gainfully employed, and very few of those are in manufacturing, and the rest are more or less ballast. You can increase the output somewhat but if you think you get to "catch up" to China or whatever, it's pure hubris. Like, when exactly are you going to build Shenzhen and staff it with whom? Do you even realize how far ahead they are in industrial automation, in integration of all ecosystems? That it's stopped to be about "cheap labor" maybe a decade ago? That your lofty plans of solving these issues with robots all depend on Chinese suppliers?
With South American imports. You mainly export pig feed (soybeans), and cattle feed (alfalfa), not human food. In the worst case, if you compel South Americans to also stop exports, they'll probably have to eat less beef and pork, as they had historically and as the Greatest Democracy India does today. Look at the calorie consumption in China over the years, they have developed a lot of slack.
American oil is irrelevant and replaceable, you're power-tripping. They depend more on the Gulf. So next comes the usual fantasy about closing the Malacca strait I guess. Of course this is an act of war which locals (Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore) will likely resist so as to not become a battlefield, and the Chinese have and will have more than enough reserves and domestic production to operate their rapidly growing navy. Did you know that China is the world's sixth largest oil producer? That in terms of total primary energy production (domestic production yes), they're global number 1 and 40% higher than the US? And that they are very quickly making inland logistics oil-independent? They'll survive even if they stop getting any oil. I swear, almost everything about conflict with China is some rehashing of the 20th century arc with Japan plus something about Soviets.
Again, for some reason you assume that your dependencies (eg the rare earths threat, that forced Trump to halt the BIS Affiliate Rule last November) are easily fixable, despite decades of forewarning, literally 30 years of Chinese openly saying that they'll weaponize it one day. I guess it's nice to have such faith in your people, and dismiss previous ineptitude as enemy action or just carelessness. Not sure how warranted it is, though.
Ok, let's say this is the new strategy. How fast do you think China could make another 2, 3, 5 thousand warheads if they wanted to? Do you really want to go back to a nuclear arms race? Who is currently building over half of all new nuclear reactors in the world, entire fleets of nuclear submarines, a nuclear aircraft carrier? In economy, they dwarf the Soviet Union colossally, and their defense spending is a fraction of yours, around 2% GD. They could outrace you by a very solid margin.
Nuclear bluff has limits, your threats have to be credible. Psychologically, they're not terrified because they assume you're not retarded enough to sacrifice New York for Taipei, no matter the imbalance. That you might sacrifice New York just to take out Beijing and Shanghai is a bit of an alien thought to them. Perhaps they're wrong, but that's the reality of their decisionmaking.
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Bias statement: I greately enjoy Pax Americana, I write this from the perspective of a frustrated and worried citizen who sees their mantle of "global superpower" slipping and is sad that the response to that is to shoot ourselves in the foot over and over again.
It's crazy you just skipped over that point lol
This is a great first step, and given they are the leader in ev's and power installation, it looks like they might be thinking about this too!
A few more things to consider, just riffing off the top of my head, happy to expand on any of them
Dominant position in heavy REE refining, yes, everyone else can stand up this capcaity, no, no one has to the same extent despite saying they want to for 20 years
One shipyard can build more ships than all US military shipyard combined
Military doctrine literally explicitly built around countering US forces
USA keeps shooting all its interceptors, of which it builds a far too small amount, to defend Israel (greatest ally btw)
If you dont want to read this , here is an AI-slop summary:
US + allies (Japan + Philippines + farther bases; excluding SK/Taiwan) — change last 10 years: Japan added only 2 HAS (and IAS grew from <60 to 100), the Philippines stayed at 0 HAS (IAS roughly doubled from a low base), and the “farther” US operating areas remained 0 US HAS; overall, in the within-1,000-nmcut (excluding SK), the US added +2 HAS total.
US + allies — current (per the paper): Japan has 36 military airfields with 140 HAS (most Cold War-era); the Philippines has 0 HAS across 13 bases; and the farther US/partner areas listed are almost entirely unhardened with 0 US HAS.
China — change last 10 years: PRC HAS rose from 370 entering the 2010s to “over 800” (i.e., +430-ish HAS, more than doubling); non-hardened IAS grew from just under ~1,100 to >2,300, reaching >3,100 total shelters nationwide.
China — current in-theater (per the paper): 134 PRC air bases within 1,000 nm of the Taiwan Strait with 650+ HAS and almost 2,000 IAS.
A collection of INDOPACOM leaders shitting their pants:
Adm. Samuel Paparo (Commander, USINDOPACOM) — Senate Armed Services posture hearing (Apr 10, 2025): “China is outproducing the United States… the trajectory must change.”
Adm. Samuel Paparo — USINDOPACOM Posture Statement (2025): “the trajectory must change. China is out-producing the United States…”
Adm. Samuel Paparo — testimony coverage on shipbuilding (Apr 2025): China building naval combatants “6 to 1.8” vs the US; “I could go through every force element…”
Adm. Samuel Paparo — Sedona Forum (McCain Institute coverage, May 2025): “every force element… is a bad trajectory.”
Adm. John Aquilino (Commander, USINDOPACOM) — Senate posture statement (Mar 21, 2024): PRC continues “aggressive military buildup”; “the risk… is high and trending in the wrong direction.”
Adm. John Aquilino — same statement (Mar 2024): “On a scale not seen since WWII… [PLA] has added over 400 fighter aircraft… more than 20 major warships…”
Adm. John Aquilino — Senate posture hearing (Mar 10, 2022): described an “extensive buildup of nuclear capability”; when asked if expansion was dramatic: “Extremely, quickly.”
Adm. John Aquilino — interview coverage (Apr 2024): “I’ve watched it increase in scope and scale, it is not slowing down.”
Adm. Phil Davidson (Commander, USINDOPACOM) — Senate testimony coverage (Mar 2021): cited “the… numbers of… ships, aircraft, rockets… they’ve put in the field,” and warned “the threat… [is]… in the next six years.”
Adm. Phil Davidson — later public quote (Sep 2021): “all those trend lines indicate… within the next six years they will have… capability… to forcibly reunify [Taiwan]…”
Yes I did skip over that, because it's a deep rabbit hole of classified information, Communist-bloc boasting, vaporware, and extremely complex speculatiion about how future wars might take place. I'll freely admit that I'm not qualified to even judge the current generation of aircraft, let alone the next generation. But from where I stand, there was a lot of doubt and worry about the performance of the F35 and Ford-class carriers, but both now seem to be working marvelously. They just finished a massive military operation against Iran! China has never done anything comparable, they can only speculate and boast about how they might someday perform. My vague impression is that the J-20 has excellent range and good stealth, but is not as good in avionics and other soft factors as the F35- and there's over 1000 F-35s now compared to just 300 F-20s. Similarly, I know they're working on a next-gen stealth bomber but don't have it ready yet, whereas the US is already scaling up production of its next-gen B21.
For the rest of it... well, I'm not sure what you expect me to say. Obviously they're a large, industrialized country which has been rapidly building up its military lately. Obviously it would be quite difficult to fight such a nation in their own backyard. But they have no means to project force overseas in any way close to what the US can, or even what the USSR could at its peak. All they can really do is defend their own local space and hope to deter us from directly attacking them. That report seems to be about them hardening their airfields, which is a good way for them to survive being bombed, but still not a great sign when your airfields are being bombed. It's far from clear that they even want to attack Taiwan, and there's a vast diversity of opinions on that, but I think most experts agree it would be an extremely difficult invasion for them- but of course US military leaders must take it seriously, and may play up that threat as an excuse to increase their own budgets.
Even if China did take over Taiwan... frankly, so what? It's a small island with no natural resources, far away from anything. It's only strategic asset is their chips factory, and that's rapidly being diversified. Iran is of much more strategic importance, and we just took that without breaking a sweat.
I agree with basically all of this.
Will China ever land troops in LA? no
But will the USA lose the ability to project power inside the first island chain? I'm worried that they might
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The most recent reporting suggest Kuwait shot down three F-15Es in a friendly-fire incident.
See: https://www.twz.com/air/f-15-spins-into-the-ground-while-on-fire-in-middle-east
Aha, the Kuwaitis! Always the Kuwaitis! The number one threat to the US Air Force is... Kuwait?
You'd expect it to be the US Navy that tried to end the F-15's perfect K/D ratio
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I imagine you crave novelty, but I'm afraid it will only be the usual, make some poor country more miserable, claim right to do whatever but take no responsibility for the outcomes. Maybe try to hold out until strikes on AI labs irresponsibly trying to build models that undercut US labs.
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North Korea is a formal Chinese ally and not negligible in terms of military.
The Solomon Islands are basically a Chinese ally at this point, although one can question whether the correct term is in fact "puppet state". Of course, their own military's negligible, but the ability to base PLA forces there is a big deal.
This is also true of the USA and Israel (with the addition of AIPAC and company).
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There's always this two-step dance about what exactly the SCO is. I think the legal details are unimportant, since these aren't countries that are going to be follow the exact letter of any treaty. The fact remains that they were cooperating, and Iran was one of very few countries directly helping China, and now they're gone. All China has left is, what, Myanmar and North Korea? Good luck with that. Any country that starts helping them too much because of "Belt and Road" or whatever can easily be "convinced" to change their ways by US military power.
Notice how even your largest numbers still fall far short of total annihilation. The fear during the cold war was that they might kill everyone, with just a few scattered survivors living in underground bunkers. Now the best they could possibly hope for is just massacring some cities, while the US would certainly survive and overwhelmingly destroy them in response.
The idea that the sheer number of nukes a country holds is the most important factor in an engagement is just silly; maintenance is costly and Russia and the US have so many nuclear bombs partially because of Cold War-era posturing. Strategically speaking, you don't actually need 2000+ nukes to do the job properly, it's not about saturation as much as it is having the capacity to hit enough targets to deter attacks. If you have even a nominal amount of nukes and a proper delivery system, that is more than enough. MAD doesn't need to be even close to total, if you wipe out the largest cities in the US the vast majority of its economy is gone in a handful of hours (and note, you'll not only kill people directly but also through the collateral damage such as complete collapse of infrastructure and radiation percolation into the water system).
Note that China has 600+ nukes, which would certainly be capable of levelling large swaths of the US; striking first is incredibly stupid. Theoretically you could remove their second strike capability by attempting an attack on their silos, but realistically you aren't going to be able to identify the locations of every Chinese bomber and submarine and target them before China mounts its offence. Even if just 20 of China's most antiquated ICBMs hit the US, that's 50 million dead according to some possible ballpark estimates, how would you feel about 300? China certainly has enough for credible deterrence against the US, and that's largely what its nuclear arsenal appears to be designed for - out of the major nuclear powers, it's the only one that actually maintains an unconditional no-first-strike policy. Even so, of the nuclear powers it's the one scaling up production fastest.
And speaking of missile defence systems, China has the Hongqi-19, which has a reportedly superior maximum operational range (up to 500-600 km) compared to THAAD (200 km). Claiming "overwhelming nuclear dominance" such that it would allow the US to steamroll any country it feels like is premature, to say the least.
I see it less in terms of "winning" the nuclear war, and more in terms of "which side has more freedom of action?" Having more nukes (as well as more ways of delivering them) buys the US considerablly more freedom of action. China is forced to evaluate everything as an all-or-nothing war for survival; the US has considerably more flexibility.
Notably, during the Korean war when we were actively fighting with China, we still didn't dare attack China directly for fear of triggering a nuclear war. Similarly, during the Vietnam War, they were able to supply North Vietnam freely with weapons and support- the US had to go out of its way to avoid hurting China or the USSR. That no longer seems to be the case- as long as we're not actually attacking China directly, the US seems to have considerable freedom of action to do what it wants. We can stop their investments in South America, stop their oil purchases from Iran, ban their tech companies, and even topple governments that they were on friendly terms with. Even if we were to go invade North Korea tomorrow, what do you think China would do about it?
And that's just for now. Despite their considerable advances in many fields of technology, China still lags behind the US in aerospace tech. The Hongqi-19 has never been tested in combat, and does not seem to be particularly more advanced than THAAD. If the US continues to invest in ground based defense like THAAD, plus gets a working space defense working through Golden Dome... China rapidly runs out of options to hurt the US. But I suppose they can just scale up mass production of nukes, like the USSR did in the 80s... how did that work out for them.
I don't think the US wants to enter a contest of mass production and industrial capacity with China. Missile defence has never been cost-effective, isn't today (as we see all these missiles piercing the existing Iron Dome whether via saturation or just outright penetration) and likely won't in the future unless there are major developments in laser efficiency. It's not that hard to make low-flying nuclear cruise missiles or fractional orbital bombardment systems or HGVs, very hard to shoot them all down.
Chinese missile defence probably doesn't work either. But at the end of the day, they do have this huge pool of talented engineers (much more than America), they do have all these robots and industrial machinery, they're marching up the value chain in all kinds of industries. Drones, 5G, renewable energy, shipbuilding, steel, nuclear power... There's no reason they can't match and surpass anything the US can do, given enough time. If an American engineer can make something, so can a Chinese engineer.
Well they'd just push the US out of North Korea like last time, probably. I think people just don't understand the scale of what China can field, if they really want to. They have 20 Million men turning 18 each year. Imagine facing an army of 20 Million at the front, imagine facing 85% of the world's drone production fired off at you day and night, imagine facing the production engineers that are brutalizing the world's car industry with their 'overproduction'. That's not even a fully mobilized China. The US mobilized about 12% of the population in WW2 for the military, so for China that'd be well over 100 million men.
You have to kill 20 million in a year just to keep up - they'll have another 20 million to throw at you next year! It's a ruthless autocracy, a party-state with total internal control and massive propaganda capabilities. Don't take them lightly!
They do, and I have tremendous respect for China's ability to do high tech manufacturing at massive scale. But I still argue that they're a step behind the US in terms of the most cutting edge tech. We see this in many areas- stealth, radar, targetting, cyberwarfare, AI, and now space launch. We will if they ever manage to catch up and surpass us in one of those fields. But they better do so soon, because their population is rapidly aging.
We arguably did just face that! If you count Iran's Basij force of 25 million reservists. But it doesn't matter how big their army is, no one moves without command and logistical support. And they're also not zombies, they're not going to march themselves off to die in North Korea if they have a choice.
(but yes, I am perhaps speaking too lightly and glibly. I'm sure the people in the Pentagon take this a lot more seriously than I am. But still... just imagine the possibilities...)
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I seriously doubt this is the case, and I don't actually think this dynamic shows up in geopoliticking. If MAD is being deployed and the costs of a first strike are far too high on either side, then the "freedom of action" argument clearly fails. You're basically dooming yourself and your people (and many other countries) either way, with a not-insignificant chance of your own death; at the levels of destruction we're talking about here, it's kind of moot. Seriously, I doubt anybody is evaluating this with the geopolitical logic of "Well, 85% of my country is dead and large swaths of it will not be able to be livable for a good long while and there's possibly a nuclear winter going on, but 99.9% of your population is dead! Checkmate."
Even if China fired none of its nukes, which isn't likely, launching 3,700 nukes in their totality to totally decimate the country blows back on the US immediately and in a big way.
Again, the sheer number of nukes does not actually allow you more freedom of action. It's basically threatening an intense no-win scenario where outcomes on every side are so horrific it's unlikely any country would want to escalate to it.
It has, at least on paper, several advantages over THAAD; being not only capable of longer range but higher altitudes and a superior radar system. And Pakistan has announced plans to acquire the HQ-19, so I guess we'll see how it fares in an in-practice scenario. Suffice to say I don't think THAAD is a particularly convincing or central point for your argument about US overwhelming military dominance.
I would argue that it shows up quite frequently, and in fact was at the heart of Cold-war decision making. The acoup article on it was good. Having more nukes, more delivery systems, and also more defense systems, allows us to push the "red lines" forward to control borderline territories. Having fewer, and using them only as a last-ditch resort, means that countries struggle to project force outside their boundaries, as China does today. It's not about evaluating the number of dead, it's about the chance of starting such a war. The USSR in contrast was able to invade prague and dominate eastern Europe, secure that the US would never risk war over some distant city. But now, the calculus is on the opposite foot- there's no way the PRC would risk nuclear war to protect Tehran, or even Pyongyang.
That seems like a rather fear-mongering article, essentially taking all of China's claims at face-value despite a complete lack of tests, while assuming that the US can't do anything in response (eg, using satellites to increase tracking range instead of relying solely on THAAD). It's probably written to encourage more spending on missile defense. But yes, I do agree that THAAD isn't a huge central point for this discussion, it's just one of many weapons systems where the US now enjoys a considerable advantage that it never had before.
I really want to address this reasoning because it's at the core of your argument (I'll move on to other parts of your comment after this has been addressed, because it's by far the bit I take most issue with). I agree that there is, as your article states, an art of "making the best use of the limited area of freedom of action left us by the deterrent effect of the existence of nuclear weapons". But the idea that deterrence can only be achieved by amassing as large an arsenal as possible is not sound, and was the very second-strike capacity which I think I addressed in my previous comments. The following Cold War argument in the article is as such: "Thus the absurd-sounding conclusion to fairly solid chain of logic: to avoid the use of nuclear weapons, you have to build so many nuclear weapons that it is impossible for a nuclear-armed opponent to destroy them all in a first strike, ensuring your second-strike lands. You build extra missiles for the purpose of not having to fire them."
This logic only holds assuming perfect information is present, but it rarely is. In practice, it is virtually impossible to detect and destroy literally every bomber and submarine in a fairly large geographical area, and second-strikes are pretty much all but guaranteed for a country with any sizeable nuclear arsenal. Once your opponent is able to diversify their holdings via the nuclear triad in any significant capacity it would not be very easy to actually eliminate your opponent's second strike capability wholesale. After your nuclear arsenal grows to a certain level, you do not in practice have to engage in this extremely costly contest in which a greater and greater proportion of public funding goes towards maintaining a nuclear arsenal of gradually increasing size.
It's partially for this very reason that there were several reforms to the planning process that came with a realisation that a bloated stockpile was not necessarily an effective deterrent (and came with steep fiscal costs) that led to the decline in such massive additions, and gradual disarmament. Hell, even McNamara himself noted the diminishing returns inherent in keeping a huge stockpile of reserves. "The point to be noted from this table is that 400 one megaton warheads delivered on Soviet cities, so as to maximize fatalities, would destroy 40 percent of the urban population and nearly 30 percent of the population of the entire nation... If the number of delivered warheads were doubled, to 800, the proportion of the total population destroyed would be increased by only about ten percentage points, and the industrial capacity destroyed by only three percentage points... This is so because we would have to bring under attack smaller and smaller cities, each requiring one delivered warhead. In fact, when we go beyond about 850 delivered warheads, we are attacking cities of less than 20,000 population."
McNamara argued that deterrence was achieved when 25% of the Soviet population could be threatened by their nuclear arsenal. According to that threshold, this study estimates that 51 warheads would deter Russia, 368 would deter China, 300 would deter all of the NATO member countries, 124 the US, and 11 Canada. Meanwhile, at the height of the Cold War the US held like 30,000 warheads. Cold War decision-making isn't something to emulate; it was excessive and inefficient by any reasonable standard, including their own.
Except: "This article tests a core argument of the nuclear competition school regarding the effect of the nuclear balance on the initiation of nuclear crises. With original data on strategic nuclear balance, my statistical analysis shows that having a superior nuclear arsenal than another nuclear-armed opponent does not lead to a reduced likelihood of nuclear crisis initiated by the opponent. These core findings hold after conducting a series of robustness tests with various measures of the balance of nuclear forces."
You'll have to forgive if I'm writing all of this quickly and without as much effort as I should- it's just that a lot of people have been responding to me and I'm doing my best to keep up, even though all of this quickly gets into deep rabbit holes, like that 200 page report on nuclear planning that you linked me.
But that's true of anyone, I suppose. Trump doesn't have all day to sit around reading academic papers, and neither did Kennedy or McNamara or any other world leader. We all act in a combination of rational thought and political biases.
Notably, Kennedy and McNamara were in power during the 1960s, a time of considerable fear and backlash against nuclear weapons. As such, they were highly motivated to find reasons to decrease the nuclear arsenal, even while being stepping up the conventional war in Vietnam. This led, in part, to several defeats for the west- the loss in Vietnam, the occupation of Czechoslovakia after the Prague Spring, and an assertion of Soviet control in Finland. That's a marked change from the 1950s, when the US had a large lead in Nuclear power, and was much less afraid to throw it around.
That second paper you linked seems to be based on the number of "crises" that occur, and draws heavily on the example of Pakistan and India with Pakistan being the weaker power yet instigating crises. I'm not sure I agree we can generalize from that- Pakistan is just an aggressive, unhinged country. But sure, maybe they're correct that having more nukes won't decrease conflicts- I'd still prefer to be on the side with more rather than fewer nukes, if such an event occurred.
In the cold war, nukes were tough to aim and essentially non-interceptable (as well as a strong chance that they might not fire at all). That led to a focus on aiming for cities, and looking for deterrance. But again, technology has changed. Most nukes would not target cities any more, but military targets and especially known missile silos or airfields. So the number of civilian losses would be much lower, and the number of second-strike weapons fired also much lower. The US could potentially decimate China's nuclear arsenal with a surprise first-strike, then shoot down most of the remaining ones fired via interceptors, and the few that get through probably hitting isolated military targets rather than major cities. That's not something I want to see but, if I was China's military, it would have me terrified. Even the vague threat of such a scenario should be enough to make them take notice. Note that, unlike China, the US has never pledged no-first-use, it's always been assumed that it can use nukes whenever necessary.
So I'm trying to strike a balance here. I'm of course not trying to say that the US is now immune from nuclear weapons, or anything like that. But the balance of power has changed there, in a way much more favorable to the US than it has since the 1950s, and we should be aware of that fact.
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Or so they say.
Or so they say, yes. Even so, in its presence or absence I doubt any major power would be retarded enough to start firing these things all over the place. MAD is a powerful deterrent.
True enough. I just don't feel like "no-first strike policy" is much more than feel-good verbiage. Would they actually refuse to strike first if it became a matter of survival? Would anyone still care about such policies after a worldwide nuclear exchange? I have a hard time imagining that such a policy amounts to much, when push comes to shove.
Which isn't to say I think the Chinese have any particular interest in nuclear first strikes. As you said. The policy just doesn't strike me as very weighty, in itself.
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At this point, it feels like the most important factor is: do the country's elites have the capacity for suicidal spite necessary for a first strike? Being the former leadership of a country that loses in conventional warfare can't be worse than huddling in bunkers under a world that's been nuked back to the stone age.
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You can not intercept an ICBM after it has gone ballistic (after apogee). The only thing stopping other powers from Nuking the US is MAD, not technical impossibility. No amount of magic anti-rocket sauce can stop a MIRVed ICBM's warheads.
That might be the official line, but given the degree to which Russia is investing in new delivery mechanisms for nuclear weapons suggest that at least they believe that American capabilities are or will be greater than are currently stated.
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Aegis and THAAD are both fully capable of hitting a ballistic missile in terminal approach, they just need enough missiles to hit all the warheads. Or we could shoot in midcourse with GMD, and we are developing the possibility for even boost phase kills with Golden Dome. Until now, the US was willing to play along with MAD and leave itself vulnerable, but there's no reason it should continue like that forever. North Korea especially should be feeling nervous right now.
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Attacking China would be insane they have nukes. If the US was going to be attacking any nuclear power it'd be Russia over Ukraine. But the possible result of everyone dies is not worth it. And why would the US attack China what gain is there? Anyway I don't think the US' ability to thrash shithole countries is anything new. Iran was playing at being a power on a horrid economic base with third rate homemade weapons, they failed harder than expected but most of the US' shithole adversaries tend to.
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Libya was completely destroyed 15 years ago. This war shows that drones and cheap missile technology has leveled the playing field. Gadaffi couldn't really do anything. Drones and loitering munitions have made a repeat of operation desert storm infeasible as fast maneuver warfare is substantially harder today. Meanwhile the US bases are getting pummeled with rockets and shipping through Hormuz has ground to a halt.
Hold up. The decisive factor behind the regime's fall in Libya was the NATO intervention, not any new piece of technology. Without it there'd have been a short civil war with the rebels eventually getting suppressed.
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Of course it’s still possible but the attacking force need to go back to premodern offensive tactics like killing or relocating entire villages to prevent the existence of any civilian population that could give succor to guerilla fighters. This makes it nonviable in our civilized age.
But it’s also why Trump’s tactics are smarter than anything in the War on Terror. In Venezuela and Iran, he leaves open the door to regime change but doesn’t seek it - he just wants to kill enough leaders that the next guy is willing to deal. He doesn’t have the humanitarian aims that the neocons did where on some level they did imagine that Afghanistan could become a Western democracy.
Just bombing until they give up worked so well in Vietnam. Afghanistan and Yemen have been bombed relentlessly. It didn't work.
The US isn't going to control the middle east by just bombing.
Why not? Israel controls (sort of) Lebanon and Syria just by bombing them unopposed. This goes on for decades, and could go on indefinitely. In principle, Iran could be reduced to this state too.
Israel failed to control Gaza in two years of war and Hamas is still running it. 70 000 dead people and they couldn't control an area the size of a small county with closed off borders.
How has controlling Yemen gone with relentless bombing for 12 years?
The war was not about "controlling" Gaza (who needs such prize), but destroying it. Now, it is pile of ruins that will be never rebuilt. Hamas can "control" it, but can do nothing to endanger Israel.
(The actual death toll is unclear, somewhere in low six figures. The rest of Gazans are going to leave or die too).
Yemen is danger because of ballistic missiles, supplied by Iran. When the factories where they come from are destroyed, Yemen would be again as threatening as Zimbabwe.
The same was said before the current war.
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I'm not sure if this is meant to be a joke.
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Bombing is a strategy, the objective is what’s relevant. Is the objective here bad? Yes, that’s why I opposed this action. But that doesn’t make the strategy impossible.
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China. China might stop him. It's really big. It holds a lot of people. They're militarizing rapidly in terms of both quantity and quality. And they're overall no longer a third-world backwater shithole. I dare say the US has not so far faced an opponent anything like this, and may in fact not be able to deliver a clean strike. This isn't a banana republic that exists only to sell oil or an islamic near-failed state teetering on the brink of collapse already.
In other words: You're somewhat drunk, go home and sleep it off.
I didn't mean to say that attacking China would be easy. I meant that Trump has supreme command of the US military and he can order that if he so chooses. I agree it would be crazy but there's really no one who can prevent such a war if he's really determined.
More likely I see him continuing to go after small 3rd world dictatorships that he can topple within a week. So maybe North Korea.
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China has minimal interest in playing world police as long as there's a somewhat-stable global market to sell into and securing its own needs in terms of resources isn't overly threatened. I'm pretty sure they don't see a need to become hegemon, just continue to increase their economic heft whilst the USA can maintain its gigantic costly international welfare efforts.
I was referring strictly to the maximalist claim that America could attack China with impunity.
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It really feels like the usual parade of cope and trope about China that has been circulating in the public discourse ever since it bootstrapped its way up from worse than sub-Saharan poverty to a world power in 45 years, all the while singlehandedly orchestrating the largest urban migration in human history and aggressively A/B testing their entire economy to see what worked and what didn't.
People really want this to be a Soviet Union situation where the regime is barely hanging on by a thread, only bolstering their public image via international propaganda, and where the dominance of the ever-so-enlightened USA will be assured in the end in some kind of teleological Francis Fukuyama-esque end-of-history sense "but tofu construction, but ghost cities, but CCP is going to collapse, but everything in China is fake". Their military technology at the moment lags slightly behind the US (though they're making huge strides in closing that gap), but their production pipelines and logistics are more streamlined and scalable, and yeah their population is massive.
Of course nobody can say for sure who would win in a scuff-up between the two, but I would not underestimate China.
Or, alternatively:
China being rich and prosperous is its default state for most of the last 3000 years.
True that, but China also has a long history of barely keeping it together, of fracturing into dozens of pieces, of being near-incapable of projecting power, of being paralyzed with institutional sclerosis and corruption...I'm not disagreeing with your point, really. I just wouldn't want to argue too much from historical interpretation when arguing from observable recent trends also gets the job done.
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Exactly. Also why I'm relatively optimistic about the Iranian efforts compared to a lot of other places in the broad proximity. They've got a history of functional civilization and being broadly productive. Some places are just going to be continually civilization-resistant in the longrun.
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This isn't new. Very little of this is new - the US has been in a massively dominant conventional position since the end of the Cold War. The reason we haven't done stuff like this in the past (except for when we have) is that it isn't particularly useful most of the time. Even in dictatorships, individual leaders are usually fairly replaceable, as we have seen in Venezuela (and will likely see in Iran), and actually achieving lasting results tends to require putting troops on the ground to enforce your will (as we've seen with the failures in Yemen) and a real plan for victory (such as was lacking in Afghanistan).
Precisely because the US has overwhelming conventional dominance, the number of foreign policy problems we have than can be solved by the quick, sharp exercise of conventional force is pretty limited. Nobody tries anymore because they know how it's going to go.
This is, in fact, the problem. A lot of "isolationist" sentiment in the US is a mixture of short-attention span and anti-internationalism. The reason US public turned against the Iraq War wasn't because of some general opposition to getting involved overseas, but because it was a miserable slog that they felt had been entered into under false pretenses. A lot of them recover their adventurous spirit the moment they get to see the US military absolutely pasting the latest guy dumb enough to stick his head up. And lose it again when it turns out (as mentioned) that brute force actually has pretty limited utility against modern problems.
The actual military problems the US has tend to be intractable (terrorism, piracy, and insurgency) or really boring (ship building, munitions production, diplomacy). The reason people are correctly calling Trump a retard for threatening to invade Greenland is not that the US couldn't take Greenland but that the whole affair reflects a kind of short-sighted thuggishness that reflects poorly on Trump and his supporters.
I think it needs to be added that one of the major constraints holding the United States (and other similarly situated countries) back from doing this kind of thing was also the presence of a genuine Christian faith and set of values grounding the actions of most military commanders. Our leaders used to have moral frontiers they would not cross, now we do not.
When JFK's generals were proposing a surprise attack on Cuba, RFK slipped him a note saying that they would be no better than the Japanese at Pearl Harbor. There was a genuine shared sense of honor, and a sense of mortal sin, that made certain actions off limits as dishonorable, as endangering one's immortal soul. Tradition stretching back through history to Chivalry, to the Romans who believed that war had to be validly declared with all due ceremony before it could be engaged in honorably. The surprise attack, the assassination, the murder, these were not avoided for mechanical reasons but because they were sins, they harmed one's soul.
Trump simply doesn't share that moral grounding. He has no belief that these are acts that would stain his soul, assuming he believes in a soul. He sees nothing wrong with launching a surprise attack in the middle of negotiations, as long as it achieves the goal. He is a pure utilitarian, there is no means that cannot be justified by sufficiently good ends.
The long term consequences of the Sucker-Punch Doctrine have yet to be seen.
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One of the greatest shows of military might ever in history was done to North Korea over the course of three whole years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_North_Korea#:~:text=A%20total%20of%20635%2C000%20tons,(including%20160%2C000%20on%20Japan)
Incredibly destructive (some estimates go as high as 20% of the population in NK dead from it) and yet as we all know now, it didn't really matter, the communists are still around and they even have nukes now. Military might is an incredibly important thing to have, but even such insanely overwhelming numbers do not make a simple fix to our problems. There must be more to it, and we've already failed at this in Korea, in Vietnam, in Afghanistan. Heck even in Iraq itself just a few years ago. Maybe it succeeds this time without a hitch, but it can't be taken for granted.
Sure, that's the conventional wisdom. I've heard that sort of thing all my life, that Korea, Vietnam, etc. prove the limits of what strategic bombing can accomplishment. But I'm not so sure that's a universal truth, or simply a limit of 20th century technology. It's sort of like how electric cars were always slow and useless, until suddenly they weren't. Previous wars involved bombing wildly and indescriminately, with the US first being unable to hit its targets (most of the 20th century) and then struggling to identify just who it should be targeting (most of the war on terror). It no longer has that limitation- It knew exactly where all the key leaders of Iran were, and targetted them very precisely in the first day of the war. It can continue to do this as long as anyone in Iran tries to resist. But so far there hasn't been any organized resistance, and the Iranian people seem pretty happy that their dictator is gone.
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The US carved out a state in Korea despite the endless onslaught of millions of Chinese bodies in a zerg rush and the risk that the Soviets would send millions more. That’s very impressive. There was no need at the time to fight further and harder to get a few more map inches up the Korean Peninsula, which was broadly seen as just another offshoot of communist China.
Observing the one historical parallel we have at hand to judge whether US intervention was a good idea, namely the current social and economic condition of unified Vietnam, what exactly was the point of defending South Korea?
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Modern birthrates might make it a bit more effective when replenishment takes significantly longer
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I mean... if a geopoltical foe demonstrates the ability to bypass your entire defense grid and either abduct or atomize you at any time... do you have any CHOICE but to accept their terms?
That's what seems new. No protacted invasion, no insurgency period, just a chopper full of spec ops on your roof, or a missile through your window. Most of this conducted from the sky.
Only completely decentralized organizations, similar to the Taliban, could expect to withstand this particular approach. If your leadership is forced to hide in a maximum security fortress at all times just to function, are they even 'sovereign' over their own nation?
The point is more that you can't get actual, willing obedience this way, all you can get is kayfabe. Any possible leader of Iran both doesn't like you much from the start, and will resent being under the cosh, so they will be reluctant servants at best and you can't actually slaughter them every year for that without looking (and being) somewhat insane.
So you have a choice: either you give orders from afar which are only carried out on the surface level, or you start putting Americans in the actually supervise these things at a low level. Accidents happen to those Americans - even if the top level don't want to get bombed b/c of dead Americans, they genuinely don't have the power or legitimacy to control idiots and murderers and rogue elements because they're considered pathetic poodles of the Great Satan. The more effort you make to protect your American observers and to help them fulfil their role, the more people hate and resent you, until the entire population becomes a distributed machine for lying to and fooling Americans.
Sometimes those top level guys get killed by their own people, and you have to replace them. This is what happened to the Shah for example. And eventually you may get revolution, and then you're back where you started, except that now you're bombing somewhat sympathetic freedom-fighters instead of fat ayatollahs.
This is the story of Britain in the ME, it's the story of Russian in the ME, and it's the story of America in the ME.
TLDR:
No, but this is now your problem because you want control over Iran not control over the 'leadership'.
I think you just want an Iran that you can keep supervised closely enough to not blow up their neighbors unexpectedly.
Since multiple other ME countries have been nominally brought 'into the fold' (I won't pretend this is a permanent thing) there must be some path to it.
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Actual, willing, obedience isn't necessary. If you pull off something like Venezuela and the new president is willing to play ball when it counts (not selling oil to Cuba and China seeming to be "what counts"), that's enough of a victory given the limited effort that was required to achieve it.
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You can dynamically align the interests of the local elite with yourself. The US and UK did this with large parts of the Middle East (not least the Gulf) already, and quite successfully.
Don’t kid yourself that these people are ideological zealots. Every few years there’s a scandal in Iran because senior IR regime figures are caught on vacation, wives unveiled, chilling in some vacation destination. The son of the ayatollah is a westernized property developer. There are a lot of people even at the top whose devotion to the revolutionary crusade is limited at best. The reason they didn’t concede wasn’t ideological zealotry but the knowledge that if the whole regime was overthrown, which is possible in a kind of Gorbachev-cascade, they’d have nowhere to hide from the people angry about 50 years of domestic repression.
That said, this will go badly because the most zealous anti-government protestors were killed months ago.
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Iran had been undergoing water and energy shortages, as well as 40-50% annual inflation, leading up to the strikes.Decapitating that regime is hardly proof of being a hyperpower, or beat China in a war. What were you expecting a peer China to do in response, strike us, try to start a proxy war? Why would a China do anything else other than say mean things? What? I'm not a nuclear expert but nevertheless am quite confident that we aren't "rapidly approaching" "overwhelming nuclear dominance", especially since your evidence is that THAAD is hitting missiles that aren't nuclear ICBMs and trump is funding the golden dome and ... spacex? While the post spends two words evaluating China (the most significant potential competitor)'s military capability, "relatively small". I don't think this was a good post.
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American military might over the middle east was pretty much already well established, we had boots on the ground in Afghanistan for almost two decades with basically complete dominance and barely anyone back home noticed. We hardly lift a finger while they fight for their lives.
But military might is just a means to an end, and even it has limits. After all, the Afghanistan example didn't turn out very well in the long run. Across the political spectrum our actions there are now widely viewed as a mistake. Yet you can go back and see the discussions of time, people were hyped as shit and drunk on power in the early parts of the war. They never would have expected such long term failures and widespread backlash, yet it happened anyway.
So yes we could attack many places, but what does it actually do? Is it an effective means to reach our goals there? What even are our goals? Does short term success get followed up with long term success or we will we keep stumbling drunk into more forever wars and unintended second and third order effects? These are all important questions. The Iranian leaders being evil and deserving of death doesn't make it simple and easy, because the same thing was true about much of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Iran is not Afghanistan. I think Afghanistan is say like the Southside of Chicago and Iran is like Naperville? Afghanistan just can’t be civilized. You can pump money into the country and they will be your friend until you quit giving them money. And then you leave and the go back to being Afghani’s and doing what they’ve done for a few thousand years. Iran has actual civilization that you can take away from them. If you blow up their government then they need a new government and loon for you to be in charge.
A place with the complexities of civilization can be conquered where as hill tribesmen can’t be conquered.
Yeah, I think people are underestimating what a big deal it is to change the regime of Iran. Even if it had no broader reaching effects, we're talking about a very large and old center of civilization. Nobody really cared much what happened in Afghanistan, but people are going to start caring about Iran once relations open up and we can go visit there and talk to them as normal human beings.
Exactly. Give me any sort of semi-stable foreigner welcoming Iranian government and I'd love to visit Tehran. The Persian diaspora generally way more functional and pleasant to deal with than the Arabs.
The Persian diaspora, though, is heavily selected -- they're largely the urbanized, westernized, supporters of the old Shah and their descendants. The people who back the Ayatollahs and their descendants may be rather less functional and pleasant.
One of my best friends is Persian. It seems to me half his family still lives in Iran. The country does not appear to be completely brain drained. It seem to me like there would still be people to work with.
Haiti seems like a place with zero existing elites remaining. Cuba if we opened it up and tried to govern it now my gut say there would not be a lot of local people remaining we can expect to put in charge because half the population already left.
Galaxy brain moment: make Miami the ruling capital of Cuba and run it as a colonial extension of Florida. Reunite the Cuban diaspora. Little Marco for Floridian emperor. I hear Florida even has a widely-recognized castle he can live in.
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Exactly. Iranians are far more capable of established self governance and have a fairly strong overseas diaspora
Not sure if I even worded it right.
Iran has a PMC, they have email job people who whatever meme you want use for that class of people. If I put a gun to the head of an email job person they might call me bad words behind my back but will basically do what I tell them to do. Afghanistan does not have email job people. There is no head email job person you can go up to and tell them I am the boss now. They herd goats or something.
Now I guess the Taliban succeeded in banning drug addicts since we left. So maybe they actually do have some email job people but control throughout the entire country is much weaker. And our email job people definitely do not understand how to talk to their email job people.
Supposedly one of the mistakes Bush made in Iraq was he got rid of all the Baathist; which I guess were there e-mail people. So then once we took over Iraq we had a lot of unemployed email people. Trump doctrine seems to be to chop heads off the top of the structure until you find the highest ranking middle manager that agrees you get to be in charge.
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I'm hedging my bets because the general American appetite for more ME misadventures is pretty much nil. And one of several reasons people voted Trump was that his "America First" policy could be interpreted quite easily as no more foreign misadventures.
Granted, on a sheer logistics, wonk and warhawk perspective, this stuff is crazy impressive. But in terms of things the regular American sees, what they see is America and Israel pissing off the entire Middle East. They don't give a shit about Iran gunning down their protesters and they might not even know it happened, because Americans don't care about foreign news. Not to mention, the media will jump on anything that makes Trump look worse and look the other way when he tries to take credit.
There are a couple of other things to note: I think people have forgotten what expensive oil looks like, end-consumer wise. And this is already with pressure on the energy market from the buildout in data centers.
It's also worth noting how Iran will just go down swinging at everything in reach. While people are saying Dubai might cheer the move due to the Sunni/Shia split, they're going to start grinding their teeth a bit when panicked multimillionaires start fleeing Dubai in droves for fear of catching debris or being trapped there. And the Arab world as a whole is no fan of Israel. Anyone in the ME who stands to eat collateral damage from Iran is going to wish that this hadn't happened. While I think that this might be overly cynical of me, I'm reminded of that old saw about how American foreign policy creates new terrorists faster than it kills them.
Finally, I think America has shown the world the blueprint for the future of data-harvested precision targeting, and if people don't think this will be a capability not levied against them at some point, they need to take a good hard look at how many Iranian leaders suffered critical existence failure in the last 48 hours.
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Trump is really going for the hat trick in his first year. I'm ambivalent on the long-term wisdom of the military operations, time will tell. But, at least in the short term, this stuff looks very good for Trump, and Hegseth, despite being panned as a lightweight, is at least delegating like an absolute champ. The first and second Iran operations and Venezuela are some of the wildest operations to be successfully pulled off by any world power, ever. And they're all in the first year.
My theory is that Trump does things that everyone else does, just louder, and more obvious. This dispels the illusions in some ways, makes the machinery of superpower status too plain. Who knows what the long term effects will be?
Trump is one of those guys Dan Carlin talks about having a "reality distortion field" around them. Historical figures who warped their societies and history itself around their ideas and goals. Ironically, it worked best on Carlin himself.
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It really does feel like the late-game stages of a Civ IV game where your economic and tech tree advantages have snowballed, so you can roll a doomstack of advanced military units up to any city on the map you want and take it out in a single turn.
And maybe, similar to Civ, the only thing that might stop such a power is if the other players can all agree on cooperation against that player and launch coordinated efforts to rein them in before they achieve space victory.
Which is functionally impossible in the real world.
And yes, I think Cuba goes splat later this year.
More to the point, it really makes you think that the whole problem of the last twenty years was leaders who were aware of U.S. dominance but had other goals in mind, probably including enrichment of cronies, that depended on the U.S. sandbagging hard. And arguably this is just the U.S. being let off the leash. We haven't even removed the leg weights yet.
"Soft Power" has an abysmal record, methinks. I do think Trump prefers the carrot to the stick, but the stick gets results.
I'm starting to question if there's even a difference between the two. In the words of Osama bin Laden: "When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature, they will like the strong horse." Hard power naturally creates its own soft power, as people flock to support the winner. And its hard to look "cool" with just soft power when you keep losing every direct fight.
I think that for a long time people thought that the US was relatively toothless, as nations like Iran publically insulted us and sponsored asymmetric warfare against us. That led to a lot of people taking the leftist line that the US was imperialist, corrupt, evil, etc. Well, no more- it turns out that when you just go in and knock over dictators, people like you.
Yep. That quote lives in my head rent free these days.
I think that literally sums up the entire mindset of every non-Western government. And even the West was only 'pretending' to eschew their strength because the last time a 'strong horse' decided to act out, a LOT OF PEOPLE DIED.
And it runs deeper than merely being an 'honor culture,' they simply CANNOT respect any power that doesn't demonstrate the ability to execute them on command?
I gather that for the Iranians, literally nothing matters but showing strength/hiding weakness. Beating them into the ground is a necessary but not sufficient step to get them to submit, you've gotta somehow let them pretend to be victorious even if you are in practice locking them in a cage.
And on the flip side, they will interpret you trying to pay them off or negotiate with them WITHOUT guns... as weakness, and act accordingly.
If this is accurate, I don't know how you "westernize" such a culture without giving them multiple generations to assimilate.
Relevant Christopher Walken Speech
You are completely ignoring the religious element, which is remarkable, since they main feature is that they are a theocracy.
There are several other similar islamic nations in that particular area that have sided with the U.S., at least nominally.
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It's interesting. I don't have the exact tweets to hand but I've seen a fair few that go along the lines of "If it's this easy, what have we been doing the last several decades"?
Sleeping, as Yamamoto famously noted.
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I'm willing to believe that the technological gap wasn't as notable prior to 2005.
But then I read accounts of Operation Desert Storm absolutely stomping the Iraqis in Kuwait, and then the invasion of Iraq proper ALSO stomping their conventional military.
And my conclusion is that the U.S. has, since the Cold War, always had the logistical capacity to bring overwhelming force to bear on any country with an ocean view. And air supremacy to ensure we can get in and out quickly and with minimal casualties, absolutely NO need to have permanent presence.
The decision to engage in protracted occupation and nation-building, therefore, was absolutely an intentional one and the ill-defined goals of such an endeavor, as opposed to "kill off opposing leadership until somebody accepts surrender", were tailor made for creating an expensive quagmire.
I'm extremely curious to see what types of movies get made about these campaigns. There's really no way to couch them than utterly triumphant for the U.S.
I think I can go on record to say that I bet the U.S. has the capability to kill Vladmir Putin at almost any time if they committed the same degree of planning to it, but the nuclear deterrent is the only thing that would ALWAYS shift the risk calculus against such a move.
China remains a question... but I suspect the apparent failure of the Chinese-made anti-air/anti-stealth radars is a wake up call for THEM too.
Point being, the U.S. military is unquestionably the apex predator of the planet, but much of its doctrine for a long time required that this never be made explicit.
No more.
Yeah, Russia also has the ability to off Donald Trump from space too, what of it? Nobody survives in either direction.
I simply don't believe that.
I also believe that almost every other country aside from the U.S. has been overstating their capabilities because culturally that's how you scare enemies.
Whereas the U.S. has been understating its capabilities because that's how you take enemies by surprise.
The surprise being that the U.S. is even further ahead of everyone else than anyone, even the U.S. realized.
I'm not sure I understand what this means. Do you think that the US military has magic AD protecting Trump that it has never deployed anywhere else in the world? If it's something more reasonable like "in a realistic scenario, Trump would hide in a bunker before anyone gets a hit on him", why not just say that? Sure, the Ayatollah allegedly refused instructions to go hide in a bunker bunker, but this is not such a prestigious military technology otherwise inaccessible to your adversaries.
If it's something like "the US can bomb them more", then sure, that's why it's a good idea to have nukes.
... I'm not counting something like this out entirely.
But I don't think any other country has a capability that they could deploy with any confidence that it would ensure Trump's demise, as long as he is serving in the Office of POTUS.
That's just magical thinking. A hypersonic missile could off him easily and the US does not have capabilities of countering them.
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The problem in Iraq and Afghanistan was never 'getting in'. In Iraq we were actually there to nation build and the CPA fucked it up. In Afghanistan we could conceivably have declared 'mission accomplished' and left if we got OBL, but alas...
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I think the main factor is the ability to do strikes. I don't mean as firing a missile from plane, that's just the culmination of the strike, but to have such a good understanding of the situation and the available materiel to plan and execute. The US is not sending a multirole fighter with a mix of air-to-air and air-to-ground missiles with a goal of "go kill this person, we believe he's hiding in this building and he's behind several layers of air defences and the might have some fighters in the area. Good luck and godspeed!". The actual mission involves clockwork removal of all known obstacles and contingencies for the unknowns. So the mission will be more like "launch at 0400, at 0600 tomahawks will destroy the air defenses in grid yyy, you will then destroy the marked target between 0615 and 0700, the airfield close will be the target of another strike in the morning, in case some of the jets manage to scramble before you will have an escort of F-22s."
Planning everything like that requires time, and these strike plans can expire as targets and defenses are moved, so if you are the US you plan as many strikes as you can for the opening of the war, start with an orgy of destruction to remove as many defenses as you can so that when you run out of pre-planned strikes you don't need to be as fastidious in your planning. If you're Iran, you can't do much to stop the strikes or cause much damage to the strike forces, so you shuffle your defenses and targets around and hope that by the time the US run out of preplanned strikes, they still don't have uncontested air superiority or achieved their objectives, then the US will either have to accept more risk in their operations or slow the cadence of strikes.
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Was Operation Rough Rider a great demonstration of American invincibility too? They brought in multiple carrier groups, bombed Yemen endlessly and assassinated plenty of Houthi leaders even up to the Houthi Prime Minister but the Houthi missile/drone capabilities were basically untouched and Trump effectively gave up after a month when stockpiles started running low.
So if this goes the same way and Iran is still firing missiles and drones a month at every country hosting American military assets, shutting down the Strait of Hormuz and possibly obliterating all of the soft oil infrastructure between the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea would you still consider it to be a great victory for Trump?
My understanding is that all of the Houthi missiles and drones came from Iran. So it makes sense that bombing Houthis wouldn't really stop the missile attacks, at least not without completely genociding them which the US was obviously unwilling to do. But with Iran's regime gone, the Houthi's will no longer have a source of weapons. This clears up a lot of problems if you can simply stop the weapons at the source, instead of trying to target every single insurgent.
But yes, maybe I'm wrong and Iran is still firing missiles all over the place forever, in which case this looks horrible for Trump and the USA as a whole.
I think this is basically a fair assessment, and it also fully applies to why/how Ukraine has held out for so long against Russia (contra the cheerleading narrative).
In fact proxies with high capacity to absorb suffering backed by countries with a moat against immediate retribution seems to be one strategy with which the stronger powers still can be made to bleed - arguably this scheme was prototyped in Korea (imperfectly because China still had to commit its own forces in the end) and perfected in Vietnam.
However, the stars need to align for this to work, in that it must not be possible to physically sever the proxies from their backers. NK is adjacent to Russia and China, North Vietnam is adjacent to China, Ukraine borders NATO and the Houthis are a short swim from Iran. Hizbollah can't be a good proxy for Iran because they have too much hostile ground to cover, and Cuba is almost unreachable for Russia. Iran itself doesn't seem to want to be anyone's proxy (perhaps their ability to absorb suffering is not actually that high?), and Georgia failed as a Western proxy for some mixture of low capability to absorb suffering and not being that easy to reach and support.
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No, on account of the nature of such things.
We have the biggest, heaviest, fastest, longest hammer in the world, which is very good at hammering things that can be hammered.
It doesn't help us if we need to fight an insurgent war, or a nuclear war (small is big enough, in this case), or a trade war.
In that regard it's just us and china with the eurozone in third; and probably it's actually just china 30 years out unless we do some serious communist/state capitalist central planning fucking QUICK.
Doesn't matter how good our army is if there is no civil society to hold that bitch up.
Why do you think we need to do central planning? I don't see how that helps anyone.
The US military is no longer just a hammer. It's very much a smart hammer, honed by 20 years of the global war on terror and cyber/intel development. That helps a lot if you need to find insurgents, or shoot down an ICBM.
We need central planning because it works better for things that might never make money. Our current technological edge is a direct result of mixed market state capitalism that started under FDR and continued throughout the cold war until it seemed like we had that bitch in the bad and Regan et all started rolling it up.
To pick an important example out of a hat: The Mcdonnell douglas corporation has done more damage to US security apparatus than any enemy we have ever had, other than perhaps the IJN (and of course the US security apparatus itself).
We need at least a bit of central planning so we don't end up in our current situation, where we can't cost effectively build ships and one of our major aerospace suppliers eats shit because the capitalists started turning dials while looking over their shoulder to see if the stock price likes it.
That was the only good thing about the Biden presidency: he started doing some big state capacity projects in chip production and making gestures at disincentivizing pure financialized bullshit, before he got revealed his cuck nature as it were.
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My initial response to this was: 'What war with Iran?' And now you're telling me it's over, and America won?
This fucking decade, man. Someone please tell God to chill out.
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A few things that come to mind:
That said, I think that China's big problem is that because the US is leagued with and can base weapons in a bunch of countries close to China, the US can probably do a lot more damage to China in a conventional war than China can do to the US. Being able to build huge numbers of missiles is good for China but not that great if most of them don't have the range and tech to reach targets in the actual US proper.
No matter how good nuke interceptors get, you can never defend vs purposefully created tsunamis by nukes.
I doubt that's actually meaningfully possible.
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Well, I fully expected the US to win, but I thought it would take a lot longer than this! Maybe I missed the discussion on this from the past 2 years. The saying among neocons during the 2000s was "everyone wants to go to Baghdad, but only real men want to go to Tehran"- even the hardline hawks expected that a war with Iran would be tough.
And I'm certainly not saying the US is immune to nukes, or should seek out such a war. Just that, if it does happen, the losses would be a lot less than people might expect based on cold war thinking. And we've just seen that the US has immense power to devastate a country in the opening hours of a war, before it even has a chance to launch its missiles.
They were talking about invading Iran. I don't think there was ever any question that we could bomb Iran with impunity. Maybe they were expecting need a bit more SEAD, but I don't think I've ever seen anyone suggest that Iran would be able to directly contest the air.
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Thinking toward China, there's just a huge amount of uncertainty about how its military would do against any country, let alone the status quo superpower. I don't think anyone, even Xi Jinping, has a good idea. The fact he hasn't acted yet is good piece of evidence that he thinks the US would win; but that's inherently a point at time estimation, and he has the advantage of choosing the most advantageous time he wants to, up until his death.
I am very confident that China would put up more of a fight than Iran, which admittedly is a bar so low it's on the ground.
The fact that a good proportion of American civilians are contemplating about striking China is a good reason why Xi should stop sitting in the cuck chair and do somethingTM. A couple easy things to try first: Myanmar rebels? Naughty Zimbabwean who threaten to stop selling China lithium? Malays and Indonesians who abuse (or used to abuse) our brethren in SEA? Hope that day comes sooner than later.
China seems to be doing pretty with well "do nothing, win" as an ethos.
Exactly short of the US actually meaningfully conducting themselves in a way to present an existential threat in the short term, momentum on most relevant factors is probably going China's way
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Yes; if China wants to be a world power, it needs to put its military through its paces as a kind of stress test. Beyond pointing firehoses at Filipino fishing boats.
I don't think China does want that. I think they want the Islands and Taiwan and the US to fuck off from their side of the pacific. But they have zero interest it establishing global hegemony. Iran was actually closer to that with their network of bases, spies and proxies.
Getting the US to fuck off from Taiwan is equivalent to being a world power.
I agree that they're not looking to create a world order where they have replaced the current role of the US, though.
Yeah they're willing to deal with smaller countries through belt and road if there's a clear rationale, but the post-Cold War status of the USA having tentacles and responsibilities everywhere isn't something they want.
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(1) Three dead American servicemen confirmed by Centcom
(2) A disinformation war is happening in regards to whether a school in Iran was hit, and if it were hit, whether its destruction was caused by Iran, Israel, or America. 100+ Iranian girls were killed.
(3a) It isn’t clear why negotiations failed with Iran. A day before the attack, the designated Omani mediator asserted that Iran conceded fully on enrichment and nuclear weapons: “The single most important achievement, I believe, is the agreement that Iran will never, ever have a nuclear material that will create a bomb,” said Albusaidi, describing the understanding as “something completely new” compared to the previous nuclear deal negotiated under former US President Barack Obama. He said the negotiations have produced an agreement on “zero accumulation, zero stockpiling, and full verification” by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), calling it a breakthrough that makes the enrichment argument “less relevant.” On existing stockpiles inside Iran, Albusaidi said that “there is agreement now that this will be down-blended to the lowest-level possible … and converted into fuel, and that fuel will be irreversible.”
(3b) It appears that Witkoff and Kushner were instrumental in the decision to strike Iran: ”Witkoff and Jared Kushner, U.S. officials said. They told him the talks had gone badly: Tehran wasn’t willing to end its nuclear enrichment or dismantle its missile program, the officials said. That further confirmed for Trump that he had one option left, the officials said. The U.S. also had intelligence that Iran considered attacking American targets before Trump authorized strikes, a senior administration official said, adding a sense of urgency to the president’s decision. U.S. casualties and damage to American interests would be higher unless the U.S. moved first, the senior official said.”
The death of Khamenei has spurred protesters to rise up and assault the security forces of the failing regime!
In Bahrain
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Here's my question: What would have to happen for Iran to stop being attacked by the United States and Israel? There are three reasons that people give for why Iran should be attacked:
Iran funds terrorism and Islamist militias. This is true, but they mostly fund Shia militias and direct resistance to Israel (i.e. Hamas). Islamic terrorism in Western countries is almost always ISIS or Al Qaeda inspired. The Shia militias are the ones who did the dirty work of defeating ISIS on the ground, so it's not clear to me that removing Iran's funding of these groups would reduce terrorism in the United States and Europe.
Iran is building a nuclear weapon. We had a deal on this, and Trump tore it up. If they were deadset on building a bomb, they would have done it by now. This seems like the kind of concession we could get in negotiations if the United States and Israel participated in good faith.
Iran oppresses its own people. Okay, what's your plan for a regime in Iran that doesn't opress its own people? Here are some common options and why they don't work:
An Islamic Authoritarian Regime - This is what we have now. It resulted in massive protests from the secular urban population which had to be repressed by force.
A Truly Democratic Regime - Lots of potential problems here, but even if it had mass buy-in and legitimacy the Iranian population hates Israel and would likely continue support for the Axis of Resistance.
A "Democratic" Regime - This would be a US puppet government. Devout muslims would be disenfranchised and oppressed (obviously we can't allow terrorist parties to run).
A Secular Autocratic Regime (i.e. The Shah) - Same problem of being a US puppet as the "democratic" regime, but even less popular legitimacy.
Let's not forget the events that led to the Islamic Revolution to begin with - democratically elected government cancelled imposed agreements and expropriated BP (Western oil extraction), the West organised a coup to install the Shah to get back the oil, he was so unpopular that the devout faction then successfully revolted. And now, Trump is already openly being grabby about oil again. Perhaps advances in propaganda mean we could now stop the Iranian populace from wanting to control their hydrocarbons or sedate them with short-form video enough to make them put up with the Shah, but how confident are we of this and do we have enough national executive function to never slip up with the opinion control?
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More. For the first two points I think America/Israel feel like we’ve already dismantled terrorist networks/nuclear program for probably a decade. I’m not going to pretend that America cares that much about Iran killing 30k Iranians. So for the three things you mentioned I think we already feel like victory has been achieved.
My gut says we want the events to unfold to at a minimum to make Iran unaligned in global geopolitics. They are not a big player outside of the ME but they still for geopolitical reasons align with Russia/China. It’s why when Iran does have something useful like drones they get sold to Russia.
Then the question is what sort of vassal do we want out of Iran. If you are going to play the game thing is no reason to stop the game with Iran being neutral especially since Iran has long had elements that are Western. The Saudis are a vassal but still get to run some of their geopolitics independently. They have played games in the oil markets we did not like. Then there is a level of vassal that has to do whatever you tell them to do. Venezuela may be in this camp now, but they bring very little value. Argentina may have chosen this path now. Trump could probably call Milei he needs 50k soldiers for peacekeeping on Wednesday and the troops would be delivered on Friday.
To summarize at this point we are not talking any given action they take. It’s alignment. Probably some change in government structure to guarantee the alignment change.
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There's no good way to knock over a regime but the Trump Method is probably close to optimal for minimizing human suffering. This question demonstrates why. It's the same question CNN anchors keep asking. What's the plan, what do we want, how do we structure this new blah blah blah....
The Hegemon has conveyed that it is unhappy with the current leadership of the country. It doesn't care how or in what form the Iranian people choose to reconstitute their leadership. That is - as it should be - up to them. The Hegemon has simply declared the existing leadership unacceptable in the clearest way possible.
How do you get it to stop? Show the Hegemon that someone / something else is in charge that's sufficiently different in behavior from the previous leadership. What's sufficiently different? Intentionally strategically ambiguous - you do seem to have the strongest possible incentive to make it something acceptable to the Hegemon, though, and it can continue communicating its displeasure until you find an acceptable answer.
It's like training a dog or a model.
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I just don’t understand any way to explain the US caring about Iran other than us being Israel’s slave
The mental model that I find predicts things the best so far is that the US is not Israel's slave, and Israel is not the US' slave. Rather, they are one entity.
If that were the case, wouldn't there be a symmetrical relationship? For instance, you'd see Israeli troops fighting in US wars like how British or Australian troops fight alongside America. Or maybe America would sell Israeli technology to Israel's rivals like Iran like how Israel sold US technology to china.
That's a good point. The Israeli troops not fighting in US wars makes sense. The US doesn't need the help, and I have a sense that when countries like Britain send soldiers to help the US in its modern wars, the main benefit to the US government is just that it makes the wars look less unilateral and gives the allied militaries a bit of very rare combat experience - the US government certainly does not need the military help. Israeli troops, on the other hand, because of how hated Israel is, would be counterproductive to the US government's PR.
When it comes to the sale of technology, however, I have no explanation. Other than, maybe just that Israel does not create enough new technology for it to be worth while for the US to sell it? I don't know.
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Israel already sells its technology to third-party powers that can easily export it onward to Iran (and already have trading relationships with Iran), this isn’t really a gotcha, there’s no defense against that happening.
The US has a whole legal requirement to maintain Israel's 'qualitative military edge', so they refuse to sell advanced hardware to anyone that might be or become anti-Israel. The Egyptians for instance get the crappiest versions of the F-16, no AESA radars and no AIM-120s.
Israel meanwhile has no such concerns about damaging US interests by selling on technology. This is what I mean by the relationship being asymmetric.
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Good article exploring how Iran is a key geopolitical chess piece regarding China: https://open.substack.com/pub/zinebriboua/p/the-iran-question-is-all-about-china
The Strait of Malacca wouldn't be "contested": it's a narrow choke point that the US will easily dominate. No oil from any country in the Middle East is reaching China in the event of a Taiwan contingency. There are also no overland pipelines from Iran to China: the inconvenient Himalayas stand in the way, making it uneconomic. Whether Iran is a American or Chinese pawn doesn't really play into it.
The main thing taking Iran's regime off the map does is they won't be able to cause (additional) trouble in the world economy by shutting off Persian Gulf oil.
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Sometimes I wonder if it has to do with airspace and access to China from the west. If Iran isn't a problem, a plane could get from Saudi Arabia to Western China without much trouble.
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The desired end goal is to blow Iran to pieces and leave a bunch of squabbling separatist factions fighting each other, like Libya on steroids.
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Who can say for sure, but I’m sure Israel smelled the abundance of blood in the water and after having laid the ground work of dismantling the proxy network and showcasing the lack of relevant defenses over Iran, they knew a joint hit with the US could deal a near deadly blow. The negotiations might have just been for show in the end.
Israel is also the reason that this isn’t likely to be another Venezuela situation. While that was the Trump admin acting on whims and under constraints of how much engagement the US populace will allow, there’s no doubt that the whole of Israeli intelligence and military assets are going to be dedicated that this biggest break they’ve had yet is going to go their way.
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This war was not popular before the war
The wars in the middle east tend to age like milk with steadily declining once they start running into problems. Trump is attempting to achieve in weeks what the US failed to do in 20 years in Afghanistan with trillions wasted. It isn't going to work. Oil prices will rise and the media will be full of pictures of war and disaster. Trump really shot himself in the foot.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll of Americans held after the strikes began shows:
27% of those polled approve of the strikes, 43% disapprove.
55% of Republicans approve, 13% disapprove.
7% of Democrats approve, 74% disapprove.
19% of Other approve, 44% disapprove.
I haven't been able to find the actual language of the poll, however.
This feels really early for polling. At least if you are not a partisan hack.
I approve of these strikes if we win. I disapprove of these strikes if we lose. I am not sure how I would vote on this poll. I tend to think Trump has mostly won in the geopolitical games especially when he tasks kinetic action. So I am either voting “unsure” or support based on a belief that in the past he’s been good at war.
The voting on this seems to be Dems against probably based on orange man bad logic and some portion of the Dems being legitimate third worlders. GOP he has tacit support on probably thinking like me where I do not love military entanglements but if he wins and <50 Americans die I am fine with it.
At this point I might even need to include the Afghanistan withdrawal as a geopolitical win. Maybe the withdrawal was always going to be messy and it was great foresight to punt that to the next administration or at least past the election.
Going to get Maduro is 100% a win for Biden. My guess is 30-50% of Dems would still say it was bad. Those are either partisans or third worlders. Polling will be the same on this action. If we win with few American deaths then popular support should hit 70-80%. If you lose then support drops to 10%.
US public support for the Iraq War just before it started, and when the outcome was not known, was much higher (about 50% in favor) than this poll shows for the current Iran war.
I think that just means we trust our leaders less today and partly from Iraq we now start with an assumption that foreign interventions fails instead of a belief America would win.
Anyway I haven’t been a big fan of public opinion polls for a long time because small changes in how you frame a question vastly changes the results. If I were Trump and had to decide on go or no go; I would rather see the opinion of the top 500 betters o polymarket on whether the action would be a success versus an opinion poll.
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Link (source)
Thanks!
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I find it tremendously frustrating that Iran can be indirectly and directly responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians over decades and decades but suddenly this is a huge problem.
I think it's a sign that most westerners are fundamentally unprepared to defend their societies from aggression and stagnation.
I think it's good, actually, when people push back on their government killing civilians for bad reasons, and the bigger problem by far is that we're much too quick to accept nebulous assertions of national security as a justification for collateral damage. If the US were intervening to stop the IRI from massacring protestors, the comparison would have some bearing, but that isn't what is happening.
Notably, there was fairly little consternation over coalition-inflicted civilian casualties in Mosul or Raqqa because it was generally accepted that ISIS was Really Bad and coalition forces were trying to stop them (even if not for purely selfless reasons) and taking reasonable precautions while dealing with an adversary using human shields. US airstrikes more broadly were criticized because there was no clear aim/end beyond killing terrorists and the target selection was often incredibly careless/callous. By contrast, this current campaign looks like gunboat diplomacy at best.
I think it speaks more to the damage the Iraq War (and to a much lesser extent Libya) did to the credibility of military interventionism. Many, if not most people have no faith that these actions aren't going to squander a bunch of money and lives for no worthwhile outcome.
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Huh? What does Iran have to do with any of the problems afflicting Americans domestically? Sex recession, unaffordable homes, the meaning crisis, woke more broadly? This is just another foreign policy distraction because it's the only thing elite American conservatives have to address their own meaning crisis.
Precisely.
No Iranian ever called me an incel.
Like the similar statement by Muhammed Ali: How do you know, do you speak Persian?
We know because their religion still promises you 72 virgins. One captured by Western feminism would not.
Feminism has nothing to do with the fact that low status men are an object of derision everywhere and there are more men than women in Iran in every age bracket up to about age 55.
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People die in war and conflict. Iran is a country actively engaged in killing its own people and those abroad (civilian and otherwise). People are arguing about the alleged death of some school children as if this event means that Iran should be allowed to go back to killing whoever they want.
That is stupid.
I don't have a dog in this fight, but look at the other side - just because America and Israel kill the current leadership does not in any way guarantee that Iran's future is any brighter.
Absolutely, we have a millions reasons why getting involved is a bad idea.
This isn't one of them - but it has gotten some of the most play on social media.
It's a shallow emotional appeal that makes no logical sense, but that is where the population is at right now. It's embarrassing.
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I think it's also an issue with Hollywood, videogames, and the US & Israeli militaries being too good at what they do. Especially for the US, who can often afford to put a premium on civilian lives due to overwhelming firepower and distance, many people seem to think that mistakes no longer happen in warfare, explosions are limited to arm's reach like those sword-missiles, missiles and bullets are always precisely on target, and any collateral damage or civilian target hit must have only been deliberate.
I'm not sure the US is prepared for a near-peer conflict where they can't afford to be so careful. There was a West Point (?) article on this very premise I read years ago, but haven't been able to find it since.
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Something has to be said for the incredible success story that is "stop hitting yourself" as a propaganda strategy. From what I can see, it was first deployed successfully with the Nordstream pipeline bombing, after which both sides in the Ukraine war have been routinely throwing it around for every less than unambiguously "clean" impact (though the only case I remember where the self-hit was unambiguously established in the end was the Kramatorsk train station thing on the UA side). Now, with this case, you can't open a normie comment section without encountering people posting that the Iranians must have done it themselves and deliberately (going beyond even the "failed AA/launch" explanation) to all-around applause.
Was Nordstream before or after the one hospital that a Hamas rocket fell on? That was the big one in my eye.
Which story is the hospital thing referring to? Nordstream was mid-2022, shortly after the Ukraine war started, so still in the year before the current Israel/Gaza round (Oct 2023-).
Al-Ahli, so near the start of the most recent war (but yes, after Nordstream).
Ah, thanks. (@DeanoBongino, too) I still don't know what to make of that one - media seems to have largely come down on the side of the Palestinian misfire story, but then the media-NGO blob is almost united about asserting it was the enemy when the target is bad even in cases that are more implausible from the start, with only rare defections. Then there is what Wikipedia quotes as
which I guess could be explained away as part of a general media strategy executed without the aide actually having any privileged information but anyhow would fit the conspiracy (IL did it, media reports whatever IL wants) explanation well.
"We're going to be bombing hospitals. Here's what you say when--not if--we're accused of bombing them" as a strategy wasn't quite prepared for "The enemy hit a hospital and we're falsely accused of it".
Yeah, that's what I meant by general media strategy.
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The Al-Ahli hospital explosion. October 2023. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Ahli_Arab_Hospital_explosion
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According to the Washington Post it was also a sudden burst of last-minute Saudi support:
“Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman made multiple private phone calls to Trump over the past month advocating a U.S. attack, despite his public support for a diplomatic solution, the four people said.”
After the strikes last year, attacks on proxies, the mass protests, the calculation by Iran’s enemies (principally Saudi Arabia and Israel) seems to have been that this is as weak as they’ll ever be, so might as well attack now. Unfortunately, that they’re as weak as they’ll ever be doesn’t mean they’re weak enough to be overthrown.
Once Iranian AA defense is disabled - from there US and Israel can afford to kill officials until only those willing to unconditionally surrender are left. It may take months or years. But it will be quite cheap and affordable. And if USA and Israel have functioning brains - will move the war to drones.
An unconditional surrender by the Iranians isn't a US victory, given the (quite correct and bipartisan) US preference for the status quo over the typical result of an unconditional surrender, which would be the US occupying Iran.
The win condition for the US is the formation of a government in Iran
Something which is notoriously hard to do with punitive bombing alone.
I think Netanyahu would consider a failed state in Iran a win for Israel. But it doesn't look like a win for the US or the US's local allies - failed states are bad neighbours and their oil and gas industry is uninvestable.
An unconditional surrender results in formation of a government in Iran with a few extra steps -- a period of occupation, someone translates the Japanese constitution into Farsi, we find some reasonably reliable Iranians to take over. Could fail of course, but the US has done it before.
The whole point I was making is that the US (and on this point, exceptionally, the US is united) has no interest in occupying Iran. All important factions in the US would prefer leaving the status quo in place to a US occupation. We can argue about whether the US is making a mistake here, but this is closer to "the utility function isn't up for debate" than "let's get a bunch of experts in post-mullahocracy occupation and reconstruction to discuss how likely it is to produce a good outcome" - not least because the relevant body of expertise doesn't exist.
Sure, the US doesn't want to occupy. But unconditional surrender from a power capable of that (which may not exist) would lead to the more desirable condition (acquiescent self-rule) through the undesirable one.
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It’s hard to picture exactly what a failed state in Iran looks like. Certainly it doesn’t look like Libya, Iraq or Syria.
Why? Firstly, the specific dynamics of Sunni sectarianism that drove conflict in Syria and Iraq don’t exist. Iraq is not ethnically homogenous but it is mostly Shia. Secondly, the longstanding, centuries old tribal dynamics of postwar / civil war Libya also don’t apply.
There are ‘factions’ in Iran. There are the Azeris. There are the Kurds (although more assimilated and pacified, even compared to their neighbors). There is a small Sunni minority. There are some Afghan refugees, although many have been returned recently. It has been a relatively contiguous polity for a very long time, unlike much of the Levant.
What does “failed state” Iran look like? Kurdish and Azeri militias fighting each other in the ruins of Tehran? Bourgeois university professors squaring off against remnants of the IRGC? It all seems pretty unlikely.
The Kurds are no more pacified that the rest of the population - i.e. they won't stay pacified if the regime collapses, unless the new regime incorporates or crushes them. As with Syria, any likely failed state scenario includes either a Kurdish statelet (de facto independent, not internationally recognised, but probably west-friendly in practice) or Turkish military intervention to prevent one forming, or both (as happened in Syria). Israel appears to be explicitly encouraging Kurdish separatists to take up arms against the weakened regime.
In terms of Iranian domestic politics, Iranian Kurds are a key part of the Khatami/Rouhani reform faction in the mullahocracy. They don't get on with the hardliners (because of religious differences) or with the Pahlavite resistance (because of Persian nationalism).
(Mostly the same people as the Kurds, who are much more religiously diverse than ethnic-Persian Iranians)
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The US bombed Yemen for years and yet during Operation Rough Rider the Houthis nearly downed American jets before Trump ultimately chickened out and cut a deal.
If Rough Rider couldn't disable Houthi air defenses then why would anyone expect a similar operation against a much larger opponent to succeed?
Houthi air defenses were, to be fair, constantly being replenished by Iran. The Houthis are also a tribe who spent decades hiding out in the caves and mountains of Yemen, and still have forces concentrated there. The Iranians have a conventional military built along standard lines with standard bases, supply chains, etc.
In addition, there were ways of defeating the houthis but they involve a return to the brutal counterinsurgency tactics of the mid-20th century that are still considered, for now, too inhumane.
Okay, so if the Houthi air defenses couldn't be stopped because of Iranian resupply then doesn't attacking Iran just move the problem a chain up to Iran getting resupplied by the Russians or Chinese? If anything it's a harder problem because the Houthis were nearly landlocked and reduced to smuggling in supplies by tiny fishing boats whereas Russia and China have fairly direct access even if they don't outright fly cargo planes directly to Iranian airports.
Also, the Iranians have a conventional military and an irregular force known as the IRGC which utilizes the exact sort of tactics (mobile launchers, mountain bases, ambush air defenses) that the Houthis used. Perhaps you've heard of them?
I've seen this claim thrown around but it was put to the test in 2018 when Trump let the Saudis go full bore and while hundreds of thousands of Yemeni children died the Saudi gains were proportionally tiny. Even getting to the point where you could apply brutal counterinsurgency tactics of the mid-20th century would first require taking Houthi territory, which would require an actual, serious ground invasion with actual casualties.
The limiting factor on foreign intervention (usually) isn't public sympathy for the suffering of the countries being attacked but the cost in blood and treasure not being justified by the potential benefits of victory.
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