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The fact that American has now done this demonstrates that they could have done it all along, so the pre-war status quo was precisely that the Americans could destroy most targets in Iran at any time. They were just mostly choosing not to do so because it wasn't going to achieve their political goals. The Americans have now destroyed a lot of targets, and the Iranians have also destroyed some targets (but a lot less), and it looks like neither side is going to achieve any political goals.
That America can destroy targets from the air with terrifying effectiveness was established at Hiroshima and has been barely challenged since then. Destroying targets from the air is a really rather ineffective way of achieving most political goals.
Well, yeah, that's exactly it. But also, at the same time, nobody knew that we could have done it all along. Everybody believed that war with Iran would be extremely costly and could potentially destroy the Middle East or cause global economic catastrophe. That's roughly what everyone on this forum was predicting six months ago when everyone believed that Iran would simply shut down the Straits of Hormuz and oil would go to $250 a barrel. That's what senators and generals all predicted.
If I went back in time and told you we could destroy Iran's nuclear program at will and they couldn't do anything about it this would have been seen as a wildly impossible delirious dream. I would have been called a crazy Trump fanatic when everyone knows that it's not that simple.
Iran's political strategy for the last 50 years has been predicated, in large part, on the idea that America can't just destroy them and that they can impose very large costs on us for trying. Turns out we can and they can't.
What happened after Hiroshima? The Japanese surrendered. Because America was far more powerful than they had really anticipated and further resistance was pointless. (Actually, even more like the Iran war, the lesson didn't sink in at first so the Americans had to bomb Nagasaki so the Japanese could really and truly understand that they were beat.)
Nothing that's happening right now is according to Iran's plan. They didn't expect any of this. They expected they could withstand the worst American attacks and inflict great asymmetric costs that would turn the long war in their favor. They can't, their entire geopolitical strategy is hosed, what we're witnessing is the death throes of a failing state coming to terms with their failure.
12 months ago, the official position of the President of the United States was that you had already destroyed Iran's nuclear programme - which implied that you couldn't destroy it in this war. I have not heard anyone claim credibly that the Iranian nuclear programme is more destroyed now that it was 12 months ago.
"As of 1st January 2026, Iran has no remaining working centrifuges and their stockpile of 60% enriched uranium is buried under a large pile of rubble" was not a crazy Trump fanatic position.
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