There are 4 players in this war and they all have very different goals and "victory" conditions.
1. Israel wants to ruin Iran permanently, to turn it into Somalia 2.0, meaning a quasi-state with no organized, central government. Were they to succeed in this it would be a humantarian disaster the likes of which we haven't seen since probably WW2. Tens of millions of refugees that will probably collapse surrounding countries;
2. The US (IMHO) wanted to placate Israel with a cheap decapitation strike that would force regime change and bring in a US-friendly regime, similar to Venezuela. This was completely unrealistic and they completely underestimated Iran's ability to maintain an offensive capability. We don't even know how much Iran's missile and drone capability has been degraded (to the GP's point). I don't even believe it's been degraded 50% (as GP claimed) abut we have no way of knowing. The entire Iranian military is built to resist a strategic bombing campaign;
3. Iran no longer trusts the US as a good faith actor and negotiator after multiple incidents of acting in bad faith, killing their negotiators and bombing an embassy so their goal is to make the price of this war so high economically that the US never thinks about doing this ever again. And that's a cheap thing to do, as you note. Drones can close the Strait and ne devastating to the economies of the Gulf states; and
4. The Gulf States just want to maintain the pre-war status quo. Saudi Arabia in particular just wanted to contain Iran. They're less vulnerable to the Strait being closed but it's still a problem politically as the US and Israel are bombing other Muslims. The Gulf states are learning the the US security guarantee ain't worth shit but they can't break away from being US client states with their own unpopular regimes probably collapsing without US arms. But in a prolonged conflict some of them may collapse anyway, particularly Bahrain and even Iraq.
So Iran just fires a dozen ballistic missiles a day to remind Israel of the war Israel started. An estimated ~50% of missiles get through missile defences now. Otherwise threats and the occasional drone are sufficient to close the Strait and massively disrupt the ME3 airlines. Militarily, Iran can probably keep that up forever. Mobile missile launchers are cheap and drones can be launched from basically any truck. They're also produced and stored in underground basis that are essentially impervious to bombing short of nuclear weapons.
Many believed prior to Trump's speech this week that he would either escalate or pull out. Instead he found a secret third, worse option, which is to tell Europe and Asia "you're on your own" (with the Strait closure) after the US launched a war nobody but Israel wanted or supported. That's an interesting strategy because it's going to cause some serious soul-searching in all of these countries about the wisdom of US allegiance.
You forgot the 5th actor - Russia - which is benefiting hugely from the collapse of NATO, the loosening of oil sanctions, the huge hike in oil prices, and the way the US was persuaded to expend a ridiculous percentage of its conventional missile stockpiles on a pointless project.
Ukraine is doing its best to minimise Russian oil exports, and that's certainly having an effect.
But strategically, Russia is a huge beneficiary of this mess.
It depends where you draw the line. The extended players include:
1. Russia (as you say): I think this war of choice virtually guarantees a settlement of the Ukraine war along the current borders. At some point Europe will need to ease their energy crisis with Russian oil and gas. Well done, everybody, the system works;
2. Europe: like the GCC they are finding US security guarantees and the NATO protection racket aren't what they were sold. Pax Americana was an illusion. I've elsewhere predicted this is going to lead to arms and tech nationalism within Europe. It's actually a race between fascism taking over Europe and Europe divorcing itself from the US and I suspect fascism is currently winning; and
3. China: the biggest wineer of all this. China is still receiving Iranian oil exports. In fact, the US "punished" Iran by lifting oil sanctions, allowing Iran to sell oil to China at market rates instead of below market (because of the sanctions). Again, well done, everybody; and
4. Asia: this has exposed their weakness of imported oil, particularly Thailand, Vietnam and the Phillipines. I would not be surprised if this war of choice is the turning point that leads to a China-cenetered Asian security compact.
In one year, the US has essentially torn up the entire post-1945 rules-based international order, which it designed for its own benefit.
China's bigger win is the future demand for solar, batteries, EVs, induction stoves (replace LPG/LNG), all things electric and energy storage. There were plans to shut down the oversupply of solar, but now there must be a huge demand.
I think this war is actually pushing many away from fascism. Trump was the reference for a lot of the European right and this is showing people he was terrible and, by extension, embarrassing them all.
Heck, Orbán is currently running an electoral campaign as "the candidate of peace".
My impression is that the fascists in Europe are trying to break up with the US too. So it's not "either or".
But I know one thing: we re going to see a rush into implementing renewables after this that will look like a post-war policy. What is also bad news for he GCC.
The post-1945 rules-based order was already a slow motion train crash that most of the West remained in denial about until Putin wiped his behind with it in the 2014 invasion of Crimea. To pretend that Trump is somehow breaking an otherwise intact system at this point is fanciful.
The post-1945 order was dead after the NATO's war in Yugoslavia in 1999, and the subsequent recognition of Kosovo. At the very latest.
One coulld argue that it happened earlier, for example after the collapse of the Soviet Union, or the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, or after the annexation of East Germany.
Really, any rival state-level actor benefits from seeing America squander its currently limited supply of high-end munitions and put months of stress on its airframes, warships, and people.
Russia needs its energy sources for its own war, too. Energy getting more expensive globally, while UA reducing the supply by targeting RU production, is a double edged sword. RU is now putting bans on export of some fuels, etc. Whether EU turning into a defense alliance with sole focus on RU, while taking in all lessons from UA war (without having to deal with US pressure to buy its expensive state of the art military HW which may not be all that effective in the potential drone war) is great for russia is also questionable.
> The Gulf States just want to maintain the pre-war status quo. Saudi Arabia in particular just wanted to contain Iran. They're less vulnerable to the Strait being closed but it's still a problem politically as the US and Israel are bombing other Muslims. The Gulf states are learning the the US security guarantee ain't worth shit but they can't break away from being US client states with their own unpopular regimes probably collapsing without US arms. But in a prolonged conflict some of them may collapse anyway, particularly Bahrain and even Iraq.
Saudi and the UAE don't want the pre-war status quo, they want America to bomb Iran back to the stone age so it can't continue missile or launcher production.
UAE wants that because their leaders are highly Israel aligned. Saudi Arabia is a lot more pragmatic, they take their role as the "leader" of the Islamic world pretty seriously.
Pre-war views were very much the status-quo was better than starting a war.
Now that a war is started it has to be finished or the GCC is left far worse off with Iran in a much stronger strategic position in the region despite a decimated military.
> Iran no longer trusts the US as a good faith actor and negotiator
Iran ("the regime") was never a good faith actor or negotiator. Their position was something like "we won't develop nuclear weapons as long as we have free reign to torture our own citizens and fund violent groups that destabilize regional governments". And still marched on enriching uranium anyway.
There's nothing to trust on either side. This war was eventually going to happen, I'm just disappointed that it happened under such incompetent leadership in the US.
> Their position was something like "we won't develop nuclear weapons as long as we have free reign to torture our own citizens and fund violent groups that destabilize regional governments"
This is unfortunately the best possible outcome. Nuclear weapons have been around for 80 years now. They are quite achievable by modern states, and they are obviously the only path to sovereignty. Ukraine, North Korea, and Iran have affirmed it.
Bombing a country in pursuit only reaffirms this logic, especially after agreements have already been made or negotiations are under way.
The only path forward, for Iran and everyone else, has been established and stable since ~1945: give people major concessions in exchange for the major concession that they will not try to achieve true sovereignty via nuclear weapons.
Every attempt to bomb or coerce someone off of the nuclear trajectory just increases the motivation (globally) to pursue it with more vigor and more secrecy.
We're on this tightrope until we fall off it, no other options.
The war absolutely did not need to happen. Iran was not pursuing a nuclear weapon and was fully complying with the jcpoa. It's mostly the US and Israel that have acted I'm bad faith.
Most countries in the region torture their citizens, even Israel except it's Palestinians, because it's a racist apartheid state.
Let's not pretend we care about funding terrorists when it's the US that has the biggest supporter of terrorism in the last 70 years.
Iran doesn't torture its citizens. At least, no more, than, let's say, Arabia Saudi. You don't say it explicitly, but the implication is clear that the US is doing this because 'human rights'. A week ago was to save the poor Iranians, and now is to bring the country to the stone age. The fact is that US is 7000 miles from Iran and have not business being there.
The one country 'destabilizing the region' is not Iran.
Wow, I can't believe someone would say this. In January, they basically killed tens of thousands of us with machine guns. After the war, the first thing they did was cut off the internet to prevent an internal uprising. They deployed many Basij checkpoints with machine guns just to warn Iranians.
This is a sample scene, don't you consider it torture?
I don't care why the incompetent leaders of the US are doing what they're doing. A bunch of unelected murderers just got dead. I consider that a positive improvement in the world, and I wish it happened more often.
The world is pretty small these days. Mass murderers are everyone's business. It's morally offensive to just say "well that's a long ways away, not my problem".
But at the same time, this war may have allowed IRGC to dig in. They've replaced a few people but the system may be stronger. Never mind that it doesn't even seem to be the administration's communicated goal to destroy IRGC in the first place.
On top of all that, they've threatened to reduce the entire country to the "stone age", and have started to target civilian industries.[0] If this campaign continues, how is this anything less than mass murder?
They're not doing this war for the reason you seem to want. They're not doing this to save Iranians.
How many civilian deaths as the direct result of US/Israel action do you consider acceptable to achieve killing the unelected murderers? 150 school children? Wikipedia cites hundreds more civilian deaths, but I don't know what sources to believe. How many layers of the regime's onion do we have to peel before we know we got all the murderers? How many children are we going to radicalize into future unelected murderers by murdering their family members and plunging their region into worse chaos? Should we kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out? Hegseth has crusader tattoos. Is he just another unelected theocratic murderer of a different stripe? Are we the baddies?
We had a deal and we tore it up. More than once, if you include the inciting incident of undermining a democratically-elected leader who was bringing the central player in the Middle East into the mainstream economic and political global order that America had set for everyone. "Not like that!"
Frankly, it's hubris all the way down. Kalief Browder.
A deal that allows the regime to murder thousands of their own citizens and export violence to the whole region really isn't worth it. Yeah not having overt conflict in that region makes our gas cheaper. But it doesn't make me sleep better.
Maybe I agree with you that the US, in 1953, planted the seeds for this situation. If I could punish the people responsible I would, but they're all dead now. Also, doesn't our historic involvement give us some moral obligation to fix it?
In this context good faith means not saying you're here to negotiate only to stall for time while you're secretly planning to invade the other country in the background, which is exactly what the US did. So Iran has no reason to take US "negotiations" seriously ever again.
I don't think we do. I think this is our Teutoburg Forest moment [1].
Part of the issue is there's no real opposition in the US to what's going on. The Democrats being the controlled opposition party aren't in opposition to the war (eg [2][3][4]). They just oppose the way it was initiated. In other words, they have a process objection not a policy objection.
I've seen lamenting over Harris losing the elction (as well as more than a few doing "stolen election") about how the world could be different. But US foreign policy is uniparty
> Part of the issue is there's no real opposition in the US to what's going on. The Democrats being the controlled opposition party aren't in opposition to the war
Most emphatically yes. We've seen occasional bursts of spirited dissent but that's about it. As far as sustained opposition, it still seems that they're hoping to just wait out the clock for things to go back to "normal".
> But US foreign policy is uniparty
No, I'd say even with this senseless "war" the "uniparty" model has still become invalid with Trump. While the US fear industry ("news media") has been beating the drums against Iran for quite some time, the US military/intelligence community has resisted attacking. If we had a President Harris, I would bet that we would not be attacking Iran, especially in this manner - not because of Harris herself, but rather because she wouldn't have gutted the domain experts who come up with reality-based plans, and who have presumably been saying "If we overtly attack Iran they close the Strait and actually end up stronger".
I like to refer to that system as bureaucratic authoritarianism - no meaningful checks on government power itself, but there are checks on how it's exercised. The critical difference is that Trumpism is autocratic authoritarianism (especially the second round after he broke so many laws the first time without consequence) - the experts and other group-project stakeholders (eg Inspectors General) were all fired (or at the very least sidelined), and replaced with glaringly incompetent yes-men who execute any simplistic "plan" regardless how bad it is.
Your “sources” are just mindless whataboutism that do not in any way provide evidence Harris/Democrats would have started this same idiotic war with Iran.
Democrats in Congress are currently almost universally opposed to the War in Iran. As the minority party they are unable to stop it unilaterally. Budget obstructions are the single lever available to them and given other issues like ICE, healthcare cuts, federal layoffs, can’t be used for every issue, every time without diffusing that very limited power into irrelevance.
Talk about “controlled opposition” given the blatantly obvious differences between the last two administrations is a signal of either being uninformed or a deliberate demotivational strategy.
Here are recent quotes from Schumer/Jefferies/Harris that for some reason you selectively chose not to include:
"Trump’s actions in Iran will be considered one of the greatest policy blunders in the history of our country," - Chuck Schumer
“The American people are sick and tired of the chaos, high costs and extreme Republican agenda. Donald Trump must end his reckless war of choice in the Middle East. Now.” - Hakeem Jefferies
“In the last 48 hours Donald Trump has dragged America into a war that we don’t want” - Kamala Harris
[1] https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/chuck-schumer-hakeem-jeffries-more-024256513.html?guccounter=1
It'll partly depend on what internal housecleaning—or perhaps fumigation—and reform happens in the US.
While it is unlikely to occur, imagine the international effect if the US resoundingly impeached and removed of a lawless president, and Congress formalized a lot of international agreements into statute rather than delegating too much to the executive branch.
Nah, this problem is systemic, and much older than the current administration. Or has everyone forgotten the "anthrax" in a test tube? The invisible WMDs? The fake news about soldiers tossing babies out of incubators? Setting up a web of lies and attacking is a foundational value of the United States.
I think this was the nail in the coffin. Not only has the US exsanguinated their military capability at the behest of Israel, everyone with half a brain watched closely as they took AD out of the gulf states and moved them into Israel. Taiwan, Japan and South Korea are not morons, they will see the writing on the wall and they will move to make diplomatic peace with their neighbours (China) now that the US has keeled over with self-inflicted wounds.
It doesn't really matter what happens internally in the US now, everyone realizes that every four years the world will roll the dice.
That is not going to happen. Even if MAGA doesn't rig the midterms and the Democrats actually win something, they will just "reach across the aisle" and "work on healing our divided nation". Nobody will see any consequences for the suffering they caused.
A Constitutional Convention, by definition, would almost certainly not cause or require dissolution of the US. You could only effectively call a convention of people who explicitly do not want dissolution.
You forgot one huge players: popular revolutions. All muslims nations that are currently managed by western puppets dictors, every single one. The puppets know their population don't like what Israels and globally most western nations are doing in the middle east and thus tried hard to pretend they support the muslim world. But this war show clearly to their population who these puppets really serve. I bet few revolutions will shake the middle east soon, and those will be powerfull (I don't believe they will create mature democraties, as those things require centuries of progress but, they won't as easy to control). And those revolution won't be easely stolen like the previous one, also because Israel don't seem to realize it lost its support from western nations, it's just a matter a time it ends up on its own.
1. Israel wants to ruin Iran permanently, to turn it into Somalia 2.0, meaning a quasi-state with no organized, central government. Were they to succeed in this it would be a humantarian disaster the likes of which we haven't seen since probably WW2. Tens of millions of refugees that will probably collapse surrounding countries;
2. The US (IMHO) wanted to placate Israel with a cheap decapitation strike that would force regime change and bring in a US-friendly regime, similar to Venezuela. This was completely unrealistic and they completely underestimated Iran's ability to maintain an offensive capability. We don't even know how much Iran's missile and drone capability has been degraded (to the GP's point). I don't even believe it's been degraded 50% (as GP claimed) abut we have no way of knowing. The entire Iranian military is built to resist a strategic bombing campaign;
3. Iran no longer trusts the US as a good faith actor and negotiator after multiple incidents of acting in bad faith, killing their negotiators and bombing an embassy so their goal is to make the price of this war so high economically that the US never thinks about doing this ever again. And that's a cheap thing to do, as you note. Drones can close the Strait and ne devastating to the economies of the Gulf states; and
4. The Gulf States just want to maintain the pre-war status quo. Saudi Arabia in particular just wanted to contain Iran. They're less vulnerable to the Strait being closed but it's still a problem politically as the US and Israel are bombing other Muslims. The Gulf states are learning the the US security guarantee ain't worth shit but they can't break away from being US client states with their own unpopular regimes probably collapsing without US arms. But in a prolonged conflict some of them may collapse anyway, particularly Bahrain and even Iraq.
So Iran just fires a dozen ballistic missiles a day to remind Israel of the war Israel started. An estimated ~50% of missiles get through missile defences now. Otherwise threats and the occasional drone are sufficient to close the Strait and massively disrupt the ME3 airlines. Militarily, Iran can probably keep that up forever. Mobile missile launchers are cheap and drones can be launched from basically any truck. They're also produced and stored in underground basis that are essentially impervious to bombing short of nuclear weapons.
Many believed prior to Trump's speech this week that he would either escalate or pull out. Instead he found a secret third, worse option, which is to tell Europe and Asia "you're on your own" (with the Strait closure) after the US launched a war nobody but Israel wanted or supported. That's an interesting strategy because it's going to cause some serious soul-searching in all of these countries about the wisdom of US allegiance.