It would be, unless China isn't yet militarily ready.

Also if China's Taiwan plan includes using surrogates like Iran to cause simultaneous trouble, then reducing Iran's capability asynchronously eliminates one US worry during a Taiwan scenario.

Don't interrupt your enemy when they are busy making mistakes.

Iran is shaping up to be a quagmire worse than Afghanistan or Iraq. Even if Trump pulls back from the brink, the GCC economies are significantly damaged, Iran will extort a massive wergild, and European and Asian economies will suffer another energy shock. China is relatively unscathed.

Arguably this has been happening since the Cold War, as aircraft-launched missiles back then were designed to take out incoming cruise missiles. But in principle using something like an F-15 firing something like an AIM-120 is cheaper than using a Patriot, because the Patriot missile has to include a huge booster stage, a disposable radar, etc, while those can all be integrated into the plane instead in the case of an AMRAAM. In practice of course whether or not it is cheaper is dependent on the cost per flight hour of the plane and how many AMRAAMS you're making versus how many Patriot interceptors you're building. In that regard though, this _is_ new, because there's a fairly recently introduced missile called Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System (APKWS) that puts a relatively cheap seeker head onto a cheap otherwise-unguided rocket (I'm pretty sure the cost of an APKWS seeker + rocket is less than $50k), and those are cheap enough that you can send up an F-15 with hardpoints full of them and not worry nearly as much about letting loose several million-dollar missiles.

I know that wars are going on and I guess I have talked about this war in particular fair-share on it.

But when all of the Epstein thing happened, I genuinely thought that US media which moved the headlines faster than I can think about the issues for, would actually slow down given the severity and we as a society could think about it.

And then the US Administration did these wars with less discussion of Epstein files and their implications.

I used to see people raise these points within the start of war but as this war is getting streched more and more, it seems that the news cycle may've forgotten a bit about the files

A lot of my assumptions on the world and how it operates feel challenged by this pace of going from epstein to wars, Reading 1984, it feels like using war as a distraction so that nobody digs in too deep but everyone feels panic and fear so that they are easily controllable.

I hope that accountability can take place within the context of epstein files. Some of it is still redacted even unconstituionally.

(I kind of wish to do some data analysis checking the frequency of Epstein files related posts in Hackernews (for example) after the Iran war actually now [maybe-later, maybe this will also be one of the ideas which I might not implement right now] but I will try to share if I find any interesting results and perhaps someone who is also interested can do that as anecdotally, I feel like I see almost zero mentions of Epstein now from Media or very little aside from some comments like the GP's comment which mentioned Epstein in saying Epstein-fury.)

The issue is that capability being gone without any ammo. As the article mentions:

> Again, the Tomahawk would be a primary weapon system used in a conflict with China, where the target sets can range into the tens of thousands, and the country’s anti-access umbrella will require the use of standoff munitions like none other in history.

>Netanyahu's self-destructive tantrum that dragged the US into this mess in the first place.

Trump was bought by the Israel lobby long ago. Miriam Adelson, Sheldon Adelson, Larry Ellison and others gave him hundreds of millions to ensure he’d start this war while he was still campaigning.