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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   15200 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.

We are in uncharted territory. This is the first war in which one of the adversaries is going strictly after the elite and is able to actually get them. Which is actually the right way to wage war. If ukraine and russia could reasonably kill each other's key people - there would have been peace years ago.

I am sure that Iran are smart and brave, but I have suspicion that the smart are not brave and the brave are not smart. For a war they have been preparing for 40 years - they don't have a single trick up their sleeve so far. In Ukraine war - we had impressive Ukrainian actions very soon after the start.

There are a lot of "middle managers" in Iran that are both scared for their lives and looking at career advancement opportunities. Soon some of them will figure out that by strategically leaking info to Mossad they will be off their hit list and help weed out opponents.

This is the first war in which one of the adversaries is going strictly after the elite and is able to actually get them. Which is actually the right way to wage war.

If ukraine and russia could reasonably kill each other's key people - there would have been peace years ago.

Why are people still stuck on this idea?

Israel tried this with Hamas and Hezbollah. Did it work? Did the flashy assassinations achieve victory? Did Israel destroy Hamas and conquer Gaza? No! If they couldn't destroy a small, poor organization in territory they totally surround with total air control, how are they supposed to defeat Iran?

All Israel managed to achieve in a couple years of fighting is killing a fair few of Hamas, killing a lot of civilians, blowing up a lot of buildings, making the Russians of all people look like positive humanitarians. Unlike the Russians, they made zero territorial gains. And they made people trust pagers a lot less, hate Israel a lot more.

Israeli military practice is so bad it should be first, second and third in 'what not to do'. They suffer an embarassingly big terrorist attack from a foe they should totally outclass. Then they totally fail to capitalize on it in world opinion, quite the reverse. They fail to secure any strategic advantages whatsoever with their much vaunted military, despite enormous expenditure of US munitions. Maybe a few months ago they could claim 'oh at least we decapitated Hezbollah' but Hezbollah seems to have just grown another head like a hydra and are taking huge bites out of the Iron Dome.

It will work because USA has limited goals in Iran. No nuclear program, inability for Iran to close the strait and no long range missiles. And they will be left to live and roll in their islamic sty of their own devise. Freedom for Iranian people, secular regime are nice bonuses, but not that important. If you kill the people that can only say no, eventually some that are amenable to yes will come to power. So the deal that the US is offering Iran is pretty sweet. Eventually there will be a clique of takers. Rule however you see fit a nation of 90m with reintegration into the global economy and the massive growth is nice.

Whereas Israel wants Gaza to not exist. Their dehamasing special military operation needed to be much deeper. And Israel didn't had the guts to conduct it properly.

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