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Notes -
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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