> The US President routinely announces policy decisions on social media…

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’d bet your life on it?

This is why it succeeded: lizard brain decisions overcame training in the armed forces.

And most chat apps are either e2e encrypted or HTTPS, both of which are hard to break for third world nations.

But leaks of those messages onto twitter are probably the most valuable info source for what the enemy is doing.

Third world? Have we forgotten the Pete Hegseth Signal fiasco?

> What do you think the chain of command looks like in the third world?

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

Yet here we are, believing that the Houthis used fake AI voice to achieve a battlefield victory.

Where men are men and 14-year old girls are FBI agents.

"AI is critical for National Defense."

"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?"

Where did Anthropic get that information to train their model on is a good question to ask as well.

Yeah, I saw that. I wonder if there are any other AI labs that are naive (good?) enough to admit this type of thing.

Obviously, it's happening with all decent models.

Makes me want to be a frontier model provider just to get the ring-side seat on what every bad actor in the world is doing.

Politically constrained. It's just the stated goal is impossible given the political RoE.

How do they do that?

A slow, ongoing reaction is not going to fix a sudden, large action.

> All other nuclear nations behave

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.

> even Pakistan and India, which are at each other throat all the time

Iran is way more aggressive in spreading influence in region (hoothis, hezbollah, hamas, Syria, Iraq, denying Israel existence).

> They share a "land" border through the Caspian sea and smuggling a few 10s of kilos of enriched material would be relatively easy.

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.

> 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?

Because Iran's leadership is actually crazy.

> All other nuclear nations behave [...] What makes you think that Iran won't?

Iran already misbehaves, exporting violence to the entire region. How do you think they are going to act when they have nuclear weapons?

I keep wondering about this western worldview where they keep equating a militant failed state with the largest democracy in the world. I can't fathom why they do it.

  > 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.

Because they'll be the first to use it to kill millions since the 1940s

Iran probably wasn't following the JCPOA, denied inspectors access to certain sites, and you'd also have to say you 100% trust American intelligence to verify that Iran isn't building a nuclear weapon in secret and if you want to do that I've got a war to sell you in Iraq.

Separately that doesn't resolve the other issues, funding militant groups, &c.

> The continual attack on the sovereignty of countries around the world has made nuclear weapons one of the few ways to

Name the other countries pursuing a nuclear weapon. Maybe you are drumming up a fear that nobody else really has.

> Eventually US will have to decide if it’s going to do anything or just live with high oil prices for long or just go back home in a British Suez fashion.

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.

What is the world going to do? The US is the only country that has a "blue water" navy. That means not just enough ships to go to sea, but enough of a supply line to handle all the logistics of having ships anywhere in the world they want them, for as long as they want.

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.

> Europe and the rest of the world will try to coup with the shock

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.

No that's not the only reason. High oil prices affect their economy quite a bit, and much of their imports form what I understand come from the Middle East.

China is the only reason you have 5-6 dollar gas and not, say, 30 dollars.

Bad argument for many reasons (and lazy). But Maduro was a criminal, supported Russia evading US and EU sanctions, and his gang and their disastrous economic policies resulted in around 1/3rd of Venezuelans leaving the country resulting in a humanitarian disaster.

You can ask the same question of the US. They're the only ones to have actually used them (and they try to justify it still).

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?

Under what scenario would they use it against New York or Washington?

Believe it or not, they're not exactly a 1-to-1.

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."

Besides the point and whataboutism, but I'm not advocating that Israel should have nuclear weapons. They do, and I'm not sure there's much we can do about it at this point. Same with North Korea. I'm opposed to the proliferation of nuclear weapons and just because one country has one doesn't mean other countries should go and get them too.

China has some influence. They did do what was said - but only if you take the absolute most charitable reading (which is a expected here).

He can't. Bibi is in charge.

At some point they might prefer stability and sanity. I would bet that at this point they don't care much either way.

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.

IMO it is a good thing that the USA is no longer paying for (among others):

- 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!)

This is also mentioned in the article that you linked:

> 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.

I believe there were pieces of a plan. This global energy shift gambit being one of them. I don’t think there was a unified strategy with contingencies etc though (if there was it certainly wasn’t very good).

>some sort of plan

George Friedman, The Next Decade

I observe mostly short term opportunism. Powerful people deliberately injecting chaos for financial profit.

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

Short-term benefits seem to be good enough for America in this new age.

Nobody cares about everyday Americans, it's about American corporations. Exxon and friends are printing money.

Please don't leave us in suspense: what would "realpolitik" be in this instance?

I wouldn't assume this administration gives a shit about inflation or rising interest rates or how the rest of the economy is doing. Do you have any reason to believe they do?

> But it's harmful for the average American because filling up the tank costs a lot more.

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?

If you think so little of them, then imagine what the people who pay $5M for a meal with him can convince him to do. Or what people who pay his son-in-law/iran-negotiator 25M a year can call and ask him to do.

Then you probably believe that the US government only consists of the half dozen clowns you see on TV every day.

He's so clever that he's probably even playing chess in a Hilbert space. The whole world envies American voters, who will receive $5,000 if they re-elect this incredible genius.

Trump is just accelerating the course of history. The fall of American hegemony, the humiliation of the MIC, the petrodollar, the fossil fuels, the USD as reserve currency is like speedrunning the historical events to reach the next more balanced equilibrium state

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerationism

Suezmax tankers, panamax, etc. Anything bigger needs to go around

Which are already being used to transit the Suez Canal.

why would Exxon allow export ban and lose exorbitant profits ?

It was cheaper, I don't think it's much more complex than that. And with fossil fuels, countries without significant local production are always dependent on someone else, with most potential suppliers being problematic in some way.

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.

I guess you only need maybe 20% of them to be puppets to mess around. It’s a lot easier to damage than to build.

Aren't those really easy to explain?

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.

> Unless they're full puppets for foreign interests,

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.

The issue was 1990s-2000s Germany argued it was in Europe's best interest to integrate Russia into the European fabric, but 1990s-2000s France+UK+Italy argued it was in Europe's best interest to integrate the Mediterranean into the European fabric.

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.

> Unless they're full puppets for foreign interests

It's an open secret that Russian money is deep, deep in European politics.

1. Waivers, state owned enterprises, shell corporations, barter trades, and using their own currencies for transactions

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.

I am saying that adding your tribal bit to your post is just completely self defeating. And yes, the goal is indeed to avoid hurting people's feelings. I don't know why you'd mock that. People are not machines, and when you make somebody angry at you, or otherwise make him feel insulted - he'll happily argue that 2+2=5 just to avoid giving an inch to you.

Works on commission?

No! Money down!

I 100% agree Iran wants nukes, but I don't think it's a given they want to "destroy the region".

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.

On that second note what about the plant in Bushehr?

>But they are not looking to destroy the world or the region, and yes, sorry to say, but Iran is.

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.

I decry the legitimacy of my coffee table, but my toe still hurts when I kick it.

Brutal conquest is a pretty well traveled path to legitimacy.

Power is taken, and regardless of the ideals of the takers, enough power grants legitimacy.

So is taliban, yet they both rule a country.

> Geopolitics is way too complicated for such black and white thinking. Do you know who amongst the governments of those countries decided to back this Syrian president? I certainly don't.

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.

> Geopolitics is way too complicated for such black and white thinking.

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.

Saudi is the exactly same as Iran. Both far right countries. Both execute gays. Both don't support women's rights. Both execute kids. My point is there is no good side so the best option is not to pick a side and get out of the middle east.

Sure, but the scale of violence committed by the US and allies is very large. Are there theocratic states recently committing similar levels of violence? Too often in the past, the oppression done by Middle Eastern governments is used to build political support for their destruction by the West.

There's a far cry between someone showing off some weird contraption they hacked together versus posting about the Houthi's military campaign. If you can't see that, then I'm not sure what else to say.

If you have showdead=true, you will see way, way more flagged comments under anything that is political, or even has a Israel connection in it.

His supporters are a minority. There are others who voted for him as they felt it was the least bad option, but they are not supporters (and many of them regret their vote, though they probably would have stayed home, or voted third party). The supporters are a loud and vocal minority though.

They always have.

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.

They do.

My point about verification is simply that if the BBC had independently verified it’s true then they wouldn’t use the quote in the headline. They’d just say taken control without quote marks, because it wouldn’t be a quote.

> officer-involved incident

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.

Do the BBC or other outlets use "officer-involved incident" without quotes?

It's generally police officials that use that terminology.

Do you consider every trial defendant to be exonerated?

This is precisely what the word quote means!

No, it's a statement of who is making the claim.