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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.

Devereaux is an interesting thinker on ancient history. On modern military matters, he's useless. Where Trump is involved, actively anti-intelligent. Put him with Dan Carlin, if you're looking for another historian eaten by the TDS.

Personally, I can't make heads nor tails of the Iran operation, and I doubt anyone else is doing much better. We'll find out in a year or ten whether it was a success.

Do you have to be deranged to make anti-Trump claims? Sometimes the guy makes bad choices.

There was a time when ordering a new war in the Middle East, and hold the exit strategy, was one of those obviously bad decisions. People joked about it. Nothing I’ve seen from this iteration has changed that calculus.

Do you have to be deranged to make anti-Trump claims? Sometimes the guy makes bad choices.

I have a thesis for you: "Trump Derangement Syndrome" is overwhelmingly an intellectual escape hatch for Trump supporters. There are people who genuinely gone off their gourd re: Trump, but he provides an incredible amount of "attack surface" to critics, to the point where it is basically impossible to mount an intellectually respectable defense of him or his presidency that still appeals to widely held ideas about how government ought to operate. TDS sidesteps that neatly. Instead of trying to rebut criticisms, you simply dismiss them as irrational and hysterical (and thus not worth considering) and never think about them again.

As a sufferer myself, I think the serial tds claimers are pretty much on point. We Trump-deranged really are responding to Trump on a gut level -- every indicator flashes, 'do not trust', 'total bullshitter', 'malevolent', 'cannot be reasoned with'.

The only difference between us and tds detractors is that they think this reaction is pathological and not based on anything substantial, whereas we think it's soundly justified by a wide range of facts and life experiences. They want to know 'is there anything he could do to please you?', and the answer is no, not without becoming someone else. They want us to look past his style to what he does, and we want to say, 'no, I refuse, the style itself is corrosive and cannot be looked past'. They want to say 'why can't you acknowledge any of the good things he does?' and we want to say 'his approach to politics is oppositional, if he can't acknowledge good things in my tribe, why is it now incumbent on me to drop the game he won't drop, and acknowledge good things in him?' Etc. Etc.

We really do have a fundamental objection to him that makes it hard to discuss individual issues while pretending he is just a normal politician. The tds allegers are onto something and they are not wrong that we find it hard to see past our antipathy.

The tds allegers are onto something that we find it hard to see past our antipathy.

That's because you're [now] a conservative, and furthermore, Trump has solidified what the reform movement that actually has a chance of damaging your conservatism is going to look like. I am not really a conservative (or rather, what modern conservatism is right now does not advantage me), and as such have had the exact opposite gut level feeling about Trump for the last 10-ish years. If neoreform wins, I'll likely become a conservative then.

I'm not particularly pleased with the Iran situation given that strikes at a rift in the current neoreform coalition- that being the late-'70s people who just have psychological problems with the Parthians vs. the early-'00s people who spent the past 20 years in that exact same low-level Middle Eastern ego trip warfare that seems to be threatened now.

But I would want the slave-importers punished, I want the slave importation (and offshoring) stopped because it undercuts my wages, I want the socially-accepted answer to "but it's social justice to accept that" to stop being "yes dear/ma'am" like [the '70s progressive-sympathetic liberals] currently do, and I want the current crop of conservatives out of power because they're more interested in DIE-ing than actual results (and will punish anyone who delivers results yet refuses to do so in a DIE manner). They also mishandled the common cold and did a Middle Eastern War's level of economic damage simply because they were angry neoreformers had a better conception of the risks (which cost about as much as the 20 year Middle East war did).

Those things are as offensive to me as Trump is to you, and like the so-called progressives before me I tolerate what takes me no effort to tolerate while offloading the emotional turmoil it causes onto you.

they think this reaction is pathological and not based on anything substantial, whereas we think it's soundly justified by a wide range of facts and life experiences

And that's just how conservatives work. I get that the progressives/"liberals" (as they call themselves) have kind of built a strawman around the term for reasons that have a lot to do with the 1960s and 70s (the people that came of age then are currently at the height of their political power, so naturally the lens through which they see the world dominates), but you have to realize that "I don't want to do it because I don't like it aesthetically, and I'm going to dig my heels in no matter what" is not a meme about conservatives for no reason.

There are people who genuinely gone off their gourd re: Trump, but he provides an incredible amount of "attack surface" to critics, to the point where it is basically impossible to mount an intellectually respectable defense of him or his presidency that still appeals to widely held ideas about how government ought to operate.

That's wrong for any definition of 'intellectually respectable' or 'how government ought to operate' that doesn't mean 'liked by progressives', and I say that as someone with no small number of frustrations with the administration from the right and left.

Good thing that's not what I meant. Trumpism doesn't even abide its own stated values and principles.

Trumpism doesn't even abide its own stated values and principles.

That's a fascinating retreat from "it is basically impossible to mount an intellectually respectable defense of him or his presidency" or ""Trump Derangement Syndrome" is overwhelmingly an intellectual escape hatch for Trump supporters."

Yes, political movements are vast, they contain multitudes, make dumb decisions or compromises. Jtarrou posted -- literally days before you nailed this jello 'thesis' to the wall -- that Trump could well be in the wrong here. Trumpists repeatedly point to how the administration has to be bullied into keeping to its claimed positions, especially in relation to immigration and sometimes at significant cost (though I think Vivek's eventual Ohio loss is overdetermined).

Neither of those facts support the original claim you made.

If by 'retreat' you mean 'responding to a different claim', then sure.

You said (emphasis mine): "That's wrong for any definition of 'intellectually respectable' or 'how government ought to operate' that doesn't mean 'liked by progressives'"

My point is that Actually Existing Trumpism isn't defensible even by the principles Trumpists claim to support, and they usually don't try. This is not simply a matter of only using progressive yardsticks. Trumpists don't generally, for example, publicly support corruption. They don't even say "I'm willing to tolerate corruption as long Trump puts the boot into the immigrants and trans people." They dismiss critics as some combination of hysterical and dishonest. They do this even when critics are mounting arguments that, if they were intellectually consistent, Trumpists ought to at least entertain.

So, yes, I feel very comfortable with the "TDS is an intellectual escape hatch" theory.

Jtarrou posted -- literally days before you nailed this jello 'thesis' to the wall -- that Trump could well be in the wrong here.

This is literally a demonstration of my point. JTarrou isn't seriously entertaining the idea that Trump could be wrong; he's saying that if Devereaux's analysis is right, it would be pure chance. Not through any direct response to his arguments, but because "Devereaux is a long time Trump doomer"

JTarrou isn't seriously entertaining the idea that Trump could be wrong...

Hm.

Personally, I can't make heads nor tails of the Iran operation, and I doubt anyone else is doing much better. We'll find out in a year or ten whether it was a success.

I don't think so.

No, but Devereaux is a long time Trump doomer.

He might even be right this time, but it would only be by chance.

Personally, I can't make heads nor tails of the Iran operation, and I doubt anyone else is doing much better.

I would wager a guess that this includes the Trump administration.

For the most part, war is not 5d chess, where apparent blunders can be actually brilliant strategy.

I doubt that Hegseth and Trump were rubbing their hands when Iran closed the Strait. "So they have fallen into our trap, just as predicted. Now let's do press conferences where we look like fools to foster their beliefs that their strategy is working. They will never realize that we have learned of a Babylonian prophecy that whoever closes the Strait will have their country devoured by the Elder Gods after a fortnight."

A more sanewashed idea than Elder Gods:

Closing the Strait hurts America's allies more than it hurts Americans. If we look like we're not doing much about it, the allies are incentivized to build up their navies again and protect their own damn shipping lanes. Anything that makes Europe/Australia look at the world through more realistic lenses than some rose-colored End of History glasses is a win for sanity everywhere.

As an European, I think it is unlikely that we would revert to Prussian militarism once our energy supply is threatened. I think it is much more likely that we would try to cut a deal with Iran. That would work much faster than building up a navy or paying the Saudis to build more pipelines.

It helps that the situation we find ourselves in is not Iran's fault. Iran did not look at its bank balance and decide to do some shakedown of the international community. Instead, they were subjected to a US-Israeli bombing campaign. Closing the strait is the one way they can hurt the US. So of course they would do it. The Ayatollah regime certainly did enough evil, but closing the strait is something every polity would have done if the alternative was just to allow the enemy to bomb you at leisure.

Europe paying them for safe passage is win-win-win. The gulf states get to sell their fuels. Europe gets its dirty energy fix. Iran gets funds with which it can frustrate the interests of the US and Israel in lieu of crashing the market.

Sure, some might claim it would be immoral to pay Iran when it might funnel that money to Hamas, but I can assure you that we have decades of practice of not watching too closely what our oil money funds. If a polity ruled by religious crazies wants to use our money to kill the citizens of other polities ruled by religious crazies, that is by now a long-running tradition in the ME, and far be it from Europe to try to impose our value systems on Iran or the ME.

Closing the strait is the one way they can hurt the US.

You understand Americans largely aren't actually hurt by this. Australia is hurt by this. Asia is hurt by this. Europe is hurt by this. America in general benefits because our oil supply mostly isn't impacted and now we have higher profits on what we export.

I wouldn't say it's immoral to pay Iran, go ahead, be our guest. But if it were that simple, why hasn't it happened yet?

You understand Americans largely aren't actually hurt by this.

My understanding is that unlike the gulf states, where oil is the main export, for the US oil is more of a side hustle (on the order of 10% of the total exports or so). A higher oil price will tank the world economy, and that will hurt US exports in other areas far more than their increased revenue from selling oil.

There is a reason that the US has been very active in the ME for longer than I have been alive, and charitably it comes down to the US faring worse if the oil price skyrockets. There is also the fact that the global oil trade is mostly conducted in dollars, which enables the US deficit as countries stockpile US currency.

If the US decides that they have their own oil and don't care about the global market, before long oil will be traded in yuan.

I will grant you though that a high oil price will hurt other Western countries more than it hurts the US, but then again it does not take a lot of economic hurt to lose an election.

It's never 4D chess. Events just aren't predictable enough for that kind of strategy to work. If you can pull off a simple misdirection, you are doing well.

Deliberately inflicting pain on your allies isn't a clever move, it's a great way to stop having allies. If there was a buried intention here (there isn't, because it's never 4D chess, especially with Trump et al), it's that someone in the administration skimmed The Accidental Superpower and decided to become a Zeihanist accelerationist.

All I said is it's more Sanewashed than Elder Gods, which isn't a very high bar. But I'm not saying this was predicted before Iran was bombed, but rather that of the options available to them now, they might be choosing to leave the Strait risky because it has created some responses that the administration thinks are useful at the time.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/2034311772354592874.html discusses it a bit.

Can you see Trump signing on to a strategy like that? Looking ineffective/losing to encourage others to step up? Because I can’t. It’s completely against his brand.

I find it much more likely that he gambled on an in-and-out, five-day adventure. Blow up their assets, decapitate the leadership, get an easy peace deal. Foot in the door.

I find it much more likely that he gambled on an in-and-out, five-day adventure. Blow up their assets, decapitate the leadership, get an easy peace deal. Foot in the door.

I agree that this was likely the hope, but knowing at least some of the players I find it difficult to believe that the current situation where in the regime has not collapsed wasn't "gamed out".

JD Vance would sign up for embarrassing Europe.

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