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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Notes -
As a general note, it kind of makes me sad to see how strange the thinking patterns had become, I think maybe because to incessant electoral campaigning. Everybody should have an ultimate plan to solve everything, forever, perfectly, or it's even not worth talking about. And if the solution takes more than a week, we don't have enough attention span to comprehend what is going on.
The saddest part is everybody knows literally 100% of people who propose these nice rounded-up solutions are liars - we know it is not going to work this way, they know it is not going to work this way, and it never ever worked this way. It will always be more complicated, more chaotic, things will change and go to off directions, unexpected things will arise and all plans will have to be changed or abandoned altogether. But somehow still everybody demands A Man With A Plan - even fully knowing (though frequently not realizing) that any such plan must be bullshit, no one can have a perfect plan for decades forward for 90 millions of people, especially those same people submerged in an ocean of 9 billion other people. If we can do something that will make the picture a little more predictable and less dangerous for a little forward, if we cut off some of the ugliest branches on the possibility tree (such as "Iran gets nukes and uses them to initiate the coming of the Twelfth Imam") that's already a huge achievement. But imagining you can control the whole tree and shape it to your will - isn't it a bit too much to expect? And yet, though we know it's impossible, we routinely demand our leaders to pretend they can do it easily and routinely.
I guess that's what attracts people to socialism - they promise there would be a Plan. Maybe some people will starve, and some will have to be killed, but look - we have a Plan! Nobody has a better Plan than we do! No matter this plan is never achieved - having it is enough, somehow.
This is a fully-general counterargument that can be used to defend any bad plan.
The fact is, the things that are currently going wrong in the Middle East were not unknown unknowns. They were not even known unknowns. These were well-known pitfalls that have been discussed for years. My high-school history teacher told us in a very stern voice that the Strait of Hormuz was a massively important trade route and that the reason Iran is so dangerous is that they control it.
It was not unforseeable that Iran would close the strait. It was not unforseeable that Israel would try to force America to commit by cutting-off deescalation pathways. It was not unforseeable that a ground invasion of a Middle Eastern country would turn into a quagmire.
It was. So what? There's no "plan" in existence that may preclude this possibility - of course, except ignoring the treat from Iran until they make nukes, and then face the consequences. Calling it "bad plan" is assuming there's some "good plan" that somehow magically makes it impossible for Iran to close the Hormuz. What would be that "good plan"? I submit it does not exist and can not exist.
If you insist on a military solution, the effects of a strait closure could have been substantially mitigated.
Refilling the strategic petroleum reserve is the obvious one in hindsight.
We could have pressured the gulf countries to invest in pipeline infrastructure to bypass the strait.
We could have waited for Venezuelan oil production to ramp up (or better yet, used the added oil security to stop worrying about the Middle East for good).
We could have brought-in Ukrainian experts to teach our forces about drone warfare before we got into another conflict.
Strategic reserve is being refilled, after being raided by Biden, who dropped it to levels not seen since early 1980s. It's just going slowly, because buying so much at once would spike the prices, which aren't exactly low (even before the war) and defeat the purpose of the exercise. Oh yes, before that, Trump tried to fill it up at $24 per barrel, and had been blocked by Dems in Congress because it was clearly just "a bailout for big oil".
That could take a while, and in the meanwhile Iran would build more missiles and recover his nuclear program. I don't have enough information to say March 2026 is the best moment and why, but saying "let's just wait and see maybe it gets better" doesn't seem to me like an obvious winner either.
There's not too much in "Ukrainian experts" that is not known in the US and that goes beyond PR. US military (and Israeli military) knows how to shut down Iranian drones. The problem is it's not 100% effective (no defense is) and it needs to be done cheaply, on existing US capacities, because wasting a million dollar interceptor on a 50k drone is unsustainable. There are solutions for that, but most of them are not scaled and deployed yet at the necessary scale, AFAIK. You can have perfect defense system, in a single prototype somewhere in Arizona - it's not going to do you much in Iran right now. Ukrainians won't help much there - they can't magic in a wide deployment of newly designed drone system (not in Middle East, and not in Ukraine). They have some useful battlefield empiric knowledge, and this knowledge is being studied (though sometimes slower than optimal, NIH syndrome is real) but they have no magic bullets. People talk like they have some magic spells that if only we could ask them we could make all Shaheds drop out of the skies - there's nothing like that. "Tons of cheap shitty drones" is a new problem, and deploying new solutions takes time, especially in a system as large and complex as US military. And again, waiting for several more years until US military fully scales to this new thing has the same problem I described above. Plus, of course, dealing with 10x more drones then.
And, of course, none of that would prevent Iran in any way from closing Hormuz. And, of course, Iran would not sit and wait until we make their strategic threat irrelevant - they could sabotage the pipelines built to bypass their zone of control, they could develop new drones that are not effectively dealt with by existing systems, they could cooperate with Russians to integrate whatever recipes Russians found to break whatever defenses Ukrainians figured out - just waiting for more time and assuming everything would be better is not really founded on anything. And there's a time boundary - as soon as Iran has enough uranium to make several nukes and does their first nuclear test, the whole construct goes out of the window and we have another Russia - except managed not by a kleptocrat with a fixation on going back to 18th century, but by an apocalyptic cult with a fixation on going back to the 7th century.
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"Everyone has a plan until they get hit in the face" is a good argument against overly elaborate plans or plans that don't take account of the enemy's vote. When it becomes a fully generalizable argument against asking for any plan whatsoever, then it's just a deepity.
"Plans are worthless, but planning is everything" is usually attributed to Eisenhower, and is a statement I generally find most reasonable.
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