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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.
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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