Apparently, this helped the Houthis advance quickly as the opposition forces were in disarray.
The military units are not very well organized, they don't have clear and stringent command, control and communications.
They understood a regional commander to be fleeing, units fell back.
This is kind of stuff is absolutely as old as time, and it's #1 rule in conflict aka deception.
The parallel would be reproducing a General's order to withdraw - meaning the command would have legitimacy among troops and junior officers, believing their own commanders were just out of the loop.
And yes - their command structure will be de facto organized along social lines, but it's more descriptive.
You’d lose a lot of money always waiting for news through officials channels.
Who knows how slow Yemini military channels are.
You’d bet your life on it?
Yes, our current President also does stupid things, and our military forces shouldn't be using his incoherent ramblings on Twitter to make snap judgements on the battlefield without checking with their chain of command either.
You mean the chain of command that has been purged of experienced professionals?
You don't even need to try because it's not happening.
This is why it succeeded: lizard brain decisions overcame training in the armed forces.
Where in the battlefield decision making process are they listening to social media recordings to make combat decisions?
Sauds, on the other hand . . .
Even in the Russia/Ukraine conflict they use Telegram for basic operations. All chat applications are dual-use.
But leaks of those messages onto twitter are probably the most valuable info source for what the enemy is doing.
I have no idea, but Im certain that twitter recordings do not put frontline forces in disarray.
> use Telegram for basic operations
an encrypted private communication channel is very different than public social media
I dont know that its a matter of professionalism. Everyone in the world has known that AI can generate video and audio that is imperceptibly fake, for years. And thats to say nothing of man-made forgeries in the years prior.
I have a hard time seeing people on the front line throwing down arms and running away because of an unsourced twitter clip.
And then recognize that the normies you talk to are VASTLY MORE internet-savvy than the illiterate child soldiers on the front lines in Yemen. You have no concept of the info environment they live in. It is all magic electronic soup.
> I have no idea, but Im certain that twitter recordings do not put frontline forces in disarray.
And yet as a counterexample: reality.
I don't want to live in interesting times anymore.
https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/e50be2e51e7695dc4b1366a37a245a...
"But I don't see it helping us, it's just helping our enemies get closer to parity ."
"Precisely. How else are we going to justify the budget?"
Obviously, it's happening with all decent models.
The point of regulation is to kill competitors and prevent private individuals from having unfettered access.
This is the most "I get both sides" issue in my mind these days. I am still not sure where I fall, or if there is even a correct position with which to agree. It really seems like there are no good options.
On the one hand, if all knowledge work ended up in two dude's hands, that is really bad. On the other hand, if every surviving child victim of war (US, RU, IL, CN, whatever) has access to the knowledge to make custom viruses for a few grand, that is also really bad.
with the press of a USB key or other device into/onto what you’re using.
This can be used to verify consistent identities for the cost of an AirTag or less - but without mandating it as a government-involved thing, which is most of the holdup.
We should stop everybody else from developing AI, except for both of them which are the most appropriate stewards for this technology.
Do they have a chain of command? Are people in charge?
Those conditions seem to be changing.
I suspect the Chinese won’t be happy with the pipeline and refinery attacks on Saudi Arabia but i also assume that there will still be plenty of Chinese bound oil for the foreseeable future.
Not that they are doing it for this reason, but they have done a lot to shield trump from the consequences of his stupid war. But those supplies can only hold for so long; things can get much worse for the world economy in the near future.
Even with that, global strategic petroleum reserves are quickly draining. Last I looked, the US was down to ~290M. There is a legal limit of 250M (though laws don’t matter anymore). The structural floor is also estimated to be somewhere north of 200M.
The world is about to not be able to meet all oil demand for any price.
I often wonder about the world we would live in if the Brooks Brothers Riot had not succeeded. That appears to have been the turning point for the fall of the USA, and even more sadly, humanity.
Which if correct is a crazy display of flexibility in the economy
[9%] https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-co2-emissions-fa...
Iran can't have a nuclear weapon. It's an intolerable premise and if the price to be paid is global oil catastrophe it's a price well worth paying and America will force the issue as we have. You can deny this or you can accept that other actors have agency in the world and interests and they may take action that negatively affects you indirectly. You can help them, ignore them, fight against them. But we live in a world where other countries and other people will do things and you have to figure out how to best deal with it.
We have seen what happened with North Korea, but at least China and Russia can somewhat keep a lid on it. Which is the minimum they owe the rest of us since they created that problem. Iran's government is ideological in a way that westerners don't really understand (and to some extent Putin is too via his desires regarding Ukraine but the Russian system isn't too alien to our own views - they play tennis and vacation in Europe and all that stuff). Their government is simply not interested in the things that you and I are interested in.
With Iran you add in the pursuit of a nuclear weapon, Iranian continued attacks coordinated in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Israel via Palestine and it's desire to continue to destabilize the region, supporting Russia's war against Ukraine, and helping Russia evade sanctions (never mind domestic repression and murder) and you've really got a problem on your hands that needs solved one way or another if we're going to go the whole peace and stability for the globe route. The primary problem right now is that the rest of the world would rather see the United States take care of this problem (and it's having a tough time but there's a lot of nuance there) then to help because if you are Europe you're somewhat on Iran's side for some god awful reason, if you are Russia, well you work with Iran, if you are the gulf powers you have no power besides your oil, and if you are China you are not going to spend any resources (nor do you have power projection capabilities). So what do we do?
You can sit here yelling until you are blue in the face that this is Trump's war, or he shouldn't have started it (ignoring history) or some nonsense about ancient colonialism (Iran itself is attempting to be a Neo colonial power) or how Israel is so bad or something but Iran's behavior in the region simply cannot continue if you value peace and stability and global trade. Yea whatever Trump isn't a force for that either I get it, but that's not a good argument to make things worse by also letting Iran do crazy shit.
China's stockpiles are dwindling, strategically that's bad for China especially if they want to invade democratic Taiwan. You still need oil to run the military, no amount of batteries are going to power jet fighters or missiles for the foreseeable future. But dwindle they will and eventually China (and others) will be forced to buy oil and it will raise prices. We're all going to have to deal with that eventuality.
Russia's invasion of Ukraine also cut off large amounts of oil and gas supplies via sanctions, and the United States clamping down on both Venezuela and Iran has further restrained oil supplies as the US has also gone after Russian shadow fleet tankers which were adding additional capacity to the market. The EU has done a little bit here too after the US led the way.
Global chokepoints are a problem. Having so much of the world (primarily Asia) rely on oil and gas from the Middle East where you've got these militant groups funding by Iran who can at a whim decide if they don't get some concession that they're going to cut off oil for everyone else is intolerable. Again, say what you want but we as a planet should not be beholden to this kind of behavior.
Says you.
All other nuclear nations behave (even Pakistan and India, which are at each other throat all the time). What makes you think that Iran won't? It will also have Russia and China keep a lid on them, same as North Korea. And I don't buy the "Iran is different" gospel. North Korea and China have completely different mindsets than the western world and still play ball.
Additionally, if Iran really is that adamant in getting nukes, I can see them asking some enriched material to Russia as a payment to the 100s if not 1000s of drones they are giving them. They share a "land" border through the Caspian sea and smuggling a few 10s of kilos of enriched material would be relatively easy.
Finally, it is not a good proposition if the hypotethical benefits will be reaped by US/Israel while the suffering is globally spread.
Russia, China, the U.S., North Korea, Israel. These are all countries that absolutely do not behave. Each commits atrocities on a regular basis. Them having nukes makes accountability much more difficult.
Just to be clear: the current situation is a huge mess caused by one deranged leader.
Agreed. The situation is worse than before the U.S. attack.
Iran has proven they can control the straight, threatening the world's energy supply. This is a more powerful weapon than a nuke (which multiple agencies, including U.S. intel, said they didn't have when this all started). New leadership in Iran is more galvanized against the U.S. than ever.
The U.S. already lost this war. Iran is dictating terms. Allies in the region have seen that the U.S. cannot protect them, and are making other accomodations, reducing U.S. influence in the region and beyond.
Everyone else realized that the world wasn't ready for anything but appeasement, our idiot didn't understand and pushed it into open conflict. Didn't change the basic situation, though.
literally no part of this sentence is accurate.
Sorry that's just dead wrong. This doesn't happen in a vacuum. I mean you could simply add Netanyahu and make your statement incorrect here. Nevermind all the other actors, Iran's deranged death cult, and more.
as for iran, they've been the picture of restraint since trump's first term.
They tried to assassinate Trump, before he did any of this!
I'm going to believe Biden's DOJ over Iran...
Iran is way more aggressive in spreading influence in region (hoothis, hezbollah, hamas, Syria, Iraq, denying Israel existence).
https://americandreaming.substack.com/p/wikipedias-islamist-...
I'm not a nuclear weapons expert but from what I understand the United States and others are pretty easily able to identify where enriched material comes from. Also we probably have eyes on the material in general and can see where it is being moved. It has to be stored in places, put into a missile, &c.
But if your argument were to be taken to be correct you're also highlighting the problem with the JCPOA. Well, one of them at least.
Maybe, if you let them inspect the material…
But what I meant was that if a weapon was used we'd be able to identify the signature of the material used and pinpoint the exact location on earth that it came from. In other words, if Russia "easily" (again that's an another feather in the cap agains the JCPOA) sent material to Iran and they used it and built a bomb and used it we'd know it came from a Russian mine. Of course they could maybe steal material from somewhere else and then Russia could transport that but hey, look where we're at. We've got Russia who invaded Ukraine supplying nuclear material to Iran to build a bomb. Maybe we shouldn't be on team Russia/Iran yea?
That isn't what the International Atomic Energy Agency said https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/iaea-...
At least before Trump started playing games Iran was in compliance
But the Iranians aren't stupid, they just moved the research to "military sites" and then denied access. Sometimes I think the UN and some of these agencies are run by people who grew up in very manicured gardens with their fancy law degrees and filet mignon and can't use their imagination to understand how someone might deceive them lol.
But this still begs the question - why do we need to have some sort of deal in the first place? Why does Iran of all countries need to have this special treatment where they threaten to build nuclear weapons unless we all do or give them something. Other countries don't do that.
Iran signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty ages ago which put certain limits on what they could do. Other countries had growing concerns that Iran wasn't living up to that treaty, and those violations (plus some other stuff) resulted in a bunch of sanctions being placed on Iran.
Eventually Iran got a president who requested an international agreement that would ease both the sanctions Iran was under and the fears other countries had over their nuclear program. After lots and lots of negotiations they settled on the Joint Plan of Action which did a pretty good job.
I don't think Iran was being treated as all that special here and we'd see similar events play out if any country under the NPT started building up it's nuclear program, especially if other countries thought that country was unstable/terroristy enough that the idea of them having a bunch of nukes was extra scary and they also felt an agreement could be reached that would help make them less frightened.
Because Iran's leadership is actually crazy.
Iran already misbehaves, exporting violence to the entire region. How do you think they are going to act when they have nuclear weapons?
> And I don't buy the "Iran is different" gospel.
Descriptions of the Soviet leadership basically word for word use the same apocalyptic terms used for the ayatollahs/IRGC by current neocons about Iran. Just swap in "Islamist" for "Communist" as the current ideology that makes any kind of realpolitik impossible.
"These leaders aren't rational like previous adversaries, they don't fear annihilation, in fact they want catastrophe to prove their own fatalist belief system. There can be no negotiation with this sort of enemy, their singular goal is our destruction even at the cost of their own lives."
It's always different this time, and all assumptions about self-serving human nature need to be thrown out the window. Anyone who thinks force isn't the only solution is a naively deluded suicidal peacenik. All out war right now on our terms is the only rational way to avoid world destruction.
Actions have consequences. The continual attack on the sovereignty of countries around the world has made nuclear weapons one of the few ways to avoid being a client state of the US at the expense of your own population. Iran has figured out another method it seems.
This is blowback. The simple lesson that we refuse to learn.
Name the other countries pursuing a nuclear weapon. Maybe you are drumming up a fear that nobody else really has.
- North Korea
- Israel
- India
- Pakistan
Others have pursued them, includng Libya, South Africa, etc. Libya agreed to surrender their program, and then their government was deposed with Western help. Ukraine gave up their nuclear weapons (left over from being occupied by the USSR) in exchange for peace from Russia, and you can see what happened. That doesn't encourage the next person to give up theirs.
So when you sort of set aside countries from prior to, idk, 1980s ish you don't really have anyone at least publicly (to your point) pursuing nuclear weapons. However it's not just the enrichment of uranium which is tightly controlled it's also the missile technology to deliver the weapons. Keeping a nuclear program secret these days I think is quite a bit more difficult than in the past.
So when you look around today you've got Iran that we know of pursuing a nuclear program. I'm not sure anyone else is by virtue of how difficult (I think?) it would be to do so undetected. Though there are countries (Japan and Korea come to mind) who we think have the ability to scale up a program very quickly.
Japan and South Korea literally have 100s of American military bases on their territory. You really think they are sovereign nations who can pursue an independent nuclear program?
Yes? Are you really sitting here telling South Korea, Japan, Germany, and more that they’re not sovereign nations because they choose to have American military bases on their home soil?
> India and Pakistan were late 90s.
Source please
India worked on them on and off for decades and first tested one in 1998, and IIRC Pakistan matched them soon after.
North Korea was in the 2000s.
> So when you sort of set aside countries from prior to, idk, 1980s ish you don't really have anyone at least publicly (to your point) pursuing nuclear weapons.
I'm not going through the comment correcting all of it.
Yea, why bother when you're peddling misinformation?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smiling_Buddha
> North Korea was in the 2000s.
Yes supported by Russia and China they got the keys they needed for the delivery mechanism (ballistic missiles). But the problem with North Korea is they threatened to kill hundreds of thousands of people in South Korea if anyone stopped them from building their bomb. South Korea didn't want that to happen and China would have fought against American forces had we tried anything in North Korea. Not much we can do.
For anyone unfamiliar with the topic, I encourage them to lookup when India, Pakistan, and North Korea developed nuclear weapons - you will find the answers in an instant.
Yes, like India successfully tested their first nuclear weapon in 1974, not 1998 like you are asserting.
Ukraine never had nuclear weapons. Russia is the sole legal successor of the USSR and these were all Russian nukes on Ukrainian territory.
> in exchange for peace from Russia
There isn't a single mention of nuclear weapons in the Budapest Memorandum.
Structuring the breakup so that the nukes are Russia's is not really different than Ukraine giving up the nukes on its territory.
Where did they draw the line? Obviously not all USSR assets are now Russian assets, as Ukraine still has (or had) its own stockpile of Soviet era weapons, and other things like Soviet era airfields.
https://web.archive.org/web/20170312052208/http://www.cfr.or...
Points 4 and 5 mention and are about use of nuclear weapons.
I think the memorandum was intended to be a security guarantee to Ukraine after they (and Belarus, and Kazakhstan) joined the NPT and transferred formerly-Soviet nuclear weapons to the Russian Federation. I don't know why anyone would suggest otherwise.
What split of Soviet debt obligations? Russia took over all Soviet foreign debt, as well as all the foreign assets
Separately that doesn't resolve the other issues, funding militant groups, &c.
What aside from their total annihilation or subjugation would ever convince you of your (Israel's) safety?
You sound gleeful about the idea of nuclear proliferation. It's unfortunate that so many have stopped caring about the institutions and liberal world order we created. Oh well.
If/once Iran gets one we'll give one to Saudi Arabia at least and make sure Israel's program is well supported. Then we can make sure Germany has them and Poland too if they want them. Korea and Japan will also get the green light. Anyone who opposes China/Russia will can get access to then and we can add a dozen or so countries to the nuclear armed states list. Why not?
So apparently, we've yet to do anything to prevent them from doing it.
We've just killed children.
They killed more than 30,000 of their own people including children and support terrorist regimes in multiple countries that also kill children.
> There's zero evidence its less possible
On the other hand we bombed the nuclear facilities so what increase in nuclear weapons capability do they have that you are thinking about here? If there's something that has changed I'd be curious to read about it or your thoughts since that would change my opinion.
The evidence we bombed their nuclear facilities is essentially this administration telling us we bombed their nuclear facilities.
This administration does not have a track record of providing the public with honest assessments of their success.
If we've successfully stopped them from developing a nuclear weapon, which was stated as the point of our preemptive aggression, I'd need a very good reason why we continue to spend billions attacking them.
No my take is we do it by accident and they do it on purpose and at a much larger scale and instead of pearl clutching about the US doing it on accident you should be pearl clutching about Iran doing it. I didn’t bring it up, but anytime someone brings up this whole “US killed kids” I’m happy to remind everyone that Iran is far worse.
> The evidence we bombed their nuclear facilities is essentially this administration telling us we bombed their nuclear facilities.
So? Do you not believe anything anyone says unless you see it for yourself?
> If we've successfully stopped them from developing a nuclear weapon, which was stated as the point of our preemptive aggression, I'd need a very good reason why we continue to spend billions attacking them.
Stopping the development of a nuclear weapon is an important goal but not the only one. We keep defending ourselves because they keep doing things like launching rockets at Kuwait, or shooting at American ships, or supporting those committing genocide or murder in Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, and Yemen.
There is a very simple solution. Iran stops funding these groups, stops murdering their own people, stop launching rockets, and stops trying to build nuclear weapons. Once they do that and behave responsibility like just about every other country on the planet there aren’t any problems.
Why is it that they can’t just stop doing these things?
"Hey, we're not as bad a literal terrorist regime!" is not a metric by which I think we should measure our own country.
I'd believe we'd actually accomplished our goal of stopping their nuclear program if this specific administration hadn't told us, before this attack, we had successfully stopped their nuclear program with a previous attack. Once you've lied to me once, my standard of evidence is a great deal higher than "trust us, bro." and this administration has already shown incompetence at judging the effectiveness of their attacks (or shown a willingness to lie to us about it).
The entire problem with this strategy, from day one, was the completely ahistorical belief that we could punish a country into behaving exactly as we want, in a way that specifically aligns with our interests.
Bullying nations has a tendency to harden them against cooperation and negotiation, as we've seen with Iran.
Ok and they did theirs with malicious and clear purpose. Yikes!
> This wasn't the unfortunate result of a necessary attack on a valid target. This was the result of stupidity.
No. Iran and their militant proxies know that we don't attack civilian targets on purpose. That's why they set up facilities, military equipment, or hide combatants behind children or in hospitals and such because they know we don't want to kill innocent people. Hamas or Iran will tell you this as part of their doctrine.
So think about it. You've got the US and allies, Hamas, Hezbollah or whatever, Iran, and they're all saying "The US and western allies don't intentionally kill innocent people" and then there's you who is like sitting here complaining about it and now it's just "incompetence". Give me a break.
> "Hey, we're not as bad a literal terrorist regime!" is not a metric by which I think we should measure our own country.
Nobody is using that metric except you. The US admitted the mistake and apologized at a minimum. I believe there was some talk of compensation though I'm not sure where that has landed. Probably tough to do because the Iranian regime would steal any money we gave to the families.
But hey I do agree with you, Iran's government is a terrorist regime.
> Bullying nations has a tendency to harden them against cooperation and negotiation, as we've seen with Iran.
Well sure but they were never cooperating anyway. If they were, they wouldn't have been taking the actions they've been taking. What does cooperation look like? It looks like not murdering tens of thousands of your own people, it looks like not pursuing nuclear weapons, it looks like not funding militant groups who murder innocent people throughout the region, and it looks like not building up gigantic stockpiles of missiles and drones and then launching them at every country around you.
Iran is the only country doing this stuff. Why aren't they cooperating with the rest of the world peacefully?
This has been heavily reported on and no counter-story has been proffered.
You introduced a whataboutalism. I pointed out whataboutalisms are ridiculous when it comes to dead children.
The frustrating part of all of this is we had a working agreement with Iran, with numerous mechanisms to ensure compliance, that was torn up because this administration, without any offered evidence, said Iran wasn't in compliance. And this was despite multiple international partners disagreeing and saying they were absolutely complying.
When are you talking about and what is that based on? It was the US that withdrew; the other countries continued. US intelligence concluded that Iran had no nuclear weapons program (or maybe, no active one; I don't recall).
> you'd also have to say you 100% trust American intelligence to verify
Nope, the plan was for the IEA to do their thing with on-the-ground inspectors, sensors, etc. As just one example, nuclear materials leak radiation and they can find indications of it in air, soil, etc., around faciltiies. Edit: Also, many other countries were involved and looking closely, including European powers and Israel.
They'd just move the research to clandestine or military facilities. They're not stupid. Countries like Iran know how to play these games and they use our own legal mechanisms against us all the time.
Separately we shouldn't have to have a JCPOA in the first place, they can just not pursue nuclear weapons like almost every other country on the planet.
> we shouldn't have to have a JCPOA in the first place, they can just not pursue nuclear weapons like almost every other country on the planet.
Other countries do pursue and have nuclear weapons. Iran has not yet created a full nuclear weapons program - or hadn't before the current war.
Iran, being under constant threat from the US and Israel, with open calls to attack Iran for decades; seeing two neighbors recently deposed by the US (Iraq and Afghanistan); and having had their own government deposed and replaced by a US-friendly one (Mosaddegh in 1953); under constant threat from neighbors and the region (Iraq invaded in the 1980s, Saudi Arabia and other Sunni states are open enemies, Israel of course); may believe that they need nuclear weapons to survive.
Is there another country in a similar position, with the resources to develop nuclear weapons, that doesn't have them? North Korea and Israel both made that choice in similar circumstances.
The US 'nuclear umbrella' covers its allies around the world, a very effective non-proliferation tool. Otherwise, I imagine South Korea, Japan, many NATO countries would build them - there is already discussion of it in the former two countries.
This is the flaw in your thinking. It won't be the US who alone decides to live with high oil prices, it'll be everyone.
Vague promises of "pushing for renewables" is a gross mischaracterization and misunderstanding of the importance of oil and gas to the global economy. Note, I'm not anti-renewable or whatever, but chalking this up to a "US problem" is willfully ignorant.
Everybody else (with sea access) has a coast guard, and maybe a few ships for show. China is making enough ships that in a decade they could be there, but it isn't clear they want to go there - they don't see to be building the world supply line needed (but around China they do have that power already).
That is if you don't like the current situation with the US deciding the rules of the sea, then you need to pay for your own navy.
The two major economies in the EU (France and Germany) are both facing severe recessions and a parliamentary deadlock + soon to be elections would will be most certainly won by Putin's allies and/or radical communists.
All of this to say I would not hold my breath on Europe doing much at all in the coming months/years.
I was talking about France Unbowed (LFI) in France which is radical left parti (and allies of the French communists parti) that wants to burn the debt owned by the French state (their own words not mine) and could be in the second round of the French election vs the National Rally (far right).
Both the National Rally and France Unbowed are in favor of stopping Ukrainian foreign aid.
China is essentially the only actor in the market that is able to weather this conflict in marathon fashion.
They have their own advantages and strategies to deal with these things, but this idea that China just like sits around and "weathers the conflict" unscathed is just incorrect.
If global oil and gas prices rise, Chinese electricity and transport prices are largely unaffected, unlike the rest of the world. Even the US doesn't have that kind of resilience.
However, China is a net importer of oil and gas, while the US is a net exporter, so when it comes to trade the US is the main beneficiary, although it mainly benefits one single sector.
This is simply inaccurate. I don't know why you or others keep repeating this. It's bizarre. How do you think China gets goods out of the country to other countries? Separately China is specifically dependent on oil and gas shipments from the Middle East. How these disruptions affect countries depends on a lot of different factors. This blasé assertion that China somehow isn't affected by oil and gas prices is not reflected in reality or China's own actions. Why do you think they're drawing on their strategic reserve?
I’m not sure the only country that has used nukes on people should be the one to decide that
For all those who are about to reply saying it was justified because it saved American lives, why didn't you use it Afghanistan or Iraq?
It's hard to predict what a theocracy might do.
Up until fairly recently, Israel was a stand-out in the region for actually having things like decently fair elections and a political class derived from a relatively wide sample of its populace. Other countries in the region were either Arab nationalist republics, Islamic republics, or authoritarian monarchies. While it was ethno-theocratic, it was one that seemed to balance religion with secular demands, and as it is, most countries around the world have at least some basis in ethnicity. The US is a notable exception for this, for what it's worth. This has begun to fade as a more conservative sector of Israeli society has begun carrying more political power, but it's not to the same extent as you find in other countries in the region.
Nuclear weapons are indeed bad and we used to try to negotiate ways between major powers to reduce their number. We don't do that anymore, for a variety of reasons. The more of them there are in different, independent hands, the more likely they are to be used. If they're used, there's a real chance that nuclear-armed powers make severe miscalculations about who is firing what at where. For example, a USAF radar operator watching an over-the-horizon system pointed eastward sees a large number of missiles being launched, and may assume that they're Russian missiles aimed at the US, when they are in fact Iranian missiles aimed at Israel. They might make a potentially species-ending mistake as a result.
The largest issue with Iran having nuclear weapons is that it almost certainly intends to use them against an already nuclear-armed power, Israel, in a way that really doesn't have any rational endgame. Iran is a Shia Islamic theocracy. Beyond the Western-ish influence that Israel brings to the region, there are serious theological implications from the existence of Israel. Islam has a core tenant that there is no higher power other than Allah and that Muhammad is his prophet. Allah is the same god that exists in Christianity and Judaism, and Muhammad is held as carrying on the thread of prophecy that began with the biblical Adam.
There's a lot in common in the three major Abrahamic faiths, and like all other faiths, people interpret it in different ways. The Iranian regime - who definitely does not represent all Muslims, let's make that clear right now - interprets it as the basis of their power. They are a group of clerics and scholars who govern a nation through interpretation and application of religious jurisprudence via one head cleric, the Ayatollah.
If you are a person who either rules a society based on any religious jurisprudence, or are working under that person - as all of the Iranian government does - you can't have too much tolerance for things that might undermine that religion. The Iranian theocracy's interpretation of the line of prophecy that Muhammad is a part of is that he is the "seal of the prophets", meaning that there will be no further revelations or corrections to the line of prophecy until the end-times. Muhammad is held up as having revealed corrections to the line of prophecy, meaning that while Judaism, Christianity, and other Abrahamic faiths are of the same prophecy, they ultimately got some things wrong.
Now let's get back to the existence of Israel. A short description of Israel in the context of what I've described is that you have a people who now control some of the Abrahamic faiths' most holy sites, and they're doing it based off of what is seen as the "wrong" prophecy.
If people who believe in the "wrong" prophecy are firmly in charge of the sites you consider holy, what does that say about your prophecy and your claim to power based on it? Sort of reduces its power, doesn't it? You can't have that. Something has to be done.
In the eyes of the Iranian theocracy, that "something" is funding, training, and commanding militia and military groups who are sympathetic to your understanding of prophecy and having them strike out at the theologically inconvenient people. Developing more powerful weapons to use while doing so is a natural part of this. What's more powerful than a nuclear weapon? Nothing. So you make that your ultimate goal. What they might do with it, who knows, but again, simply having more nuclear weapons in the hands of more independent actors raises the likelihood of their use with potentially catastrophic results.
The plight of the Palestinians just happens to be a convenient excuse for all of this. They're Arab and majority Sunni as opposed to the Persian and Shiite Iran. If there were a two-state solution as we spent most of the last 30 years working towards, it likely wouldn't satisfy the Iranians, which is why they don't recognize Israel at all instead of saying "we'd recognize you if you retreat to your pre-1967 borders and let the Palestinian Authority govern the West Bank and Gaza Strip."
That being said, if you're talking about the 1953 coup, ask the British about that. Also, it doesn't take away from the fact that the 1979 revolution didn't install any sort of representative government, either.
One classic method is to try to tie it to scripture, but people behave like people regardless of their scriptures, and members of every religion has done plenty of horrible things in the name of their god. The Christian Gospels are about as pacifist as scripture gets and yet many horrible things have been done in Christianities name - often justified because the victims were non-Christian.
There is plenty of religious-sanctioned violence in the Old Testament, including in the Torah, and plenty of violence against non-Jews today - so much that it's a bit bizarre to overlook it.
I mean, we have modern day Islamic societies that are still dragging out homosexuals and stoning them, and still putting women in bags as property.
If that was what I needed to defend with a straight face, I also would be pretty desperate to shift the focus back a thousand or so years.
At what point does reality become more important than your favorite childhood stories?
At this point they'd be fools to not pursue getting one, and we killed everyone in a position of authority who was rational about it. Cats out of the bag, one more nuclear rogue state.
Maybe we should have brokered some kind of deal with Russia to prevent them from invading Ukraine. Do you trust American intelligence 100% to verify Iran is not building a nuclear bomb? And if they weren't, why also were they funding these militant groups? What's the point? It's Neo-colonialism in the Middle East.
> At this point they'd be fools to not pursue getting one, and we killed everyone in a position of authority who was rational about it.
The leadership wasn't really rational in your western sense. I'm not sure where you are coming up with that. If they were rational they wouldn't be murdering their own civilians, chanting death to Israel and death to America as a national past time (no sane nation does this, or if you want to argue they do then don't get mad when Americans are burning the Koran or whatever) and funding militants. You're trying to argue from a place that assumes your values about economics and prosperity and global human rights with an entity that does not care about those values.
If they were rational as you'd like them to be they'd just not do any of the things they've been doing. Why does Iran have to get special treatment to not build a nuclear weapon? Have you thought about that? Why do we have to pay them off? Why are they special snowflakes who get to hold the world hostage less they build nuclear bombs to threaten others?
> Cats out of the bag, one more nuclear rogue state.
That's the fault of the rest of the world then for failing to come together to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
The point is we had a deal, and Iran kept their enrichment below weapons development levels for all of that time. Even a few years after the deal was broken by Trump, apparently. We could have kept that status quo going and not dealt with tolls in the strait and expensive military operations, and it would have been better for everyone involved. But now I don't see a path back to that, and no one is interested enough to stop the proliferation or put enough resources into it to "win". Blame whoever you like I guess, but I'm blaming Trump for tearing things up and kicking off this recent war.
> We could have kept that status quo going
Like the last time the Houthis disrupted shipping? Or when Iran launched and supported attacks on Israel, plus continued disruption in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq? (Yemen too but mentioned via Houthis). Idk if that's a tolerable situation.
Good luck with non proliferation but I think the very obvious "we can attack and invade countries without nukes but can't do that to countries with nukes" lesson is being demonstrated to everyone, so countries that don't want to be invaded will be trying to get them now. Anyone near Russia for sure, possibly even Switzerland eventually.
I understand history and contemporary events is not your strong suit, but such a deal was very much on the table in December 2021 and the Biden Admin laughed it off. Then again in April 2022.
I'd check your understanding but ok.
> but such a deal was very much on the table in December 2021 and the Biden Admin laughed it off.
What was the deal then? And please let us know how acceptable it was to the EU and Ukraine as well. :)
It's also clear that Iran having nukes would be a strategic deterrent to Israel's ultraviolent territorial expansionism.
its not clear at all. They clearly tried to hit Izrael with barrages of missiles, but looks like their targeting systems suck.
There's a reason why Israel has stopped directly striking Iran.
its inefficient at this point and Israel has other targets
I'm not supportive of Israel having nuclear weapons, but Iran won't do something like this because the Israelis might nuke them. That doesn't excuse Iran also building nuclear weapons. Neither should have them, in my view.
Iran also supports the militants that continue to create conflict in Palestine. It's not one-sided and any vague assertion that there's only one bad actor here is illegitimate.
You've said elsewhere in this thread that Iran can never have a nuclear weapon and that a global oil crisis is worth preventing that from happening. You've referred to the Iranian government as a "deranged death cult". Here you're saying that even though Iran already has the capability of making Israel uninhabitable, they won't do it because they're rational actors who understand mutually assured destruction. Which one is it? Assuming your premise in this comment of the Iranians being rational actors who understand MAD is correct, could there be other reasons for Iran to pursue nuclear weapons (i.e. sovereignty and national security)?
It's both. The Iranians are rational within their own cultural understanding of what rational actions are. It's not rational, for example, for them to build nuclear weapons, deprive their people of economic prosperity, kill thousands of protestors, fund militant groups spreading terrorism and murder throughout the region, yet they do it anyway.
You can be simultaneously "rational" in some ways and "irrational" in others. Their general activities are irrational, but that doesn't mean they see the point in launching indiscriminate missiles at Israel only to be on the receiving end of a nuclear weapon. Why not wait until you have dozens and then go for it and launch one at Europe (don't forget, despite European politicians kissing the toes of Iran out of fear and cultural decline that Iran still hates Europe too) or the US too?
> could there be other reasons for Iran to pursue nuclear weapons (i.e. sovereignty and national security)?
Why do you assume the other reasons are for peaceful purposes? Can you think of some malicious purposes that Iran might acquire a nuclear weapon for?
Chemical weapons are perfectly effective for that desire and dramatically easier to build and deploy than nuclear weapons.
So if you expect Iran to just explode Israel ASAP, why are they holding back right now with their weapons not targeting civilian infrastructure? Why did they stop pursuing cheap WMDs that don't need complicated enrichment?
Note that Iran is objectively not pursuing a nuke as fast as possible. They've had sufficient enriched uranium for a long time to be able to actually start building and testing physics packages and even get their first detonation test, but they instead have just been building a stockpile.
>I'm not supportive of Israel having nuclear weapons
Okay, then by your arguments about Iran, we should be invading Israel right? Like right now! They cannot be allowed to have nukes!
What about North Korea? It sure is funny how all the hand wringing about them getting nuclear weapons got quiet after they built a nuke and didn't use it
This is immature. If you wanted to use that logic we should invade Russia and China too, and of course the UK and France. Let me cut to the core of the issue here and prune away the window dressing: not all countries are treated the same, nor do they deserve to be.
> What about North Korea? It sure is funny how all the hand wringing about them getting nuclear weapons got quiet after they built a nuke and didn't use it
You don't think it's still worth hand-wringing about? Just because it's not #1 on the news cycle - quick look a Trump tweet - doesn't mean it's not a big problem. Tell it to the Japanese in particular who have to suffer from North Korea launching ballistic missiles around their country.
“The United States will never condone leadership by corrupt criminals who are supported by and support Russia”
This was an interesting piece of fiction you've written, with some very impressive mental gymnastics on display. However, it's so wrong that engaging with it would be doing you a disservice because it would make you think it's even an intellectually respectable position to have in the first place.
What they did was aggressively reduce demand by accelerating the switch to EV's and firing up a few more coal powerstations.
In terms of influencing the midterms - I suspect China isn't anywhere near the front of the queue in hoping Trump get's a beating given the chaos he is causing.
Complaining about foreign interference is ironically straight from the Hillary playbook.
How much of their strategy is to change elections vs other concerns I don't know.
Donald Trump can end this at any time if he wants. It would have been better to not have started it, thou. Less killing of innocent people, less spending on weapons, better mental health for USA soldiers...
And why is China suddenly at fault for America's actions?
OTOH midterm generic ballots are much more stable than top line presidential horse race polling. So it might only matter at the margins.
I see this over and over again with the Canada stuff. Or Greenland stuff. Not taking it seriously because "oh that's just Trump deflecting cuz of [Epstein|Midterms|etc]." Meanwhile the actual blast radius here is far far far outside of the domestic arena.
When will people just take this guy at his word? He says he wants to conquer or do X Y and Z. That's it. He said those things. Believe him. Stop trying to make it about yourself. (And also he wants to make personal money off manipulating the stock market and oil prices.)
It's not a good look, esp to the victims of Trump outside the US who have no power to vote in American elections and yet are victims of American power.
China is playing long, most of the ~unchanging things are in their favor and the US already proved that they're unreliable. People won't forget that soon even if Trump is gone.
My bet would be that China doesn't care much either way, they win regardless.
In my view the worst that can happen for China is that Trump gets limited by anything. He's hurting US relations more than he's hurting China short or long-term. Relations take longer to build than trade
"Don't interrupt your opponent when they're making a mistake"
Yeah, that's the obvious answer, but I suspect there's a point where if the US fucks things up too quickly and too messily, there's fewer customers for China's crap and/or the random throws of monkey shit drag China into messes they don't feel like dealing with.
Slow erosion of the US's global power is likely better for them than an implosion that might cause collatoral damage.
The situation you're imagining is one of a global all encompassing depression caused by a single government.
Not unthinkable, but the Americans would feel that deeply. Do you think they want to?
- NATO - Maintaining security on the high seas for other than USA shipping,
- tariffs imposed by other countries (yes, other countries have been imposing tariffs for decades):
https://wjno.iheart.com/content/2025-03-17-qa-how-many-count...
The USA can use the money saved for its own citizens (possibly even lowering their taxes!)
> - NATO - Maintaining security on the high seas for other than USA shipping,
NATO consists of a lot of countries, why would they only work for USA shipping? And where do you think that shipping comes from?
> - tariffs imposed by other countries (yes, other countries have been imposing tariffs for decades):
Of course they do. But they're not usually idiots about it.
> The USA can use the money saved for its own citizens (possibly even lowering their taxes!)
You advocate for tariffs but don't understand how tariffs work...
How is that going? Any progress there? Are US citizens richer than they were before?
Some of them certainly are richer, specifically people with the last name Trump.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/13/trump-presid...
I was feeling miserable reading this thread until I saw this, thanks for cheering me up.
I thought the remaining issues were a dispute related to the timing requirements in the War Powers Resolution, plus unsettled Constitutional law.
The 2001 AUMF hasn't been repealed. It was used as recently as 2025 to justify attacks on Venezuelan ships.
source: https://www.raffaellocortina.it/scheda-libro/piergiorgio-odi...
I don't have the book here with me so I cannot check the exact amount of years but it's ridiculously small.
It wasn't a war we could win. We fought it anyway. Now we're stuck trying to lose in a tolerable way. Which requires more fighting.
At some point the balance will tip and China will take over patronage of the right selection of powers to push us out, which will disentangle western involvement (and make it their problem, of course). But at this stage there really is no hope for genuine stability.
Luckily, we reversed that policy and have been using as much oil as possible.
All hail the great barrel of goo.
Women, gays and infidels are pubished by Houthi police.
The EU & US don't have ANY issues supporting and financing governments that punish gays and infidels. Hint: New Syrian government, Saudi government (which is also famous for publicly beheading gays)
So why not accept the Houthis too ? Otherwise, my apologies, your stance just sounds like the usual disgusting Western sanctimonious hypocrisy.
I think you're right that strategic / economic interests have outweighed cultural issues / human rights.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarkha
> "God is great, Death to America, Death to Israel, Curse on the Jews, Victory to Islam"
> In April 2016, during UN-brokered peace talks in Kuwait, Houthi representatives gave the United States a "sincere apology" for the "Death to America" slogan, claiming that the slogan was used for "domestic consumption as a means to attract support in the streets and create a common cause between their supporters to keep them united."
> During the Red Sea crisis, Houthi supporters waved the flag of Palestine every Friday during anti-Gaza genocide and anti-western attacks on Yemen demonstrations, alongside the slogan and flag of Yemen. A new Houthi slogan appeared after the group's re-designation as a terrorist organisation: "America is the mother of terrorism" set on a red background.
The mainstream media has made it sound like the fall of Mocha was at least somewhat surprising, but I don't think that's accurate. It was pretty clear the Houthis would reach the port as late as last week.
His message to the room was essentially that giving $1 billion to his campaign was a low-cost investment that would guarantee massive financial returns for their companies
Reflection Eternal | Ballad of the Black Gold https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryFMKYNJeTM
This is the ballad of the black gold
They call it Texas tea
But it's bigger than a cowboy with a lasso
It's deeper than a black hole
Create monopolies
Except they collect your fee when you pass Go
Crisis international
The government de facto
We got no control of this fiasco
Darker than the back roads
Bubble hotter than Tabasco
More than what you bargained for or asked for- make sure fuel prices increase globally
- The US economy is relatively well-shielded from the fallout by its own fossil fuel sources, local and in colonies like Venezuela.
- export more US fossil fuels, especially to Europe, at inflated prices. US insiders reap the profits.
- further kneecap European competitiveness in energy intensive sectors, steal market share. Oh well, small gift to China here too, but still a net win for the US.
Iranians were rioting against the regime, Israel intelligence handed the US a report that the collective "Head" of the Iranian regime will be all together at one place, at one time.
Cut off the head, and the rioters riding high on the win will topple the rest. Coming off of the swift clean victory in Venezuela, and Trumps incredible desire to put feathers in his cap, it was an irresistible proposition.
So he decided to cut off the head, which was successful. The miscalculation however was that the rioters got scared/apathetic rather than motivated. The power vacuum was filled by the same people who were there before. I'm sure Mossad and the CIA were probably on the ground trying to ground swell support, but evidently it didn't happen.
Killing a few heads of Iran was known to not be an effective strategy, because the power is in the hands of the IRGC as an institution and large group, not the figureheads. This is especially hilarious when the Trump admin was so freaking stupid, they couldn't figure this out even after it didn't work the first time. They continued trying to kill random figureheads as if that plan would have had more success if you killed people nobody had previously heard of.
None of this is "miscalculation" or bad luck or taking a reasonable gamble. It's stupidity. There was not evidence to believe this plan had a strong chance. There was no organized resistance. Claims of supporting the Kurds, a group the Trump admin has fucked over more than once (nit: Other Kurds, they aren't a single group), happened only after the war was already going tits up and involved absurd tweets about "dropping them weapons" as if that's just a thing you can do on a whim and as if the Kurds themselves were willing, ready and able to resist the Iran regime.
We did not "Cut off the head" in Venezuela. We conspired with insiders to replace one figurehead with another. It was not a victory except for extremely weird people who think abducting a foreign head of state is somehow a good thing.
The Pentagon was actively telling the admin all of this, which is why some of them were fired.
What happened was even dumber than this absurd post-hoc rationalization: Israel was fucking pissed after Oct 7th, which is reasonable, and decided that "Mowing the grass" was done, and they were going to Finally fix this. They planned to attack Iran. Their strikes over the next year were done to enable this. Shortly before their planned attacks were to start, Bibi came to Trump and told him about this Righteous war they were about to do and got it in Trump's mind that it would be good for the US to look Strong if they attacked first, as Iran would probably attack US bases in retaliation anyway, and may end up pulled in regardless. IE, there's a chance Kamala would also have gotten sucked into this quagmire in some fashion, depending on how Iran had reacted to just Israel's strikes. Nobody was in a strong position to tell Israel "No, don't start this war, that's stupid, it's stupid, you've already neutered all the proxy groups, just take your victory and go home"
This is Israel's war. They don't mind the straight being screwed up. They don't mind the world economy falling down.
Negative externalities:
- loss of trust
- loss of evidence based policy
- loss of long-term planning
- loss of talent
- financial loss for almost all except the rare insiders
George Friedman, The Next Decade
Seems to be in contradiction.
The truth is probably much more multi-headed - though hard to see how the US would have gone to war without some assessment of their own energy situation.
A rise in crude prices might pay off for a small country that lives almost exclusively off it (say, Saudi Arabia, in the hyphotetical case that it could keep exporting as normal) but for the US? I don't think it does. Surely, Europe is more exposed than the US and will suffer even more, but this is not a zero-sum game.
So I don't think it's an elaborate plan, it's just Trump being reckless as usual.
The fun part about this is that it shows what people actually care about.
What happens if petroleum prices go up? People use less. It's the entire premise of a carbon tax. Fuel costs more so people buy a hybrid or electric vehicle, power utilities find renewables or nuclear more attractive relative to natural gas, etc. In a market economy this is the primary way to get people to switch from something to alternatives -- which is pretty important if you think climate change is a problem.
This is obviously not why Trump is doing it, but it's the consequence of it anyway. So now we get to see what people care about. Do you like higher oil prices because it speeds up the transition away from fossil fuels, or dislike them because of who it is that caused it this time?
We dont have to imagine this. We kind of see both variants in the open.
The ICE recruits are raising the bar.
Oh and now the FBI can consider those with a background in bestiality, so lots of fresh talent there
> https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/iran-war-warn...
We had a retard in the Oval Office 2017-2021 surrounded by "the deep state" (i.e. career managers of the ultra-complex organization called "the government"), and politically constrained by Congress.
Now we have that same retard, but supported by vast purges of aforementioned managers, and politically unconstrained by the cultists and cowards (the two forms of GOP representative) in Congress.
When all is said and done it will be he, not AOC or Bernie or any "Green New Deal" folks, that will be remembered by history as the president who did more to get people off fossil fuels than any other.
The Venezuela comment is extremely weird. You know Venezuela has negligible production, right, and that it would take 100s of billions of investments, over decades, to get reasonable production that would make a difference. That's ignoring that currently there is a laughably illegitimate puppet government -- literally just Madero's government minus him, as they did the coup with the US -- that has a 100% chance of a violent overthrow in the future. Which is exactly why all of the oil companies are shrugging and saying no thanks.
Venezuela is a farce -- much like $5000 "dividend" for a government literally on the precipice of bankruptcy, as Bessent runs around, near tears, trying to convince everyone that they're the house and he's the big dog German Shepherd instead of the face of a failing empire having its last pathetic gasp, to laughter all around -- that Trump thinks gives him leverage against Canada. It is unbelievably pathetic business, like renaming a 400+ year old name on a lake like a little bitch.
There is zero scenario where this has benefitted the US, but a drunkard incompetent secdef (sorry "secwar") convinced a foolish demented rapist, who already had Israel whispering in his ear, how easy and painless this foolish debacle will be.
ROFL.
oil spiked and then crashed during the gulf war & the iraq war in 03.
the gulf war probably because of western price control methods kicking in, the iraq war because of an increase in confidence that the region would produce oil after western 'securing' of oil fields allowing further volume investment from the UAE and friends.
I guess it really just depends on what the definition of 'regional disruption' is.
Instability is instability. Oil is fungible.
There’s no reason to think someone else won’t escalate this further disrupting supplies even more. That will push prices up.
Even if they don’t, if oil can’t get through this straight it will have to go somewhere else, which will increase shipping traffic and demand for “your oil” right? And wouldn’t that also push up prices?
GCC will have to talk to Iran now, there is no reasonable way out of this quagmire other than a regional accommodation with Iran. Talk about a regression but here we are.
And against, not with, Western Europe?
So being prices down where, in eastern Europe?
I suspect they would sooner curtail production rather then sell at a discount due to route restrictions.
It doesn't matter if in Texas wells are producing it at a penny for barrel, if the global prices are high that oil is going to be sold to Philippinos, Japanese, Italians or South Africans.
So, at the same time, it doesn't matter if some new routes open or close, it doesn't particularly favor one or the other buyer, it's still sold globally on a bid.
The Iranian-backed Houthis also struck the Saudi East-West oil pipeline [0], pumping stations and refining capability. Reductions in export output initially estimated around 700,000 barrels per day now missing from the market.
[0] https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Saudi-Oil...
This hurts Europe more than Asia.
The UK, France, Italy, Netherlands, Denmark, and others are similarly opposed to the Houthis having conducted airstrikes on the Houthis (eg. 2025) as well as helping target them directly or indirectly.
And a large portion of global shipping is owned by Greek conglomerates - a country that is a close ally of Israel.
Most GCC states also have some form of defense agreement with the UK or France. If those turn out to be meaningless, it reduces their incentive to cut preferential deals with European states.
Additionally, this further enhances Turkiye and Pakistan's hand, as Saudi Arabia has signed defense pacts with both and Pakistan has threatened action against Iran yesterday if further incidents threaten Saudi Arabia. If they were able to dislodge the Houthis without direct European intervention, then it is a massive black stain on the EU's power projection capacity and it's claim that it should be treated as a great power. It also gives Turkiye additional leverage against the EU.
Finally, the Houthis struck the East-West Pipeline [0]. Much of the KSA's oil is in Eastern Saudi Arabia around Dhahran. Most large Asian states like China, India, Japan, and South Korea have continued operations in Iran that allowed them continued passage. European states lack access to GCC oil as a result of Perim island being controlled by the Houthis.
[0] - https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/yemens-houthis-rea...
Be it the Ukranian conflict, the ME crisis, the NA wars and instabilities, etc. The EU is the one that geopolitically speaking lost the most.
Unless they're full puppets for foreign interests, I simply do not understand how they could leave foreign actors to dictate policies that affect thier own territory and enterprises without any sort of critical thought.
But even then, they could not have possibly been all mere puppets. And yet.
Of course we should have gone for renewable energy more forcefully, but that wouldn't have resolved the issue. That change will take time, and you can't arbitrarily accelerate it.
https://www.ffe.de/en/publications/merit-order-shifts-and-th...
Nuclear is cheapest, then lignite, then hard coal, and then gas. Germany phased out the cheapest option first, now continues with the second, and is expanding the most expensive.
The obvious choice would have been to do what China and India are doing - phase out gas power first and focus on electrification. But Europe did the opposite.
Sure, the environment, etc but Europe hasn't invested strategically in that, either. China has.
EU opposes the Houthis because they are a horrifying slave state that distributes children as sex slaves to their troops.
EU opposes Russia because it is a horrifying fascist dictatorship that has repeatedly invaded it's neighbors, and constantly talks about it's historical claims to EU territory.
In the NA conflicts it's harder to draw such a clear line, because the conflicts typically have about 15 sides each, but the basic algorithm you can use is generally that EU tries very hard to pick sides based on morality, not geopolitical interests.
The EU is like the US, it does business with vile and despicable people if it is in its own interest.
The European parliament has been bought 10 times over by the lobbies.
See https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/08/lobbyists-euro...
"By some estimates, they influence 75% of legislation"
> But even then, they could not have possibly been all mere puppets. And yet.
Even if the lobbying was not reason for all the bad decisions of the EU, the EU parliament has no way to actually propose any laws on its own. All the laws emanate from the commission which is also bought and paid for by you guessed it, the lobbies.
When the UK left the EU and France+Italy were in the midst of their economic doldrums due to the Eurozone crisis, this left the hard power states within the EU comparatively weakened.
But the collapse of Minsk II and the ongoing war in the Middle East led to a cascading crisis for a unified Europe.
It's business and by now it should be clear to anyone that there's no morality involved in this space.
There's nothing wrong with Russia as energy partner, as long as you don't shoot yourself in the foot by blowing up the alternatives. South of EU had proper energy supplies from ME/NA. For example crisis in ME was mitigated by Russian energy or NA energy (Algeria, Tunisia, Lebanon, etc).
The new hegemons like Turkey, Israel, etc came only later, yet we can't say they're Saints can we? Also to appease the US administration line a lot of green energy projects were put on hold, and were only restarted this year after the Hormuz situation.
The only real explanation is shortsightness for personal interests (but even then you'd have to have all your capitals abroad), or being a tool for foreign interests.
It's an open secret that Russian money is deep, deep in European politics.
1.How do they pay Iran considering the sanctions? 2.Do you think EU shouldn't sanction Iran even though they violated NNPT and their terrible record on human rights because Iran can threaten them with a sufficient price?
> a country that is a close ally of Israel
Are they? They never sent a single weapon or soldier to help israel, they have no formal or informal mutual defense agreement. Israel buy no military equipment from Greece. You mistake mutual interest because of a common enemy - Turkey to close alliance.
2. I agree. I'm just being prosaic as to why European states are in the pickle they are today.
3. They are closely entwined via logistics, but Cyprus would be an even closer Israel-Cyprus ties. The reality is, the Saudi-Turkiye-Kuwait-Pakistan alliance is a direct reaction to the Israel-Greece-Cyprus-UAE-India cooperation or the now signed Israel-Greece-Cyprus trilateral.
Yet MAGA supporters were saying early in the war that they are "plan trusters" as prior US admins sucked at regime change because it is a "skills issue" and none of the prior admins had the triple digits IQ of Hegseth, Trump and Bessent.
If they were going to try this it needed to be done months earlier when the protests were raging. Instead the brain trust fumbled the initiative and let the Iranian leadership kill and scourge their local allies into compliance. Then fumbling the decapitation strike coupled with the decades of preparation for a decapitation strike (via redundancy of command) the genius brigade seemed to be unaware of because they fired all the experts, and the total repression of the protesting populace, led to an unusually strong system in Iran. They also almost certainly let racism play a big role in underestimating the Iranians, who are a very technically sophisticated society and have been preparing for this scenario since day one of the revolution.
Everything that’s happened was predictable and predicted, which is why other administrations who were more than happy to topple foreign governments when it suited them to not do so in Iran. MAGA feels like the junior dev that blames the compiler for their own syntax errors.
Obviously this war has been the US' latest great failure, and at the beckoning of a foreign power which makes it especially catastrophic. If people could focus on this, rather than trying to divide things into teams and then sling mud, they'd have vastly better outcomes come November (and on) than just using it for divisive mudslinging which does nothing but ensure that all elections, regardless of how bad the decisions of a incumbent, or how awful a challenger, will remain these sort of 50/50 coinflips.
Holding people like Hegseth (who literally insider traded defense equities right before the start of the war) and Trump accountable (who practically made a gazillion insider trading each mad meme he posted while the world burnt) is not "dividing people into teams"
I believe this war started with a tomahawk missle murdering a school full of children and then the US denying involvement. I very clearly remember it. US attacks Iran unprovoked. First act, murder their children in school. If you wanted to solidify opposition to the US in Iran, I don't think they could have done a more effective job.
The poster blaming everything "100%" on Israel tells me that they are not a person of nuance, and people who engage in rigid, black-and-white thinking often have overly simplistic views about how the world works (e.g. Jews control the world).
Correlation does not mean causation, but it hints at it.
Outside of extremist Muslim rhetoric, I've seen almost no anti-Jew criticism of Israel, but I've seen many statements like yours that equate criticism of Israel with antisemitism.
I'm sick of this equivocation. Nobody is claiming that Jewish people in general manipulated Trump into touching the stove.
Some facts:
* Netanyahu met with Trump in February to show him a presentation intended to convince him to attack Iran.
* Netanyahu convinced Trump that it would be fast and easy.
* Trump's own intelligence agencies and cabinet members called this "farcical" and "bullshit."
* Trump gave the green light anyway, based on Netanyahu's presentation, and against the advice of CIA, State, and the Joint Chiefs.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/07/us/politics/trump-iran-wa...
a.k.a. please don't feed the trolls
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
(Also, please avoid tit-fot-tat spats - they never do any good.)
The objection here is to the particular faction in power. Not the existence of the state.
Will MbS place a phone call to Pakistan National Command if his oil shipments get distilled for too long?
This would be the wrong conclusion to take from it. Trump is incredibly unpopular domestically and the war is dumb and pointless and was sprung on the US population by surprise and planned and executed with complete and utter incompetence, and the negative economic consequences are way out of proportion to any conceivable benefit we will get out of it. It's not a lack of resolve, it's a rational reaction to incompetent leadership.
"The West's enemies" have to be careful not to give the US an excuse to commit to a real war, rather than fight it with basically pocket change the way we are now while we look for a way out.
I realize that this thread has many ways of degenerating but what you posted here was particularly pure flamebait.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49660220.
But why on 9/11 have front page about Houthis, many comments supporting them and others apparent unknowing who they are?
Their other opponents, namely the US & Israel, killing thousands innocent of people every year, yet you don't really mind.
Why do you have to immediately redirect
Are you sensitive to this topic or something?
During WW2, the Allies used flame throwers for goodness sake and killed a lot of innocent people taking Europe back from the Nazis.
If you made this argument in the 1940s, you would've been dragged out of your home and beaten half to death. And it would be for good reason. :)
There's no pseudo-intellectual moral argument that stands up to might-is-right. In the real world, that's how it works, regardless how much you disagree.
There is a well coordinated group here that seems unusually allergic to inconvenient truths.
Or wait, maybe just flamewar style debates are not so welcome here, so people flag instead have another debate about who is more evil?
Everything you buy has to be shipped. That needs gas. Everything with plastic has oil in it.
Economic downturns/depressions/panics affect investment and the amount of money available for companies to keep running. Plus consumer/business demand. Especially hard on startups who aren’t profitable or don’t even have a product out yet.
Even if you ignore the extremely obvious political stuff, this will directly affect the entire audience here.
They need to just stop promoting alternative facts and call it Yemen.
All three headlines seem pretty neutral, no?
News media generally report the de iure situation, not the de facto situation. And de iure, Yemen still has a regular government, and the Houthi are a bunch of rebels.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/03/27/yemen-houthis-sentence-m...
“In addition to death sentences that include crucifixion and stoning, the Houthi court sentenced 23 men to prison for periods of up to 10 years. Three of them were also sentenced to public flogging”
https://www.humandignitytrust.org/country-profile/saudi-arab...
Slightly harder to design and build. Much cheaper to run. Excellent for power. Bad for bombs.
And, yes, just to get ahead of your next question: the US (and Europe and Russia and China) have offered to help Iran create these. Explaining it to them. Send people and engineers who have done it. Just get them from us. Or for free. We have tried everything. Iran has systematically refused everything, yet insist their program is for peaceful purposes only.
I'm not saying Saudi Arabia is perfect, far from it. But they are not looking to destroy the world or the region, and yes, sorry to say, but Iran is.
I’m just pointing out that we’re oh so happy to give people who murder gay people weapons and very advanced technology. Because they’re the bad people we like who give us cheap oil.
It’s all just used as a narrative to justify war. Like when we go invade somewhere to promote ‘democracy’ but still give money and power to all the little kingdoms with zero Democracy.
It is more likely they want to get the same level of safety countries with nukes get, e.g. North Korea's leadership is at no risen of getting a "democratizing" invasion.
Then again, who knows what the next leader will do.
The IRGC has constantly used every weapon they have, and by that I mean firing it, not as a means of defense, but as a means of attack. That too, is something they're still doing, before and after the US-Iran escalation.
Allowing this particular bunch of assholes get a nuclear weapon is a level of stupidity that is barely describable. If they want such a weapon for safety, that'll be the first time in their history.
And yes, I get it, a lot of people really hate Israel. There is even some justification for that. But do you believe for even one second this government will stop after bombing Israel?
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/1/13/a-timeline-of-crise...
It doesn't look like foreign conquest is part of their MO.
Trump literally said a day or two ago that if Iran had nukes, he'd treat them a lot nicer and would cozy up to them like with China, Russia, and North Korea. Given that what government wouldn't serious consider obtaining nukes if only as a matter of survival?
Then why did Iran discontinue their other WMD programs, like much cheaper and easier to manage chemical weapons programs?
Why is Iran holding back and not targeting Israel's water infrastructure? If they just want to kill everyone they have options right now that they aren't taking.
Why does Iran hold back if they would use a nuke as soon as they get one because they just want to destroy the region?
Iran objectively wants to build a nuke, and has willingly sacrificed everything to do it, but it wouldn't have taken becoming a rogue state and trillions of dollars of GDP to kill Israel to their liking. Other than a nuke, Israel's retaliation options are fairly limited.
IMO this is kind of bad framing because it suggests that they're the minority in Yemen, when in reality they basically are the government of 70-80% population of Yemen and absorbed 60+ percent of the Yemeni regular army.
They are basically at this point the de-facto Yemeni government
sure, they took this by force while killing those who disagree. Its part of Sunni vs Shia confrontation, and Yemen is majority Sunni.
Power is taken, and regardless of the ideals of the takers, enough power grants legitimacy.
The Syrian President and current Western/Israeli "good boy" - belongs to Hayat Tahrir al-Sham which has committed warcrimes which make the Houthis look like choir boys. He was former Al-Qaeda too with a multi-million dollar bounty. Done an utterly ridiculous number of beheadings, chaining & rape of women, torture, the whole galore of works carried out by a popular ruthless terrorist in a long career.
Now he is fully supported by the US AND the EU.
So, any time, any citizen of a Western nation complains about "war crimes" and wants "regime change", I call them deeply disgusting, sanctimonious hyprocrites. You fellows have lost any and all moral standing to talk about "war crimes".
I am very much against black and white thinking. But the typical US and even EU liberal citizen is mired in such thinking when it comes to talk about "war crimes and "regime change". If you don't know who in the EU govt decided to back this Syrian President, then I can only facepalm since even as a poor, "low-IQ" third-worlder (according to MAGA folks), I am educated on the same. Please look at Ursula von der Leyen and her €620 million support package.
Yes, I will hold you folks responsible. This is not some "abstract idea" - it is basic, common knowledge and you fellows always, always fall to your media propaganda.
You’re certainly free to hold whoever you want responsible, but I’d argue it’s not a realistic position. And keep in mind that it’s hard for someone living here to have an accurate view of what the average American believes, even harder for someone living outside the country - dominant opinions vary widely between regions of the US. I’m sorry that our government supports war criminals of varying degrees on our behalf, though, would certainly be nice if our leaders were more principled on that front.
Your comment reeks of western superiority and exceptionalism.
Its not black and white thinking. It just hypocrisy at the highest level.
The EU does not spend a single day without going around telling anyone and everyone that human rights are very important and that we should do absolutely everything to keep things that way but then turns around and welcomes the head of a (former) terrorist group in Europe.
Even Macron welcomed the guy in Paris even though ISIS killed hundreds of French citizens.
Can anyone then reasonably blame China or India when they continue doing business with Russia? If so why the double standards?
The US and the EU love to criticize other nations but don't mind supporting war criminals and dictators when its suits them and even give them money and/or sell them weapons.
After the Ukraine war ends, I'll bet you you'll see Putin or his successor being invited to cocktail parties in Frankfurt or London, no question about it.
Edit: Downvote me as much you want doesn't change the facts. the front line fighters for Yemen government is Al Qaeda. It was same thing as Syria which is why we have an Al Qaeda leader as their president.
https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2019/02/middleeast/yemen-los...
Just trying to see how the compare to the US and Israeli militaries when it comes to war crimes.
We’re not talking about Israel’s war crimes, or America’s war crimes, or Japan’s war crimes, or China’s war crimes, or Cambodia’s war crimes, or Germany’s war crimes, or Britain’s, or Armenia’s, or North Korea’s, South Korea’s, Italy’s, or actually any other country’s.
So why do you think we shouldn’t condemn the Houthis?
As I type this I feel somewhat vindicated by the update to the page, "Iran does not dictate every Houthi decision - but they appear increasingly aligned", which I think does a good job of clarifying the relationship. It does, however, say "Iran has publicly backed the Houthis during the latest fighting. The geography helps explain why", which is useful factual evidence (since Iranian officials have indeed made public statements in support of the Houthis) but the use of "backed" in this sentence is bad style since that word has been used in exactly this context to have a much deeper meaning than Iran saying "we've got your back bro"
The next question should be: who benefits?
It's funny to see the evolution of language. Quotation marks indicated that something was a direct quote. Then people started to use them as a sarcasm indicator. Now we're to the point where people can't even recognize them as indicating a direct quote.
Israel invades Lebanon due to risk of Hezbollah attacks
rather than:
Israel says "risk of Hezbollah attacks" reason for invasion
I think this was just a stylistic choice and that this whole thread is a weird tangent.
But generally, yes, I think cynicism has run amok among the very-online.
“40 beheaded babies” and mass/systematic rape propaganda accepted with zero verification (journalism 101) and, once debunked, zero retractions were made
Hamas-run, but not Likud-run
Condemnation of atrocities by Israel and the US that comes from Israeli and Western voices is given significantly more weight than the same claims coming from Palestinian or Arab voices. After all, the native lacks the capacity to be objective.
Israeli gov statements are taken as undeniable fact, while Palestinian (Gaza or West Bank) gov spokespeople or even Palestinian people in general are barely even platformed
Over-representation of Zionists in editorial teams of every major newspaper and news channel across all Western countries, which (naturally) led to coordinated suppression of any Palestinian voice internally and externally (started to change only relatively recently).
And the list goes on.
On the BBC specifically, try reading through their articles, especially from early on, and tell me what the editorial slant is. Yes, most of the content is neatly wrapped in quotation marks, but what picture were they trying to paint?
On UK media in general: https://www.declassifieduk.org/beheaded-babies-how-uk-media-...
My point is that both UK and Western media immediately jumped on and recirculated the claim in the first few days without confirmation. This was just enough to sear the image of beheaded babies into the minds of viewers & readers in the West, helping to justify Israel’s campaign to starve out the “human animals” and raze Gaza (a least in the mind of the avg citizen).
https://cfmm.org.uk/resource/bbc-on-gaza-israel-one-story-do...
I believe BBC and other outlets with journalistic standards use quotes when reporting what officials say and only drop the quotes when they have independent verification, like eyewitness reports from one of their own journalists.
Iran says Strait of Hormuz is 'open' but tracking shows few ships moving - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwydexp39ddo
I see how it would read as bias if one interprets them as scare quotes, but it really does just mean "this is verbatim" when used here.
The BBC's main sin in relation to Trump is sane-washing, treating his bizarre outbursts as if they were reasonable things for a US president to say. Eg. were he to say "I have a solid gold prostate!" they'd have an Anthony Zurcher piece entitled "Is Trump's prostate really made of gold?" with a quote from a doctor saying "while it seems unlikely and would probably be uncomfortable, having a gold prostate would be unlikely to cause any noticeable side effects as the metal is inert" and a discussion of the benefits of replacing a cancer-prone organ with a noble metal.
Not reporting on Trump is not an option because his words and actions have huge ramifications for the world.
I think in general the press has gotten much better at just straight up saying that Trump is lying or wrong, as opposed to previous policy of only reporting counter claims from other parties.
They are simply reporting what sources have said:
Houthis 'take control' of Perim Island - government source published at 09:00
Houthi rebels have "taken control" of Perim Island in the Bab al-Mandab Strait, according to a source. Earlier, we were reporting that the group had reached the key island.
The AFP news agency also says Houthis have "taken over" Perim Island, also referred to as Mayyun, according to eyewitnesses and a local government official.
"Boats carrying armed Houthi fighters reached Mayyun Island after government forces withdrew from it yesterday," the official tells AFP.
Reporting discourse is different from reporting fact, and I do not know the BBC for reporting unverified discourse or facts.
Activists decry police murder of protester
Activists decry police "murder" of protester
The first implies that the police murdering the protestor is an established fact. The second makes it clear that it is the activists who used the term "murder" rather than it being a non-contentious fact.
Mayor denounces "radical activists" rioting and damaging city property in response to an officer-involved incident that resulted in one fatal kinetic altercation with a "loud and provocatively dressed" man.
Ah, the past exonerative tense. https://archive.is/wPVdy
Read McSweeney's guide to ambiguous grammar, where they lead you step by step from the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog to the ultimate say-nothing sentence speed was involved in a jumping-related incident while a fox was brown, and the punchline is you can then translate "the St Louis County Police Department was involved in an officer-involved shooting after officers came under heavy gunfire" to "a police officer shot a black person" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Michael_Brown)
https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/an-interactive-guide-to-...
But no, that's the language issued by police departments covering their asses. Journalists are a little bit covering their asses in making clear what is a quote and what isn't, but they're still responsible for what they choose to quote, and to be clear on whether they have verified the claims they're quoting.
Ideally, unverified claims shouldn't even be in an article. But when there _has_ been some kind of stramash, they just don't know who did what, the need to rush out an article to get clicks means they'll just quote both sides and try to give them equal prominence until they can do more verification.
oh like this article that says a child was hit by a "LAPD bullet" as though wild bullets roam the streets of LA looking for children instead of being fired from a gun by a person who made a decision.
It's generally police officials that use that terminology.
tl;dr: two countries, divided by a common language.
It is not about the quotes being verified or unverified. It is about something said by somebody, that you are reporting.
If you’re reporting that “Government sources say Houthis have ‘taken control’ of an island” then the fact that government sources used the words ‘taken control’ is itself interesting.
The headlines “Russia ‘will be defeated’ in Ukraine says Zelensky”, “Russia ‘will be defeated’ in Ukraine says Putin”, and “Russia ‘will be defeated’ in Ukraine says Taylor Swift” all tell of vastly different news events.
That single quoted phrase was set in the context of other words, and that context defined its meaning. We know this to an extent that almost no one could have imagined since LLMs have become a huge part of the world.
My favorite example of this is how no article in Britain during Corbyn's leadership of the labor party would ever quote an entire sentence that he had said. Thousands of articles, and the quotes were all fragmentary phrases and lone words framed in editorial.
edit: Brits and the BBC especially do this more than most, likely because of their bizarre libel laws (that were once even worse than they are now.)
> actually verifying the truth
That's the job of the reader, not the journalist. Unless you're living under oppression. So you have misunderstood the purpose of reporting.