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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   17121 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 15, 2026

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The MOU Homesick Blues

Over the last two days, Donald Trump and JD Vance have been selling their embryonic Iran Deal to the American public and to the world. Trump has said, among other things:

  • Hamas is behaving very well these days.
  • Iran should have missiles. Why not?
  • We're going to unfreeze Iran's money. It's their money. Why should we steal their money?
  • If the war kept going there would have been an economic catastrophe. So we had to end it.
  • Some of the guys in the Islamic regime are really nice.
  • If Iran didn't open the Strait of Hormuz our oil reserves would have run out in 4 weeks. We had to make a deal.
  • Netanyahu is crazy. They keep killing innocent civilians. He needs to be more responsible.
  • Without me and America, Israel wouldn't exist.

Directly he states:

“The alternative to this deal was a global recession. There are stupid people who want to see a global recession. They are just stupid people. The Strait of Hormuz would never have been opened."

Along with this banger

“I think [Israel] could do better … I'm not saying they shouldn't protect themselves. I'm saying when two drones are shot into the desert and drop harmlessly, you don't have to knock down buildings in Beirut. They could behave better…”

JD has said:

“If I was in the cabinet of the Israeli government, I might not be attacking the only powerful ally that I have left. 2/3 of the defensive weapons that have protected your homeland have been built by American hands and paid for by American tax dollars. The problem for Israel is not Donald J. Trump, and anybody in Israel who thinks their biggest problem is the President of the United States needs to wake up and smell the reality of the situation that country is in”

"Do I think there are people within Israeli society who would like to turn Iran into Libya, basically a failed state with 90 million people? Probably."

"What is your exact proposal? You’re a country of 9 million people. You can’t just kill your way out of solving every single national security problem that you have."

Israeli ministers have been striking out against the deal

For every tear of an Israeli mother, a thousand Lebanese mothers must weep. All of Lebanon must burn! With all due respect to the Americans, Israel must make it clear to the entire world that the blood of our sons and the security of our citizens are not forfeit. All of Lebanon must burn. Our supreme duty is to protect the citizens of Israel and the soldiers of the IDF, and this commitment takes precedence over every other consideration. I told the Prime Minister, even in our private meetings: For every tear of an Israeli mother, a thousand Lebanese mothers must weep. Enough with the ping-pong. In the Middle East, you don’t win with measured responses and restraint—you need to go berserk. To obliterate. To crush the terror.

The entire first line of Lebanese villages has been destroyed. We are destroying all the houses. The residents will never see them standing before their eyes again.

Now reports are coming in that Israel does not consider itself bound by the MOU, and intends to keep bombing Lebanon without reference to it.

The IRGC has stated today:

“Since Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon, the complete lifting of the naval blockade, and the withdrawal of American terrorist forces from the Persian Gulf and the region are among the main conditions of the agreement between Iran and the United States. The Strait of Hormuz will remain closed until these conditions are met. All ships are requested, for the sake of their security and safety, not to approach the Strait of Hormuz. Any vessel that defies this directive will be targeted.”

With the United States executive committed to the MOU, and Israel committed to the opposite policy, Yeshiva World News reports:

Israeli officials told Maariv that Trump’s demands are not merely theoretical and that issues concerning Lebanon, Syria, and the Syrian Hermon were raised in recent discussions with Netanyahu, adding that the prime minister made it clear that Israel will not agree to withdrawing from its security positions in the north. A senior Israeli official told Reuters that Israel is carrying out “stubborn negotiations” with the US on maintaining its military presence in southern Lebanon and has no intention of backing down. The officials warned that the messages coming from Washington are no longer limited to difficult discussions. The US is signaling that if Israel continues to insist on its position, it will consider practical measures, ranging from delays in weapons shipments to restrictions on operational assistance, and even more severe steps that could potentially amount to a de facto arms embargo.

So, what now?

How does the USA navigate this problem with its erstwhile ally?

Part of me feels very strongly, the patriotic Toby Keith, regardless of your feelings about US policy or about this administration, that we can't have our president get cucked like that on the world stage. Trump has publicly signed, endorsed, justified, sold the MOU. He's stated clearly that it is necessary to the interests of the United States in maintaining the global economy. If Israel is our ally, our greatest ally, then they can't be allowed to do this to us. They can't insult and undermine the clear foreign policy of the POTUS and be allowed to do so. From the beginning I've said that Israeli forces, inasmuch as they are allied to the USA, should be under the command of an American general, Spartan style. They can't be allowed to go against us and continue to suck off the teat of the American taxpayer.

So plan trusters, antisemities, pro-Palestinians, shitlibs, anyone. Where do we go from here with Israel? What happens next? How can you, as the American President, allow your ally to undermine your own clearly stated foreign policy goals and, in your own opinion, wreck the world economy? At this point in the process what pressure can even be put on Iran?

This feels bad.

In the long term, I increasingly feel that the only hope for Israel is that whoever first invents and controls ASI (Amodei, Altman, maybe Brin and Page) takes pity on their co-ethnics and/or purported homeland.

Otherwise the geopolitical situation is bad, the demographics are bad, the reputation is bad. Israel was a fool’s errand. You can’t stand against two billion Muslims forever, especially as they stream into Western lands in ever higher numbers and grow to be politically prominent there, too. As Scott has said so many times, only a small number of people have to really care about an issue to get their way if most people don’t care about it, and Muslims care about Palestine as much as Jews care about Israel and are far more numerous. The Iranian state succeeded in its central ideological mission of making Palestine the central, primary ideological cause (by far) of two billion people, 25% of the world’s population. No cunning, no chutzpah, no number of places on the Forbes billionaires list can stand up to that.

The only possibility was gambling that the easy prosperity and trade ties that had persuaded the Gulf Arabs into reducing their hostility could be replicated in an Iran in which the revolutionary regime was defeated, and that possibly as a consequence over many decades hostility toward Israel could be reduced. The Mossad judged that, after the recent widespread protests, a killing blow to the ayatollah and IRGC and cabinet elite, plus using Claude and image recognition to dynamically identify and track police stations, local pro-regime militiamen and troop movements and strike them with air superiority, would bring the people back to the streets in a way the government could not crush. That gamble clearly failed. The highest risk tolerance protestors were already arrested or killed. The rest stayed home. The Iranian middle class are simply too comfortable to rebel in a way that threatens, for most of them, their lives. Most of us would do what they did, which is nothing.

What more is there to say? The decline may be fast or slow, maybe both. You can’t hold out against the world forever, surrounded by enemies.

The Iranian state succeeded in its central ideological mission of making Palestine the central, primary ideological cause (by far) of two billion people, 25% of the world’s population.

This is like one of those weird fantasy-movie retcons where the new villain introduced in the sequel is suddenly found to have been the biggest villain all along behind all the bad things that happened. Israel was the primarily villain in the Muslim world for three decades before Khomenei appeared on the scene, Israel had already fought several wars against a varied lineup of Arab muslim enemies. If anything, Iran's obsession with Israel is an effort to post up off the pre-existing Islamist hatred for Israel to climb the Jihadist power-rankings. Which, Iran will be top of the table for the foreseeable future.

The highest risk tolerance protestors were already arrested or killed. The rest stayed home.

I see this statement all the time and it strikes me as so odd; the much more likely explanation is that people don't like when other countries bomb their homeland and react negatively to the people doing the bombing, regardless of their feelings about the government of their homeland. This has been proven over and over and over again. If the US and Israel were relying on a strategy where the People Rise Up, they first needed to demonstrate that they cared about the Iranian people. They mostly demonstrated the opposite. Iranian dissidents found themselves caught between a regime that hates them, and outsiders who hate them.

They mostly demonstrated the opposite. Iranian dissidents found themselves caught between a regime that hates them, and outsiders who hate them.

I would rather say that "outsiders who don't care enough to support, or even know them". I know of at least one famous Russian political dissident, Alexei Navalny. For Iranians, I can only think of a film director.

This is like one of those weird fantasy-movie retcons where the new villain introduced in the sequel is suddenly found to have been the biggest villain all along behind all the bad things that happened. Israel was the primarily villain in the Muslim world for three decades before Khomenei appeared on the scene, Israel had already fought several wars against a varied lineup of Arab muslim enemies.

There was no suggestion that Khomenei invented Muslim anti-zionism. But the transition from secular Arab Nationalism of the PLO and Nasser to anti-zionism with a more explicitly Islamist character - both inside and beyond Palestine - coincides almost perfectly with an expansionary (Sunni) Islamist identity, spread in grand irony from the gulf, that radically reshapes the Muslim world, as Naipaul so adeptly chronicles. That ideology completely changed Islamic identity in Muslim states more populous and in some cases more important than much of the actual Arab heartland. Indonesia, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Muslims in India, in the Philippines, in West and East Africa. Regions of increasing strategic importance to the United States. Regions where Muslims care much more about Palestine today than they did in 1955.

It was in that context that the Islamic Revolution tried to take that mantle from the Sunnis.

Considering how iran's islamic revolution champions the palestinians and advertises themselves as a literal defender of the greater islamic faith, I fail to understand why israel has not deployed expeditionary IDF corps to root out the IRGC while they were already blockaded. This should be a existential conflict for israel in the long term, Trump would probably continue air support if israel provided ground troops and a reasonable path to victory.

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