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To sort of echo Daste's recent post, it's remarkable the lack of threads for the ongoing conflict given its historic implications for Culture War, but I'll keep the ball rolling for another update/call to register your predictions:
It's very possible the next few days will be a turning point in history. I guess I will register the prediction of Trump TACO given any other alternative is too bad for the world to fathom. Yesterday Iran did enormous damage to the towns in Southern Israel hosting Israeli nuclear infrastructure (which actually does not fall under the oversight of the IEA in contrast with Iran's program to this point). The notion that Iran is incapable of following through with its avowed retaliation is bunk, given the recent strikes on Qatar gas facilities that will have long-term impacts on global supply of natural gas.
So what's going to happen tomorrow? All of the public signals point to Trump making the decision to totally destroy Iranian infrastructure in order to destroy the country. But Iran won't back down because it would be the end of the regime. So who's going to blink?
I mean I don’t think he’s going to TACO there. If he were, he would not be proudly shouting that he intends to do that. He’s perhaps TACO over tariffs in the past, but this is different because he’s being very clear about what he intends to do, and he’s positioning the thing so that the west looks absolutely weak if they don’t force the straits open. Add in that we’re mere months from midterms, and the public isn’t going to be patient if gas prices stay high, and inflation goes up by 10% in a month etc. It’s a situation where if he doesn’t get a big win quickly, the whole thing can blow up in his face. Backing down isn’t going to fix this.
Chad Centrist time: Trump uses a nuclear weapon (set for Tiny Yield) on Iran, then signs a treaty with them saying that they agree not to even think about maybe pursuing atomic weapons for 100,000 years and that the US gets a 20% cut of their net oil revenues which will be diverted entirely to finding a cure for cancer. In return, Trump agrees to Iran's demand to
hand over 'hostile' mediawithdraw from the region entirely.The big red button is generally not labeled "I win".
"They nuked us, so we surrendered" might be a plotline which was swallowed by the Imperial Japanese forces (who had lost a conventional war in any case). "The Great Satan decided to martyr 20k of our citizens, so rather than face further losses, we decided to pledge allegiance to them" is not something the Iranian theocracy could sell to the grunts in the IRGC.
Few people doubt that Putin has nukes, and few people think that NATO would start WW3 if Putin nuked Ukraine. Yet Putin has fought years of a very frustrating conventional war against them. If you are right, he is stupid to do that, he should just nuke them a bit and watch them surrender. Personally, I do not think that he was simply to stupid to consider nukes, but rather that he correctly concluded that they would not secure his objective.
Of course, even if Iran after a nuke turned into Venezuela, this would establish a precedent. At the moment, few middling military powers pursue nukes because they do not significantly improve their security situation. If nuclear powers use their nukes offensively to miraculously force surrenders, then that changes. After all, you do not need to win a pissing contest against the US to make nuking you unappealing. It is enough to be able to kill enough Americans so that whoever attacked you will lose the next election.
Please do not read too much into my actual political thinking based on a comment that starts with "Chad Centrist time" and is structured around a political compass meme but,
It's very unlikely a bomb set to Tiny Yield would kill 20k people. Maybe if you intentionally dropped it on a populated part of downtown Tehran (in fact, Nukemap gives almost exactly that). But Iran has a target set uniquely suited for tactical nuclear weapons: all those big underground bunkers they've built and filled with ballistic missiles. From what I understand, the US has trouble penetrating them properly, although it can damage the entrances. Dropping a B61 in the entrance or having it bury itself before detonation would do more damage than can be achieved with conventional weaponry, from what I understand – it's one of the relatively cases where a tactical nuclear weapon might be able to pull something off that can't easily/at all be accomplished with conventional weapons.
It was reported that Putin did consider nuclear weapons, and it freaked the West out, although I have no idea if the reports that filter their way back to the US press are anywhere near accurate. I definitely think he would reconsider his lack-of-use if the US used one in Iran. Which is one of the reasons the US is relatively unlikely to use one, although I hope that Iran doesn't decide to start hitting desalination plants based on this line of reasoning.
This isn't really true, I don't think, nuclear weapons significantly improve your security situation, it's just that the powers that already have nukes throw a hissy fit if you try to get one. I also don't think it's true that middling military powers don't pursue nuclear weapons; most middling military powers (if you watch closely) have sort of collected a lot of the bits and pieces. Examples include Egypt (suspected of pursuing a nuclear program), South Korea (putting ballistic missiles on submarines for conventional deterrence, has nuclear reactors), Brazil (pursuing a nuclear submarine program, possibly as a convenient way to spin up a domestic nuclear program) and Saudi Arabia (stashed a nuclear program in Pakistan).
I do think this is true. But I also think that the last couple of decades have increasingly been an object lesson in "get nukes" if you think your security situation is precarious even without the US attacking Tehran.
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