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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   7872 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 2, 2026

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There are conflicting reports on if Iran was starting to concede it's nuclear stance during negotiations last week.

On the one hand, Oman said Iran was going to reduce it's stockpile.

“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.”

“I think we have agreement on that, in my view,” he added.

Wall Street Journal says the opposite though. Laurence Norman, WSJ reporter in Germany, says, "My understanding comes from non-U.S. officials close to the talks as well as what Washington has said. This is what we have from 3 people."

Iran came to Geneva on Thursday with a draft text of a few pages as it had been asked. It did not permit the U.S. or others to keep the text. It was planning to do so Monday at the technical talks. But they talked through what was in it. But the draft text was not the key text

Attached to the text was a single piece of paper, which Iran described as its 10 year nuclear plan. The text was based around the idea that as Iran's enrichment needs expanded, it's enrichment should be permitted to expand. The paper set out an ambitious set of targets or expanding its civilian nuclear program. The new version of the Khondab reactor (formerly known as Arak heavy water reactor) would be completed. A number of other long-planned, never-built research and power reactors would be put into operation.

In order to fuel those supplies, Iran would need to run 30 cascades of IR-6 advanced centrifuges Tehran said. That's more than 5,000 advanced centrifuges. Iran would need to be able to enrich up to 20% to meet the demands. That is what Iran was proposing.

Let's compare that for a moment to JCPOA. For the first decade under that accord, Iran was permitted around 6.000 IR-1 basic centrifuges. For 15 years, its enrichment purity cap was 3.67%. In other words, Iran was saying the enrichment deal shld be weaker than the Iran deal.

Overall, I don't think we can take it for granted that Iran was capitulating during talks.

Is there any way for Iran to credibly promise not to get a nuclear weapon in the foreseeable future?

It strikes me that with each Israeli-USA attack on Iran, it becomes more obvious to any Iranian that a nuclear weapon might be a useful thing to have. The bombings might set back the physical process, but they increase the motivation.

If a bunch of guys come to my house several times and kick in my door and beat me up and break my furniture and tell me "you better not get a gun, if you get a gun we'll get really angry!" My first thought, and I would think any man's first thought, is "I better get a gun."

I just can't see a way for Iran to credibly make a promise that they don't want a nuclear weapon in a world where they quite obviously should want a nuclear weapon.

In June 2024, "Only around 20 percent of respondents want the Islamic Republic to remain in power, according to the survey." I think that number went even lower after the recent violent suppression of protests.

The US sees it more like intervening in a messy domestic dispute, where the male partner (Islamic Republic Government) keeps threatening to get a gun and shoot the police, the police (USA) keeps saying, "Don't do it or we'll have to come in there," and the wife and kids (80% of Iranian people) are hoping that the police intervene but are afraid of getting beaten up again.

The US sees it more like intervening in a messy domestic dispute

I don't really see any evidence of this. The current US administration rejects humanitarian concerns as a basis for foreign policy and has explicitly disavowed the idea that this is a regime change war.

Trump first explicitly called it a regime change war and said it was Trump fulfilling his promise to intervene if the government of Iran started killing protestors. He's also said it's not a regime change war and governing Iran isn't his responsibility. This contradiction seems to be Trump's typical MO: https://scholars-stage.org/on-bombing-iran/

Recall that in my story, I said the guy with the gun is threatening the police, not just the battered wife. America also is tired of putting up with Iran and their proxies threatening shipping and launching ballistic missiles at American bases every year. It can be tired of Iran providing weapons to Russians and oil to China. And maybe, the thought of stopping these irritants while being able to be the big damn hero, riding up to rescue the battered wife, gave it the self-righteous push it needed to get the job done.

Things can have more than one cause - it can be a preponderance of snowflakes that creates the avalanche.

I think the metaphor is deceptive, not clarifying - it recasts the various actors in this conflict into roles they do not actually occupy.

This contradiction seems to be Trump's typical MO: https://scholars-stage.org/on-bombing-iran/

This should be taken as evidence that the Trump administration has no coherent plan, especially given that the stated rationale seems to change hourly, but we can look more broadly at their past record and see that current US leadership is not motivated at all by humanitarian concerns (corroborated by the rising civilian casualty estimates from these strikes, which will only continue to rise, alongside Hegseth's remarks earlier today).

It's my opinion that strategic ambiguity - ie, not knowing what the hell you want - can work if you're the monopole hegemon. It's up to the people you're messing with to come to you with an offer that gets you to stop. The bull in the china shop may not know why he's inside, but the shopkeeper definitely has an interest in leading him out. Not that any of this is well-considered or wise, but the question of 'what are we doing here?' can be answered by 'I don't know, but we're sure to find out if we break enough plates.'

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