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The explicit early war objectives laid out by Trump and Hegseth were
What kind of benchmarks would you consider success for 1 and 2? 80%? 99%? I suspect you'd call anything short of 100% a "humiliating loss", and probably even then. Their Navy is about 90% destroyed.
And the MOU is "an agreement to talk out a future agreement", but one of the points purportedly agreed upon is 4. Which is still very far from a done deal, and very much obscured in the fog of the negotiating table. And that describes the entire situation. This isn't some trad war where a total surrender happens at a formal event. Both sides are going to posture and threaten and build contingencies, likely for years to come.
I will admit that this whole ordeal has strengthened the conventional wisdom that airpower alone is limited. But "we blew up most of their shit and crippled their economy, total W for them" seems like a retarded and delusional take.
Trump called for Unconditional Surrender and made regime change a clear goal of the war from the get-go. That objective was clearly unachieved. Replacing Khamenei with Khamenei is a joke.
On 1, 2, 3 we don't have any data that shows a significant decline in capability. The ability for Iran to project power has not been meaningfully reduced in any way that is testable, as they still possess the naval/missile capability to shut the Strait of Hormuz, threaten their neighbors, and force a deal that benefits their proxy Hezbollah.
The problem here is that some people think this is Team Deathmatch rules and some people think it's Capture the Flag. The objective isn't to kill a lot of Iranians, it's to achieve some kind of strategic goal. The K:D doesn't matter, the objectives do.
Eh, "unconditional surrender" did not come up in any of the overviews and AI summaries I looked up when making that post. Totally makes sense that he said it; demanding massive asks and threatening to walk away is the man's main tactic.
Compare it to the Iranians who have sworn to fight "until complete victory" while insisting that no negotiations have even been happening. This is what I mean when I referenced a fog of bluster, threats and maneuvering. What's going on in the minds of them men involved? What do they really want, what are they really willing to trade or sacrifice, what do they really think of the situation so far? I think I don't know, you don't know, Daes definitely doesn't know (or can't say if he did, isn't he posting from China these days?) and none of us have any plausible methods for rectifying that.
People can call that cowering in the fog of war. I think I'm dispaying some epistemic humility while acknowleding the basic surface-level consideration that there does seem to be a lot of fog.
Maybe. Their rate of fire did plummet something like 90% over the first few weeks. I am definitely open to the position that the Iranian decentralized method is overly difficult or impossible to completely stamp out with just air power. There's a lot of middle ground between "strong enough to shut the Strait", which seems not really true since we've been running ships through it, and "plucky enough to kick shipping insurance premiums into intolerable territory", which seems reasonably true.
There's a fair bit of room for criticism of the US here, but I do think this hUmIlIaTiNg LoSs line is just nakedly motivated reasoning.
And this is exactly what I'm taking a wait-and-see approach about.
Yes, let's compare. Indeed, to our knowledge, no direct negotiations with the US have been happening at virtually every moment where the US was claiming negotiations, and the MOU is both extremely similar to initial Iranian terms, dissimilar to Witkoff-Kushner terms which Iran had dismissed, and an admission of Iranian victory. They've performed so much better than you that you can't look at this. Wiki:
Pretty clear who's been full of bluster here and who achieved victory.
Uh-huh. From the inner spiritual China. The politruk does keep a tight watch over what I get to post on themotte. @aquota see, I really wouldn't have needed xitter to lose interest in dancing around the fact that some Patriots are going off their rockers and it's pretty funny.
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From Wikipedia:
Perhaps you're unfamiliar with how the term is used, but when it comes to power projection Iran's navy (which I don't think anyone seriously contests was "meaningfully reduced") is much more relevant than their ballistic missile arsenal (which was also "meaningfully reduced," if only because they launched off such a large portion.)
"Shut the Strait" is self-contained motte/bailey inasmuch as it suggests that Iran has much more complete control over the Strait than they actually do (nobody denies that cargo ships successfully passed through the Strait under the nose of Iran, do they?), thus successfully spreading a misleading idea, but if challenged the person using it can always say that they mean Iran has the ability to threaten traffic there (which is also true), not that Iran actually shut the strait, making it tedious to address, even though it may mislead the underinformed.
For this reason, I wish you (and everyone else on here) would stop using the phrase and switch to more precise language instead.
"He didn't have the choke on me. I could still breathe in little gasps! I just tapped out because of the choke."
Trump himself has said, when justifying the peace deal:
And again:
Trump himself has made one of the clearest statements he's made about the war, saying that the strait of Hormuz was insufficiently open. We can get pedantic about what exactly "closed" means or whether we just needed gutsier ship captains if you want, but I don't think that really matters in assessing the success of "America" or "Trump & Hegseth" as strategic actors. Trump stated directly: the restrictions placed on the strait of Hormuz worked to force Trump to make a deal.
A general or an admiral can claim a "stabbed in the back theory" that "we didn't lose we left" that "we won the war on the battlefield and the politicians lost it at the negotiating table" or that "the civilians followed the traitors at home and didn't support the war enough."
A politician, a POTUS, can't claim that, because rallying public support is kind of his whole job. Coordinating with international insurance companies is within his purview. The home front is his war. Trump can't whine that we were winning the war if it wasn't for public opinion and the markets, public opinion and the markets is his job. The buck stops here. He needs to go to war with the public he has, not the public he wishes he had.
Trump and Hegseth made the specific decision not to attempt to build a public case for going to war with Iran, not to coordinate with international partners, not to plan ahead for the business consequences of the war. They chose speed and surprise over those things. That turned out to be a bad decision.
Are the things Trump claims when he is justifying his actions trustworthy or not?
That's...why I'm here.
The context of the conversation had to do with achieving war aims which is a separate-but-related question, since achieving war aims can actually be really bad if your war aims are strategically stupid. The ability to achieve war aims is a question of military capability, and whether or not military capability is exercised successfully is a different question from whether or not it is being exercised wisely.
So: there's a difference between the economic considerations of Iran's ability to threaten transiting ships and their military capabilities to threaten ships. In a discussion about Iran's military capabilities Iran's military capabilities matter. And their military capabilities are sufficient to credibly threaten ships passing through the strait, but insufficient to reliably follow through on that threat. This indicates that they have imperfect ability to complete the kill chain required to strike ships transiting the strait, which is more directly relevant to a discussion of Iran's military capabilities than the degree to which civilian shipping is willing to take on the risks of a transit. For people who think about conflicts in terms of things like kill chains, sensor webs, and material capabilities, that's an important distinction that tells you something about the military capabilities of Iran (and the United States).
It's the difference between saying that German U-boats targeted Allied shipping, imposing a grievous economic cost, and saying that they "closed the Atlantic for the duration of World War Two." It is entirely possible to point out the success of unrestricted submarine warfare without exaggerating its effectiveness.
I did not claim otherwise. You said things that were either untrue or, I am arguing, misleading. I think you can make your case without doing that.
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