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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.
To believe in US defeat you have to believe the US is so squeamish that we'll beg Iran to re-open the SOH and in exchange offer to let them build nuclear weapons with impunity.
Stabilizing the strait may be costlier than we would like and somehow we'll do this public good alone, as usual, but not as costly as letting Iran have nukes.
I don't think Iran having nukes, in and of itself, would be costly for me. I estimate the chance of a nuclear-armed Iran using nuclear weapons against the US to be extremely low unless the US for some reason launches an existential war against the nuclear-armed Iran, which I also think would be very unlikely to happen.
As for a nuclear-armed Iran's ability to disrupt global shipping, I also do not care about that. A nuclear-armed Iran would likely prefer to be integrated with the global economy, just as it prefers that now over being sanctioned, and would not benefit from being heavily sanctioned if it tried to strong-arm itself into control of the Strait of Hormuz.
If Iran had nuclear weapons, it would be able to more successfully deter US and Israeli geopolitical ambitions in the Middle East, but I don't care about those ambitions.
The only thing that actually bothers me about the idea of a nuclear-armed Iran is that having nuclear weapons could help to stabilize the Iranian government and its authoritarian chuddism, with negative consequences for its population. But then, the current war has so far also been bad for the Iranian population. So far they are getting a really bad deal: getting bombed, their economy damaged, but without the government being replaced by a better one. And that seems unlikely to change barring a US ground invasion or a sudden collapse in the government's structural integrity. So it's not like the US is actually pursuing a policy that is focused on helping the Iranians to get a better government.
I would have to disagree with this. The leadership regularly chants "death to America" and has done so for some time. It's reasonable to believe that this means what it seems to mean. Iran has regularly attacked Israel even though Israel would gladly accept an uneasy peace with it just like Israel has with Egypt, Jordan, and the UAE.
Even if the US did absolutely nothing to harm Iran, Iran's leadership would still have strong incentive to harm the US if they thought they could get away with it. As a way of gaining clout in the Muslim world.
I'm sure that Putin and Xi also say the Russian and Chinese equivalents of "death to America", but I don't worry about the possibility of a Russian or Chinese nuclear first strike on the US.
India and Pakistan have attacked each other through proxies before, yet neither has launched a nuclear first strike on the other despite extreme levels of mutual hatred and the fact that both have nuclear weapons.
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I consider it a revealed preference that Iran is willing to plunge themselves into darkness over pursuit of nuclear weapons. It's fairly clear that they can resist insurgency and invasion just fine without them and that they would be a lot less isolated if they weren't pursuing them, but they persist. They could have security just fine without them: they're not in Saddam's or Gaddafi's position, the IRGC survives despite decapitation. Their territory is huge and difficult to conquer.
They want nuclear weapons to service their global Islamic Chuddist revolution.
They had a growing nuclear medicine program, while facing sanctions which had the practical effect of limiting their medical imports:
https://theintercept.com/2023/06/12/iran-sanctions-medicine/
https://dw.com/en/iran-sanctions-mean-life-saving-medication-in-short-supply/a-74825554
https://www.neimagazine.com/news/iran-unveils-new-nuclear-medicine/
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I disagree. They cannot actually resist invasion without them. They are perpetually one hawkish US administration that has enough political capital away from being invaded and replaced.
If the US committed to a ground invasion of Iran, the US would easily and quickly topple Iran's government. It would be like a world heavyweight boxing champion fighting a scrawny 15 year old. US soldiers would be in Tehran within a few weeks of the start of the conflict. What would follow would, from the point of view of the current Iranian government, be horrible. They have seen what happened to Saddam and to Gaddafi. They would be turned over to their political opponents, put on trial, their lives as they knew it over, some possibly executed. They're in danger of assassination every day now, but at least they still have power and the emotional satisfaction of not having been defeated. A US invasion would be the end of everything for them.
Would they like to use nuclear weapons in support of their global Islamic revolution? Sure. Would they actually use nuclear weapons in a first strike? I doubt it. When I look at their actual foreign policy in the recent decades, they haven't been acting like ISIS-type fanatics. The most reckless thing they did was to support Hamas too much, and then Hamas massacred a bunch of Israeli civilians, which made Israel unite even more than before around the goal of destroying them by any means necessary. But that does not necessarily mean that they follow a fanatical foreign policy any more than the fact that the US supported an Indonesian government that killed hundreds of thousands of civilians in the 1960s means that the 1960s US was following a fanatical foreign policy.
What's interesting is that the Trump administration is the one administration that genuinely does not seem to care about if you are a "bad guy" or not – the Trump admin has been extremely functionalist.
However, the Trump administration can only do so much to bind the actions of a future administration, which creates a real risk for Iran.
I think on balance if they don't make the Trump admin a good offer (and they still can) they will come to regret it.
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Some times I forget how naive and anti American many of the posters are on this forum. This take hugely discounts the tail risks of having an unstable country with a history of exporting terrorism having these things. What if the leadership changes in the future or some part of their government, or if it results in other middle eastern countries proliferating as well.
It’s worth noting the extent to which America has exported terrorism:
We pressured Saudi Arabia to fund Wahhabi mosques globally as part of our fight against the Soviet Union
We supported the Mujahideens to the tune of 4 billion USD
We produced millions of violent jihadi textbooks for the youth in Afghanistan (lmao)
Of the ~100 Islamic terror attacks in America since the 90s, virtually all of them have been Salafi-Wahhabi and none of them have been Shia (Iranian).
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Agreed. Even if we accepted for the sake of argument that the Supreme Leader himself would not order a first strike, how confident are we in the rest of the Iranian regime's command and control infrastructure?
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Why can China be the biggest trading partner with most middle eastern countries without wasting trillions on wars? What has the US gained from all these wars? Supporting wars that flood Europe with migrants is anti war.
Iran wouldn't want nukes if the US wasn't meddling in the middle east.
The terrorists that bomb the west are Sunni groups that Iran is fighting. Iran helped defeat ISIS and fought all sorts of extremists in Syria.
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That doesn't worry me any more than I worry about the slight chance of getting hit by lightning when I walk outside while it's raining.
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Iran didn't have nukes before the war despite Netanyahu claiming the bomb is weeks away since the 90s. Currently 20% of the world's oil, several decently sized economies that invest heavily in the US, a large portion of global LNG, and 35% of the world's helium are under blockade. This is in order to fight a war to go back to the way things were two months ago.
Had Iran even wanted nukes if it wasn't for the constant threat of American war? The US needs to fight the enemies while the constant war creates the enemies.
This war could easily end up dragging on for an extended period of time. Nobody enters a war thinking the war will last for many years yet wars often do. The US could easily be stuck in a quagmire that drags on and becomes a story that never stops giving.
So if Iran doesn't want nukes then why is giving up enrichment such a deal breaker for them? They'd rather apparently be all killed than negotiate on this.
They do want nukes. No matter what one's opinion about the war is, and mine is against it, the fact is that they clearly want nukes. They would be insane not to want nukes. Having nukes is just better in almost every way than not having nukes, if you can afford the high price tag of building and maintaining them. For Iran's government nukes are the only possible way of guaranteeing their system's survival, other than a Russian or Chinese commitment to defend them in case of war, which does not seem to be forthcoming.
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If you believe the Omani negotiator, Iran was willing to give up their stockpile and enrichment in exchange for sanction relief; that was likely the point of building the stockpile in the first place. Once the US tried to regime change them, the calculations shifted.
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The bomb likely has been weeks away since who knows when. It still could be for all I know. Because they haven’t fully enriched is not evidence they can’t. It’s evidence that they continually chose not to do so. At this point, proceeding to make a few nuclear weapons is their best bet to not be attacked again.
Yes. I don't understand why we need to wait until they have 99% completed a bomb to take them seriously when they pony up to the negotiating table with their balls out and say "as you can see we have everything we need to build a bomb, including long range bomb delivery missiles; so, what are you going to to give us?"
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