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Notes -
No peace deal with Iran
Can I just point out that 21 hours seems too short for negotiations? I don't think the talks were done in earnest, at all. The 150-page JCPOA took almost 2 years of frivolous negotiations and lasted just as long. A 21 hour session in the middle of an active conflict is not very likely to reach a better equilibrium that both parties are happy with. Iran carried bloodstained schoolbags of kids killed in the Minab strike on the flight to Pakistan, they were certainly not there to surrender. I suspect the administration (or at least Vance) already knew this, and deliberately structured one-sided terms intended to be rejected so Trump can attempt building political scaffolding for escalation and blame Iran ("Look, we offered Iran a peace deal and they chose not to accept it"). Meanwhile, the Israelis have been busy!
Between accepting one of the greatest strategic defeats in decades, and trying to prosecute a horrific war amidst historic energy and food prices, we remain stuck with the latter.
Why? These things are usually drawn out because America and Iran don’t negotiate directly and pass everything through intermediaries. And by Trump’s account they agreed essentially on every point except for the nuclear question. I don’t see why it would take longer than 21 hours to realize that, the idea that negotiating is this special activity that takes lots of expertise is a myth from the Georgetown school of foreign policy to promote the need for bureaucrat-scholars to run everything.
The leading theory on this forum a week ago was that Trump was losing so badly he would accept any peace deal as long as it was face-saving and he could declare victory. Not so?
America totally destroyed Iran’s military in a stunning lopsided victory. I’ve been told this was only a tactical victory because Iran now controls the straits and is using that as leverage, but, weirdly, Trump is now announcing a blockade of the straits himself. Perhaps America isn’t defeated?
I fear that denying this will have me marked as some kind of rabid Trump fanboy who can’t deal with reality but I have to point out that oil was much higher during the 2008 crisis, back when the same dollars were worth more.
The US having tactical military dominance over Iran can hardly be "stunning". The US not being able to translate military dominance into a strategic victory is, well, somewhat par for the course, but is in this case at least a bogey, and probably a double or triple given that the strategic loss on the Strait has fundamentally worsened our security/economy, by a lot, compared with pre-war.
I was going to say this as well. Congratulations on your "victory," I suppose. It seems pretty empty to me. Unless that's the kind of victory you were hoping to pull out of this situation from the beginning. Considering what the original war aims were, given that the US has still been unable to achieve it; I wouldn't call it a victory at all. All they're managed to do is destroy infrastructure.
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Oil tankers are now filling up at American ports because we have oil and the rest of the world does not. America controls a near-majority of the world’s oil supply and has a surplus even if prices go up. We destroyed Iran’s military and are dictating terms. I guess America is losing because Europeans are mad it’s not going faster?
There's a big shift in how the American empire now functions. It used to be the source of stability, projecting Pax America over its sphere of influence. Even Iraq, not exactly a success story in nation building, was viewed more like a "good idea, terrible execution" mistake.
The new American empire is the source of instability. It's telling other countries, "You have to work with us, because only we can afford to fuck up the rest of the world and weather the fallout".
Take Qatar, for example. Did everything the US wanted, played its role of a small friendly petrostate heavily investing into soft power perfectly. What did it get for this? Iran destroying its economy and Trump telling it to suck it up. The only reason Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani hasn't publicly thrown in his hat with Xi after this is because there's a non-zero risk Trump might bomb Qatar after reading about it on X.
Everyone is going to start hedging their bets now instead of viewing being friends of the US as the safe default.
Are you referring to something specific or did you just make that up? Because publicly the Qataris are talking about how this is ruining their impression of Iran, not America. And privately nobody is contemplating anything close to America bombing Qatar. You think Trump just wakes up on Twitter and decides who to bomb? You aren’t being dramatic? Trump is on Twitter so you can hear his message, not the other way around. If you think differently maybe you also think the hooker has never seen one so big before?
The logic of the whole war is Trump stitched together a new Middle East coalition of Israel, Saudi, Qatar, UAE, and Bahrain. This entails all working more closely with America which is how Trump got the buy-in to start the war in the first place. Did someone tell them that America is a partner of instability and everyone is moving out of America’s orbit? They didn’t seem to have gotten the memo.
So far none of these "coalition members" have been rah-rah about the war. What exactly are the Gulf states getting out of it? Two months ago, they were pumping oil and shipping it to their customers with no problems at all. Today, they have to join this coalition of yours, spend their oil revenues on air defense, on navies, on a land invasion of Iran just to go back to what is basically status quo ante bellum: pumping oil and shipping it to their customers with no problems at all.
The Sunni states hate Iran and have been informally allied against it for a generation. They are not amused that Iran is bombing them and they want to see Iran put down.
https://m.economictimes.com/news/international/world-news/israel-iran-war-uae-joins-bahrain-in-urging-unsc-action-on-strait-of-hormuz/articleshow/130050237.cms
https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/iran-news/article-891956
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy8lzn2ejpjo
https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/uae-minister-coexistence-with-iran-impossible-right-now-addressing-threat-essential-for-peace/
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/24/us/politics/saudi-prince-iran-trump.html
https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/kuwaits-top-diplomat-blasts-irans-destabilization-of-the-region/
Stories like this are extremely common. The Gulf States do not want to be constrained by a rogue nation willing to blow up their international trade routes. They do not want Iran to toll the strait. They are happy to use America’s military to achieve their objectives. If your model here is that Saudi et al. were happy with Iran until America blew it all up, I don’t think you know what you’re talking about. If you think Saudi et al. view this like European countries seething about everything Donald Trump does, I don’t think you know what you’re talking about.
I didn't say they were happy with Iran, I said they were happy with the status quo, that is, Iran shouting "Death to America" and funding proxies in various shitholes away from the Gulf. Iran didn't blow up their international trade routes or try to toll the strait, because it had a reasonable expectation that it would get attacked by literally every major country if it tried this without a provocation. But now the window of acceptable fuckery from Iran has been widened thanks to the US and Israel launching a decapitation strike.
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US economy and stock market will be and are worse from the war. For the US, our own fossil fuel production and exports cushion the blow, but it is unambiguously an overall negative.
I disagree, that this is "unambiguously an overall negative"
There are geo-political considerations that go beyond just "make number go up"
That's AI slop.
As a rabid AI slop hater and slop hunter, I don't see anything too suspicious in this video when I look at the transcript. Additionally, gpt zero also scores it as a human.
The publication appears to be a real television station on the air in the UK, which is weak evidence against ai slop.
Are there any tells or other signs of AI that I missed?
It was originally a link to an AI slop tweet that included the video.
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Did you watch the video?
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The US is a major oil importer and the US exports oil because it imports oil, refines it and sells the refined oil. The US isn't energy independent because the US doesn't produce enough diesel. The US has more light oil that it consumes but not enough of other grades.
The US isn't dictating terms. The US is desperate to open the straight and has abandoned all its original goals and adopted Iran's demands as a basis for negotiating.
Honestly I think if Iran played their cards right, thus might have happened. If iran opened the strait last week, then hung the threat of no deal = strait closes again over the negotiators heads.
But Iran insisted on playing stupid games and now it's unclear if Iran is willing to open the strait irregardless of what the US offers. Iran's semi-official media seems to imply that tolling the strait is a red line for Iran - which if true means no deal, even if the US was willing to give up literally everything else for the strait.
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I think this is totally out to lunch and if you were right the US would have accepted Iran’s terms already
Iran's terms mean nuclear war in the Middle East probably within a decade. The US can't accept Iran's terms, neither can the force Iran to accept theirs. So the strait remains closed (soon by us too) until enough other nations decide to force our hand or Iran figures out how to make a bomb during the war.
If one saw the kinds of things that Indians and Pakistanis regularly say about each other, one could expect there to have been a nuclear war between the two countries by now. Yet there has not been one, even though both have been nuclear-armed since 1998 and they actually fought a conventional war recently.
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Iran can’t make nukes because we can bomb their facilities faster than they can build them. Their options are to surrender now for good terms or later for worse ones
That only works until the build one we don't know about or that we can't bomb.
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It's true that the US is a net importer of crude. In fact, the US tends to export light sweet crude and import heavy sour, because we have a lot of refining capacity for the heavy stuff that many other refiners don't have. But that crude is mostly coming from Canada, Mexico and South America, not the ME. And in January a bunch of Mexican heavy crude refining capacity came on line, leaving US refiners with a problem, at least until Venezuela happened. I rather suspect Trump knew all about that too.
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I am skeptical that many people of the strongly anti-Trump persuasion would have, two months ago, committed to a prediction of "The US dumpsters Iran's military with training accident levels of cost". I think we'd have heard a lot of rhetoric about how Hegseth is an incompetent, drunken Christofascist retard and that the US would massively underperform.
The US military hasn't dumpstered anything at all. No strategic goals have been achieved. No political objectives have been achieved. The straits of Hormuz have not been secured, nor have Iran's missile and drone capabilities been severely degraded. Their attack rate over the last 30 days before this ceasefire was fairly stable.
The US has the military capabilities a 15 year old gamer would seek: prioritizing K/D and cool explosions and 'ownage' moments like blowing up leaders in sneak attacks. Hegseth exemplifies this dimwitted outlook, obsessing about lethality and violence and devastation: 'back to the stone age'.
The US does not have the military capabilities of a serious power pursuing serious strategic objectives like territorial control, waging industrial wars over long spans of time to outlast and crush enemies. That's mutually exclusive with maxxing out K/D and all these flashy, ludicrously expensive and rare wonderweapons the US likes to focus on.
You don't need to kill your enemies to beat them. Killing helps but disorganized, shambolic killing isn't the key thing. The key thing is to defeat your enemy's plan, not just blow up their soldiers. Iran's plan, using their drone and missile forces to choke the straits, choke energy exports over the course of a long war that saps US political will remains intact while the US is going through plans at a rate of knots.
Trump crows about blowing up the Iranian air force and navy. Who cares? Is the Iranian air force the lynchpin of their plans, like the German luftwaffe in WW2? No. Their conventional navy also is not a big part of their plan. Destroying random bridges or power plants - not going to help.
What a curious choice of cut-off! Sort of like counting Muslim terrorist casualties starting in 2002, isn't it? Very convenient how it lets you ignore the 90% dropoff from the first week of the war.
Don't worry. I'm sure Iran-senpai is just hiding his power level! He's baiting out Trump's secret moves before he unleashes his ultimate technique, which is... ????
Rose Tico-ass logic.
Yes, their conventional forces have been dumpstered, their missile and drone options brutally degraded, they can't pay their people and the industrial base to rearm is a smoking crater.
All according to keikaku (keikaku means plan). Iran is definitely winning.
Oh, so the US has done no damage after the first weak of the war, in your view? All subsequent bombing has been ineffectual at further reducing their strike rate, after that huge 90% success? Maybe you're just not aware that the Iranian plan is to fight a long war, which necessitates not shooting their load in the first few weeks.
And the grand idea of what you're saying is that Iran's been totally smashed but the US navy is just too cowardly to secure the straits of Hormuz? They need to do a blockade out of Iran's strike range... for some reason. All those drones and missiles have been brutally degraded... But not so degraded that America can actually protect its bases in the Gulf. Not so degraded that American troops can quit hiding in hotels. Not so degraded that America can actually protect the oil facilities of its allies, protect the basis of the petrodollar.
Fantasy. After losing the last few Middle East wars against vastly inferior opponents, I would've thought the hubris bubble might've been pricked a little but noooooo...
They literally tried to. That's what a 90% drop off means.
Iran is doing Houthi stuff. They don't "control" the Strait, they're an unacceptable insurance risk.
Yeah, America needs to play like I do when I'm mopping up single player Starcraft. Zero losses, because I like the aesthetic, and because the world is full of people rooting for Iran to win and America to lose.
So no, you don't put a carrier where a cheap drone might do millions in damage and kill a sailor. You do shoot down the overwhelming majority of the "irregular militia" levels of attacks Iran launches. If one missile got through and blew up an empty truck every two weeks you'd still be right here sneering.
This is just fundamentally unserious. Those wars were smashing successes. It was turning the peoples who lived there into Minnesotans that we failed at.
I say this again and again and again and Americans still don't understand that wars CANNOT be a smashing success just by blowing things up. They have to achieve the political goal. War is politics!
Whether that's opening the straits, securing territory, installing a friendly regime, the goals are all-important. Blowing things up is only good in as far as it achieves those goals. If you fail at achieving your goals, you lose the war.
That's not a thing. US missile defence consists of firing enormously expensive interceptors at cheap missiles and the cheap missiles still getting through, destroying enormously expensive air defence radars to the point that US soldiers are hiding in random hotels, to the point that the 5th fleet HQ is gone and US warships are slinking back in the Indian Ocean - unable to achieve their goal of securing the straits of Hormuz.
The US is losing the war, not least because Americans do not understand what war is fundamentally about and are very bad at it, due to this ignorance.
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The US has dramatically increased the availability of options for this conflict and future action.
If we want to leave and leave it to a coalition of local nations to ransack Iran? Much more feasible now.
If we want the regime to have very real tradeoffs between keeping the country functioning and rebuilding vs. missiles, drones, and rebuilding the military? It's a serious problem. The regime may be done from this alone, just not in a time horizon that the US needs for this specific moment.
Want to ground invade? Soften them up.
The amount and variety of stuff that we have destroyed is immense, the economy is in shambles... just because we haven't destroyed all the missile launchers doesn't mean that all those bombs were dropped on nothing.
If there's one thing this conflict has proven beyond doubt, it's the utter incompetence of Kuwait, Qatar, UAE, Saudi Arabia. The Houthis are more than a match for Saudi Arabia, they're no match for Iran. Kuwait's biggest accomplishment was shooting down some friendly aircraft, they're hopeless. Oman and Qatar already were trying to cut a deal.
They're not ransacking, these loser countries are the ones who get ransacked.
You dramatically overrate US airpower. They routinely bomb 'nothing'. Scudhunting didn't work well in 2003, a good amount of US bombs would've been dropped on decoys in Iran too. You just can't tell from the air whether something is a real launcher or an inflatable decoy with some IR mimicking an engine.
Note also that this is why they keep on firing their missiles and drones. Because the air campaign isn't working. A country planning for and expecting a US air campaign for decades, with weeks and months to observe the US military buildup... is going to make extensive use of decoys and concealment.
Come on. We've been told the regime is done for for years now, they've been saying they were about to be overthrown by the biannual protests. Remember also that this isn't America, they don't feel the need to make constructing or rebuilding anything 10x more costly and delayed than it needs to be.
The US dropped far more bombs on North Vietnam, to no avail. Bombing does not work like people imagine, it's not capable of achieving any serious goal alone. Certainly not the anemic sortie rate the US has been managing.
The Saudi coalition ended that war primarily because the Biden administration pressured them to (threatening continuing arms sales), not because of the Houthis. IIRC they weren't doing particularly well even before then, but the Houthis were at least accused of using hospitals as bases in the same sorts of tactics Hamas uses, and the NGO international response was largely the similar in its condemnation.
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No argument from me that the other countries are idiots and would only make a mess - balkanizing Iran and running around pillaging would be a humanitarian disaster and is therefore a suboptimal outcome but it would get the job done.
No doubt that at times we've bombed inflatable decoys, but we've bombed plenty of infrastructure - both military and otherwise. Large factories and supply depots are static targets that are well within our ability to have targeted in advance. Even empty buildings need to be rebuilt.
The regime is economically hurting, that's one of the reasons we are in there now. Things that get destroyed now are going to be much harder to replace.
I don't remember seeing "the regime is done" for years. I have seen some credible argumentation that the situation is much, much rockier for them now.
Remember that is an isolated country that is about to be more isolated than it has ever been.
This seems like a whole parallel universe away from where we are. Who is running around in a balkanized Iran? Who is the victim here? The Gulf depends on desalination. UAE is a city in desert, food is imported. They are the Big Losers if this war goes badly, or just continues on its course. Iran can ruin them and they can't do much of anything. Arab troops aren't going to march out and invade Iran, they lack the motivation to fight Muslims for America and are no match for Iranians in battle.
Nobody is invading Iran, pro-Iranian militias are largely in control of Iraq.
Iran can get aid from both Russia and China by land routes, China is supposedly going to start sending MANPADS shortly, prompting more threats from Trump.
You seem to assume that Iran is a pushover, that the war is in a state of damage control, where humanitarian concerns are in play. Like deciding how much to kick someone who's already in the foetal position. In terms of power, nukes aside, Iran considers themselves to be in a strong position!
After seeing naked hostility from 'back to the stone ages' Trump/Hegseth, who is going to rise against the regime now? They'll instantly get tarred as Mossad traitors and face a very gruesome fate.
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Probably, but most people of every political persuasion are extremely un-knowledgeable about military affairs. I think that smart people who follow military affairs knew how this war would go militarily because they paid attention the last few recent wars between the US/Israel and Iran. It's gone largely as I expected it to go, from a military point of view. Actually, Iran has done better than I expected. I did not expect them to still be capable of regularly launching effective strikes against their enemies after a month of US and Israeli air strikes.
FWIW, I would say the Iranians have proven more resilient on the ground than I expected (the US and Israel seem to be pretty hung up on permanently putting their bunkers out of business), but also that their air defenses have done more poorly than I expected. Saddam Hussein shot down more Strike Eagles than Iran has so far. Iran has shot down a lot of drones, though.
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I mean, the US' planes being really good doesn't change that Hegseth does seem extremely incompetent and that the US has performed pretty badly unless you only count having a stronger army.
What’s demonstrates his incompetence?
That there really was no plan beyond "...and then the people will rise up and seize power." The US military should not have been taken so off guard that decapitation and a couple days of missiles did not topple the regime.
Except it seems like the military analyst concluded there was a real chance the people would not rise up.
Either way, seems like the military itself has performed fine. Now crediting Hegseth for that is probably unfair but blaming him for a political decision also seems unfair.
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What's the evidence that the U.S. government had no plan?
The U.S. has a plan to invade Canada (back before people were talking about that as a real possibility). The plan not being very good, or not panning out as well as one hoped is not the same as their being no plan.
No plan, no plan for Hormuz, etc. are essentially memetic slurs.
It is not credible to assume that the world's largest military with a hard-on for over preparation didn't have a plan, or that one of the most well run and heavily motivated for this specific scenario militaries (Israel) had no plan.
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Leaving the TDS angle aside, the conventional dovish view on Iran (which was also the official MAGA position during the 2024 campaign) was "Of course the US can curbstomp the Iranian military, but the consequence of winning is that you either have to occupy Iran (which would be a worse quagmire than Iraq) or you have a failed state on the shores of the Straits of Hormuz." Fundamentally, it was a prediction that Iran would end up like Iraq, but bigger, coupled with the long-standing and extensively battle-tested conventional wisdom that you cannot effect a regime change by air power alone.
Iran is exceeding my expectations in terms of its ability to put up a meaningful resistance to American air power, but the problem is that either America is planning to invade or they are not, and neither is a good outcome. If America bombs Iran back to the Stone Age but leaves the regime intact, then they can carry on obstructing shipping on the Straits of Hormuz with stone age technology (plus imported Russian or Chinese drones).
A boots on the ground operation wouldn't be anywhere near as big of a problem for Iran as it would be for the US. There's no long-term military solution for this problem from the American POV, but when you factor in Israel's designs for the region as a whole, you understand why we got involved in it (stupidly).
When the US-Afghanistan war/occupation was still going on but nearing it's end, there was an American soldier that asked some local there who had connections to the Taliban why he thought the Taliban would be back as soon as the Americans left; and his reply was "... Uh. Because we live here?..." You saw the same sentiment echoed after our withdraw by Suhail Shaheen when he said "... they (Americans) have all the watches, but we have all the time..." So go ahead. Put us in timeout for the next 20 years; we'll be back tomorrow... Unless you manage to completely eradicate the regime, the same conditions will continue to persist, just in a modified form.
Iran isn’t Afghanistan. I’ve been to weddings with people who flew in from Iran. Many are normal/high IQ types. Not goat fucking inbreds like Afghanis. There actually is a replacement elite in Iran to seize power.
They can't. Either they don't really exist to any significant extent and most Iranians support the regime (which, since they're Muslims, might well be). Or they're so completely disarmed and leaderless, and Iranian state capacity so great, that they can't even make a try at it when the US has bombed the hell out of the regime. Either way, there's no one who can replace the regime.
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