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France and Germany did not join the US in Iraq, so the US ability to dictate to its allies is at least somewhat limited. They aren't obligated to join everything the US decides to do.
Yes, the US got away with smashing a sovereign nation with no criminal charges or serious reprisals. But:
I'd have thought we'd be clear on this after this whole mess. Yes, the US doesn't have to go with its allies into Iran. Yes, the US can just kill a leader of a formidable nation and Trump will likely retire to golf in peace. What did you achieve though?
We basically won the war so we won’t agree. Their leaders are dead. All aims were not achieved like complete regime change but the reason we failed at that is primarily domestic US politics and an unwillingness to cause a lot of Iranian civilian deaths.
Whether the War was worth it is a much different question than whether the US is in charge.
How America chooses to cope is irrelevant. It's especially irrelevant because, for all of the talk that the US would see red bro and just crush if it really wanted to, the supposed wildcard President backed down. You can't even blame it on the effeteness of some Obama-style figure drunk on dreams of liberal internationalism. This is the most vocally ruthless Presidency in a while, that ran around threatening to wipe out their entire civilization and...what happened?
Maybe don't start wars you can't win without massive casualties you're not willing to inflict? Especially don't threaten it if you won't go through.
In any case, I don't see how this isn't a loss. The strait isn't open. The IRGC is still functional enough that the US has to negotiate with it to open it. The US is apparently going to have to pay danegeld and Trump has downplayed disarming them. Iran just now suspended talks again and is working (successfully) to drive a wedge between the US and Israel*
The reason regime change was such a central pillar of the thinking (not some sort of stretch goal) was that it was the only path anyone could see to stopping Iran's nuclear ambitions decisively. That failed.
* Regardless of how one feels about Israel, your enemy being able to do this to you is a sign of weakness.
People like you make me want to just kill every Palestinian and Iranian to prove a point we won because we can.
Iranian Nukes are pushed back a decade minimum. We can bomb then again in the future because easily because their air defenses don’t exists anymore. Their conventional military is degraded.
You are setting the win conditions to Iranian statehood or turned into glass. We don’t want that.
Yes, but people like you make me want to defect to China. Going full psycho is not just another move you can pull out of your repertoire like you're playing blackjack and deciding whether to hit or stay. When you are in protracted legal wrangling over a breach of patent costing 10m USD, the reason you don't just pull out a gun and waste the judge, plaintiff and opposing council isn't because it won't work, it's because making it clear that you are a psycho with no switches except 'kill' and 'don't kill' acts as a strong signal to everyone else that they need to drop everything and focus on killing you now.
Case in point: all of Israel's former allies now loathe them. To the extent that there is any support for Israel remaining, it is that senior politicians manage to temporarily squeeze it out whilst avoiding increasingly bipartisan pressure from all the up-and-coming politicians. Whatever the provocation, going straight to 'kill everyone' is not a good move unless you are obviously so desperate that there is no other choice. America is very clearly not in that position.
Was there any way that Israel could have realistically fought Hamas without their former allies loathing them? They could have done better, but it would have still been enough that they'd be loathed, IMO.
They were doing fine, prior to Oct 7th. Hamas did what they did precisely because they were losing ground; Arab countries were normalising relations. What they should have done - and it's not perfect, and it would have been very hard - is put back up the fence, gritted their teeth, and carried on the way they were going.
I can't think of a nation that has reacted that way to this sort of thing.
It's not just psychologically impossible for the populace to absorb, it's just a bad part of the world to be seen as weak. The minute it happened the people who supported Hamas were emboldened. In the West protests started immediately.
Netanyahu and co. just gambled they could contain Hamas easily and lost. Once the attack happened it was just functionally impossible to not react and no reaction would have been good.
Whether or not how Israel waged the war was wise or whether it could do better I don't know. The enemy gets a say too and I think it's telling that the best we can come up with here to avoid the consequences is "turn the other cheek". I don't think that particular Jew is in charge.
Israel’s enemies would certainly have been emboldened, but Israel’s friends would have been (and were) emboldened too. When you get right down to it, a fence is a fence. Oct 7th was an Israeli cock-up as much as it was a Hamas triumph and I honestly don’t think Israel had much to fear if they had just stopped sending their reservists home for the holidays.
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