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Notes -
On the failed peace negotiations and the US blockade of Iranian oil
This started out as a reply to last week's CW post about the Islamabad negotiations having failed, but then I got into the blockade and decided to drag this to the new CW threat instead.
When Trump chickened out of becoming one of the top four genociders of all time by ending Iranian civilization, he called the Iranian ten point plan a "workable basis on which to negotiate". I was a bit surprised by that (call me naive for being surprised by anything out of of the White House), given that this plan was basically the wish-list of Iran,
but then again I am not a "stable genius" master negotiator.Honestly, I thought this was the best outcome the world was going to get. The world gets their dirty energy fix. Iran gets on the order of a dollar a barrel in transit fees, whatever. Perhaps Iran and Israel nuke each other in the next decade, but at this point I can not really bring myself to care -- religious crazies will do as religious crazies do, and the best thing the civilized world can do is to stay the hell out of it.
Presumably, at some point, someone in the White House thought to actually read the ten point proposal, and noticed that it would place Iran in a strictly better strategic position than before the start of Trump's special military operation. I am kind of amazed that they took 21 hours to realize that they had no overlap. I think Vance rejected anything which was not the miracle victory Trump would need not to get slaughtered in the mid-terms, and Iran was unlikely to budge on key issues such as the control of the strait or their nuclear program, whose strategic importance Israel and the US had just made blatantly obvious.
People have been pointing out that the Trump timeline was obviously never meant for production use for a decade, but lately things have been going to shit at an accelerated pace.
Now Trump has apparently announced that the US is going to block the strait of Hormuz. I wonder who could have given them that idea, and expect Trump to announce that the US will start enriching uranium next week and the US will start funding Shia proxies in May.
More seriously, a blockade is an act of war. Arguably, it is not only an act of war against the country being blockaded, but also against any neutral country who wants to peacefully trade with the blockaded country.
Not all blockades are created equally. When Kennedy blocked the peaceful trade of medium-range ballistic missiles between the USSR and Cuba, he could point out that actually this was a rather narrow blockade aimed to interdict a specific strategic weapon.
Iran's blockade is much harder to justify. Saudi oil being sold to Europe or Asia is not of direct military importance for any conflict Iran is currently fighting, their blockade is a weapon aimed at global trade itself. This makes them a rogue state and gives any country which trades oil with the gulf states a legitimate casus belli against Iran: simply send a single tanker under your flag through the strait claiming innocent passage. Either Iran sinks it, in which case you have war, or it does not, in which case you have no blockade.
The problem is that Iran does not exactly care, which is sound strategy given their situation. Blocking the strait is their one way to squeeze the balls of the world economy to exert pressure on the US, of course they are doing it.
Some strategists might notice that the United States find themselves in a slightly different situation than Iran. So far, they have not been considered a rogue nation willing to wreck the global economy to exert pressure on their opponents.
A US blockade of oil tankers bound for Iran would be as little justified as the Iranian blockade, but like the Iranian regime, they would probably get away with it. China is sadly not in the position to champion the free, peaceful trade between nations by sinking a few US aircraft carriers blockading Iran. Everyone can see that trying to end Iran's capability to block Hormuz will be a military mistake, trying to attack the US over their blockade will end just as badly.
Of course, this strategy will also not work very well for the US.
The Iranian blockade works because the median US voter reasonably cares more about the prices of gas than the regime in Tehran. Oil is the lifeblood of the economy, even a modest disruption will wreck the economy to a far greater degree than what a US presidency can survive.
The US blockade will not work because the Iranian regime cares a lot more about who rules in Tehran than their quarterly growth numbers. The US and Israel just spent tens of billions in bombing the shit out of Iran, with the net result of hardening their will to resist (if only someone had warned us!).
The idea that economic constraints might achieve what getting bombed did not seems absurd. Put bluntly, the regime in Tehran can survive a year with Hormuz being closed (especially as there are countries in whose strategic interest it will be to support them, even if they can't buy their oil, in the same manner in which NATO countries support Ukraine). The one on DC can not.
A chess grandmaster often has different objectives he achieves with a single move. Likewise, Trump has an uncanny ability to make strategic blunders which hurt American interests in a lot of different ways.
In the grand scheme of things, Iran does not matter. However, the US is just establishing that they consider broad trade blockades of enemies a legitimate strategy. This seems foolish not just in principle but because there is a country which matters which might be vulnerable to blockades, which is Taiwan.
(So far, China has been the adult in the room, refraining from any special military operation adventures. The CCP might be evil and bend on world domination, but at least they seem competent. Xi Jinping seems to have object permanence and an inclination to stay out of social media, both qualities which I find aesthetically pleasing in world leaders, and as far as avoiding a paperclip maximizer goes, I trust the CCP more than I would trust Altman, Zuckerberg and Musk. Still, looking at this timeline, it seems sadly possible that Xi Jinping might decide to walk in the footsteps of other elderly world leaders and decide to fuck up the world a bit before he exits the stage.)
Purely on capabilities, it does not matter if there is a precedent for a blockade of Taiwan or not. But narratives matter, especially when allies are concerned. Before, China blockading trade to Taiwan would have been an outrage. Now, they can simply point out that just as the US prohibits Chinese oil tanker from approaching Iranian ports on pain of war, China is blockading western container ships approaching Taiwan.
You should. A nuclear exchange would be a disaster for humanity. The deaths of hundreds of thousands of Israelis and Iranians would be a huge loss to the world. The loss of human capital and consciousness would be a tragedy, the suffering would be immeasurable.
Oddly, I think the Iran war probably precludes a Taiwan war in the near future because two things have become clear. Iran has demonstrated the USA's superiority in technological warfare to an absurd degree. The United States and friends were able to decapitate the Iranian leadership, they've been able to operate with impunity over Iran, they were able to land a small force and operate an airstrip inside Iran during a war. If the USA is even marginally interested in fighting China, it will be extremely costly for China, and especially for the Chinese leadership elite. But also, the Iran war has apparently hastened the decline of American influence abroad. Niall Ferguson brings up, over and over, that this could be the American Suez crisis. America's irresponsible behavior is causing rifts within the alliance system, the special relationships with the anglophone countries are gone, NATO could die. American may have sacrificed its alliances in Europe for its "alliance" with Israel. This increases the odds significantly that Taiwan peacefully unifies with China, with no American opposition, because China grows in power and prominence and Taiwan eventually sees the hand writing on the wall.
As for the blockade war, I can see the logic, but a lot depends on China and India. If China sends a naval escort for a Chinese flagged ship, what happens?
It could quite easily have the opposite takeaway. We've now seen that even a pariah state can exert a surprising amount of leverage against the superpower next door, even with only a fraction of the military power. And we've seen that said superpower can't reliably affect regime change simply by dropping a few bombs, boots on the ground are likely required.
It's been clear for a while now that reunification with mainland would be a massive boon for the Taiwanese economy, but I doubt the Taiwanese people would want it.
I thought boots on the ground was China's Plan A?
Peaceful reunification has always been plan A. The official line has always been “we pursue peaceful reunification with maximum effort but never rule out the use of force” or something along those lines. The Communist Party has always talked with the Taiwanese KMT (Kuomintang, lit. Nationalist Party, the party that was defeated by the Communists and retreated to Taiwan) since Chiang Junior’s era about peaceful reunification. Xi met with then-Taiwanese president and KMT chairman Ma Ying-jeou in Singapore in 2015 and met again with KMT chairwoman Cheng Li-wun just a few days ago, which should be a step in the right direction. I think it’s one of the biggest happenings for cross-strait relations lately, but few seem to have heard of it in the West, partly because the other strait took their interest. Partly because Chinese positions on Taiwan was not imo rightly represented in western media, and the fact you think boots on the ground is plan A is pretty telling.
Also, PLA military advantage over Taiwan is a relatively recent development. Before the 2010s, the PLA navy and air force were weak, and their only edge against Taiwan was the PLA Rocket Force, which as you can see right now in Iran cannot force a complete defeat without boots on the ground.
I think it would be obviously stupid and tremendously tragic to do an Ukraine on Taiwan. I don’t want rockets destroying their (in my mind, our) civil infrastructure. I don’t want to destroy our cultural artifacts, and most importantly I don’t want to kill my own people, even if they don’t recognize themselves as my own people, which I think is something that could be changed without the use of force. They are 96% Han Chinese after all. There might be good reasons to have to do all of the above (the anti-secession law in China outlined a few things, including Taiwanese acquiring nukes) but it’s by no means plan A. I hope the KMT wins the next election (although I think it’s rather unlikely), and the temperature cools down a bit.
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You are correct, of course, my not caring is about their polities qua polities. My frustration is that there is little one could do to ensure better outcomes. Similar how life under the Taliban is obviously terrible for a lot of people, but there is preciously little the rest of the world can do to fix it. We do not have the will to permanently occupy Afghanistan, Israel and Iran permanently (or until they wisen up and become slightly less murderous in another century or so), and I don't require an EA impact analysis to notice that past occupations have been terrible on a QALY-increase per dollar spend metric (and a lot of other metrics beside that).
I would liken dealing with such countries to dealing with a chronically suicidal ex-partner. Of course you care if they suicide (or nuke each other), but you also don't want to spend the rest of your life doing crisis intervention. Bombing Iranian enrichment facilities, or having your ex committed to a psychiatric hospital for some time is a stop-gap measure which kicks the can down the road, but makes the problem worse in the long run.
Nobody has the stomach to occupy Iran or have someone long-term committed for suicidality. If someone wants to kill themself, or a regime is willing to pay the price of tens of millions of their civilians being murdered in reprisal for them murdering tens of millions of 'enemy' civilians in turn, that is hard to prevent.
Personally, I would have preferred to take my chances with a timeline in which Iran gets a nuke earlier but also does not have a history of Israel and the US bombing the shit out of them for a few decades to delay their nuclear program, and hope that both sides would be rational enough to play cold war like responsible adults.
With Trump in charge, your guess is as good as mine.
Generally speaking, I think that China is unlikely to start a war in a theater it can not win, and I do not see them winning a naval war in the ME against the US (though I am also not very well informed on relative naval capabilities).
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