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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   8611 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 1, 2026

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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.

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.

Are we in a new age of hyperpower?

OK, this war in Iran is only 2 days old, and as we all know "truth is the first casualty of war." So this is very much a hot take, and we'll need a lot more time and thoughtful analysis to see how this plays out.

But right now, as an American watching the news, I'm feeling a bit drunk on national power. I can only imagine how Trump and other leaders must be feeling, let alone the actual soldiers who drop the bombs. Already this year we've fought and- it seems- won two wars! The first one with absolutely no losses, and this one also seems quite low casualty. This was done purely with American military (and help from Israel), no NATO help necessary. Iran has spent the last 40 years building up a gigantic military, and now it all just looks like an absolute joke. All their leadership is dead within the first day, and the US has massive air superiority over most of the country. It's now basically just a choice of what targets we want to bomb.

I took this chance to go check back in on Venezuela. I couldn't find many good sources there, but so far it seems... basically fine? There's no civil war or hardline Maduro loyalists fighting to the death. The new president has taken over with basically no issues, and she seems to be cooperating quite well with the US. Lots of Venezuelans are happy that this happened. Of course there are still many problems with the country, but it's fair to chalk that war up as a win.

But what about China? We're supposed to be in a new "multipolar" age, right? The US can't just go throwing its weight around wherever it wants because there are other powers to stop us. Iran was heavily involved in selling oil to China, and was a military ally of them through the Shanghai Cooperative Organization. Well, so far all China has done is say mean things about us. They can't even say it openly, they have to do it in phone calls to Russia. So apparently they're not much of a counter at all.

I think we've reached a tipping point where US air power just crushes all of its adversaries with no counter. It's not any one weapon, but a combination of factors- more satellites, better human intelligence, more stealth aircraft, better radar, more JDAMs and stand off munitions, cyberattacks, and now AI to help us identify targets. The US can completely devastate most countries, even large ones like Iran, without putting a single boot on the ground, unless we want to send special forces to arrest someone like we did to Maduro. And we've got 100 next-gen stealth bombers currently in production, plus... whatever the hell the F47 next-gen fighter can do, so I expect this dominance to increase over the next decade.

But what about nukes? Soviet nukes held the US in check throughout the cold war, surely those also put a break on US imperial ambitions? Well, to some extent they still do, but the US has made some very impressive progress in missile defense lately. THAAD is now hitting its targets with an impressively high success rate, and was recently used to help defend Israel against Iran's missile barage. The main limiting factor there is just building more interceptors, and Trump is pushing for massive funding there as part of his Golden Dome project. That also opens up some intriguing options in space- and, oh hey, would you look at that, the US also has SpaceX utterly dominating LEO launch, and it will likely get even more dominant there if/when Starship becomes practical. Meanwhile China has a relatively small nuclear arsenal, and Russia's is just leftover Soviet junk that might not even work anymore. I think we are rapidly reaching a point where the US has overwhelming nuclear dominance.

The question then becomes- what do we do with this power? Trump used to always preach the merits of isolationism, and he made a big splash early in the Republican primary by being the only candidate who strongly denounced the Iraq war. He clashed heavily with Marco Rubio over that issue. But now he has Rubio as his Secretary of State, and he seems to have rapidly "evolved" to favor military interventions. But, being Trump, he still makes speeches about "taking Venezuela's oil" and other me-first boasting. So far no such boasts about Iran, but I can only assume there will be some.

My guess? He keeps doing this. Cuba is an obvious target, they're pretty much falling apart already. Next would be Panama, where he always talked about wanting the Canal back. After that... I have no idea. Colombia? Mexico? Somalia? Cambodia? He could potentially attack all of those places, if each one is as fast and decisive as this current Iran war seems. I... don't think Trump would actually invade Greenland, or attack China, but... who can say? If he chose to do those things, who could stop him?

Anyone ready for Colombia? Mexico? Somalia? Cambodia? Salivating at the thought of more hyperpower dominance?

Was Operation Rough Rider a great demonstration of American invincibility too? They brought in multiple carrier groups, bombed Yemen endlessly and assassinated plenty of Houthi leaders even up to the Houthi Prime Minister but the Houthi missile/drone capabilities were basically untouched and Trump effectively gave up after a month when stockpiles started running low.

So if this goes the same way and Iran is still firing missiles and drones a month at every country hosting American military assets, shutting down the Strait of Hormuz and possibly obliterating all of the soft oil infrastructure between the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea would you still consider it to be a great victory for Trump?

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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