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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   27438 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 6, 2026

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If they just wanted to get out of the sanctions surely they could have at any point just said "hey, actually we would like to be more like Saudi Arabia, we will stop funding proxies and be chill" and any of the previous presidents would have tripped over themselves to get this deal.

Past precedent suggests that unilateral disarmament ends in your regime winding up like that of Gaddafi, not Saudi Arabia.

Which shows that they value having proxies over having nuclear weapons. Ultimately, trying to get nukes has been more trouble than it's worth for the Iranians; Israel can't invade them, the US pre-Trump wasn't interested, and it just led to a whole bunch of crippling sanctions. Khameini issued a fatwa against nuclear weapons which, presumably, meant something in a very fundamentalist society.

The sanctions surely would have come about in response to the proxy funding in some non-nuclear counterfactual. Maybe lesser sanctions. At the end of the day the idea that Iran would have been satisfied with being a normal country that gets rich with its combination of obviously smart population and natural resources is complicated by the fact that this option was always on the table and they turned it down. The regime has ambitions in the region, and lofty ones. And once you have lofty ambitions counter to a nuclear power's wishes then you need nukes or you fail somewhere in the escalation chain above where sanctions are involved. Needing to at least be able to threaten to have nukes is a a necessary component of any plan to accomplish their regional objectives, no way around it.

Wasn't that the point of the JCPOA? You can point out it was not indefinite, but given millennarian Shia expectations, it could plausibly be renewed without too much ideological handwringing.

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