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Why is Peter Thiel Moving to Argentina?
Some Irresponsible Speculation
Billionaire Investor and ideologue Peter Thiel has publicly announced that he is moving to Argentina. Among a grab bag of explanations that included nuclear war and AI risk, along with the obvious implications of the California wealth tax on his residency, Thiel reportedly was concerned about the political direction of the United States. Given Thiel's ties to much of the American political right, what does this tell us? What should our Bayesian update be from this information?
Some possibilities:
-- Get the obvious out of the way: Nothing ever happens. This is a non-event, Thiel is moving for publicity or tax reasons, and the announcements are just him engaging in punditry.
-- Alternatively, none of this may indicate anything because Thiel himself might be stupid/mistaken/prejudiced/insane.
-- Thiel is in deep with MAGA, but thinks that the wind is changing direction, the MAGA project has failed, and he doesn't want to be left holding the bag in America when the left comes back into power. This seems like a sub implication of the action even if he doesn't believe it, because his very act of fleeing and blaming the political climate will tend to reinforce the idea that MAGA has failed and increase the odds of it failing.
-- Alternatively, Thiel thinks MAGA will be triumphant, but Thiel is on the outs with The Donald, and he is concerned about being targeted after Trump turns on him. Moving to Argentina is an attempt to hedge risk.
-- Thiel is a true believer in the Argentine project, and thinks Millei-ism will succeed beyond all our wildest dreams.
It feels like something big for Thiel, who is intelligent and well informed if perhaps nuts, to make this move and publicly announce it is motivated by the state of the union.
It doesn't take a Thiel-tier political genius to see that 'starting a guaranteed-loss war with Iran' will greatly damage Trump and perceived Trump allies.
Fuel prices were very damaging to the Biden administration. Humiliation/botched withdrawal in Afghanistan was pretty damaging. Amp both factors up considerably, what does that do to Trump?
Can't keep draining the SPR forever, can't keep manipulating markets with announcements forever. How can Trump survive midterms if there is a fuel crisis? There will be a fuel crisis by September unless Iran opens the straits. How can Trump survive midterms if he makes objectively humiliating concessions to Iran, who is not exactly beloved by Republican voters? They've been told that the war has been won about a dozen times by now, so a humiliating defeat is not going to go down well.
There can't be an 'Only Trump could go to Iran' moment like Nixon, not after a surprise attack Trump started. Few consider world-historically deft diplomacy to be a Trump strength either.
Thiel is to the left as Soros is to the far-right, they hate him a lot. But the left actually goes after enemies with institutional power.
Now I predict someone is going to come and suggest a military breakthrough will rescue the day for Trump and America. But what military breakthrough can there be? If there are amazing anti-drone weapons or other wonderweapons, why haven't they been used already? Or used against the Houthis earlier? If the straits can be secured, why haven't they been secured already? If there is ongoing work to degrade Iranian capabilities that will soon show fruits, why has the US been so quick to look for a diplomatic solution, why accept a partial truce that logically enables Iran to regroup and prepare for further fighting? If the blockade was going to degrade Iranian oil infrastructure why hasn't this happened already or when Iran lowered oil production in 2020? If Iran were to be more aggressively bombed, how would this prevent Iran destroying more oil infrastructure and heightening the fuel crisis?
US can end the Iran War in 36 hours if we wanted to. We choose not to because of stupid liberal war ethics. And that’s without using nukes. A few key hits on infrastructure and Iran surrenders.
OK but then Iran would retaliate by razing oil infrastructure across the Middle East. And so Trump would be considered a Bibi-tier war criminal and also ensure very high oil prices, probably a recession.
That's not a victory! Wars are fought to achieve political goals, not just to blow things up.
How would Americans feel if Russia or China attacked key electrical and water infrastructure? How would Americans feel if a great power launched a sneak attack across their whole country? Would they cuck out like pussies or hit back hard? Iran isn't a country of pussies. They didn't give up after taking considerable casualties against Saddam Hussein (not known for liberal war ethics), they kicked him out of Iran and tried to conquer Iraq, only to get bogged down after years of bloody fighting. That was when they were at their weakest and Saddam was supported by both superpowers, Iran was very determined and tolerant of suffering in that war.
They didn't give up when Saddam terror bombed them, they're not gonna give up to US terror bombing.
To beat Iran there would need to be a full scale multi-million man ground invasion or large-scale nuclear attack, which is just not on the cards.
Though Iran already maxed their ability to hit other countries oil infrastructure. Yes sure a lot of these conversations are just discussing who is holding back military capabilities. The US is 100% avoiding Iranian infrastructure attacks. Iran has hit some oil infrastructure.
I have no idea the reference to Bibi or War crimes. We live in different news source worlds. Seems like a good guy to me.
Lots of normies think Netanyahu is a war criminal and so does the ICC. Obviously the biggest crime a leader can commit is losing the war, that's the key issue. Kill lots of people and win - statesmanlike, to be emulated, FDR and Churchill. Kill lots of people and lose - infamous, hated like Nixon.
I don't think that Iran has maxxed out their abilities, if they wanted to destroy the Saudi pipeline to the Red Sea they could, they've demonstrated the ability to hit it. If they can hit US bases and Israel, presumably they can also hit oil facilities.
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Yes, 36 hours. A few well-placed hits, and they surrender. They're just not realizing how they're outmatched, they think the US is bluffing, the "whole civilization will die tonight" stuff was a joke, but no, it's totally serious. If only liberals weren't in the way…
Sure.
It is edifying to reread the posts around the start of the war, when it was actually measured in hours. I suggest this one. I'll even quote it in full, it's so amazing.
Anyone ready for Colombia? Mexico? Somalia? Cambodia? Salivating at the thought of more hyperpower dominance?
Sarcasm is unbecoming.
It’s possible to build a good post around a rhetorical turn, but when the rest of your comment consists of quotes, you need to speak plainly.
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For some reason the warmongers can get it wrong literally every time but they never lose their confidence in predicting how easy the next war will be
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That strikes me as wishful thinking. Neither Iraq nor Afghanistan surrendered, they had to be taken, and each of them took more than 36 hours, as would Iran, due to their geography and population, if nothing else.
I am specifically saying “Not if you do war crimes”. We clearly can’t do regime change etc with just air strikes on military targets. But we do have the ability to bomb basically anything in the country. We can nearly completely cut power/water in Iran.
The regime will shoot protestors to maintain power. If we credibly threatened civilian infrastructure and it became topple the regime or die I think we could succeed.
You said you can "end the Iran War", how do you propose cutting power, and ruining their infrastructure will do that? They have stockpiles, underground bases, and a fanatically devoted military. They'll keep shooting at ships until you mop them all up. I'm not saying you're unable to do that, but thinking you can do that in 36 hours is delusional.
How well can a modern army operate without electricity? Can you make drones in the dark? Do starving populations riot for regime change? Do starving soldiers still fight?
There are good reasons to not do things that lead to a large loss of civilian human life. But let’s not act like it wouldn’t be effective.
They can't even get the Palestinians to riot for regime change, and compared to Iran that's shooting fish in a barrel (the barrel being Gaza).
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No, but you can store them.
Who cares? Are they going to stop you from shooting at ships from your secret underground bases?
Who says they're starving?
“Can store them” - eventually run out.
if you don’t control your own country and hinterland then the underground missile launch points you propose eventually run out of supplies
“who says their starving” That is why you take out civilian infrastructure. Cut electricity, power, key bridges and suddenly your farms don’t have irrigation and the food disappears.
So all you did was ignore the entire point I made of taking out civilian infrastructure. You just ignored it. You didn’t even counter that it would fail for x,y,z reason. Which it may.
How long would America last if a country had air superiority and bombed every power plant and oil refinery?
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Saddam Hussein fired chemical weapons directly into Iranian cities and killed hundreds of thousands of people yet the Iranians kept fighting for years in the hope that they could seize some territory in compensation.
It seems pretty doubtful that blowing up some civilian infrastructure would achieve much of anything
Grok say this never happened. And from what I know about the US military they tend to find chemical weapons as not effective but I’m no expert.
My point wasn't that chemical weapons are effective, it's that Saddam was willing to cross all moral red lines against the Iranians and it didn't work. Where is the evidence that your strategy works?
Perhaps you should think and research with your own brain instead of replacing it with a machine
Dude. You 100% used a machine to research whatever you said occurred in Iran. You used either Wikipedia, Google, or maybe some podcast bro. AI can just scan more data points than google.
You didn’t go to Iran and interview villagers and do soil samples.
FWIW chemical weapons have never been effective in war. History is filled with stories of high civilian casualties and destroying civilian infrastructure led to victory. Roman salted the earth. Mongols slaughtered entire towns who fought to well so other towns would just agree to be slaves. America carpet bombed Europe and nuked Japan. Sherman marched thru Georgia.
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Wikipedia indicates a few tens of thousands of civilian injuries from Iraqi chemical weapons, some Iranian and some Kurdish in an Iraqi city recently captured by Iran.
Just to be clear you quoted sources that indicated “0” recorded instances of Iranian civilian deaths.
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Not some civilian infra, it would need to be nearly all of it. Full shutdown of roads, industry, oil, etc. Any building that makes other things. If production is mixed into residential then the residential has to be hit too to hit the production.
This would of course be a genocide but if nobody can move an inch without being cluster bombed with artillery surely Iran would collapse if only to starvation and looting. The strait would probably be open in this case.
Trump hesitates because he fears the inevitable war crimes tribunal this would cause from democrats. He is not confident republicans can hold the executive for the remainder of his lifespan, or that some other republican president would throw him under the bus in an act of bipartisan goodwill.
The US doesn't have the sortie rate to do this. US aircraft already fired off the bulk of their standoff arsenal and achieved nothing of great significance.
The necessary munitions do not exist, nor do safe airbases to launch such a demanding operation.
Iran is much less vulnerable than the Gulf Arabs in a war of food and water, their retaliation would smash US regional allies and severely hurt Israel, who is also desal dependent.
There is no path to victory for America here.
Ah, well if that's the case then Trump and the US are truely done for unless ground troops are mobilized. There's no way the IRGC will settle for anything less than full nuclearization and financial reparations for the damage they suffered otherwise.
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Why? Has everybody forgotten that partisan / guerrilla warfare exists?
Partisans can exist only within a living civilian population. Guerrillas can't exist for very long without civilian support.
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Both sides want ships to pass through while neither side wants a deal that the other can accept. In the last 24 hours 11 ships have transited. Other fuels have gone through saudi arabia to the red sea. Iranians are trading at record rates through the caspian sea, pakistan and through central asia. Iraq has a land boarder with Turkey.
The doomsday scenario is overblown. We are not going to see a mass collapse of the economy after oil spikes to 250 dollars. What we will get is a dragged out forever war that is going to drain the US navy causing years of maintenance backlog while keeping oil at 100+ dollars per barrel and inflation a few percent higher than projected with meagre economic growth. Trump is stuck, and the war isn't going to end due to a shock. The US is going to go woke again because Trump decided the middle east was more important than the US.
This is optimistic. Land borders are irrelevant, the Caspian is irrelevant: because we're talking multi million barrels per day, the only thing that matters is existing pipeline capacity, available short term. And there's really only three pipelines in the area that matter: the Saudi East-West pipeline to the Red Sea, the Abu Dhabi Crude Oil Pipeline to Oman, and the Iraq-Turkey pipeline to the Med. Their max capacities are around 7 million barrels per day, 1.5 mb/d and 1 mb/d, respectively. But they all already carried fuel before Hormuz was closed (albeit not at full capacity), so if you want these pipelines to substitute for crude carriers through the strait, you might get an additional 4 mb/d through them, 7 mb/d if you're lucky (that requires the Saudi to do some real magic to their pumping stations, and you need to unfuck the political trouble between Iraq and Turkey that prevents them from using that pipeline - and even then, it doesn't even connect to Iraq's major oil fields in the South).
That leaves the global market short 13 mb/d, -13% in total. And that's a major oil crisis, almost double the shortfall of the Arab oil embargo of '73, which quadrupled oil prices. Once the strategic reserves run dry, the oil price is going to do violent things.
And then there's, of course, the matter that pipelines are extremely large, effectively impossible to protect and thus really easy to bomb with drones.
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