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The Democratic Party is working hard to give MAGA the mid-terms despite everything.
Apparently, the resolution failed by two votes. However, my understanding is that this would have been largely symbolic, as a bill would require both the House and the Senate to vote in its favor, and actually require 2/3 majorities to override the presidential veto which can be taken as granted.
Strategically speaking, preventing Trump from continuing his war seems like a classic case of interrupting your opponent while he is making a mistake. It seems clear that MAGA is searching for an off-ramp whose taking they can sell as a win. But the next best thing to a win is a scapegoat. If Congress stops Trump from bombing Iran, Trump will surely claim that his strategy was going great and Iran was just about to surrender unconditionally when he was stabbed in the back by the radical leftists. Half the country will end up believing that sure, Trump's war raised the gas prices for a while but it was the Democrats who made sure it was all for nothing.
From the perspective of the Democrats, MAGA should obviously be a much larger threat to the US than even a nuclear armed Iran. Who knows how many lives a pandemic managed by RFK Jr would claim, or what blunders Trump might commit while conducting (or failing to conduct) a war over vital interests of the US through social media? By contrast, the damage Iran is likely to do seems limited, even if they take tolls for passage that would not a much of a threat to the US, plenty of countries with questionable regimes have nukes.
Obviously the Democrats would not want Trump to earn a triumph for his war, but I doubt that there is much chance of that. The most powerful person in Iran had his father and his wife killed by US strikes and also adheres to the same religion as Hamas does. I seriously doubt that he will be willing to make large concessions to the US.
This again? Maybe you haven’t been following the news? The blockade is working, oil tanker traffic in the strait is up, Iran might be coming to the table. Oil tankers are coming to the US to refuel. Trump is hosting talks between Israel and Lebanon. America announced a new partnership with Indonesia which will give America control over the strait of Malacca. We now control Venezuela, Panama, Hormuz, Taiwan, Malacca. America controls not a majority of the important sources of global energy, and the chokepoints through which that energy is traded.
Maybe Trump and Hegseth had a plan after all?
The idea was that, even though America destroyed Iran’s military and military-industrial base, Iran was winning because they controlled the Strait of Hormuz. Not anymore! We took that back in an afternoon. We always could have. Because America has total dominance over Iran, because we won. The delay was not some kind of epic American failure but the natural ebb and flow when negotiating terms, working out deals, testing military alliances and technologies etc. (America is not happy that Europe denied us use of our bases — and refused to condemn Iranian terrorism.)
However I do see that the Iranian Consulate in Hyderabad got 116K likes on a tweet saying America can’t block Iran when Iran blocked us first. And I have to admit that one of the Iranian LEGO AI Trump-Hegseth “Epstein Fury” rap videos is pretty catchy and has been stuck in my head all week. Call it a tie?
Basically, Trump is rearranging the whole global order on America’s terms. Of course Democrats would want to be stop that. It would be good for them if they could. The idea that it would be bad for them is some kind of reverse jiu-jitsu that requires the war actually be going so badly for Trump that they would be saving him. I don’t know that it adds anything at this point for me to say that l obviously, if you believe that, I disagree. But just as obviously Trump launched a war that is deeply divisive with his base and relatively unpopular domestically and even at this great point of vulnerability Democrats can’t stop him. So I don’t think it’s a convincing use of power for the Dems. Their best hope is that the negotiations with Iran drag out for months and the blockades last a while and oil stays closer to $5 a gallon. Which is always possible. But it’s probably a bad idea for them to rest on their laurels and hope that Trump’s sign of timing suddenly fails him right before the midterms.
You mean Khomeini Jr.? The puppet? They literally inaugurated a cardboard cutout because he couldn’t be seen in public.
These 2 statements are contradictory.
No serious analyst claimed Iran controlled Hormuz directly, as if they had an armada guarding it or something. The point was always that they could block it through threats and asymmetric action, which they clearly did, and the US has thus far been unable to rectify.
At any day Iran might come to the negotiating table, but this war has been full of fits and starts and so I wouldn't trust any "public statements" from either side until they've been put into practice for several days at the very least.
The only thing Trump has done has been to unite the world against the US. He's shown the world the US military is strong tactically, but is still woefully deficient in terms of long-term strategy due to a number of factors -- exceptionally low pain tolerance, overstretch, insufficient missile stocks for long campaigns, political winds shifting, etc.
The blockade is against traffic to Iranian ports and (more recently) against sanctioned tankers. Not against unsanctioned tankers using the strait to visit non-Iranian ports.
OK sure.
What are you even saying here? You agree, you disagree, you want to argue but don't have an argument, you just want to express snarky disdain, you understand and acknowledge the point? This is why we have a rule against low-effort posting. It's annoying and contributes nothing.
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