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Trump is Texas Sharpshootering here. Before the war, he said that his political goal was regime change. During the war he is saying that he didn't necessarily mean that, and is keeping his real political goals secret in order to confuse the enemy. After the war, he is going to declare that whatever he got, particularly if it is status quo ante is a YUUGE victory and the thing he was looking for all along. But if Trump's real political goal was (as he will no doubt claim) opening the Straits of Hormuz, he could have achieved it much more cheaply by not starting the war in the first place.
Iran can’t control the Straits in their own backyard let alone project force across the Middle East. How is that status quo ante
The Straits were open before the war, and Iran's ability to project force across the Middle East involved individual men crossing borders clandestinely with guns and bombs, which is not a capability they have lost.
They were transporting significantly heavier weapons than that. I'm pretty sure the Houthi missiles aren't (at least mostly) domestically produced, shall we say.
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If before the war you had told the average person that America could bomb Iran, disable its nuclear sites, destroy its navy and drone factories, kill its top leaders, dismantle its militias, blockade its ports, and that in addition Iran wouldn't even be able to shut down traffic in the Straits, this would have been hailed as a wild American victory.
If before the war you had told the average person that at the end of the war the Iranian regime would still be in power, that the Straits would be marginally less open to shipping than before the war, that there would be no change in the status of the Iranian HEU stockpile that had been buried under rubble a year earlier, and that the US had achieved this result based on a huge drawdown of hard-to-replace munitions stockpiles, this would be seen as a draw, and a net negative for the American national interest.
Bombing Iran, destroying its navy, killing its top leaders, dismantling its militias, and blockading its ports doesn't benefit America unless it also delivers a political goal.
Go back a few months and people would say that Iran would close the Straits and America would have no way to open them, and everybody in the world knows this which is why nobody before Trump ever attacked Iran. Really I think you're making my point for me.
Iran will never have nuclear weapons.
This has been discussed a few times already but: the missiles that were drawn down were old supplies of some stock left over from the 90s, and some prototypes of some very recent weapons. The idea that the US blew a hole in its strategic munitions stockpiles is basically fake news.
It reaches a point... So we crushed our enemies, see them driven before us, hear the lamentations of their women, but does it serve our goals? Well, yes, Iran is an enemy of America's foreign policy, regularly stages attacks on America and its allies, sponsors terror, threatens neutral third parties, wanted to acquire nuclear weapons so they could threaten to keep doing that forever -- and now America crushed that and has more power than ever before and substantially controls the world's oil markets.
If you have given up claiming victory and are just saying that the war was less of a disaster than online doomers predicted, I am happy to concede the point. The war has indeed been less of a disaster than online doomers predicted, and the Straits of Hormuz are indeed partially open in a way that they would not be if we had seen an Iranian victory.
As I have said elsewhere, this is what a draw looks like...
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