Political Posts

[73 Reds]

15 hours ago, changegonnacome said:

 

 

I understand where you guys are coming from and share your disgust of the actions Iran supports indirectly and carries out directly - but your making the standard error in IR, which is your falling to walk a mile in your opponents shoes. The madman fallacy (like with Iran) is the oldest narrative in conflict - first between neighbouring tribes, then between Kingdoms, now between States. The story goes that your enemy is crazy, psychotic & irrational. The the more truer reality is your enemy is paranoid, scared and has no way of knowing what YOUR true intentions are. The cost in international security of attributing benign intent to a rival and getting it wrong - is that you don't get to exist anymore. The problem is compounded by the fact that in war all defensive military spending when viewed through the lens of fear and paranoia looks an awful lot like offensive spending. This leads States to act in ways that you perceive as crazy but is essentially survivalist paranoia driven by incomplete information (i.e. rival intentions)

 

The reality is if you take a step back and re-frame the Iran & Israel rivalry from a purely classical realist, offensive & defensive perspective - as a regional security competition between two powers vying for regional hegemony it is depressingly similar to so many regional security competitions throughout history. The novelty with Iran/israel (say versus France and Germany's European competitions) is the use of proxies AND the involvment of non-regional global hegemon in the competiton. 

 

When you get down to it - both countries, Iran and Israel'sp, are deeply insecure and hyper-concerned about their survival & security - they should be they live in a bad neighbourhood. They are both adolescent regimes - one created in 1947, the other in 1979 . Both have had existential territorial events in the last 80yrs (i.e. living memory). So they are both paranoid - as they should be. Paranoid geopolitical actors are the ones that survive. When you reframe things with this lens what you find is that Iran since 1979 has been operating a very rational (albeit brutal) relative power/survival playbook. Has it been effective? I mean the proof is in the pudding - the Islamic revolution is still in existence, Iran's territorial map hasn't changed since 1979 despite being the least preferred regime option of the global superpower and its pal in the neighbourhood Israel. Its this still there. Indeed Iran just had the US gunsights on it for a full two months and walked away with an MOU and sanctions relief. 

 

 

@inofeisone above kind of sums it up well here, my view on Iran.....hate the regime, the behaviour is morally abhorrent.....you can say many things about what they've done, all true.....but irrational isn't one of them....in fact its extreme moral & ethical bankruptcy is a function of its extreme rationality when viewed through the lens of the power asymmetry that exists between them and the US/Israel

 

I'll tackle your points @Marco Van Basten line by line. Before I do - you need to hold the following realist framework principles constant as they underpin the explanation around Iran's behaviour over time that hopefully helps you see them less as lunatics intent on Israel's destruction and more like the paranoid, weak state that drives much of their decision making. Seen through this lens - Iran's foreign policy is quite rational and dare I say it quite innovative in its construction given the unique security puzzle it has to solve for itself....its not often a regional foe has the complete and almost unfettered support of the Global hegemon as Israel has. Which makes this regional security competition somewhat unique and that uniqueness drives a lot of Iran's novel response to its novel regional security competition.

 

Anyway here are the principles - it's hard to argue with any of them:

 

(1) there are no actors in the system above States, the system is anarchic by nature, when you call 911 in the international system nobody answers - its fundamentally a self-help system

(2) States, therefore, are chiefly concerned with their own survival (they have to be, nobody is coming to help)

(3) it's impossible to know the true intent of your international rival, as intent lives in the minds of men

(4) Because the cost of intent miscalculation is "national death,". States must constantly weigh the costs and benefits of their actions based on imperfect information. Paranoia in international relations isn't a psychological defect, it is a structural requirement. You must assume the worst in your rival.

 

Put all that together you get the output (5)

 

(5) Because you must assume the worst, and because you can never know how much power is enough to guarantee survival against future threats, the only truly rational choice is to maximize your relative power in whatever way you can. Taken to its extreme the ultimate goal of any highly capable rational state is to become the regional hegemon—to be so overwhelmingly powerful that no other state in the region would even dare to challenge you (similar to the position the US enjoys in the Western Hemisphere). China, as we know, is on this mission in East Asia.

 

Now let's look at the actions you highlighted as being somehow irrational.

 

 

Taking the hostages wasn't an irrational act - it was a deeply insecure, newly formed regime prioritizing its own survival. Because the US had previously orchestrated the 1953 coup to install the Shah, the revolutionaries acted preemptively to eliminate what they rationally assumed was potentially the main staging ground for a second counter-revolution - the US embassy.

 

Furthermore as you mention the Soviets, Iran shrewdly relied on Cold War calculus here in doing so....they knew their massive border with the Soviet Union served as a geopolitical shield, preventing Washington from risking a full-scale retaliatory war or nuclear strike that could trigger a direct superpower confrontation. It was an ugly violation of international norms, but in the ruthless, zero-sum logic of a self-help system, it was a highly calculated and rational move.

 

Did it work? Well yeah. By seizing the embassy, the revolutionaries successfully blinded US intelligence to preempt a feared counter-coup, while Ayatollah Khomeini weaponized the external crisis to purge his own domestic rivals and consolidate absolute clerical control. Death to America was a shrewd exercise in consolidating power inside Iran. A fundamental law of statecraft is that a looming external threat is the single most efficient mechanism for internal political cohesion. When the revolutionary regime took power in 1979, it was highly fragile and faced massive domestic fractures from various rival factions. By institutionalizing the specter of an ever-present, monolithic external enemy—the "Great Satan"—the ruling clerics engineered a permanent state of emergency.

 

Furthermore, using the hostages as an asymmetric deterrent paralyzed the United States for 444 days, shielding the fragile new regime from superpower retaliation and ensuring its immediate short-term survival.

 

Of course not very nice thing to do, morally abhorrent but brutally effective....a nascent fragile newborn theocratic regime is with us 40yrs+ later via the actions Khamenei decided to take. Death to America - Great Satan...political theatre Disgusting yes, rational if survival of Islamic revolution is the only thing being optimized for. I can argue of course that Khamenei optimized for the short term too much here and created a decades long problem for the regime...."Death to America", the "Great Satan" may have helped him consolidate power inside Iran post-revolution but it became a rallying cry for Israel to recruit the Great Satan himself to help in its relative power games with Iran.

 

 

You state that Iran "chose war" against the US by funding Hezbollah to bomb the Marine barracks. A realist would counter that Iran emphatically did not want a conventional war with the United States, because its leaders mathematically understood they would be destroyed.

 

Instead, Iran was engaging in asymmetric balancing. In 1983, Iran was already fighting a devastating, existential war against Iraq (a war the US was covertly supporting by the way). Simultaneously, the US and Israel had moved massive military forces into Lebanon—right in Iran's geopolitical backyard. From Tehran's perspective, a hostile superpower was projecting overwhelming force into a vulnerable periphery, bolstering a regional rival in Israel while also supporting a neighbouring state (Iraq) to incur into Iran.

 

Because Iran lacked the conventional capital to challenge the US military directly, it engineered a highly leveraged asymmetric response: Hezbollah. They correctly identified that U.S. survival was not at stake in Beirut and so by consequence Washington’s political tolerance for pain and casualties was naturally low. Iran's leadership mathematically calculated this threshold. The bombing was not a spasm of blind fanaticism; it was a targeted strike on American political will. By inflicting a sudden, unacceptably high cost in blood—241 American servicemembers—Iran fundamentally altered Washington's cost-benefit analysis. The attack forced the Reagan administration to realize that the geopolitical yield of pacifying Lebanon was not worth the asymmetric price being extracted. The true strategic genius of the proxy model, however, lies in risk management. If the Iranian Air Force had bombed the Marine barracks, the U.S. would have been structurally compelled to retaliate directly against Iranian soil, potentially destroying the regime. Proxies keep actions in gray zones and hedge against retaliation. 

 

The strategy succeeded perfectly. A few months later, the United States withdrew its forces from Lebanon. Take a step back - Iran successfully forced a vastly superior global hegemon to retreat from a strategic theater without ever triggering a direct war. This 1983 blueprint established an exercise in pure structural deterrence, proving that a weaker state could successfully balance against a superpower by exporting chaos, managing escalatory risk, and bleeding its adversaries by proxy.

 

Brutal, morally abhorrent. - but deathly rational and effective.

 

 

You correctly point out that pre-1979, Israel and Iran were not at war, and Israeli engineers even built Tehran’s water system. But in international relations, alliances are not built on gratitude or friendship - they are temporary alignments based on mutual interest and threats. Indeed if/when the US goes to war with China people will marvel at how we used to work so closely together on trade. I mean will let them manufacture 100% of our medicine APIs, control all the rare earths we need!

 

Anyway prior to 1979, both Iran and Israel shared a massive common enemy: the Soviet-backed Arab nationalist bloc (Egypt, Syria, Iraq). Israel and Iran engaged in a highly pragmatic "alliance of the periphery" to pool their power and hedge against that Arab core. The cooperation over water systems and agriculture was simply the byproduct of aligned security interests. However, moving into the late 20th century, the structural landscape of the Middle East underwent a seismic shift. The Arab states were neutralized or hollowed out (Egypt signed a peace treaty, Iraq was severely degraded). The geopolitical board was cleared.

 

Suddenly, Israel and Iran found themselves as the two most capable, dominant powers in the Middle East. Realist theory dictates that when a regional system consolidates into a duopoly (with two highly capable states and no higher authority to enforce peace) they will inevitably view each other as the primary threat. Iran didn't just wake up and "choose" to hate Israel....the reality is the structural disappearance of their mutual enemies left them alone in the Middle East room together alone, sparking a classic, inescapable security dilemma and an ensuing wholly predictable security competition between them both.

 

 

You ask if it is rational to fund groups dedicated to the destruction of Israel. Realist theory teaches us to pay attention to a state's capabilities and structural functions, not its public rhetoric. The rhetoric of "wiping out Israel" is largely an ideological tool used to recruit fighters and legitimize Iran's presence in the Arab world. The actual, on-the-ground function of these groups (for Iran) is fundamentally deterrence and containment.

 

Consider the severe power imbalance: Israel possesses overwhelming technological superiority, total air dominance, deep structural US backing (from the global superpower no less), and a nuclear arsenal. Iran is under heavy sanctions with an aging conventional military. If Iran were to fight Israel in a direct, state-on-state conventional war, Iran would be decimated. The last thing a rational Iran should ever do is to enter into a conventional war but lets remember Iran is interested in maximzing its relative power in the region despite its inherent weakness relative to Israel/USA.

 

Therefore, Iran's only rational play is to avoid a direct war while neutralizing or more precisely minimizing Israel's advantages. They do this through a doctrine of "Forward Defense." By heavily arming Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, Iran has essentially built a "ring of fire" directly on Israel's borders. It is a containment strategy. It's a deterrent strategy.

 

A morally bankrupt one - see the horrors of Oct 7th - but ultra rational in its effectiveness given the power, resources asymmetry between Iran on one side and the US/Israel on the other.

 

The brutal logic of the proxy war is that from a strategic standpoint, a proxy network is the most capital-efficient way for a conventionally weaker state to project power. Using proxies like Hezbollah and Hamas allows Iran to cap its downside exposure (actions of these groups never quite rise to the level of state on state conflict). It keeps things in a gray zone. While also keeping the battle lines thousands of miles away from Iranian borders and forces Israel to expend massive resources fighting multi-front wars of attrition. Resources its unable to project further afield.

 

Again morally bankrupt - but if the game is relative power, survival etc etc....its highly rational.

 

 

I hear you on Iran's "wiping out" aspiration for Israel but you know realist analysis requires us to strictly separate a state's declaratory policy (what it says) from its operational policy (what it actually does with its capital and military).

The public rhetoric about "wiping out Israel" serves a very specific utility: it is a low-cost ideological mechanism used to legitimize Iran's influence on the Arab street, recruit proxy fighters, and justify the regime's heavy security state at home. However, their operational policy is deeply pragmatic and deterrence-based. They are trying to build a security buffer to ensure regime survival against structurally superior adversaries. They know they lack the military capital to actually wipe out a nuclear-armed Israel, so they do not operationally attempt it - instead, they attempt to contain it and establish mutual deterrence.

 

If Iran were truly an irrational death cult indifferent to its own survival and dedicated to wiping out Israel/US, it would have launched an unprovoked conventional frontal assault against Tel Aviv or a US aircraft carrier decades ago. Instead, Iran operates with extreme discipline to cap its downside exposure. By utilizing a decentralized portfolio of proxies (Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis), Iran imposes continuous costs on its rivals while strictly keeping the conflict in a "gray zone" below the threshold of conventional or nuclear retaliation.

 

 

You ask - If this is rational, what is not rational? In structural realism, irrationality is defined as a failure to accurately calculate the balance of power, leading a state to take on unhedged, existential risk that guarantees its own destruction.

Examples of true state level irrationality are Imperial Japan attacking Pearl Harbor or Saddam Hussein invading Kuwait - Saddam miscalculated the unipolar dominance of the US, inviting a global coalition to utterly destroy his military infrastructure & regime.

 

Iran systematically avoids those actions that would bring a true ground invasion (because its highly rational) - it constantly recalibrates its proxy attacks to avoid crossing existential red lines, calibrates its retaliatory responses to US/Israeli attacks and strictly manages its risk to ensure regime survival while keeping its regional rival (Israel) bogged down in its immediate backyard (Gaza, Lebanon) 

 

I find it all disgusting, as I find much of what the US does in the name of its national security at times disgusting - but Iran whatever way you slice operates as a deeply rational, albeit ruthless, geopolitical actor optimizing for its own survival at all costs in an anarchic system where maximizing your relative power best optimizes for the regimes survival over the long haul. 

Change, you may call Iran's behavior rational but when your ideology is death and destruction to those you don't agree with, your definition of rational needs some serious adjustment.  We all have to share the same World.  It is really no more complicated than that.  Trying to "rationalize" any definition of "rational" beyond that is truly irrational.

[changegonnacome]

5 hours ago, Marco Van Basten said:

USSR was in no position to help Iran in 1979 since it invaded Afghanistan in 1979.  Don't forget USSR fought a border war with China in the 1970s.  USSR sure as hell would not and could not help Iran - already fighting a war in Afghanistan, anticipating a possible Chinese invasion in the Far East, and now fighting the US?

 

Whether the USSR would have actually intervened is irrelevant....the mere tail risk that they might was enough to scare the hell out of Washington. The US had spent decades at that point meticulously avoiding a direct conflict with the USSR in theatres across the globe, and they weren't going to gamble on starting World War III on the Soviet border over a bunch of clerics running around in Tehran . That uncertainty alone gave the Islamic revolution a cold war deterrent shield in those early days. The US sat on its hands paralyzed by fear - not because they we're certain the USSR would intervene but because they couldn't be certain the USSR wouldn't! The Iranian regime exploited this Cold War anxiety to its maximum effect.

 

5 hours ago, Marco Van Basten said:

If Khomeini was worried about a coup originating from the US embassy, he could have just demanded that the embassy personnel leave in 48 hours or 72 hours.  Taking an embassy hostage is an act of war and had either Carter or Reagan had guts, Qum and Iranian regime would have ceased to exist.  

 

You missed the second part of my explanation re: hostage crisis - yes expelling diplomats removes a foreign threat, but the hostage taking was doing double duty for the Islamic revolution. By manufacturing a 444-day national emergency, Khomeini forced Bazargan’s moderates to resign, purged all his secular rivals, and locked in absolute clerical control for the Islamic revolution. In that period every domestic rival was labelled an American agent seeking to destroy the Islamic revolution. See it wasn't just a counter revolutionary security operation- it was a manufactured crisis to allow for a highly calculated internal power grab. It allowed Khomeini to brutally consolidate power - highly rational for that narrow purpose.

 

5 hours ago, Marco Van Basten said:

Sure, but where is the sense of creating enemies? Why turn two nuclear powers into enemies?  Given Iran's interference in its neighbors affairs for 2,500 years, it can hardly object or be surprised that other countries will interfere in its affairs!

 

The realist answer here is quite simple - structural and geographic considerations drive who becomes enemies over time.......as you pointed out yourself Iran and Israel had a relatively cooperative relationship pre-1979. What changed outside the obvious? The structure of the Middle East. Think of it like a mini-version middle power version of the famous thucydides trap.

 

When shared Arab enemies collapsed in the region, Iran and Israel were the only major powers left - a duopoly of power & influence, this made a structural rivalry inevitable as both pushed to grow its relative power in the region(Germany - France etc.). As for the US, I mean Iran didn't arbitrarily pick an enemy here....due to the 1953 U.S.-backed coup, Washington was already an established existential threat to any regime that took office in Tehran that wasn't to Washington's liking. But "who started it" is nonsense best left for kids in the playground...structural realities are what sustain conflicts over time.....the Israeli-Iran regional security competition would have inevitably pulled in D.C. over time regardless of the hostage incident to say nothing of the Cold War dynamics sitting above that.

 

I will concede one thing however in the neighbourhood of your point above about creating unnecessary enemies - in a perfect world if Khomeini had an alternative vehicle to consolidate power domestically in 1979 to the US hostage crisis he should have taken it.....I don't know enough about the options available to him at the time to judge rationality or not but the hostage crisis did indeed move Iran from being enemy number 52 on the US's enemies list to being much much higher (to put it mildly).

 

I think in this area one can argue that perhaps Khomeini/the regime miscalculated the ROI of the hostage crisis which is not the same as being irrational nutjobs.

 

5 hours ago, Marco Van Basten said:

You contradict yourself.  In one sentence you say that those who believe in benign intentions cease to exist, in the next sentence you state that claims death to Israel and US are rhetorical flourishes.  So which is it?  Using your logic, US and Israel should have each wiped Iran of the face of the earth given Iran's post 1979 behavior.  

 

The moderator - mediator here is clearly capability. You've seen the threat equation before -

 

Threat = Intent x Capability

 

Death to America is rhetorical nonsense coming from the mouths of any Iranian who spews it - what US person goes to bed at night concerned that Iran may do something that would threaten the US's continued existence, the answer is precisely zero US persons. Look at the asymmetry in capability here. Death to Israel carries more  freight  as Iran is a larger country in closer proximity and as we've talked about engaged in a regional security competition with proxies to boot....but again let's be real here, Israel has the US security umbrella, vastly superior military capability, larger economy and if that weren't enough a nuclear capability. These phrases are hot air and rhetorical nonsense because simply they are not underpinned by any credible capability to carry them out. Iran is a threat to Israeli safety and security but it does not rise to the level of an existential threat to Israel.

 

And as regards US and Israel wiping out Iran......lets be serious here, the reason they haven't is because invading and occupying a massive, mountainous nation of 90 million people would require a catastrophic expenditure of blood, treasure, and political capital. The ROI on total annihilation is deeply negative. Therefore, the US and Israel make the highly rational, calculated choice to manage the threat through crippling sanctions, cyber warfare, and systematically degrading Iran's proxy networks....containing the problem without paying the suicidal cost of a full-scale ground war.

 

Epic Fury has proved both my points above again.....nobody anywhere considers the Iranian threat serious enough to expend the massive cost required to annihilate the regime. The reason Israeli/US neo-cons can't rally popular support for further military action in Iran (boots on the ground) is for that precise reason. Put simply Iran is just not a credible of enough threat that it is politically popular enough in the US to bother to pay the high price required to annihilate them.

 

5 hours ago, Marco Van Basten said:

 Iran's strategy is not deterrence but aggression that is guaranteed to result in massive retaliation.  Neither country, to my knowledge, expressed a desire to attack Iran before Iranians fired the first shot (Embassy occupation and funding Hezbollah.).   You also conveniently ignore Hezbollah and Hamas attacks on Israel, since they are the opposite of deterrence.  It is one thing to keep guard dogs, it is another to sic them on your neighbor.  The former deters burglars, the latter invited shooting the dogs and the owner.  Irans's actions have been since 1979 been the opposite of deterrence.  They have been begging for a war.  

 

'First shot' arguments are just nonsense and I wont get dragged into one except to say that Iran would say the first shot was the US's in 1953 with the coup they orchestrated against the regime in Tehran....but as I said before "who started it" arguments are best left to kids in the playground. Structural contemporaneous realities are what sustain conflicts over time not who did what back in the past or when it comes to the Middle East who did what back in 500 BC or 20 AD and all that nonsense!!!!!

 

re: Attacks by Hezbollah & Hamas.....my language wasn't precise enough here previosuly but goes back to offense-defense indistinguishability arena. Yes its offensive in nature but its fundamentally a defensive strategy... the aim for Tehran, is to impose continuous friction on Tel Aviv that sits in a geopolitical grey zone. It ensures Israel must perpetually expend capital just to manage its near backyard.....a rival expending military capital near-shore has by extension less military capital to expend offshore i.e. in proximity to Iran. Again a form of offense that is functionally defensive. It is a deterrent in the sense that it shifts the theatre of the conflict to Israel's backyard and away from Tehran.

 

Of course the other point re: Hamas and Hezbollah that nobody likes to acknowledge but is true - is that Iran has a principal-agent problem with these groups......they exert great influence over them no doubt but they don't perfectly control them and their interests aren't perfectly aligned.....US intelligence post Oct 7th shows that Tehran was as shocked as anyone regarding what Hamas had done....indeed many commentators have indicated that if the leadership in Tehran had been aware of Hamas's plans re: Oct 7th they would have attempted to stop it for the very reasons you point out....it was an act of such brutality that it invited the dog AND the owner to be shot. Iran wants low level friction that continually consumes IDF resources & political attention in Tel Aviv but not so high that attention turns directly to Tehran.

 

Nothing in proxy warfare management is perfect. Your local proxy pitbull designed to impose continuous low level friction on your rival and keep things in a gray zone...... is an animal you only partially control and because their risk calculus is not your your risk calculus things can go wrong.....to your point and I agree with it.....Iran has a tail risk here via this proxy network that could go badly wrong for it SOMEDAY....but let's be clear, the owner hasn't been killed yet after 45y years of imposing that brutal proxy friction. Highly brutal, highly rational. 

 

The U.S. and Israel have spent decades and billions "shooting the dogs" in Lebanon, Gaza, and Iraq, but they painstakingly avoid invading Iranian soil. Even now Epic Fury was just an aerial bombing campaign that can't gain the momentum to move to a ground invasion. Hell the US couldn't even sustain the blockade of the blockade after the bombing stopped! Why? Again because even the ROI on the blockade of the blockade was negative - never a mind a direct ground war with a mountainous nation of 90 million people which would be catastrophically negative relative to existential risk Iran poses to the US. For Israel we can argue something else but that circles back to the capability problem Israel has....it can't annihilate Iran on its own.

 

In a perfect world the leadership in Tehran should be disappeared but the world isn't perfect - they've entrenched themselves in power there with the distributed control system the purposely designed to be regime change proof.  The SOH saga proves how little it takes to shut the Straits - and the world needs some kind of central Government in Tehran controlling its vast territory (if only to keep the oil and fertilizer flowing). Turning Iran into Syria for this reason alone is not a good idea.

 

The dilemma remains the above for Bibi/ the US etc......the Iranian threat (intent x capability) has never risen to a level where the ROI makes sense for the US/European allies to greenlight the massive investment required to take out the regime (despite Bibi's years of threat inflation) and Israel alone hasn't the capability itself.......I would love to see them gone tomorrow but it's clear the cost (relative to the actual threat level from Iran) does not meet the threshold that makes sense...I totally get it, try saying the above to the family of the victims from Oct 7th or those living under air raid sirens in Northern Israel caused by rockets coming in nightly from Hezbollah.

 

The reality however of Epic Fury ending in an MOU has proven that devastating algebra once again.....Iran and how it chooses to execute its foreign policy is a blight on the world and the Middle East but it calibrates its chaos so the juice is never quite worth the squeeze in terms of removing the regime. The one nation for which the algebra works and it would be 'worth it' (Israel) hasn't the capability to do it alone.

 

 

 

[Marco Van Basten]

@changegonnacome, of course Israel by itself can wipe out Iran.  Israel has nukes, and presumably chemical and biological weapons.  Hell, Israel can just destroy Iran's oil industry and Iranian population starves to death.  

[changegonnacome]

1 hour ago, Marco Van Basten said:

@changegonnacome, of course Israel by itself can wipe out Iran.  Israel has nukes, and presumably chemical and biological weapons.  Hell, Israel can just destroy Iran's oil industry and Iranian population starves to death.  

 

This is fantasyland alternative universe stuff. Having the capacity or capability to create a nuclear/chemical wasteland should not be confused with the viable strategic option to do so......every option you described above would result in Israel, on the day after, becoming a global pariah State. It would be a version of State suicide for Israel itself to engage in any of the above options, therefore they aren't actually options at all. 

 

I mean think about it - It would be breaking the nuclear taboo, the chemical weapons taboo or your last option (Iran oil destruction/starvation) would plunge the world into a global depression by destroying Iran's oil infrastructure (which as Epic Fury has shown is the functional equivalent of saying your going to destroy the entirety of the Gulf's energy infrastructure guaranteeing a global depression). 

 

Stripped of apocalyptic fantasy, Israel's actual strategic options for overthrowing the regime in Iran boil down to a conventional conflict......and that is a conflict they structurally lack the capability to win on their own.

 

Edited 5 hours ago by changegonnacome

[73 Reds]

33 minutes ago, changegonnacome said:

 

This is fantasyland alternative universe stuff. Having the capacity or capability to create a nuclear/chemical wasteland should not be confused with the viable strategic option to do so......every option you described above would result in Israel, on the day after, becoming a global pariah State. It would be a version of State suicide for Israel itself to engage in any of the above options, therefore they aren't actually options at all. 

 

I mean think about it - It would be breaking the nuclear taboo, the chemical weapons taboo or your last option (Iran oil destruction/starvation) would plunge the world into a global depression by destroying Iran's oil infrastructure (which as Epic Fury has shown is the functional equivalent of saying your going to destroy the entirety of the Gulf's energy infrastructure guaranteeing a global depression). 

 

Stripped of apocalyptic fantasy, Israel's actual strategic options for overthrowing the regime in Iran boil down to a conventional conflict......and that is a conflict they structurally lack the capability to win on their own.

 

The same can be said of any country with nuclear capability.  You are ignoring the third option (though I don't necessarily agree that Israel could not go it alone in Iran without using nuclear weapons).  It could continue laying waste to anyone who threatens and attacks its borders as it has done throughout its entire existence.  Not optimal, but it has worked thus far even though the costs have been substantial.  Unless you don't believe that Iran today is essentially defenseless, I don't understand the point of your argument.  

[lnofeisone]

1 hour ago, changegonnacome said:

 

This is fantasyland alternative universe stuff. Having the capacity or capability to create a nuclear/chemical wasteland should not be confused with the viable strategic option to do so......every option you described above would result in Israel, on the day after, becoming a global pariah State. It would be a version of State suicide for Israel itself to engage in any of the above options, therefore they aren't actually options at all. 

 

I mean think about it - It would be breaking the nuclear taboo, the chemical weapons taboo or your last option (Iran oil destruction/starvation) would plunge the world into a global depression by destroying Iran's oil infrastructure (which as Epic Fury has shown is the functional equivalent of saying your going to destroy the entirety of the Gulf's energy infrastructure guaranteeing a global depression). 

 

Stripped of apocalyptic fantasy, Israel's actual strategic options for overthrowing the regime in Iran boil down to a conventional conflict......and that is a conflict they structurally lack the capability to win on their own.

 

I agree. I think Israel can put up a good fight but it lacks the necessary strenght to do anything in Iran and it will 100% become a pariah state. Israel's best capability here is to do what Iran does and that is engage in assymetric warfare.

[changegonnacome]

7 minutes ago, 73 Reds said:

The same can be said of any country with nuclear capability.

 

Hence why nuclear weapons are fundamentally a defensive weapon, the ultimate deterrent.

 

I know smoke will come out of your head - but if Iran got a nuke, it wouldn't actually use it unless an existential threat forced it to use it to survive.

 

8 minutes ago, 73 Reds said:

You are ignoring the third option (though I don't necessarily agree that Israel could not go it alone in Iran without using nuclear weapons).  It could continue laying waste to anyone who threatens and attacks its borders as it has done throughout its entire existence.  Not optimal, but it has worked thus far even though the costs have been substantial.

 

THIS would suit Iran down to the ground.

 

What you've described is essentially the 'ring of fire' proxy strategy Iran has had in place for Israel for a couple of decades now.....Israel resources are endlessly consumed in low level friction extinguishing threats on its borders...the result is those resources aren't available to expand its relative military power in the region beyond its immediate neighbour i.e. the ring of fire is about containing Israel's aspirations toward regional hegemony which would diminish Iran's regional relative power.

 

The US has a containment strategy for China - its South Korea, Tawain, Japan etc. etc.

 

Iran has a containment strategy for Israel (& by extension the US in the region) - that containment strategy is Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and previously Syria. 

 

17 minutes ago, 73 Reds said:

Unless you don't believe that Iran today is essentially defenseless, I don't understand the point of your argument.  

 

This whole exchange was about whether Iran is a rational actor versus the caricature of them as somehow irrational suicidal death cult - and of course this whole back and forth was triggered by President Trump saying out loud that they are rational

 

the argument I've made now with alot of detail is they are brutally rational and that rationality has been brutality effective when seen through the lens of regime survival....which is not be confused with whether they are moral or admirable (they aren't).

[changegonnacome]

7 minutes ago, lnofeisone said:

Israel's best capability here is to do what Iran does and that is engage in assymetric warfare.

 

100%......and the blue sky scenario for Israel (and I hope it happens) is that Iranian regime actually becomes the carcuture that is sold by Bibi in D.C......which is to say that they actually start acting IRRATIONALLY and do something that rises to the level that would spur nations with the capability to destroy them (i.e the US) to make the investment to remove them......the mass use of chemical weapons for example or a massive terrorist attack on US soil. If Iran was a 'death cult' these would have happened already and Islamic Regime would have been removed.

 

I'm certain one of the hopes coming out of Epic Fury in Tel Aviv - was that by killing the rational layer of Iranian leadership an irrational layer would emerge to replace them that would do something so stupid that it would generate the popular support required in the US to greenlight the boots on the ground regime change war that is needed here. 

 

Edited 4 hours ago by changegonnacome

[73 Reds]

11 minutes ago, changegonnacome said:

 

Hence why nuclear weapons are fundamentally a defensive weapon, the ultimate deterrent.

 

I know smoke will come out of your head - but if Iran got a nuke, it wouldn't actually use it unless an existential threat forced it to use it to survive.

 

 

THIS would suit Iran down to the ground.

 

What you've described is essentially the 'ring of fire' proxy strategy Iran has had in place for Israel for a couple of decades now.....Israel resources are endlessly consumed in low level friction extinguishing threats on its borders...the result is those resources aren't available to expand its relative military power in the region beyond its immediate neighbour i.e. the ring of fire is about containing Israel's aspirations toward regional hegemony which would diminish Iran's regional relative power.

 

The US has a containment strategy for China - its South Korea, Tawain, Japan etc. etc.

 

Iran has a containment strategy for Israel (& by extension the US in the region) - that containment strategy is Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and previously Syria. 

 

 

This whole exchange was about whether Iran is a rational actor versus the caricature of them as somehow irrational suicidal death cult - and of course this whole back and forth was triggered by President Trump saying out loud that they are rational

 

the argument I've made now with alot of detail is they are brutally rational and that rationality has been brutality effective when seen through the lens of regime survival....which is not be confused with whether they are moral or admirable (they aren't).

Smoke won't come out of my head, LOL but we are discussing one country that values human life and one whose leadership does not.  Therefore, any talk of whether the country that doesn't value human life is acting rationally is only as sensible as how you define "rational" - as per my earlier post.  Do THEY believe they are acting rational within the perverse universe of their ideology?  Of course they do - that I think was Trump's point.  But that definition of "rational" is wholly inconsistent with participation in today's Free World.  Looking at the issue any other way only lends itself to continued conflict and turmoil, which is precisely what we are trying to stop.

Edited 4 hours ago by 73 Reds
word

[changegonnacome]

13 minutes ago, 73 Reds said:

Therefore, any talk of whether the country that doesn't value human life is acting rationally is only as sensible as how you define "rational" - as per my earlier post.

 

I defined it already but not clearly enough maybe.

 

Rationality at the State level as regards security- is about engaging in activities that optimize basically two things.....regime survival/persistence overtime and connected to that maximizing your relative power in that State system or league of nations (remember in international system when you call 911 nobody answers, its a self-help system and so like my mother told me "God helps those, who help themselves" and as a State then you should be at every opportunity maximizing your strength and leverage with whatever resources you have at your fingerprints because fundamentally you are on your own and its a big bad world out there).....thats it....thats how i define rationality at the State level.

 

13 minutes ago, 73 Reds said:

But that definition of "rational" is wholly inconsistent with participation in today's Free World.  Looking at the issue any other way only lends itself to continued conflict and turmoil, which is precisely what what we are trying to stop.

 

The 'Free World' is fantasy, its held together with sticky tape and hot air from polticans mouths - the system is inherently anarchic....we spent much of our lives in the Unipolar moment with the US as close as it comes to being the Global Hegemon.......this period is the closest the international system ever comes to having a world police force & court system where when you call 911 somebody in the UN or DC picks up the phone (but I mean ask Rwanda about dialing 911 even then). That Unipolar moment is fast disappearing and we are returning to multi-polarity.....the great aberration in history will be this 1945 to ~2017 period.

 

Edited 4 hours ago by changegonnacome

[73 Reds]

Just now, changegonnacome said:

 

I defined it already but not clearly enough maybe.

 

Rationality at the State level as regards security- is about engaging in activities that optimize basically two things.....regime survival/persistence overtime and connected to that maximizing your relative power in that State system or league of nations (remember in international system when you call 911 nobody answers, its a self-help system and so like my mother told me "God helps those, who help themselves" and as a State then you should be at every opportunity maximizing your strength and leverage with whatever resources you have at your fingerprints because fundamentally you are on your own and its a big bad world out there).....thats it....thats how i define rationality at the State level.

 

 

The 'Free World' is fantasy, its held together with sticky tape and hot air from polticans mouths - the system is inherently anarchic....we spent much of our lives in the Unipolar moment with the US as close as it comes to being the Global Hegemon.......this period is the closest the international system ever comes to having a world police force where when you call 911 somebody in the UN or DC picks up the phone.......that Unipolar moment is disappearing and we are returning to multi-polarity.....the great aberration in history will be this 1945 to ~2017 period.

Regime survival and maximizing relative power are two entirely different concepts and if you remove any degree of selfish motive from the mix, neither is particularly important (if at all) to Iran's future.  No one is threatening the existence of most countries and most countries are not a threat to anyone else.  Ironically, those who make direct threats are the least successful in terms of quality of life of their people and pretty much every other way most would define success; coincidence?  But that is looking at the issue rationally, the way most of the World would view it because most of the World simply wants to co-exist in peace.  Those who don't for any reason are not acting rationally the way most of the World would define it.    

[changegonnacome]

30 minutes ago, 73 Reds said:

Regime survival and maximizing relative power are two entirely different concepts

 

Being  big and strong and as powerful as you can be - its the definition of optimizing for regime survival/persistence over time.

 

30 minutes ago, 73 Reds said:

No one is threatening the existence of most countries and most countries are not a threat to anyone else.

 

Kind of......most countries are too small and too unimportant to matter in the system.....they live under the shade of the large nations who are playing these games of relative power and security....as they eye each other up around intent, capability etc.

 

Your view of the world is I would argue is clouded by two things....first a lifetime is a relatively short period of time....you grew up in the Unipolar moment (as I said its as close to stability and world police + peace the world has known)....and number two we all live in America (i know you lived or spent some time in Israel)......but the US is the regional hegemon....it has achieved (through not insignificant violence and relative power moves i might add) the Nirvana of security....it is the regional hegemon in the Western Hemisphere nobody can challenge it in anyway.....which is why nobody loses a wink of sleep in the US at the night worried about our neighbours.....we are simply too powerful for them to consider challenging us in anyway. 

 

The dream for Israel would be to wake up in the Middle East in this situation......taking Iran of the chess board would be a BIG step in this regard.

 

China dreams of the same thing in East Asia.....and we have policy of ensuring that never occurs..Why?......the logic goes that a power who achieves regional hegemony in their part of the world is then free to "roam".....what does roam look like....say like the United States roams (with 800 military bases in 80 countries) across the globe getting involved in all manner of local security competitions....sometimes doing good (WWII/Marshall plan) but broadly causing chaos via unintended consequences.

 

The US's main security challenge over the next hundred years is ensuring China is contained within Asia that it could never consider "roaming" into the Western Hemisphere.

 

 

30 minutes ago, 73 Reds said:

the way most of the World would view it because most of the World simply wants to co-exist in peace.  Those who don't for any reason are not acting rationally the way most of the World would define it.    

.

I think thats right....but only when applied to lower middle powers and lower powers...the other Gulf states for example (the Omans etc.) live like this but even they manage alliances with etc with regional powers (its why the smaller Gulf States will hedge tail risk by playing ball with Iran even after being bombed by them).  The cool kids these days have a name for naitons like this....they are called NPCs....It stands for Non-Player Character (the background characters in video games that you can't control, like shopkeepers or random townspeople who just repeat the same lines of dialogue). The world is indeed full of NPC countries...but even they need to manage relative power via sensible alliances with MPCs!

 

Edited 3 hours ago by changegonnacome

[73 Reds]

1 hour ago, changegonnacome said:

 

Being  big and strong and as powerful as you can be - its the definition of optimizing for regime survival/persistence over time.

 

 

Kind of......most countries are too small and too unimportant to matter in the system.....they live under the shade of the large nations who are playing these games of relative power and security....as they eye each other up around intent, capability etc.

 

Your view of the world is I would argue is clouded by two things....first a lifetime is a relatively short period of time....you grew up in the Unipolar moment (as I said its as close to stability and world police + peace the world has known)....and number two we all live in America (i know you lived or spent some time in Israel)......but the US is the regional hegemon....it has achieved (through not insignificant violence and relative power moves i might add) the Nirvana of security....it is the regional hegemon in the Western Hemisphere nobody can challenge it in anyway.....which is why nobody loses a wink of sleep in the US at the night worried about our neighbours.....we are simply too powerful for them to consider challenging us in anyway. 

 

The dream for Israel would be to wake up in the Middle East in this situation......taking Iran of the chess board would be a BIG step in this regard.

 

China dreams of the same thing in East Asia.....and we have policy of ensuring that never occurs..Why?......the logic goes that a power who achieves regional hegemony in their part of the world is then free to "roam".....what does roam look like....say like the United States roams (with 800 military bases in 80 countries) across the globe getting involved in all manner of local security competitions....sometimes doing good (WWII/Marshall plan) but broadly causing chaos via unintended consequences.

 

The US's main security challenge over the next hundred years is ensuring China is contained within Asia that it could never consider "roaming" into the Western Hemisphere.

 

 

.

I think thats right....but only when applied to lower middle powers and lower powers...the other Gulf states for example (the Omans etc.) live like this but even they manage alliances with etc with regional powers (its why the smaller Gulf States will hedge tail risk by playing ball with Iran even after being bombed by them).  The cool kids these days have a name for naitons like this....they are called NPCs....It stands for Non-Player Character (the background characters in video games that you can't control, like shopkeepers or random townspeople who just repeat the same lines of dialogue). The world is indeed full of NPC countries...but even they need to manage relative power via sensible alliances with MPCs!

 

As usual, for the most part I agree and do tend to look at look at things from a Western-centric POV.  But this is because I believe our POV is largely correct and the best model for a free, prosperous, peaceful World.  There is no reason to eliminate, cultures, customs, histories, alliances, religious practices, and fundamental beliefs as long as they don't threaten and infringe on the rights of others.  History teaches us that this can largely be accomplished through deterrence but the exceptions like Iran have to be dealt with more directly unless we want another 47 years of fundamental fanaticism.  For me its about time.   Because of its success, the US has a unique role in the World.  Nothing says the role can't be shared and in time it will.  

[changegonnacome]

7 minutes ago, 73 Reds said:

As usual, for the most part I agree and do tend to look at look at things from a Western-centric POV.  But this is because I believe our POV is largely correct and the best model for a free, prosperous, peaceful World.  There is no reason to eliminate, cultures, customs, histories, alliances, religious practices, and fundamental beliefs as long as they don't threaten and infringe on the rights of others.  History teaches us that this can largely be accomplished through deterrence but the exceptions like Iran have to be dealt with more directly unless we want another 47 years of fundamental fanaticism.  For me its about time.   Because of its success, the US has a unique role in the World.  Nothing says the role can't be shared and in time it will.  

 

@73 Reds you are liberal idealist at heart!...me too!..this is indeed the way things should be if man wasnt so tribal, paranoid, prone to think of others as lesser than, if nationalism wasn't such a powerful tribal force etc etc........I was the same until I spent time studying IR and while no social theory is perfect (the world is far too complicated and so ANY theoretical frameworks are always gross gross over simplifications of the real world) the IR theory that stands above the rest and has the best (though imperfect predictive power) is realism. The great tragedy of realism applied to the world is the end game inherent in it....global and regional powers are prone to war not because they are crazy...but because in anarchic system a state acting rationally acts in ways that trigger paranoia in its foe which sets of inevitable escalatory paranoia sometimes ending in something of a balancing stalemate but many times tipping over into something much worse a hot war.......we all know the phrase - sometimes the best defense is a good offense...well States come to that conclusion all the time and we get hot wars.

 

The thing I find with liberal idealists is they want to divide the world neatly into "good guys who want peace" and "bad guys who want war." The great tragedy of realism is proving that the bloodiest wars in human history are rarely started by cartoonish villains rubbing their hands together in pure evil. They are usually started by terrified, highly rational leaders staring at a map, looking at trend lines, and concluding: "If we don't attack them today, they will destroy us tomorrow.".......Israel is terrified of the trend line with Iran's nuclear capability, they should be....as I said above that Iran is highly highly unlikely to ever use a nuclear weapon on Israel they want it as a deterrent....."unlikely" is doing alot of work here of course.....I'm 99.9% sure of this prediction....but if I handed you a revolver with a THOUSAND chambers in it and a bullet in one of them how comfortable would be putting it to your head and pulling the trigger? This is Israel's dilemma....and I'm very sympathetic to it.

[Spekulatius]

Lots of countries will develop nuclear weapons - Saudi Arabia (through Pakistan), South Africa (they have nuclear power already), South Korea (counter North Korea), Iran, Ukraine (longer term) and likely Europe down the road. This a clear result of the wars on Ukraine and Iran, imo.

 

This is a result of the Neo imperialism that is going to be the next chapter in a global politics.

Edited 12 minutes ago by Spekulatius