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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It looks like things between the US and Iran might be seriously heating up again, with the US saying that they have responded to Iranian ceasefire violations with major airstrikes. Perhaps more significantly, the Treasury pulled the waiver that allowed Iran to sell oil.
I had been told, on here, that the terms of the MOU indicated that the US was desperate to come to the table with Iran. It seems to me that these recent actions by the US indicate otherwise – that the US is comfortable escalating again. However, by the same token, it seems that Iran (or at least the hard-liners) are also comfortable escalating again.
However, the timing does strike me as interesting: it looks, to me, like the US waited until July 4th and America's 250th were comfortable over before upping the strikes on Iran a notch.
But I am curious as to what the rest of the Motte thinks. Does this change your thinking on the conduct of the war so far? Anyone want to predict what happens next? Are we looking at a widening of the war, or will this all fizzle into more extremely protracted negotiations?
The key facet now seems to no longer be regime change or demilitarizing Iran or nukes but about whether Iran can impose a toll or not on the straits. That's what Iran is trying to do. They shot at some freighters using an unapproved route, US struck Iran in retaliation. It has nothing to do with the 4th of July.
It's a bit like the second phase of the Iran-Iraq war where the Iranians pushed Iraq out and sought to install a new revolutionary regime in Baghdad. They overreached there, the US and Soviets made sure Iran couldn't win. We'll see if this is an overreach too...
To clarify a bit, the reason I think the 4th could be relevant is that there may be a desire on the part of the administration to keep oil prices down while Americans are traveling for vacation and to keep war news to a minimum during the 250th celebrations.
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Nigel Farage, the UK MP and leader of the right wing Reform party has trigged a by-election in his local constituency - the faded seaside town of Clacton-on-Sea. This is an attempt to seize back the initiative after a series of revelations about his personal finances. Farage is accused of taking cash gifts from dodgy crypto businessmen in exchange for promises to influence government policy.
Farage won by a sizeable plurality in the last general election. His supporters skew older and poorly educated, he’s unlikely to have lost much of their support over the scandal.
In a coordinated move, all the other major political parties have indicated that they will boycott the election, they have nothing to gain by legitimising his publicity stunt. Farage will be entering the by-election as the sole mainstream candidate.
Fascinatingly there is still a small but real risk he might lose with a coordinated protest vote - to the UK’s premier joke candidate Count Binface.
Fraser Nelson has posted an entertaining writeup on his substack, but the political fallout of Farage being defeated would have far reaching effects. UKIP (his previous project) withered and died without his name recognition; a similar fate may befall Reform should he be defeated.
Although some of Farage's opponents are muttering about quid pro quo, that isn't really what the argument is about. "The UK should build on our existing strength in financial services by becoming a crypto hub" is obviously correct unless you think that the cryptofinance industry is inherently malignant, so to someone who doesn't already hate Farage it looks like "crypto money finds crypto-friendly politician" rather than "politician becomes crypto-friendly in exchange for crypto money". The argument is (in theory) about transparency and (in practice) about aggravated spivvery.
Newly-elected British MPs are required to declare certain types of payment received in the 12 months before they were elected. Farage didn't. And when caught, rather than trying to spin it as "outsider gets caught on a technicality and is punished overly harshly for a paperwork violation" he tried to double down. First he tried to claim that the gifts were personal and didn't need to be declared*, then he went for the "enforcing generally applicable laws against a Man of the People just proves how much the establishment hates you" approach, and eventually to calling for a criminal investigation into whoever leaked to the media. (Remember that this is information that was supposed to be on the public record anyway).
Farage will be censured when the investigation is complete, because he uncontroversially broke the rules. And given the large amount of money involved (£5 million when the scandal started, now £6-7 million across multiple undeclared donors), he will be suspended from Parliament for long enough to trigger a recall petition. The current by-election automatically suspends the investigation, but it will restart when Farage is re-elected, and there will almost certainly be a second by-election after Farage is censured and recalled.
Even before this became Farage vs Binface, the politics of this don't make sense to me. Calling this by-election means that an what would otherwise have been an inside-baseball funding scandal is going to be the current thing for several months. I can see that the "It's not the £5 million in dodgy overseas** crypto money, it's the persecution" line working in Clacton where 70% of the voters are right-populist, but it isn't going to land with swing voters in the seats Farage needs to win if he wants to be Prime Minister in 2029. It could (low probability, but potential high impact) also sink him if Rupert Lowe finds a good local candidate - something that is more likely now that delaying the process gives Lowe more time to do so. (Restore can land the "I'm work for you, Farage works for foreign billionaires" attack even if the establishment parties can't.) And even if the other parties had run in the by-election and being trounced, "Farage can still win in Clacton" doesn't shift the narrative.
The best theory I am seeing is a Bulverist one, which makes me doubt my own judgement. But "Farage is high on his own supply with the persecution narrative" seems very plausible, because politicians getting high on their own supply happens all the time. Farage says that he is at such high risk of left-wing political violence that he needs a bigger security detail than Prince William***, and that the taxpayer ought to provide it. That he actually thinks this is entirely plausible and the leap to thinking the voters will agree with him is not a large one. If you accept that narrative (and Farage's online supporters do) then "I only needed to take money from foreign crooks and criminals because the police denied me the level of protection I clearly deserve" makes sense.
* This doesn't pass the laugh test. The explanatory notes to the rules say that the exemption for personal gifts is about things like Christmas and birthday presents from family and close friends. This was a £5 million gift where both Farage and the donor have said the money is linked to his political activity.
** The donations aren't legally foreign donations because the people writing the cheques are British citizens living abroad. But the ultimate source of funds is foreign and everyone knows this.
*** The only British public figures who get £5 million in taxpayer-funded security are the King and the Prime Minister.
I recall Bezos was only having his security detail funded by Amazon to the tune of $1 million USD.
Prince William's and Princess Katherine's security cost £1.4 million a year back in back in 2010 (the breakdown of Royal security isn't public, but that number leaked), which would be £2.2 million adjusting for inflation. Other full-time working royals who are not the Sovereign probably get something similar. The cost of providing security details to nine living ex-PMs is £13 million pa in direct costs and £24 million pa including a contribution to police overhead. So a cabinet minister/ex-PM/mid-level royal tier security operation costs about £2 million a year. The leader of the official opposition (currently Kemi Badenoch) gets this level of taxpayer-funded protection as a matter of course. Other opposition politicians only get taxpayer-funded security details if there is intelligence of a specific, individualised threat - and "People like to throw milkshakes at me when I go out in public" doesn't qualify.
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From the analysis I heard, Farage pulled this stunt because he is probably going to be censured by Parliament, and that censure would trigger an automatic by-election. His goal was to trigger a by-election of his own, win it, and thus moot the censure. Now, though, he has a slim chance of actually losing this election to a joke candidate, and even if he wins it, his opponents in parliament can credibly claim that it wasn't a "real" election anyway since he ran "unopposed", and thus proceed with the censure and a second by-election that they can actually contest in a serious manner. The miscalculation on Farage's part seems quite severe.
Restore, the insurgent party running to Farage's right, seem disinclined to come to his aid, percieving him to be an obstacle between themselves and mainstream legitimacy on the Right.
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US Cmdr. Gabriel Edwards , the commander of the helicopter squadron of the USS George W. Bush, died earlier this week in the Persian Gulf, the US Navy announced Wednesday. According to official reports, Edward’s needed up missing at see when his helicopter collided with a unicorn. The collision caused Edwards to teleport fifty miles to the left, where he was lost at sea in contested Iranian waters. His death was not the result of any hostile military action. Any concurrent ceasefire violations that happened the same night as his disappearance are completely coincidental
He is survived by two children. I appreciated the United States Navy’s great candor and honesty during this difficult time for them.
In the interests of speaking plainly, I believe the Navy is lying about the circumstances about this man’s death, potentially in a way that violates federal law and the Constitution. Frankly I think the only reason they didn’t ship him back to Norfolk and claim he died of a heart attack is because they don’t have his body.
I’ll take that bet.
I say this as someone with a very low opinion of the current chain of command; a ceasefire is politically valuable at the moment, and our President (and SecDef) are exactly the kind of people who might apply pressure to keep it quiet.
The odds just favor a legitimate crash.
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It's always plausible for the military to be lying, but helicopters are genuinely dangerous even in noncombat scenarios, and four days of search would be a pretty expensive cover story. There were also three survivors, which... isn't incompatible with hostile military action and isn't anywhere near the size of the general coordination you'd need to keep the story secret, but sounds closer to 'mechanical problem' than 'rocket fire' from a gutcheck.
Particularly since the standard emergency bailout procedure for two-pilot/multi-crew helicopters over water is for one pilot to attempt to maintain control so that the rest of the crew can jump as a group, and then get the helicopter away from them before a bunch of highly kinetic metal blades hit the water. The later is the far more dangerous part of even a 'controlled' crash, and it's basically a deliberate trade of the last pilot to save the rest, who can help eachother swim / stay aloft and activate any rescue equipment. In a kinetic shootdown over water, it typically tends to be everyone, since a shot that takes down the aircraft is probably violent disassembly in air, or just one or two survivors.
Also, this part of BigGuy's conspiracy-
-is just stereotypically American geographical confusion trying to wrap up in sarcasm.
The Arabian Sea- the place where the aircraft was claimed lost- is not the Arabian Gulf, the culture-rivalry rename of the same waters as the Persian Gulf ala the Korea-Japan East Sea versus Sea of Japan. The Arabian Sea is a completely different body of water in the opposite direction from contested Iranian waters.
Iran's territorial water claims that are causing tensions are regarding the Strait of Hormuz. The Persian Gulf is the waters west of the Strait of Hormuz. The Gulf of Oman is the waters east of the strait of hormuz leading to the Arabian Sea. But the arabian sea itself is the part of the indian ocean between the arabian peninsula and India. There is no Iranian claim on the broader geography of the Arabian Sea, not least because Pakistan dominates the north face and Oman dominates the west. Iran only has the tiniest of proximity in the furthest north west, which is not part of the Strait of Hormuz dispute.
Notably, the general location of the carrier groups since the start of the war has been generally understood to be... not there. During the war and the blockade one of the main frustrations for Iran's efforts to attack the carriers was that it could find them, and that was because duringn both points the carriers fell back into the Arabian Sea far enough to stay out of Iranian detection and weapon range. (There was the war-time conspiracy that the laundry fire on the Gerald Ford was actually a lie to disguise a critical damage from anti-ship cruise missile, but that largely petered out when the Ford returned to a high traffic port without observable evidence of a cruise missile.) During the blockade portion of the post-conflict, helicopter landings of ships trying to run past the blockade happened in the Arabian sea, well away from Iranian waters and ability to interfere.
So the military version of the story is that a helicopter from a carrier known to have been operating in the Arabian sea away from Iranian waters and weapon ranges went down for non-iranian-weapon reasons, with casualties consistent with a controlled mechanical failure helicopter crash.
The BigGuy version presupposes that the carrier group was far further north than there is any conflict-contemporary record of them being, in order for '50 miles left' to be anywhere near Iranian waters as opposed to, say, uncontested Oman. It also is probably confusing a body of water already to the west of the Strait of Hormuz that no carrier has been observed in since the war started- even in which case 50 miles left would be further from the strait- to a body of water thousands of square miles large to the south east, in which fifty miles 'left' would still be... well south.
Something something war is how some Americans learn geography.
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I need someone to list all the Looney Toons accidents that happened in Iraq I & II, Vietnam, Korea, WWII, etc. Because I'm starting to turn Schizo from the fact that the USA is claiming all these losses of men and material from ridiculous mishaps ("A clothes dryer caught fire and destroyed a carrier" "we landed the planes in a mud puddle on a rescue mission that just happened to be right next to the nuclear supplies we were planning to Mission Impossible" "Plane crashed in the middle of nowhere"). I'm even looking at the two recent civilian skydiving accidents a little crossways, and they happened in Missouri and France.
246 fires on aircraft carriers and big-deck amphibs over 70 years, after WWII.
"Destroyed" is... a tremendously strong word. It's not like FORD went full BONHOMME RICHARD.
There's also that time the US sank one of its own subs while the thing was moored at a pier. Oh, and that time an aircraft carrier sliced the top off the cruiser USS BELKNAP. Can't recall if the cruiser was carrying nuclear cruise missiles at the time or not, but I do remember that the officer determined to be at fault had just won an award for his ship-handling skills.
And from a related branch, there was that landing craft that up and sank during training off the coast of California, killing 9 marines. Or the F-35 and refueling tanker casualty that had a botched SAR operation in very friendly waters. And I don't need to tell you of the (oft-maligned, and possibly out of context) Osprey safety record concerns...
Reports have varied, but we're looking at a return to service in 2027 on the optimistic government timeline. While "destroyed" is perhaps aggressive, "damaged sufficiently to be removed from operation" is infelicitous, and anyway we're being weirdo skeptics so we're rounding up and assuming the damage is worse than we were told.
How much of that is due to the fire, and how much is standard/deferred maintenance cycles, though? I have a feeling they'd be in port close until 2027 even without the fire.
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The US Navy in WWII lost quite a few ships and aircraft to typhoon storms in the Pacific. Typhoon Cobra sunk three destroyers and killed 790 sailors, but there were a few other storms too.
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There’s the German U-boat that had a catastrophic toilet failure…
Okay, but early submarines really cannot be used as representative of modern(ish) naval accident rates. Those things were... well, death traps is a bit too strong of a word, but issues abounded.
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Interesting that the landing craft crash happened just five days after Russian forces broke through at Mariupol....
I'm honestly unsure of what you're trying to imply here.
That there is big unofficial US personnel presence on the ground in Ukraine as advisors and if you squint there is pattern where USA training accidents in conus happens soon after massive Russian missile attacks in Ukraine.
Judging by how well Ukraine's best pilot their F16s, the idea that there are people that help with stuff like Patriot at critical points is not unthinkable.
That'd have to be a lot of people in on the coverup... the other 12 landing craft and support ships/personnel involved in the exercise, the half the crew that did survive...
Technically possible, as you said, if you squint.
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The US navy has something of a record of stupid crashes. The inquiry into the Fitzgerald crash in 2017 came to the conclusion that one of the contributing causes was crew fatigue due to a sustained high operational tempo. The idea that basic safety compliance collapses during combat ops making a technically non-combat crash an order of magnitude more likely seems obviously correct.
That said, if the Iranians had shot the chopper down, the Trump administration would probably lie about it. To those familiar with combat helo flying, how likely is a near miss which does enough damage to render the chopper inoperable (e.g. by taking out the tail rotor) leading to a ditching without blowing it to smithereens in mid-air?
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The 1967 USS Forrestal fire is a good place to start if you want to get the idea of the sort of things that can just sort of happen by accident (21 aircraft destroyed, 40 damaged, 134 deaths).
John McCain – better known as a US Senator – was present at the fire. What's not as well known about him is that his aircraft crashed twice (due to engine trouble on both occasions, I believe) and he clipped power lines a third time, on top of being shot down.
Generally speaking my understanding is that military aviation and indeed "the military" more broadly has gotten safer as time has gone on. This might have the effect of elevating accidents when they do occur.
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Don’t forget Argentina!
In all seriousness, listing incidents is just begging for a Texas sharpshooter to come and draw you a bullseye. All the usual SSC pieces about selection bias apply. Batshit insane stuff does happen occasionally. If you turn up the number of opportunities by, say, maintaining the world’s largest navy and two largest air forces, then sending them across the planet to run combat missions, you will generate more batshit insane incidents. Drawing a line through all these incidents will tell you more about the person drawing the line than about the base rate!
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