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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   4421 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.

I honestly don't get the geopolitics of wanting to attack Iran in the first place, unless Israel has some plan in mind for controlling the future government of Iran. Which, in your analogy, would be that one of the intruders stays in your house and keeps a knife at your throat at all times so you don't get any funny ideas. You might even develop Stockholm syndrome.

But then again, any given leader of Iran isn't necessarily the guy in the analogy. The guy in the analogy was the ones who just got killed. That guy is dead now. The future leaders of Iran are the people who move into the now vacant house, even after being told by the intruders to see what happened to the last guy who tried to get a gun. Maybe the American policy is to present a credible threat to any future leadership of that country, and follow through on it if they don't play along, until the Iranians just accept perpetual foreign domination? Seems unlikely, given that America can switch out its leadership and abandon any policy every few years.

tl;dr: I have no idea how this is supposed to work. Getting nukes ASAP cuts the gordian knot.

The goal is to wreck the middle east and keep all other players weak. The goal in Syria wasn't a prosperous democracy, it was to shatter the country into pieces with no functional economy or cohesion. The goal isn't to "liberate" Iran, it is to weaken its leadership, keep the country poor and keep it in a constant state of turmoil. This is great for Israel, expensive and bad PR for the US, horrific for the middle east and brings blow back for Europe.

No, what we have is two mutually exclusive attitude that US policy keeps ping-ponging between due to the difference mapping reasonably cleanly to Republican vs Democrat and Populist vs Technocrat.

The broadly Democrat-coded attitude is one of sympathy (if not active support) for Islamic revolutionary movements. These views are framed in terms of "Decolonization" their opposition to the left's hated enemy the right. The right is the outgroup, revolutionary Islam is the fargroup and if revolutionary Islam can inflict some casualties on the right that is a "win" in the left's book. This is why Carter left the Shah hanging out to dry, this is why Clinton and Obama offered backing to the various "Moderates" who would become ISIS/ISIL, this is where "Queers for Palestine" come from, and it is why they think that the killing of Qassim Soleimani is something the rest of us ought to be upset about while the killing of John Christopher Stevens is not.

The Republican-coded attitude is one of "Fuck Around and Find Out". That is that if the if US is going to occupy the role of hegemon we ought to play the role. To the extent that there has ever been a consistent through-line to US foreign policy, that line has been "Don't touch the boats", and in the eyes of the MAGA crowd that is what this is ultimately about. The Iranian regime thought that by laundering their attacks through proxies like HAMAS and the Houthis they could immunize themselves from retaliation, turns out they were wrong.

The US public doesn't want this war and there is a reason why Trump ran on America first and opposition to war rather than neoconservatism.

The republican position is that these wars are a giant waste, lead to massive refugee waves, cost trillions, kill Americans and grow the surveillance state. There is a reason why Matt Walsh, Nick Fuentes, Thomas Massie and Tucker are going hard against this war. It is a war for big government that kills typically red coded voters.

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