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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   15614 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 23, 2026

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So Brett Devereaux has also published his opinion on Trump's Iranian adventure. It will come to the surprise of exactly nobody that he is not a fan.

(Lots of quotations, scroll down to the bottom for a few thoughts on Israel's strategy.)

He starts by pointing out that Iran is significantly larger than Iraq in both population and area, which is true but not very original. Then he continues:

Equally important, Iran was not a major strategic priority. [...] But the Middle East is a region composed primarily of poor, strategically unimportant countries. [...]

The entire region has exactly two strategic concerns of note: the Suez Canal (and connected Red Sea shipping system) and the oil production in the Persian Gulf and the shipping system used to export it. So long as these two arteries remained open the region does not matter very much to the United States. [...]

Of course, before Trump attacked the oil was flowing just fine.

In short then, Iran is very big and not very important, which means it would both be very expensive to do anything truly permanent about the Iranian regime and at the same time it would be impossible to sell that expense to the American people as being required or justified or necessary. So successive American presidents responded accordingly: they tried to keep a ‘lid’ on Iran at the lowest possible cost. [...]

The United States is much stronger than Iran, but relatively uninterested in the region apart from [fossil fuels], whereas Iran was wholly interested in the region because it lives there. The whole thing was the kind of uncomfortable frontier arrangement powerful states have always had to make because they have many security concerns, whereas regional powers have fewer, more intense focuses.

It is, as Clausewitz might say, a difference in will.

He then goes on to describe Trump's plan, e.g. Venezuela 2.0:

The gamble was this: that the Iranian regime was weak enough that a solid blow, delivered primarily from the air, picking off key leaders, could cause it to collapse. For the United States, the hope seems to have been that a transition could then be managed to leaders perhaps associated with the regime but who would be significantly more pliant [...] By contrast, Israel seems to have been content to simply collapse the Iranian regime and replace it with nothing. That outcome would be – as we’ll see – robustly bad for a huge range of regional and global actors, including the United States

And why it would not work:

The Islamic Republic of Iran is not a personalist regime where the death of a single leader or even a group of leaders is likely to cause collapse: it is an institutional regime

If you do a war where thousands of people die and billions of dollars are spent only to end up back where you started that is losing; if you end up worse than where you started, well, that is worse.

He goes back to the origin of the war:

Administration officials [...] have claimed that the decision was made to attempt this regime change gamble in part because they were aware that Israel was about to launch a series of decapitation strikes and they assessed – correctly, I suspect – that the ‘blowback’ would hit American assets (and energy production) in the region even if the United States did nothing. Essentially, Iran would assume that the United States was ‘in’ on the attack.

And why would Iran believe such a thing?

Iran did not assume that immediately during the Twelve-Day War in 2025. Indeed, Iran did not treat the United States as a real co-belligerent even as American aircraft were actively intercepting Iranian missiles aimed at Israel. And then the United States executed a ‘bolt from the blue’ surprise attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities on June 22, 2025, catching Iran (which had been attempting to negotiate with the United States) by surprise.

Remember, the fellow getting bombed does not get to carefully inspect the flag painted on the bomber: stuff blows up and to some degree the party being attacked has to rapidly guess who is attacking them. [...] But in the confusion of an initial air attack, Iran’s own retaliatory capability could not sit idle, waiting to be destroyed by overwhelming US airpower: it is a ‘wasting’ use-it-or-lose-it asset.

[The] Trump administration created a situation where [...] Israel could force the United States into a war with Iran at any time.

He then goes on to discuss the Strait of Hormuz, which allows Iran to throw a spanner into the machine of the global economy by blocking oil tankers.

once you try to collapse the regime, the members of the regime [...] have no reason to back down and indeed must try to reestablish deterrence. These are men who are almost certainly dead or poor-in-exile if the regime collapses. Moreover the entire raison d’être of this regime is resistance to Israel and the United States: passively accepting a massive decapitation attack and not responding would fatally undermine the regime’s legitimacy [...]

“If the regime is threatened, Iran will try to close the strait to exert pressure” is perhaps one of the most established strategic considerations in the region. We all knew this.

He then describes this as a trap situation, where neither side can deescalate for domestic political reasons, and points out that neither side has much hope to secure their objectives through military means. Iran can not stop the US from bombing them, and the US will probably not be able to secure the Strait against Iranian attacks.

He discusses escorts and why he does not find them feasible (too many ships, Strait too long)

There is a very real risk that this conflict will end with Iran as the de facto master of the Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf

He then discusses the other US strategic interest, dismantling the Iranian nuclear program:

Actually destroying (dispersing, really) or seizing this material by military force would be an extremely difficult operation with a very high risk of failure, since the HEU is underground buried in facilities (mostly Isfahan) in the center of the country. Any sort of special forces operation would thus run the risk of being surrounded and outnumbered very fast, even with ample air support, while trying to extract half a ton of uranium stored in gas form in heavy storage cylinders.

On Iran's strategic objectives:

This is the second sudden bombing campaign the country has suffered in as many years – they do not want there to be a third next year and a fourth the year after that. But promises not to bomb them don’t mean a whole lot: establishing deterrence here means inflicting quite a lot of pain. In practice, if Iran wants future presidents not to repeat this war, the precedent they want to set is “attacking Iran is a presidency-ending mistake.”

There is a frequent mistake, often from folks who deal in economics, to assume that countries will give up on wars when the economics turn bad.

As a historian, he draws an analogy to WW1:

Food deprivation and starvation in Germany was real and significant and painful for years before the country considered surrender. Just because the war is painful for Iran does not mean the regime will cave quickly: so long as they believe the survival of the regime is at stake, they will fight on.
There is a great deal of ruin in a nation.

He again hammers on the lack of success at achieving any strategic objectives:

it is not a ‘gain’ in war simply to bloody your enemy: you are supposed to achieve something in doing so.

Something which was new to me he mentions in passing is that the Strait is also a significant source of fertilizer, and a lack of fertilizer might increase food prices which will lead to all sorts of bad things in poor countries. According to him, this was a major source of the Arab spring protests and the Syrian civil war, for example.

Having argued persuasively that this war was a terrible decision on part of the US, he then considers the position of Israel.

Israeli security and economic prosperity both depend to a significant degree on the US-Israeli security partnership and this war seems to be one more step in a process that very evidently imperils that partnership. Suspicion of Israel – [caveat antisemitism] – is now openly discussed in both parties. [...] more Americans sympathize with Palestinians than Israelis for the first time [...]

And how Israel would fare without the backing of the US:

On the security side, with Israel has an independent nuclear deterrent and some impressive domestic military-industrial production the country is not capable of designing and manufacturing the full range of high-end hardware that it relies on to remain militarily competitive despite its size. There’s a reason Israel flies F-35s.

Economics:

Economic coercion is equally dangerous [...] [T]he USA and EU are hugely important players in Israel’s economy but Israel is a trivial player in the US and EU economies. [...] A war in which Israel cripples Iran in 2026 but finds itself wholly diplomatically isolated in 2029 is a truly pyrrhic victory.

He finishes by pointing out that wars are not zero-sum:

Every actor involved in this war – the United States, Iran, arguably Israel, the Gulf states, the rest of the energy-using world – is on net poorer, more vulnerable, more resource-precarious as a result.

While Bret is certainly seen as a woke academic in these parts, I find his text not particularly dripping in SJ. Mostly it is a few caveats (yes, everybody is important but we here we are talking about being strategically important; antisemitism bad). He certainly does not strike me as a radical pacifist who wants to abolish the US military.

One of the less pressing issues of the Iran war is that it is hard to say anything insightful about it. Yes, it was an immense strategic blunder, but that has been noticed by one or two other persons by now.

I think that Bret's prediction that the US-Israeli relationship might turn sour is perhaps a bit optimistic (even if that is not the word he would use). I do not want to go "the evil Joos control everything", we have other posters for that, but AIPAC has a rather good grasp on Congress and it seems like a lot of media (including new media like TikTok) is in the hands of Israel supporters.

This does not mean that Nethanyahu coaxing the US into fighting Iran is in Israel's long term interests, though. For example, if Iran establishes that bombing them is a presidency-ending mistake, even a pro-Israel president might be reluctant to walk in Trump's footsteps. The gulf monarchies who bore the brunt of Iranian attacks will probably not be too happy about the whole situation either, and might come to reconsider the tradeoffs of US airbases, which would limit the ability of the US to project force, at the behest of Israel or otherwise. And some European countries might decide to push for economic sanctions against Israel eventually.

I am also wondering if Israel might not lose support among the liberal Jews in the diaspora, given that they are drifting to the right and are closely allied with MAGA in the US. I mean, there are probably some billionaires who are true believers in Greater Israel, but I imagine that the perhaps lukewarm "it is a good thing that my ethnic group has a state where they are safe from further persecution" support of many Askhenazi professionals might be different in kind to the billionaires'. In the last decade or so, I imagine that things have changed as Israel drifted to the right. After all, the die-hard believers in Zionist expansion likely immigrated to Israel to settle in the West Bank, and an Israel defined by the religious crazies murdering each other will have little appeal to the liberals.

What he misses is that it's not just Iran that's been preparing for this conflict for 40 years- the US has been also. Other than Russia snd maybe China, I don't think there's a single other country that the US has spent more time wargaming and thinking about how to defeat.

In particular, their favorite tactic of "mass swarms of cheap drones and missiles across short distances" is not some brilliant new innovation. The US (and Israel) has had plenty of time to work out how to beat it. In particular, it relies on them having a functional command/control to launch those attacks all at once with coordination. But since they lost all their C3 on like, day 2 of this war, all they've been able to do is launch small numbers at random, mostly unimportant targets.

Its also very easy for the US to bomb any obvious lanch sites or weapons caches, so they're rapidly running out of weapons even without firing them. Especially the big expensive antiship missiles and fast attack boats that were their biggest threat. Pretty soon, all they'll have left is small numbers of crappy drones that can be easily be shot down by gunfire or even lasers. At that point, the Strait reopens, and their regime will have no leverage and no funding.

He's right, of course, that if the US gives up now it would be a disaster. But for me, the implication of that is clear- we just have to win. No half measures.

I don't think there's a single other country that the US has spent more time wargaming and thinking about how to defeat

Hell, it led to the (in) famous "Millenium Challenge" exercise.

Yes, exactly. And the Naval Gazing article about that is excellent. In a nutshell, the Iranian missile boats that were supposedly a dire threat to our navy were already badly outclassed even in 2002, unlikely to hit their targets and essentially helpless to any air attack. Which is... pretty much what we've seen so far. The USN has not lost a single ship, while the Iranians missile boats are getting wrecked. As far as I know they haven't done anything at all, their only real success at sea is using drones to hit tanker ships.

It probably also helps that the USN made sure not to get teleported right off the coast this tine.

As far as I know they haven't done anything at all, their only real success at sea is using drones to hit tanker ships.

Which is, it turns out, sufficient.

$250 million to learn not to park warships in the Persian Gulf was money well spent.

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