Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
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How is that relevant?
First you have to suppose that the disruptive threats are still possible in an actual war. Iran will not be able to manage the resupply required to keep things going very long if the country falls apart. An army requires logistics which is why attacking logistics is the first job of any military. We aren't really doing that now. If the Iranians have to choose between feeding and watering their population or warfare then the war won't last long, you'd get some insurgency afterwards but the organized military response would be over very quickly.
That also presupposes we care. Most of the negative impact seems to be on the gulf states, who are enemies if you'd ask the average American for most of the last 50 years. Suddenly lots of people think Saudi Arabia is an ally and while that's true to some extent it's certainly a wild swing for both the left and the right.
Outside of the gulf states it's the Europeans who are refusing to help with the problem, that's pretty easy not to care about, and again you can shut down the gulf disruption pretty fast by just tanking the country.
Of course nobody wants to leave millions of Iranian starving and homeless, and nobody wants to turn the entire country into a misery factory or something that requires an occupation for another couple of decades.
That doesn't mean we can't.
It's relevant because American power projection and global export economy relies on other countries preferring to have you as patron vs. the alternatives. If the choice for Iran is genocide and America running their country vs. letting China come in and run some chunks of their country, which do you think they're going to pick? And what are you going to do when making Iran play nice involves bombing Chinese citizens and tripwire forces?
Likewise the Gulf States. They don't like each other much and America has been pretty good at keeping things stable and paying for oil - far from perfect, but good. When it's a case of "any American President may genocide us because half the electorate considers us enemies", guess how fast they will seek a new Patron? And guess how fast they will seek nuclear weapons?
America has up until now made the calculation that one uppity little regional power that is fairly isolated is much better than big groups of regional powers who agree on little else except the need to have tripwire alliances and patrons to guard against the US, and are happy to pay for it with resources that America's global adversaries want.
TLDR: America's foreign policy has always been founded on putting together lots of NATOs that allow it to project influence, and to avoid becoming the target of NATOs owned by other superpowers. That means being careful how you escalate.
All that is an argument for "should" I jumped into this to make a point about "can."
I've seen a lot of people misunderstanding the situation about "can" (in part because making this unclear is in all likelihood an organized part of our adversaries propaganda efforts).
The Iranians are smart and clever and have a good plan and are winning or losing the political war depending on who you talk to. They lost the war war so bad it's not even funny.
This isn't a bad trade for them if they get what they wanted/out unscathed, but it's still happening.
And it's important that people understand it's happening because if you don't you'll miss how the ethics of conflict are being defined and the role of propaganda in shaping policy and mood.
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