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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.
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.
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.
This reinforces my belief if you do these things you have to do them properly. If you go in and say "This "death to America" thing has gone on too long. We will rule you for 100 years." you have a good chance of success. Overwhelming force; casualty rate will be higher, but achieving ultimate victory will be popular. "We now have monarchic control of a 90M person country who we've spent the last 40 years preventing from getting a nuke because they have every intention of using it" sells pretty well.
Putin made a similar mistake in Ukraine. Limited military operations don't work if your counterpart is not willing to go along.
Of course America is not a politically serious country and this kind of thought is not acceptable. Sort of a nightmare scenario for this kind of failure because these are religious zealots who have sufficient resources for serious retaliations both now and in the future.
Are you sure the US could achieve ultimate victory over Iran and rule it for 100 years? I'm not convinced. Even after removing all rules of engagement, glassing half their cities and sweeping every single mountain valley 10 times, it still would just be insurrection after insurrection.
I'm actually having a hard time thinking of a single combination of society and geography more capable of resisting foreign rule.
The... province would certainly have close to zero economic output. The infrastructure necessary for any sort of economy would be to easily destroyed by insurgents. So what's even left of the idea? Trading army brigades for a thin justification of genocide?
It has to be on the scale of de-nazification but I think it's doable. Complete disarmament of the populace. Choosing new winners. If people want to go and hide in the mountains/foreign countries you can keep them there with drones/border control. Levels of security need to match levels of resistance, but once everyone is more prosperous than before and the most resistant have been dealt with it should be pretty stable.
People respect power and competence including everyday Arabs. Yes, done poorly it will be a shit show (and shouldn't be done at all), but for a competent regime with modern tech it shouldn't be hard.
But you do have to classify them as an enemy nation which, if they got a nuclear weapon, would use it against you or allies, in order to justify the de-nazification treatment. And I do think you would need direct foreign rule for decades to ward off insurrection because they are a more foreign culture than Germans.
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The US could easily beat Iran and rule it as long as we wanted, in military terms. In political terms, it's entirely impossible to do with a "democracy" of oligarchs who will change policies at the drop of a hat if the media whines a little.
How do you imagine the country to look like under US rule?
How do you "easily" stop the IRGC (and its successor insurgency groups) from perpetually setting the oil fields on fire, blowing up the pipelines, attacking every single supply route you run through the mountains, firing MANPADS at every single helicopter and airlifter that dips below 15k feet and generally IED-bombing, droning, mortar-ing and rocketing every US installation in the country? How do you stop them from infesting every town you turn your back on for five minutes?
Is it just a million miles of barbed wire fences with autonomous auto-cannon turrets? Because you certainly can't just kill them all. Trying that always results in recruitment automatically out-pacing your kill rate, and Iran has a - for all intends and purposes - infinite recruitment base.
I don't think it's that hard to imagine- we can just look back to what Iran looked like in the 60s and 70s under the US-backed Shah. Some political repression and violence, but also a lot of peace and prosperity. I expect we'll also see this in Venezuela.
More generally, the kind of violence you're describing- massive use of MANPADS and sophisticated explosives- doesn't just magically happen. It happens when some other country with sophisticated weapons factories is sending them weapons. Normal people on the street don't have the capability to blow up an oil refinery or shoot down an airplane. And for a long time now, the country that's been supplying most of those sophisticated weapons to insurgents was... Iran.
Wait, wait, your scheme hinges on Iranian royalists/secularists/liberals fighting your (ground) battles? Ramming through regime change from the air, once again going out to win hearts and minds (successfully this time, for real!), and then having them do the dying? Watch from afar while they de-islamize every single institution and hunt down the mullahs? I'm very skeptical. They don't have history, especially recent history, on their side. And neither the training, the cohesion, nor the morale.
Frankly, the IRGC is going to eat them alive.
Well, if the IRGC doesn't have absolutely enormous stashes of at least small arms (and probably even drone/rocket parts plus warheads) in the mountains, they didn't plan even a week ahead. I'd be very surprised. Also, I'd expect Russian surplus equipment and Chinese dual use goods to make it across the border. But for any of that to even matter, they'd first have to lose the cities, which would be orders of magnitude more bloody than Mosul or Falludscha.
You asked "how do you imagine it would look like under US rule" and I gave you an example. Is it your opinion that everyone in Iran- the entire population! is a fanatic who will happily die for their Islamic theocracty? Because so far that does not seem to be the case, at all.
The bailey: "the IRGC will endlessly destroy all equipment and aircraft with their infinite stocks of missiles" The motte: "They must have some small arms still buried in the mountains somewhere..."
Well, I suppose they might actually try to fight in a motte-and-bailey style, but I don't think it's going to devastate the US military like you're imagining. They seem to have mostly stopped their missile attacks already.
Which border? Neither of those countries shares a border with Iran. Is China going to be sending convoys of missiles all the way across Afghanistan, do you think? Is Russia going to stop their war in Ukraine to focus on sending cargo ships across the Caspian Sea?
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Iran has a very low tfr compared to Afghanistan or even Iraq at the time of the US invasion. Broadly I agree with you but the incoming supply of young men is proportionately lower.
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