And the drain on resources this war will result in is going to ensure the US is no longer in a position to contest China in Asia.

Makes me think of the point you made here:

A prime example of the problem is how the US has stopped producing key materials like rare earth metals. Without them, it’s not possible to produce radars, missiles, or anything else in a modern weapons system. The equipment shortages are now becoming acute, and you can see it in how the US is pulling THAAD systems out of South Korea just to plug holes in the Gulf. South Koreans are furious because they damaged their relationship with China to host those systems, and now they’re just gone.

Which may be the single most impactful part of all of this. If the US keeps breaking military infrastructure on Iran and there isn’t obvious replacement, that is a HARD loss in the ability to project power. And hard is increasingly the bulk of what they have left, with how Trump’s mask off gangster policy is burning through remaining soft power. And Europe is in no position to take up the mantle of projecting power.

So not to say it’s all said and done over, but I think when we look at how a strategy like Venezuela’s current one is landed on, we can consider it as trying to sort of get the empire off their back long enough until its decline is so deep that it can no longer threaten them as effectively anymore. They don’t necessarily need to take heavy losses in a protracted war if they can compromise without capitulating long enough to wait out the decline until the empire threat is more manageable.

Every piece of military tech and military infrastructure that Iran destroys is one less piece the empire can use elsewhere. That means its projected power weakens everywhere, not just against Iran. But the Trump admin has also put itself in a bind. If they don’t turn this into any kind of victory and Iran walks all over them, that severely damages, if not obliterates their control in the region, which is also a loss of global power. So they are motivated to keep putting military resources into it, in spite of it being a quagmire that is destroying portions of what they put into it. And Iran has no reason to sue for peace without concrete outcomes of booting the occupier out the door when all that would do is give the empire time to build back up its destroyed tendrils and continue its covert operations to undermine Iran with impunity.

So it’s like… the empire laid out the framework for a trap sprung against them. Iran, seeing the decades of framework on repeat, prepared for the eventuality, in spite of likely not really wanting it to have to come to that. Then the empire waltzed in and triggered it, putting itself in a lose-lose situation. A quagmire that some of the more sober imperial power brokers saw for what it was and is why they hadn’t picked that fight with Iran directly, instead trying to do things through color revolution and the like. But Trump and the kind of people he surrounds himself with are just desperate and arrogant enough to pull the trigger, unwilling to reckon with imperial decline, thinking they can brazen and brute force their way through it.

Thanks so much, this is very inspirational for me! Your method of teasing out interconnections is kind of similar to the Zettelkasten method, which I’m trying to learn. I agree your kind of interconnected analysis is essential in geopolitics and is sorely lacking in liberal media, who seem to focus on individual choices in isolation.