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US carries out fresh strikes against Iran after tanker struck in Hormuz, escalating hostilities
So how about that ceasefire? Despite proclamations that we had it sorted out this time, definitely for real, things are popping off in the Gulf again. Yesterday, Iran struck a tanker that wasn't abiding by their prescribed route through the Strait of Hormuz, and today the US struck at targets in Iran in retaliation (Trump also once again promised to destroy Iran in a threatening Truth).
Unclear if we're still giving them $300b.
Iran's strength is worrying, IMO. They hold the strongest hand of cards. We won't get any accurate information on the damage done (aided by Russian satellites) to US bases and forces, but I suspect it's significant, given how unafraid and bold Iran has seemed lately.
I think conceptualizing the situation as Iran being strong is the way to think about it, holding the best hand is much better, but mixing up these two confuses some things.
Iran is a homeless man with a gun outside of a guy's office building. Threatening? Sure. But it is a homeless man with a gun. The man in the office can go buy some body-armor and a shotgun, he can hire some thugs to beat the guy up, and so on. He doesn't because he's worried about inconvenience and cost and other people in the building bitching at him.
Iran's calculus as it has been for the last several decades is to find a way to ride the annoying line and not trigger an actual response. Yes they can be a physical threat (especially with Russian and Chinese intelligence) but fundamentally they continue to only exist because the U.S. cares about civilian casualties what happens afterwards, nagging third parties.
As a politically entity the U.S. can be defeated and that's the goal, but it is a mistake to lose track of the force disparity.
Appealing to some theoretical maximum effort is irrelevant - if you are not willing to endure the pain and costs necessary to achieve victory, then you are not able to achieve victory.
This has been a perennial failure of the US' post-CW cabinet wars, where the US government has repeatedly half-assed military endeavors out of a combination of blithe faith in its conventional supremacy to quickly secure victory and an unwillingness/inability to convince the general public to support military action on a scale necessary to succeed. The current war with Iran is perhaps the apotheosis of this: the administration clearly expected the Iranian government to be overawed (or perhaps simply collapse) in the face of sheer US strike dominance, and didn't give any question to thoughts like "what if this country of 90m people, led by religious fanatics, doesn't immediately surrender" and "is there some asymmetry of effort that might partially offset the massive disparity in capabilities"? Even in operations like Iraq and Afghanistan, we were still half-assing it, because while we put in more effort in absolute terms, we still acted like these were fundamentally sideshows, not major national endeavors requiring sacrifice and commitment from the citizenry.
The trouble is that this kind of failure will keep happening because it never really blows back hard on the US. The US can just walk away from the fallout and a certain kind of tough guy can tell themselves "we totally could have fucked them up if we wanted, plus look at our KDR." Not helped by the fact that there is a cult of brutality that holds the core problem with US military operations is that we aren't reckless and bloodthirsty enough.
I think the most interesting questions are downstream of this: American adversaries don't seem to think we can be realistically defeated by force of arms, so what do they do in response?
I think this relates to other projects we talk about here like the role of foreign botnets in agenda setting in U.S. politics. It isn't really clear to me what extent that's a paranoid conspiracy theory vs. an actual thing in truth (it seems likely to be latter but I would like to know more).
You are right that the difference is practically immense between ability and will but it has felt to me in the last few months most people have forgotten those are two different things, even if the will is going to be more practically predictive.
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