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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   677 thread views

Transnational Thursday for March 12, 2026

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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So about Iran - a lot of places and few times here people mention that IRGC are well trained, motivated and such. Usually from people that are skeptical for one reason or another about the war. I am sure they utilize the lion's share of the Iranian resources available, but the evidence of them being competent is scant at best. They consistently fail to protect people and infrastructure, their proxies are also not terribly effective. So where does their good reputation come from?

As we speak, Trump is trying (bitching on truth social) to marshal a global coalition to reopen the straits of Hormuz. Nobody has shown up.

There are 2 US carrier groups in the region. Even they aren't brave enough to go in close to Iran and open up the straits.

If the IRGC are incompetent, then what is there to be afraid of? Why should the US and Israel need to call for help in this war? Coalition-building clearly wasn't part of the plan before the war, Trump spent much of his time sneering at Europe. It seems that only very recently has Trump discovered a need for allies...

The next day, he rhetorically drives more of a wedge between the US and the rest of NATO again, having already discarded the thought that allies may be very useful in the future too.

They may not be good at a lot of things, but so far they are pretty good at one thing that matters - keeping the power.

When your point of comparison is 2003 era Iraq, where the units on the front line weren’t even allowed to speak to each other by radio to avoid coup planning, the IRGC looks pretty damn elite.

So where does their good reputation come from?

Propaganda. Iran, for all its faults, is a reasonably functional nation with a well educated population. Iran has a similar HDI to countries like Brazil or Mexico. Iran has the ability to put out propaganda about the IRGC, and does so.

That said, there's basically no country that could stop the USA from bombing the piss out of them if the USA wants to. China and Russia could nuke the USA, but it's not clear if they could actually protect their airspace otherwise.

Rather, and I'm going full Philly here, we need to realize that effectiveness for Iran (and for their proxies) is like the movie Rocky. Not the later sequels where Rocky Balboa becomes champion, beats Mr. T, wins the cold war, etc. But the gritty, original, actually good version of Rocky, where the story is just about this big palooka taking on (fake) Muhammed Ali. And he doesn't win. He doesn't even really get close to winning. But he goes the distance. He doesn't get knocked out. He takes it to a decision, he takes it to the closing bell, and at the end of the fight he's beaten all to hell, but the champion has to go to the hospital too. Rocky endures.

If the Iranian regime comes out the other side of this without being removed from power, the regime will spin it as a credibility win because they held together and the United States couldn't dislodge them. So hopefully there is an effective plan in place to dislodge the regime because the alternative is much worse.

The Vietnam War was the last time anyone deliberately took on the US military in a conventional fight (Noriega and Saddam Hussein made some very bad decisions that led to a conventional confrontation, but that was very much not what they expected to happen). North Vietnam a) got pasted in basically every head-to-head engagement with US forces (and that while quality of the US military was at a low ebb) b) ultimately succeeded.

One of the consequences of US conventional dominance is that no one wants to fight us. This is good, but it also means that the amount of foreign policy problems the US has that can be solved by the brute application of conventional force is fairly low. This is compounded by the accumulated psychic damage of Vietnam and Iraq, which has greatly attenuated the ability of the USG to count on popular trust to justify a sustained war effort (which is to say, I think complaints that the public has gotten soft are misunderstanding the problem).

That is a major stumbling block for people who want the US to pursue an aggressive, hard power-oriented foreign policy. Most potential adversaries know that even if the US goes ham in the air, it isn't going to put troops on the ground to force the issue. So if you can bunker down and ideally turn up the heat in response, America will lose interest because Americans do not believe in US foreign policy. Hell, one of the reasons the US foreign policy community has been guzzling the special forces kool-aid is because promises results without the cost, footprint, or media attention of large (whether or not it delivers is another matter).

If the Iranian regime comes out the other side of this without being removed from power, the regime will spin it as a credibility win because they held together and the United States couldn't dislodge them. So hopefully there is an effective plan in place to dislodge the regime because the alternative is much worse.

Or to put it another way, "Kill lots of people" is not a viable war goal even though Hegseth seems to think it is.

Kill lots of people is absolutely valid war goal. The thing is US and Israel not so slow down the killings. Which they seem to have slowed down in the second week.

No, it very much isn't.

"Kill people required to achieve this strategic goal" is a valid war goal. Same with "Kill these specific people". Even "Kill or drive away everyone in this area" might be. But just "Kill lots of people" isn't because it doesn't achieve anything useful.

So where does their good reputation come from?

The mid-2000s successes of their proxies that they trained/equipped/advised in frustrating / stonewalling the Israeli's in Lebanon and the US in Iraq. These were cases where the larger conventional force made deliberate efforts to win a decisive battle, and failed to reach any sort of conclusive victory. This translated into prestige for the groups that won-by-not-losing against world-leading professional militaries, and prestige-by-proxy for the IRGC.

The best example was the 2006 Lebanon War, which started when Hezbollah kidnapped Israeli soldiers and the Israeli's launched a conventional invasion into southern Lebanon. In the month-long war that followed, Hezbollah fought with guerilla tactics the entire time and was not cleared by IDF forces, launched over 4000 rockets with the IDF being unable to stop it, and kept the war goal of the captives away from the Israeli reclamation efforts. It's debatable how well / long Hezbollah would have lasted had the war not been brought to a quick close after a month, but the war did conclude and Israel certainly did not achieve its objectives in that time. Hezbollah went toe to toe with one of the more respected militaries in the world, won the war it set out to do, and almost certainly would not have without IRGC efforts.

A later but still IRGC-coded example was the Huthis in Yemen. While the Huthis are their own entity who are more partners than pawns, cultivating that relationship was an IRGC effort, and it provided major frustrations to Iran's adversaries. The Saudi war in Yemen for one, the later closure of the red sea shipping, and the US inability to stop that as well. It provided the durability of a missile force focused on area denial, which is what the

The IRGC reputation has never rested on the ability to protect people and infrastructure, so its failures in that respect don't really work against their reputation. The Iranians have pursued a proxy-war-abroad strategy for decades, basically since their foundational experience in the Iran-Iraq War, and that has generally worked from a premise of having other people bomb militants and infrastructure anywhere but Iran.

The strategic wisdom / competence of the IRGC strategy is an entirely different question, one where I have a dim view that boils down to 'they lost the plot on how a proxy strategy works,' but the IRGC's current (recent) reputation derives mostly from its proxy warfare capacities abroad, which are significant.

Typically those sorts of praetorian-style elite forces select on the basis of loyalty or ideological commitment or some such rather than ability, and are more intended to reinforce the regime than excel at special military missions. However, since they do get the lion's share of available resources as you say, their training is usually above the standard that their countries are able to offer. So I'd expect them to perform better than the shitty conscripts that make up large parts of these 3rd world armies but poorly compared to special forces that are organized strongly for competence like the Navy SEALS.

That's not saying they are nothing: probably we can expect them to at least maintain cohesion in the face of American-Israeli bombings, and thus resist internal uprisings while also keeping up harassment of shipping along the straight. So I'd say it's fair to consider them a factor in this whole affair.

Propaganda and wishful thinking?

That being said, it's probably difficult for even a competent military to deal with the USAF+IAF when they don't have their own air force.

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