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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   8966 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 9, 2026

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Does disaster in Iran make war with China less likely?

As the fog of war begins to clear after the last ten days, a few things have become evident.

  1. There is no revolution in Iran. The IRGC’s grip on power has strengthened, or at least not weakened. In Khamenei’s son it has its preferred candidate in power, at least nominally (it may be the institution rather than the man who is in power, but it doesn’t really matter). The IRGC has more than 150,000 men, heavily armed, extremely well trained, in control of more than 40% of the economy. True Shia believers, deeply committed to the Islamic revolution, they know they have no future in a secular Iran and will do anything to prevent it. The secular middle class can flee, as they have for decades, and have low casualty tolerance. Even worse, the risk-takers in that demographic were already killed or jailed in the previous wave of repression. According to various sources, more than 80-90% of Iranian mine laying speedboats and other platforms are still operational. These are very hard to target from the air, they’re small, easily hidden, widely dispersed along the coast. Minutes ago, Fars announced that Iran will not allow a single ship affiliated with America or its allies through the Strait. According to CNN, US intelligence believes mine laying has already commenced.

  2. The US has only two escalations left open. The first, which is low-casualty (comparatively), is to bomb Kharg and/or Iranian oilfields, pipelines and refineries, and/or Iranian tankers using the Hormuz or Iran’s Eastern ports where they’re scaling up shipping. In that event, Iran’s low cost drones will attack Gulf oil production. The Strait will remain heavily mined and inaccessible for months for cargo traffic. Oil surges to $150, perhaps beyond; the Gulf nations will be forced to sue for peace with Iran, expelling US bases. The regime holds, even still; the people are not armed, resistance is limited. The second option is that the US goes all-in, attempting a ground invasion, arming the Kurds (destroying further relations with Turkey); thousands of American soldiers die but Tehran can likely be occupied, the IRGC retreats to hardened mountains it knows well, quagmire with far higher casualty rates than Afghanistan, and far less US support. Both routes end with the GOP finally turning on Trump and a wipeout in the midterms.

The consequences are clear, and for all his faults, the president has very good immediate political instincts if poor military ones: the US will declare mission accomplished, the president may well personally blame the Iranian people for failing to rise up (“you know, I really thought they’d do it, it’s a shame, you know, but they had their chance”), Witkoff will force Israel’s hand to stop further action like he did with the Gaza deal. Through back channels with Turkey or Russia, the Iranians will agree to slowly stop their action, so that they can rebuild. Iran will quickly complete its bomb. A period of rebuilding and greater domestic repression will follow. The Gulf states will be angry with Iran, but will ultimately draw closer with it out of necessity.

Most importantly, and this is true in pretty much every scenario, the US will have experienced a major geopolitical and military humiliation that makes conflict with China much less likely. Missile defenses shredded by cheap drones that can be mass produced by the million by China will rightly create visions of entire hundred billion dollar carrier fleets destroyed by a hundred million dollars of Chinese drones in a massed attack. Unlike in the Gulf, in a Taiwan conflict in which the US actually fought, bases in Guam, Korea, Japan and elsewhere could definitionally not be evacuated abroad (those forces would be needed to fight).

And while some Americans, Jewish and Evangelical, place eschatological and otherwise deep religious important on the geopolitics of the conflict with Iran (or rather, on its hated adversary), even these people are less motivated for a war with China over Taiwan, especially as chip production diversifies geographically. Who actually wants war with Taiwan? Some AI labs who don’t want Chinese competition? Seems unlikely, open source models will get out regardless. The influential Taiwanese diaspora like Lisa and Jensen? Seems unlikely that they want their country destroyed; most smart Taiwanese I know have made peace with their country’s destiny a long time ago. Neocons? Even many of them seem to be going on record to say this war is a bad idea, and many don’t care much about China for the reasons above.

Most importantly, and this is true in pretty much every scenario, the US will have experienced a major geopolitical and military humiliation

We killed the core of Iranian leadership in an afternoon and their only viable response is to attack unrelated countries and merchant fleets. What do you mean humiliation! Maybe on twitter where geopolitics is about what makes people feel good but in the real world there is not a single major leader who is not terrified of America's military. Humiliation? America downgraded Iran from a regional power to a backwater without a meaningful military in an afternoon, all they have left are guys with guns pointed at their own citizens.

We have won so overwhelmingly that we are reduced to calling this a failure because Iran was able to get a hit in at all. Yeah, that's what war is!

In Khamenei’s son it has its preferred candidate in power, at least nominally (it may be the institution rather than the man who is in power, but it doesn’t really matter).

Please note that if the Iranian regime cannot even prove their leader is alive, either because we killed him or because we will kill him, then the Iranian government has collapsed. Collapsed! Claiming otherwise is like declaring war in the Pacific with Japan a failure because rogue holdouts continued fighting for years. We also had to drop two nukes so maybe the first one was a failure?

Who is really in charge of Iran? Nobody knows! That's not a government! Who collects taxes, who negotiates with foreign powers, who runs the judiciary? Maybe the Iranians can dig giant tunnels and live in underground cities like the mole people, although the US could actually bomb them there too.

We killed the core of Iranian leadership in an afternoon and their only viable response is to attack unrelated countries and merchant fleets. What do you mean humiliation!

What happens when you do all that and it turns out you still don't get what you want (and possibly cause a humanitarian crisis to boot)? Energy price stability is the only reason the US cares about the sandy dump in the first place, and now that shit is literally on fire. I can't help but feel like the pro-Trump position sees this as some ape-brained dominance display and are confused and angry because people keep asking about things like 'consequences' and 'strategic objectives.'

The risk of humiliation is that the US tries to impose its will by force and backs down once it realizes that's going to take real effort that it doesn't have the will for. Blowing a bunch of stuff up and leaving is not victory. Neither is a situation in which the US destroys quality of life for ordinary Iranians but the same IRI regime holds power.

Blowing a bunch of stuff up and leaving is not victory. Neither is a situation in which the US destroys quality of life for ordinary Iranians but the same IRI regime holds power.

Why is that not a victory? Who says it's not? You? A situation in which the United States can destroy Iran's government and military at will, and Iran can't respond, is a total victory.

This is so obviously true you can only reframe that as "some ape-brained dominance display". Ok, so Trump and Hegseth are baboons who can't formulate or even imagine goals so you don't have to try to understand it, got it. What about Israel? What about Saudi Arabia? Those are two countries that wanted to start this war, are they irrational too? Did Benjamin Netanyahu and MBS have no sense of "things like 'consequences' and 'strategic objectives'"? Maybe everyone in the Middle East is incompetent? Incapable of first-order thinking? Maybe they should read The Motte?

I got downvoted the last time I said this in a different discussion so I want to elaborate: I consider this form of thinking to be a form of TDS. It reduces a complex geopolitical situation into a farce that only makes sense if Trump is the only actor in the world. It's Shakespearean! Trump speaks, anything that doesn't happen on stage while Trump gives his soliloquy to the camera doesn't happen at all. I don't need to consider anything else. Based on media rumors in the fog of war, I've determined that the war is a failure. I don't actually have to understand what American goals are because Trump is irrational, so he must not have had any. I don't even have to consider anybody else's motivations, because they don't meaningfully exist.

In reality we're on week two of an extremely complex operation in which Iran's leadership was decapitated -- they have a cardboard cutout for a Supreme Leader. The best Iran can do in response is mine the Straits of Hormuz and bomb random Gulf targets. Maybe that's a higher cost than America is willing to bear, maybe nobody thought that far ahead, but it doesn't seem likely!

Why is that not a victory?

Because you didn't actually get what you wanted. Of course, it's hard to say here because the Trump administration can not articulate what it wants.

Ok, so Trump and Hegseth are baboons who can't formulate or even imagine goals so you don't have to try to understand it

I have tried to understand it. You act as if the only reason you could conclude Trump doesn't know what he's doing is because you're not paying attention.

The problem is that they seemingly can't articulate what we're trying to do and contradict themselves like twice a day. Let me ask you this: why should I extend any of these people the benefit of the doubt? Have they displayed some record of competence that suggests I should and wait and see what strategic genius unfolds? Spoilers: no, they haven't. These are the people who decided we needed to threaten a close ally to gain access to territory we already have access to. We are fortunate that they can at least lean on the immense operational competence of the US military, but that cannot cover for a strategic deficit.

No, all the evidence available to me suggests that they expected the Iranian government to be cowed by the initial attacks and don't have a follow up plan beyond "keep bombing until they give up" (a strategy with a terrible track record). Maybe this was done at the instigation of Israel/KSA, but "Trump got suckered into doing something stupid in Iran at the behest of self-interested 'allies'" is a point in favor of the "Trump doesn't know what he's doing" argument. He is at least in good company there, since that describes a lot of US involvement in Iran since the end of WW2. For Israel, we have both clear national strategic interests and the personal interests of the leadership, but Israeli leadership wants to do a lot of things and the US doesn't have to indulge them.

And there's the thing: you don't even have to be a weapons-grade dumbass to wind up in this situation. Military actions not producing the desired results and forcing planners to clumsily improvise has happened to smarter people than Trump.

Maybe everyone in the Middle East is incompetent?

I wouldn't dismiss the possibility, though I think it's more likely that the lack of quality institutions highlights the prevalence of incompetence more.

Have they displayed some record of competence that suggests I should and wait and see what strategic genius unfolds?

I think there's good evidence that a broad effort to strengthen America's hand relative to China is succeeding, rather slowly. I would count this as strategic competence at play. The counter-Trump view is that this is despite his efforts, not because of it.

I also think it's likely that the Trump administration is screwing with reporters on purpose ("lying") which is going to make things look very chaotic to external observers and provides little to no insight as to whether or not the administration actually knows what it is doing. (The counter-Trump view here, I think, would be "jokes on you, I'm only pretending to be retarded" is not very convincing.)

Of course, it's hard to say here because the Trump administration can not articulate what it wants.

Yeah there’s your problem you just need to listen to Donald Trump more:

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/read-trumps-full-statement-on-iran-attack

  • Destroy Iran’s nuclear capacities
  • Destroy Iran’s capacity to build missiles
  • Destroy Iran’s capacity to threaten the lives of Americans

Adding other materials (November’s National Security Statement, Abraham Accords, Trump’s speech to the UN etc.) it’s like this: Trump has negotiated a new security framework for the Middle East on which all powers agree. Relationships with Israel have been normalized. Hamas and Hezbollah have been destroyed. The only threat to a lasting peace in the Middle East is Iran. So their capacity to threaten the Middle East is being destroyed.

I don’t know what else to tell you, this is all stuff said out loud in treaties and speeches and I think everyone chooses to pretend Trump just isn’t worth listening to. Maybe when he said we were going to destroy Iran’s missile industry he was just being extra figurative.

These are the people who decided we needed to threaten a close ally to gain access to territory we already have access to.

I’m choosing to interpret this as a reference to Diego Garcia, which is a pretty apt lesson in why European powers are not reliable partners. Or maybe you meant Trump threatening Spain after they refused to let us use our bases there to stage attacks in Iran? It’s hard to tell, there are so many examples that make my argument for me.

I wouldn't dismiss the possibility, though I think it's more likely that the lack of quality institutions highlights the prevalence of incompetence more.

By the way how did we end up with incompetent institutions when apparently we used to be lead by people smarter than Trump?

iirc Big Yud had an essay on this, called something like "Am I Smarter Than The Bank Of Japan?"

From chapter 1 of Inadequate Equilibria: Where and How Civilizations Get Stuck, "Inadequacy and Modesty":

I once wrote a report, “Intelligence Explosion Microeconomics,” that called for an estimate of the economic growth rate in a fully developed country—that is, a country that is no longer able to improve productivity just by importing well-tested innovations. A footnote of the paper remarked that even though Japan was the country with the most advanced technology—e.g., their cellphones and virtual reality technology were five years ahead of the rest of the world’s—I wasn’t going to use Japan as my estimator for developed economic growth, because, as I saw it, Japan’s monetary policy was utterly deranged.

Roughly, Japan’s central bank wasn’t creating enough money. I won’t go into details here.

A friend of mine, and one of the most careful thinkers I know—let’s call him “John”—made a comment on my draft to this effect:

How do you claim to know this? I can think of plenty of other reasons why Japan could be in a slump: the country’s shrinking and aging population, its low female workplace participation, its high levels of product market regulation, etc. It looks like you’re venturing outside of your area of expertise to no good end.

“How do you claim to know this?” is a very reasonable question here. As John later elaborated, macroeconomics is an area where data sets tend to be thin and predictive performance tends to be poor. And John had previously observed me making contrarian claims where I’d turned out to be badly wrong, like endorsing Gary Taubes’ theories about the causes of the obesity epidemic. More recently, John won money off of me by betting that AI performance on certain metrics would improve faster than I expected; John has a good track record when it comes to spotting my mistakes.

It’s also easy to imagine reasons an observer might have been skeptical. I wasn’t making up my critique of Japan myself; I was reading other economists and deciding that I trusted the ones who were saying that the Bank of Japan was doing it wrong… … Yet one would expect the governing board of the Bank of Japan to be composed of experienced economists with specialized monetary expertise. How likely is it that any outsider would be able to spot an obvious flaw in their policy? How likely is it that someone who isn’t a professional economist (e.g., me) would be able to judge which economic critiques of the Bank of Japan were correct, or which critics were wise?

How likely is it that an entire country—one of the world’s most advanced countries—would forego trillions of dollars of real economic growth because their monetary controllers—not politicians, but appointees from the professional elite—were doing something so wrong that even a non-professional could tell? How likely is it that a non-professional could not just suspect that the Bank of Japan was doing something badly wrong, but be confident in that assessment?

Surely it would be more realistic to search for possible reasons why the Bank of Japan might not be as stupid as it seemed, as stupid as some econbloggers were claiming. Possibly Japan’s aging population made growth impossible. Possibly Japan’s massive outstanding government debt made even the slightest inflation too dangerous. Possibly we just aren’t thinking of the complicated reasoning going into the Bank of Japan’s decision.

Surely some humility is appropriate when criticizing the elite decision-makers governing the Bank of Japan. What if it’s you, and not the professional economists making these decisions, who have failed to grasp the relevant economic considerations?

I’ll refer to this genre of arguments as “modest epistemology.”

...

I once heard an Oxford effective altruism proponent crisply summarize what I take to be the central argument for this perspective: “You see that someone says X, which seems wrong, so you conclude their epistemic standards are bad. But they could just see that you say Y, which sounds wrong to them, and conclude your epistemic standards are bad.” On this line of thinking, you don’t get any information about who has better epistemic standards merely by observing that someone disagrees with you. After all, the other side observes just the same fact of disagreement.

Applying this argument form to the Bank of Japan example: I receive little or no evidence just from observing that the Bank of Japan says “X” when I believe “not X.” I also can’t be getting strong evidence from any object-level impression I might have that I am unusually competent. So did my priors imply that I and I alone ought to have been born with awesome powers of discernment? (Modest people have posed this exact question to me on more than one occasion.)

It should go without saying that this isn’t how I would explain my own reasoning. But if I reject arguments of the form, “We disagree, therefore I’m right and you’re wrong,” how can I claim to be correct on an economic question where I disagree with an institution as reputable as the Bank of Japan?

...

The converse side of the efficient-markets perspective would have said this about the Bank of Japan:

CONVENTIONAL CYNICAL ECONOMIST: So, Eliezer, you think you know better than the Bank of Japan and many other central banks around the world, do you?

ELIEZER: Yep. Or rather, by reading econblogs, I believe myself to have identified which econbloggers know better, like Scott Sumner.

C.C.E.: Even though literally trillions of dollars of real value are at stake?

ELIEZER: Yep.

C.C.E.: How do you make money off this special knowledge of yours?

ELIEZER: I can’t. The market also collectively knows that the Bank of Japan is pursuing a bad monetary policy and has priced Japanese equities accordingly. So even though I know the Bank of Japan’s policy will make Japanese equities perform badly, that fact is already priced in; I can’t expect to make money by short-selling Japanese equities.

C.C.E.: I see. So exactly who is it, on this theory of yours, that is being stupid and passing up a predictable payout?

ELIEZER: Nobody, of course! Only the Bank of Japan is allowed to control the trend line of the Japanese money supply, and the Bank of Japan’s governors are not paid any bonuses when the Japanese economy does better. They don’t get a million dollars in personal bonuses if the Japanese economy grows by a trillion dollars.

C.C.E.: So you can’t make any money off knowing better individually, and nobody who has the actual power and authority to fix the problem would gain a personal financial benefit from fixing it? Then we’re done! No anomalies here; this sounds like a perfectly normal state of affairs.

...

But the Bank of Japan is just one committee, and it’s not possible for anyone else to step up and make a billion dollars in the course of correcting their error. Even if you think you know exactly what the Bank of Japan is doing wrong, you can’t make a profit on that. At least some hedge-fund managers also know what the Bank of Japan is doing wrong, and the expected consequences are already priced into the market. Nor does this price movement fix the Bank of Japan’s mistaken behavior. So to the extent the Bank of Japan has poor incentives or some other systematic dysfunction, their mistake can persist. As a consequence, when I read some econbloggers who I’d seen being right about empirical predictions before saying that Japan was being grotesquely silly, and the economic logic seemed to me to check out, as best I could follow it, I wasn’t particularly reluctant to believe them. Standard economic theory, generalized beyond the markets to other facets of society, did not seem to me to predict that the Bank of Japan must act wisely for the good of Japan. It would be no surprise if they were competent, but also not much of a surprise if they were incompetent. And knowing this didn’t help me either—I couldn’t exploit the knowledge to make an excess profit myself—and this too wasn’t a coincidence.

This kind of thinking can get quite a bit more complicated than the foregoing paragraphs might suggest. We have to ask why the government of Japan didn’t put pressure on the Bank of Japan (answer: they did, but the Bank of Japan refused), and many other questions. You would need to consider a much larger model of the world, and bring in a lot more background theory, to be confident that you understood the overall situation with the Bank of Japan.

But even without that detailed analysis, in the epistemological background we have a completely different picture from the modest one. We have a picture of the world where it is perfectly plausible for an econblogger to write up a good analysis of what the Bank of Japan is doing wrong, and for a sophisticated reader to reasonably agree that the analysis seems decisive, without a deep agonizing episode of Dunning-Kruger-inspired self-doubt playing any important role in the analysis.

When we critique a government, we don’t usually get to see what would actually happen if the government took our advice. But in this one case, less than a month after my exchange with John, the Bank of Japan—under the new leadership of Haruhiko Kuroda, and under unprecedented pressure from recently elected Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who included monetary policy in his campaign platform—embarked on an attempt to print huge amounts of money, with a stated goal of doubling the Japanese money supply.

Immediately after, Japan experienced real GDP growth of 2.3%, where the previous trend was for falling RGDP. Their economy was operating that far under capacity due to lack of money.

Now, on the modest view, this was the unfairest test imaginable. Out of all the times that I’ve ever suggested that a government’s policy is suboptimal, the rare time a government tries my preferred alternative will select the most mainstream, highest-conventional-prestige policies I happen to advocate, and those are the very policy proposals that modesty is least likely to disapprove of.

Indeed, if John had looked further into the issue, he would have found (as I found while writing this) that Nobel laureates had also criticized Japan’s monetary policy. He would have found that previous Japanese governments had also hinted to the Bank of Japan that they should print more money. The view from modesty looks at this state of affairs and says, “Hold up! You aren’t so specially blessed as your priors would have you believe; other academics already know what you know! Civilization isn’t so inadequate after all! This is how reasonable dissent from established institutions and experts operates in the real world: via opposition by other mainstream experts and institutions, not via the heroic effort of a lone economics blogger.”

However helpful or unhelpful such remarks may be for guarding against inflated pride, however, they don’t seem to refute (or even address) the central thesis of civilizational inadequacy, as I will define that term later. Roughly, the civilizational inadequacy thesis states that in situations where the central bank of a major developed democracy is carrying out a policy, and a number of highly regarded economists like Ben Bernanke have written papers about what that central bank is doing wrong, and there are widely accepted macroeconomic theories for understanding what that central bank is doing wrong, and the government of the country has tried to put pressure on the central bank to stop doing it wrong, and literally trillions of dollars in real wealth are at stake, then the overall competence of human civilization is such that we shouldn’t be surprised to find the professional economists at the Bank of Japan doing it wrong.

We shouldn’t even be surprised to find that a decision theorist without all that much background in economics can identify which econbloggers have correctly stated what the Bank of Japan is doing wrong, or which simple improvements to their current policies would improve the situation.

The BoJ isn't staffed by populist outsiders who actively tout their lack of qualifications. If it was, the answer very well might be 'yes'.

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