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I think anything that ends with “USA leaves without meeting the objectives of ending Iranian support for terrorism and ending the nuclear ambitions of Iran” are failure with extra steps. And really leaving Iran in control of Hormuz is also pretty much a dead end. If you go to war, you can’t stop without a victory of some sort unless you want to destroy credibility as a war-fighting civilization. Nations can easily detect weakness and will exploit it for their advantage. If Iran can defeat the USA with commodity prices, every other country with natural resources or the ability to destroy them with missiles is going to do so rather than be invaded or submissive to the USA. China can do so with rare earths, any country in the Middle East can do so with oil, Egypt and Panama can close their shipping lanes and disrupt trade. That’s not a good place to be in because any time these countries want something or want to stymie the West, the hostage situation “don’t you dare stop us or the global economy gets it” comes out.
I think we need to keep in mind the specific strategic goals Rubio laid out at the beginning and has been sticking two whenever he gives a speech:
We've done the middle two very comprehensively. We're doing the first pretty thoroughly. The last one is hard to define a victory condition of, how do you destroy a "chance?" But the US can say, 3/4 isn't that bad, and take that as a win given the primary goals the leadership has been sticking to this whole time.
Indeed, we've totally obliterated the Iranian military at least once a week since the war began.
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This isn't possible. Specifically the word "ever". An industrial civilization with 1940s tech can make a nuke. "Ever" is a very long time.
I'd accept "5 years", I'd accept "10 years", passed that and there's quite a lot of hopium getting involved.
But "ever" isn't possible unless you 1) essentially genocide them by quite literally bombing them back to the stone age, which isn't feasible or 2) 100% occupy the country like Germany or Japan and reshape them in a more desirable image, which is also wildly unfeasible (although more feasible than 1)
Unless by 'they' one means 'the mullahs' regime'.
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But does the spice flow? The previous Iran leadership at least played lip service to working relations with it's Arab neighbors. The new leadership, or fragments thereof, seem much more willing to break norms. The US may be done with the war, but that doesn't mean that the war is done with the US (or at least it's allies/interests). If the flow of oil out of the Persian Gulf remains blocked, heavily impacted, tolled etc. no one is going to view that as a US win, not even Americans if gas prices remain high and downstream inflation picks up as result (both direct from gas prices, and indirect through increased energy costs and imports from directly impacted countries).
The previous Iranian leadership apparently told the KSA and the other Gulf states that if they were attacked by anyone, they'd attack the Gulf states. This was supposed to get those states to discourage attacks by the US, but it apparently had the opposite effect, since the various princes and emirs are not France.
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The oil point has arguably been widely known since the 70s and the rare earth point was kind of made during the China tariff news phase last year.
Colonial wars can never be fought against zealots. You can fight them against fat local elites who value their lives and wealth and local fiefdoms over the cause, because eventually they will sue for peace or flee. But you cannot fight them successfully against those truly, strongly motivated by an ideology. The US has never been willing to pay the required price to overthrow the Islamic Revolution since 1979, and that is as true today as it was then and as it has been throughout the period between the two.
Against true believers, only total war works. In very, very limited cases (like the Boer War) an extraordinarily capable colonial power can win these, although they require extraordinarily disproportionate resources and are often not worth it even when attempted.
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