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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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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