Also, at his rallies, drill baby drill wasn't exactly met with booing
Have you looked at the current administration's policies regarding reality, for that matter?
Another way would be to introduce carbon pricing, which folks like Greenspan, Volker, Bernanke, Yellen, etc endorsed:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economists%27_Statement_on_Car...
You add a surcharge on carbon emissions, they raise the prices of carbon-intensive activities, which get passed onto end consumers. Companies which reduce their carbon footprint would be able to sell products/services for less money and where many people would choose because it's cheaper.
The key: the money collected is returned to consumers (why it's labelled "dividend") on an average basis. So if you use less carbon than average your refund will be more than your surcharge outlay and you'll come out ahead. If you use more than average, then it's more money out of pocket.
Sadly when Canada tried this under the Trudeau Liberals the Conservatives—which tend to be (federally) concentrated in the O&G-dominant western provinces—attacked it as a "tax" (regardless that the money was refunded), even though it's probably the most market efficient mechanism—which Conservatives even testified to: "Scott Moe says Saskatchewan considered carbon tax alternatives, but found them too costly":
* https://nationalpost.com/news/scott-moe-says-saskatchewan-co...
The gradual increasing of the price would put continued, increasing pressure to reduce emissions, but would not (net) cost people more out of pocket.
The other market efficient solution would probably a cap-and-trade, which is how Canada and the US (under Bush 41) dealt with acid rain.
Unfortunately not the case. There are an odd number of refinery issues happening across the US lately.
Witness the commodity runup from the last time we blew up west Asia - the resultant liquidity squeeze would melt down the financialized economic system. A collapse only slapshod avoided by exchanging government risk for private risk on an unprecedented scale. Did the Iraq 2003 adventure actually net more money for oil companies in a 10-20 year horizon? Debateable.
So while they might have incredible man power and manufacturing capability, everyone in that first battle will be seeing battle for the first time in their life.
> I shudder to think just how badly we will be outmatched in a shooting war with China.
This difference makes China look smarter and wiser.
Define "military" first. China's infantry is less experienced than Russia's, but so is America's infantry by-and-large. Neither country envies Russia's army, or the war they chose to fight. Arguably China got the best of both worlds by sending a limited quantity of mercenaries to study the way the conflict was fought.
The war China wants to fight is in the first island chain. They don't need their infantry to swim to Taiwan to occupy it, they need their navy and air force to deny America A2/AD while their Marines fight onshore. Their army is almost purely a defensive force in this conflict, and it's unlikely that they'll be deployed en-masse if the US manages to disrupt their logistics. The pressure will be on China's missile forces and naval assets, both of which are very credible for the war they want to fight. On the other hand, America's Arleigh Burkes will be running with half their VLSes empty because the US needed to launch decapitation strikes against Iranian kindergartens.
Military-wise, China has almost every advantage they could want. They'll be fighting an overextended opponent that has limited support from their Pacific ocean assets, a miniature international coalition, and a depleted magazine depth with no esclatory strategic advantage. None of those are worth giving up to bloody your troops, especially if those troops are mostly just going to watch the war unfold on their smartphone.
Thales land radar systems always perform as expected, sometime better than expected, in land conflicts. If this is the same for their naval radars, they are far ahead of the competition.
Iran also basically just fought us to a stalemate, with an arguably long-term strategic victory going to Iran, just by being willing to absorb more punishment in the short term. Once we depleted our stocks of expensive weaponry we had to stop. We could win every fight and still lose the war.
Iran had a different victory condition. All they had to do was outlast and not be completely wiped out. Trump's victory condition was... well, only Trump knows. Short of a total ground invasion of Iran and full eradication of the Iranian regime (a tall, tall order), victory for the US in Iran, in the eyes of the public, was always going to be impossible.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/16/im-on-the-fron...
Afaik official pro russian Chinese TV report broadcasts stopped abruptly when their team got a front view of a tank turret toss on a road 100km away from official front.
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/russian-tank-blown-up-...
After that they kept quiet recording tactics and occasionally producing some russia propaganda like this gem https://news.rthk.hk/rthk/en/component/k2/1810903-20250627.h... where dude on a front line in full camo complains being mistaken for a soldier.
no one is suggesting that
> nor do we have a viable alternative for making nitrogen based fertilizer
nor is anyone suggesting that
I assume your understanding of "demand destruction" is mixing concepts.
GP said switching to alternative sources isn't demand destruction when it IS technically and relatively.
The parent's point: until you get those renewables online (decade long process now with permitting), prices will go up. You'll have people using less energy (in general) and less O&G -- both are quintessential demand destruction.
For nitrogen fertilizer (ammonia), there's already demand destruction with people cutting back due to price shocks. That's less food and ag.
My point was that the OP was myopically focusing on fossil fuel do demand when the real demand that would lead to switching to renewables is the demand for energy.
Recursing back up to the original level then I’d say who cares if demand for oil specifically goes down? We still get energy from renewables and there will still be an oil industry working at a reduced capacity for the products that are oil derived like fertilizers.
Honestly I’d be more worried about niche resources that are a minor side effect of fossil fuel extraction like helium that might skyrocket in price if the extraction was being done only to acquire.
"How" it happens is the nuance.
The point above was that people would get priced out (not by choice), lowering (read: destroying) demand. They experience lower quality of life, can't afford fertilizer for crops, lack capital to build reliable renewables, lose jobs, etc.
And if we no longer need the majority of fossil fuels for oil, we will have more of our own ample local fossil fuels to allocate to production of things that still require them like your afore mentioned fertilizer or lubricants.
Obviously it's not NET positive, but if I had to highlight one positive for the US from their perspective, setting most of our guided munitions on fire overnight breaks the military, and the suspicion is that it breaks the military at a time when China is not quite yet prepared to invade Taiwan. It is now in a widely acknowledged catastrophic munitions stockpile crisis which Congress will have to fix via large, sustained investment; Increasing procurement rates for many systems by an order of magnitude on the low end. A year ago, and 10 years ago, and 25 years ago, it was in a severe munitions stockpile crisis according to everyone who's ever ran a wargame or tried to figure out deterrence policy for a non-nuclear shooting war
After the Cold War, we basically reduced most munitions stockpiles to a level consistent with a Desert Storm scale operation, but kept paying exorbitant amounts of money to keep defense contractors technically alive, producing a handful of units a year at costs that pay for the overhead of existing. In areas like naval procurement, the contradictions entailed by this approach combined with neoliberal austerity posturing and a lackadaisical response to delays, have combined to turn almost every major shipbuilding effort since the Cold War into an expensive failure. We are spending a remarkable amount of money on military equipment and probably getting 5% of what we would get if we spent twice that much and emphasized industrial performance rather than contractor sustainment.
A year ago, Congress and the Pentagon were carefully ignoring this for political reasons, while the MIC & foreign policy blob believes China was looking at it as an opportunity.
How exactly is it positive to waste munition and thus force the congress to buy new munition? You will spend a huge amount of money to ... get where you was.
You ask your military experts what would happen if your border region would get invaded by your rival neighbor, and they say that any scenario where the castle there holds out and breaks the siege would require upwards of 300,000 arrows to be expended in the first month, and you say "I hope my rival doesn't invade then. I'm so happy they're friendly now after the Great War." You're also happy that the regional lords under you are happy that they don't have to pay so many taxes.
Ten years in the future, the situation has changed a bit. Your neighbor is building a massive army. You say "I hope my rival doesn't invade. It doesn't look like they're close to my military yet. I'm increasing arrow production to 2 per day," at a nominal cost of 4000 elbomarks/day, but an actual cost of considerably less. You achieve this budget change... barely. Can't ask for more - can't disrupt the regional lords right now. None of them seem to think there's a threat right now.
Ten years after that, your rival is fortifying its border and building siege equipment, but your walls are high and it would need a couple more generations of larger siege tower to reach them. You hold a jousting and archery competition, and deplete your stockpiles, shooting 9000 arrows at a target in a weeklong circus of an event. This was all your idea and basically everybody criticizes you. Former supporters start talking about you retiring.
You tell the regional lords through a budget request "We're completely defenseless now. You HAVE to give me the elbomarks to rebuild the arrow-making factories and start producing 300 arrows per day, starting immediately and for the next five years, or there will definitely be war.
I'm not saying for sure how deliberately this scenario happened. It's unlikely that it failed to occur to every single advisor to Donald Trump, but whether it was part of Trump's personal decisionmaking calculus is impossible to say.
Until this year, US military bases were seen as an asset. They were thought to deter attacks, and in the case of someone being crazy enough to attack the country that hosted a US military base, they sold the promise of a quick and decisive response.
But for countries in the Middle East, every base was nothing but a liability with nothing but a long list of detriments. The bases got attacked and destroyed with basically zero effort whatsoever, local militaries had to step up to defend the US bases on their own dime and with their own people putting their lives on the line, and the bases basically just served as provocation and ended up with the countries being attacked as "punishment" for letting the US military operate on their land. And the US put in the bare minimum effort, if any, to defend the countries being attacked. It was basically "that's on you. Buzz off".
Europe is now being threatened with having their US bases cut back/removed entirely and I'm not sure if people are even worried anymore. People have been using the term "paper tiger" to refer to Russia these past 4 years because their efforts at war have been absolutely embarrassing. Somehow the US has made Russia look competent, and despite being against all the BS America did in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc, I didn't think America would somehow show itself to be more rotted out from the inside than Russia. I always assumed the US was competent, albeit war hungry. But somehow competence has completely vanished.
And right now, East Asian allies of the US operate under the very wrong assumption that the US will back them up if China/Russia/North Korea tries something. And now that those countries know the US won't do shit, there's a non zero chance that they've taken war plans from purely hypothetical plans to "we could actually do this" plans.
The US bases are also pretty expensive to set up. Lots of logistic support has to be in place to let those bases function. That require a lot of support from the host country. Normally, you would expect the US to be friendly with the host countries, but that seems lost on the current administration.
What is really wrong is that it is known that russia is fighting in Ukraine with drones designed in Iran. And we have seen how hard it is for US designed weapons to deal with those drones. To the point that a lot of development is happening in Ukraine to deal with this problem.
By attacking Iran, the US has shown the world that Ukraine is the weapon supplier of choice against future drone wars.
As a US citizen, I hope more countries come to this realization and start rejecting these.
It's such a lose-lose for everyone
The establishment and maintenance of these bases cost the tax payers so much....
If only we could refocus this massive expenditure of resources to internal domestic infrastructure...
I say this as an anti-empirical leftist with no great sympathy for the effort, but for those proclaiming to put America's interests above all else it's just such an obvious and idiotic short-sighted self-own.
US farmers growing otherwise unprofitable crops with no buyer? Check. US exporters being able to export crops? Check. US Aid workers being able to give food to starving people in countries that have huge deposits of rare earth materials? Check. US intelligence apparatus having advanced knowledge of developing situations in strategically important countries? Check. US Aid workers being able deliver tremendous goodwill to countries that China or Russia would love to have their tentacles in? Check.
Everyone's happy, everyone makes money, everyone eats.
Yet Donald Trump and Elon Musk don't like it, so away it goes. And there's no adult in the room to say "no, you're not cutting it, here's why".
USAID somehow managed to get everyone paid and kept everyone happy. Who gives a shit if it was a CIA front?
I don't disagree that money should be spent here. But instead of billions spent on military contractors, using some of that money in developing countries through USAID gets us some incredible returns...such as our work in the Congo securing our rights to the largest Cobalt deposit on the planet. Or our work in Namibia giving us access to the 4th largest deposit of Uranium on the planet. The top 3 countries for Uranium exports are either under the Sino-Russian sphere of influence (Kazakhstan) or are nations that could get there due to the fact that they fucking hate the US due to the genius words of Donald Trump (Canada and Australia).
You want America's sources of Cobalt and Uranium cozying up to China and giving the US the finger?
The dollar being the world’s reserve currency gives us the ability to print dollars for infrastructure projects with relatively little consequence.
This is now being threatened by our best attempts to get everyone in the world to hate us and see us as hostile, unstable idiots and unreliable partners.
I’ll also note that the America First MAGA crowd seem to also be against funding public infrastructure projects, especially the radically socialist notion of high speed rail.
They supported USA's hegemony, extension of soft powers - essentially (not a quote) 'we trade with USA because they're our partner, they help us with defence against tyrants'. Except, when USA vote in a fascist tyrant.
Many bridges have been burned.
USA is just like a company taken over by venture capitalists, and just like such a company those capitalists look like they'll run it into the ground and make off with all the money.
European here (from Spain), and the overwhelming majority of people I know are hoping for the removal of the bases. They are worried, yes... worried that it's just grandstanding and it's not really going to get done (which is likely, because those bases have always been there mainly for the benefit of the US).
It was pushed out, by force.
I think Trump is about to lose patience with Iran again and we're in for a second phase of this war. What that looks like afterwards is anyone's guess. I'm not very optimistic.
It's not impossible that if the IRGC can't make payroll that things start to change from the inside, like what happened in Serbia. I'm not going to bet on that outcome though.
I think we'll have that answer shortly after trump and xi have their little meeting, but I agree with you.
And the reason no one brings up Ukraine is because we used more interceptors in three days than were sent to Ukraine in the entire 4+ years of war. It’s a complaint that doesn’t make sense unless one is jd Vance.
The difference is obvious.
The reason it's so incredible you could think such a thing is the White House has been saying how horrible that deal was in every interview for months, and of course intermittently for a decade.
"So a win will be returning to Obama’s Iran deal?"
Where in that long comment before yours did you see an implication that anyone was thinking a return to Obama's Iran deal was a win? Why did you use the word "so"?
Why are people so literal these days? The poster didn’t use a magic buzzword so no one can connect dots?
An no, I don’t actually think they’d consider returning to Obama’s deal would be a win because if I had to guess anything Obama did is the definition of bad in may peoples books.
Maybe don't troll. Or sealion. Or shill. Or propagandize. Not sure which of these is the best description, but it's one of them.
US IC assessment is Iran is 5-10y away from delivery tech, and there's no imminent threat.
You need to stop watching too many movies and/or conspiracy videos. Given how security has gotten tighter it is impossible to "sail it into New York City". The budgets for nearly every 3 letter agency is up. The only reason to make up such absurd points is to get more funding for the agencies or just continuing the war.
https://www.ft.com/content/2e0185d1-3229-463c-8391-6dd09fe11...
Then the causal chain is War in Iran -> Oil Price increase -> Inflation & Fed Rate fears -> Treasury sell-off. Geopolitical risk creates inflation shock, and if bonds sell off on war news, their utility as a portfolio hedge weakens, and capital holders start looking for new assets (stocks and property). Also, the exodus from bonds first results in a pile of sidelined capital whose eventual rotation into stocks and property and gold leads to more market instability down the road.
Also, Russian and Iranian windfall oil profits are up along with those of Exxon, Chevron, Shell etc., the arms producers like Lockheed are booming, and for some reason, ‘prediction markets’ (gambling interests) also:
https://vestedfinance.com/blog/us-stocks/who-made-money-from...
Agree with the rest of your point.
Iran can't credibly threaten to nuke Israel over a threat that isn't existential to Iran. And Hezbollah or Hamas being bombed (along with a lot of civilians) is is not that.
> If a country has a peace treaty with Israel and the monopoly on violence in their territory, they experience no Israeli aggression.
Doha called about the Israeli bombing of the peace talks with the Palestinian resistance.
https://imemc.org/article/israel-bombs-palestinian-negotiato...
A study a few years ago gave the US just 1 week before all its missiles were depleted with China in just a naval war.
Its really difficult to overstate the level of strategic defeat that has occurred here.
CCP on the other hand can play the nationalist card.
Ofcourse it is my genuine belief that war between the US and China would be amazingly stupid and a waste of human life.
I wouldn't jump to conclusions yet. The war is not over. I wouldn't even be so sure as to say Iran is in a good place right now.
Iran can absorb more pain than the US, but even that has a deadline. For the US, the only pain is inflation, which is more a matter of political capital than anything tangible. Trump is a lame duck president so I think he's more than happy to spend his political capital on this.
It's different for Iran. The main concern with a prolonged conflict is a lack of oil storage space. Once the tanks are full you have to cap the wells which is nigh disastrous for Iran because of the cost and difficulty of reactivating those wells later on.
To be clear, I'm not saying the US is going to come out victorious. But war is complex and it's a folly to predict any outcomes this early on.
It doesn't. This is the western mentality, thinking you are dealing with sane people.
I'm from Iran (now living in the West), there's a famous Shia motto: "Every day is Ashura, every land is Karbala".
Around 30% of the population are die hard IRGC supporters, another 10% are neutral and the rest don't like the regime.
The problem is that, the war has caused a major rally around the flag effect.
The IRGC has more support than ever now. It's a battle for the Iran now against United States, attempting to destroy people's homes.
I'm not a fan of IRGC. My 20 year old cousin was captured and tortured in Evin prison for 6 months during the Mahsa uprising in 2022 [3]. You can't imagine how much I hate them, but I love Iran more. If I was there, I would be fighting the Americans right now.
Iranians are not going give up, right now, you will have to kill all 90M of us to "win".
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashura
Why? If you call the IRGC insane, why would you support them? Is the issue that the Americans are more insane? I don't think that's true... Is the issue that many not/less insane people are being killed by the Americans? But doesn't the IRGC have a track record of doing the same, but worse?
I'm baffled. If the Pope started a Crusade against China, would you support the die-hard Catholics?
I'm not talking about sanity. I understand that the IRGC is greater than the sum of the parts and that no individual life matters.
I'm talking about the oil wells. The IRGC may not care about human life, but you need money to stay in power. Money that will disappear the longer you can't sell your oil and the more oils you have to cap.
> The problem is that, the war has caused a major rally around the flag effect.
I don't believe you. Do you have proof? Iran is pretty damn closed off from the rest of the world so I have a hard time believing that you have some great insider knowledge about this.
> I'm not a fan of IRGC. My 20 year old cousin was captured and tortured in Evin prison for 6 months during the Mahsa uprising in 2022 [3]. You can't imagine how much I hate them, but I love Iran more. If I was there, I would be fighting the Americans right now.
I don't believe you. I'd believe you saying that you'd be against America, but not that you'd be fighting them. If that were true, why are you not traveling to Iran to join the IRGC right now?
They are not entirely closed off. Apparently there is a communication going on around closures, because I have seen fairly inside Iran info in French media (about executions, about people leaving Teheran etc etc). They are more guarded and dont do strong statements as OP. It is not possible to establish general what people in general think under current conditions. The executions are still going on, no one will randomly admit they are against irgc. But, they are fairly consistent with what he said.
The other consistent thing I heard in interviews (this time by British media) is that Iran is very nationalistic. Even people who hate regime are proud of Iran itself. That makes them more prone toward rally around the flag.
And unfortunately, America made it clear it wants to harm average Iranian. Plus its idea of regime change is to keep regime intact and change head (see Venezuela), so there is no one who would had actual reason to want America win.
By and large this is not true. The US and Israel have hit Iran tens of thousands of times, and have never hit a pure civilian target on purpose. They've hit dual use targets, and accidentally hit civilian targets, but not ones on purpose. They could flatten Tehran if they wanted to hit civilians.
> Plus its idea of regime change is to keep regime intact and change head (see Venezuela), so there is no one who would had actual reason to want America win.
You're not entirely wrong here, and I've seen frustration from the US side that Mojtaba Khamenei is MIA (or dead).
Did you get upset when the Islamic occupiers took over Iran in 1979 and stated 'we have defeated/ended Persian culture/civilization'?
And no, it was not metaphore. Trump was threatening them and stating his intent. Israel wants exactly that too. The claim here is not that iran loves america. The claim here is that Iranians hating on country that put in hated king in 1979 is weak argument about how Trump in 2026 wanted.
For that matter, American army is still murdering fishermen, it is not like it had norms against crimes.
Israels attacks on civilian infrastructure are not random or accidental either. They are the literal strategy and goal.
> I've seen frustration from the US side that Mojtaba Khamenei is MIA.
This is just US side being dumb, honestly.
Re: "I don't believe you. Do you have proof?" - you come off as un-necessary rude and aggressive. You are assuming GP lies - and that is not a good attitude. You could re-phrase your question in a way to make people engage with you.
Re: "If that were true, why are you not traveling to Iran to join the IRGC right now?" Do you understand that Iranians living in the US have different choices than Iranians living in Iran?
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/19/iran-attack-qatar-lng-capaci...
It's not. The problem, which I already wrote in my original comment, is with oil storage. When oil flows, it needs to go somewhere. Before it would go on tankers and be sold to China (and a few others). Now, it goes into storage. But storage is not unlimited. And when storage runs out, the oil wells will need to be capped. If they stay capped for more than a few weeks, those wells become insanely expensive to reactivate, and might not be something the IRGC will be able to do.
This is the clock that's ticking.
> Re: "I don't believe you. Do you have proof?" - you come off as un-necessary rude and aggressive. You are assuming GP lies - and that is not a good attitude. You could re-phrase your question in a way to make people engage with you.
You made statements about what Iranians think. I want some proof, given that the internet is off in Iran and I have seen no reporting around the thoughts of the Iranian people.
The Trump admin has pretty low approval ratings. If some very hostile country bombed the US, is your default assumption that the folks who despise Trump would somehow support the bombing?
You could probably find a few crazies that would, but wouldn't you assume people would prioritize their hate towards the people blowing up their friends, family, and property?
You're missing some very important context, which is that the IRGC slaughtered between 6,000-36,000 people in January during the protests. And they would've continued for as long as the protests lasted, and still execute people to this day.
> You could probably find a few crazies that would, but wouldn't you assume people would prioritize their hate towards the people blowing up their friends, family, and property?
By and large the strikes have been against military capability, with some strikes against dual use targets and a few unintended strikes against purely civilian targets. The famous strike on the school was because the school had been an army barracks in the past and was not properly updated. This isn't an excuse, but it's to clarify the situation.
Claims about it not happening are a lie.
Also, double tap attacks. Even that school was dpuble tapped.
If we're talking context, isn't there more to include? Like why those protests were happening in the first place? Did the hostile government cripple your economy first and potentially fund and arm agitators within the legitimate protest movements?
> This isn't an excuse, but it's to clarify the situation.
How confident are you that will clarify anything for the families of those children?
There are no good guys in this situation. Just the people supporting this calamity and the growing number of people affected by it.
The shared cultural context is so low that as an American, I have absolutely no idea what this means. If I had to guess, "zealotry" or "patriotism"?
That is not correct and the comment you replied to even pointed out several ways it hurt the US other than that
Inflation is the only Immediate pain. The other harms will play out over years.
While war games already predicted we’d run out of basically all defensive and offensive weapons almost immediately in a confrontation with China, that wasn’t demonstrated yet. Now it has been proven, but not even with China, with much smaller and less powerful Iran. We used a major portion of our stuff, it didn’t accomplish anything major, and now we’re already depleted like a paper tiger.
This is a positive, not a negative. It's a needed wake up call and better to get it now instead of during a war with China.
The war is not over, but I would not count out the Iranians going for another strategic goal not mentioned in the GP post: make is so that the American president that attacked Iran loses the midterm big time.
The US doesn't need to fire more missiles, it just needs to blockade the strait and force Iran to cap its wells.
> The war is not over, but I would not count out the Iranians going for another strategic goal not mentioned in the GP post: make is so that the American president that attacked Iran loses the midterm big time.
I think Trump has already conceded the midterms. He's a lame duck president anyways so it's not his mess to clean up
I don't get why so many people ignore it. Does Trump look like the kind of guy who respects the constitution to you? Or more like the kind of guy who is trying to build an autocracy? Have you noticed what he does with officials that follow the law and their agency's mission, but not Trump's whims?
What you wrote would make sense if Trump would be driven by rationale. But as everyone who has seen a news program in the past 12 months knows, Trump is driven by vanity and greed. Because of vanity and greed he will do whatever he can to win the midterms. Including doing all he can to gerrymander the red states to get more votes in the House.
Yes I fully agree
> Because of vanity and greed he will do whatever he can to win the midterms
I don't see how vanity and greed relate to the midterms. Trump is into insider trading and making billions off of crypto pumps and other schemes. Winning the midterms is not all that relevant.
And if he was willing to do whatever it took to win the midterms, surely stopping an incredibly unpopular war would be step 1?
He has no political future. He pillaged the country as best he could (top notch performance so far) and will continue to do so for the next 3 years and then off to Mar-a-Largo or wherever to live out the few remaining years he's got left
Depends on how you connect conflicts to strategic aims. The US won the cold war. Could they have done so without all the military conflicts? Further, what's the best way to maintain a strong fighting force? By fighting. The US needs wars to maintain it's fighting muscle.
They won it so hard they're not even aware it's still going on...
Russia can't even beat it's much smaller, much poorer neighbor in a full on war.
But you're probably right, an actual puppet wouldn't be so blatantly obvious about working for Putin.
Edit: I know you'll be surprised but the current administration still hasn't spent the $400M allocated for Ukraine![0]
Interesting for someone you think won the cold war!
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/19/iran-attack-qatar-lng-capaci...
That and its trust and geopolitical influence even among allies being quickly eroded to the benefit of countries like China.
Inflation and ammo stockpiles are easier to fix.
Yeah but all of that is orthogonal to the war itself. It's not like Trump needed to threaten to invade Greenland to go to war with Iran.
As others point out Iran had their own fair share of issues and there were protests but now they have a common enemy to fight. Most likely it keeps galvanizing people in the Middle East against US and then Americans wonder why people chant - Death to...But then again this shows average American has no clue about different cultures and the best analysis is - Iran is done, just like how Taliban was done right?
The evidence of this is is literally right in front of you, how could a country with no military or capabilities hold the straight for 2+ months? The IRGC literally tweets every day about how full of shit the U.S. is, hard to tweet if you're dead as the U.S. claims.
Well, European partners are looking, too - and they are drawing logical conclusions, such as producing more interceptors locally rather than wait years for the first batches of PAC-3.
Just like renewables, EV's and a lot of other technologies, the expensive toys the US arms producers are hawking are starting to look like relic from another era.
So, Ukraine cant produce what USA sells ... but USA is refusing to follow its contracts.
Interesting. So Urkaine and the EU have been denied USA weaponry, and yet Ukraine is turning the tide of the war anyway.
I guessing this isn't how the current USA administration expected that would turn out. I imagine they thought the collapse of Ukraine would reinforce the USA piston as leader of the western world.
Judging by the West's silence when Trump appealed for help with Iran, that isn't what happened. Instead it looks like the Wests reaction to Trump's USA threatening to the leave their club is "don't let the door hit your arse on the way out".
Urkaine successfully waging war with weapons that cost several orders of magnitude less than what the USA is offering probably has something to do with that, particular given they are right next door and will be greatly appreciative of the EU's support for them through the war. Friendship and helping a mate out in a time of need brings it's own rewards.
(Once ICE cars fall below a certain percentage, they will have structural disadvantages to EVs because ICE engines are so expensive to design.)
The only administration that did anything wrong with regard to Epstein is the one that (stupidly and maliciously) promised to release them and then (stupidly and maliciously) declined to do that.
The stock market did, which is amazing if you're the top 10% of asset owners who own 50% of the country's wealth.
>except Russia by heaping sky rocketing energy costs on them
Russia doesn't benefit from this energy spike, since its biggest customers, China and India, have long term contracts that Russia can't just rip and renegotiate to charge spot prices, since they're in a pickle right now and depend on imports to keep the war going while not being able to sell to too many nations so they're stuck watching potential earnings go past them.
No? https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/05/11/iran-war-russia-putin-t...
> Data suggests that Moscow has already made billions of dollars of additional
> revenue from oil sales because of higher crude prices, as well as the fact
> that the United States temporarily rescinded sanctions on Russia to rein in
> global costsWhat's the data and how many extra billions did the make from China and how much increase is that in %?
Why does the market seem so disconnected from the general economy?
That said, it seems that the stock market is doing well in spite of this war, and not because of it. Who knows how long that will last
Whether or not you believe the United States' leaders, whether or not you think there was a better way for them to achieve their goals (something something Obama deal) is up for debate. But it's very facetious to say you "can't think of a single way in which the United States came out ahead in the war," when the United States' leaders have been publicly announcing it for nearly a year.
This comment doesn't make sense to me; if one doesn't agree with the US leaders then one can perfectly well say that one can't think of a single way in which the US has come out ahead. In fact that's just another way of saying that one doesn't agree with US leaders; there's no contradiction here.
> All of this to get to a point where we are negotiating a deal which is worse than what we already had with the JCPOA.
But that deal also ended nearly a decade ago, and the United States has been in talks for more than a year to strike a new deal. It is facetious to say they gain nothing by starting a war, if your excuse is they could have just not blundered a decade ago. Unfortunately, the United States does not yet have access to time travel.
To clarify, in case that was not clear:
"Yes, the leaders say they gain something, but I disagree because they wouldn't have anything to gain if we could just go back in time and fix their blunders."
There is a ready list of American and European IRGC sympathizers. They would rather have the status quo of the Carter disaster than to give a green light to a no-RoE takeover of Iran.
Deny (or strip) them clearances, access to intelligence, and/or influence over defense policy.
They do care about the cost of war and possible refugee tsunami though.
It's funny that Trump got elected on the premise of ending the "forever war" of America world police.
Their position on the systematic rapes that were perpetrated by their proxies on Oct 7th were not moderate in any sense of the word. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48109535
The 'moderate' Ghalibaf and others literally threw students off of buildings. Is that 'moderate' to you?
Iran has not exported crude by sea for 28 days. That is not 'control'.
Funny the people that pushed for a ceasefire in Gaza now calling ceasefires 'total loss' and a 'ceding of permanent control of Hormuz to Iran'. Call a temporary ceasefire and dialog to try and prevent escalation 'complete failure'. As if the US trying to achieve our goals via negotiation is less preferrable than continued bombing of Iran.
Maybe not directly from this conflict, but it’s becoming hard to differentiate the actions taken by this administration from solely that of seeking personal gain.
* Demonstrated that the US simply can't offer any meaningful security guarantee to it's middle east partners.
* Permanently ceded de facto control over the straits of Hormuz to Iran
* Significantly strengthened the hardliners in the Iranian regime and cleared the way for them to have absolute power by eliminating all moderates
* Spiked inflation at home and doubled down on pissing off pretty much every single country except Russia by heaping sky rocketing energy costs on them
* Exposed the perilous state of of the defense industrial base (in spite of us spending more than the next 10 countries combined). We simply can't produce enough military hardware to sustain a sustained conflict with a country like Iran. I shudder to think just how badly we will be outmatched in a shooting war with China.
All of this to get to a point where we are negotiating a deal which is worse than what we already had with the JCPOA.
I think we will look back on this as the US version of the Suez crisis, the beginning of the end of the US empire.