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Notes -
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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