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.
That’s my thinking as well. The US finds itself in a scenario where there’s no good outcome. With Ukraine being a proxy war, the US could always just walk away. But with Iran, it’s a direct conflict and even if the US decided to pack up and leave, Iran can just keep the strait closed until they get reparations. So, Americans can’t end this was on their terms. And this is going to be a colossal drain on resources for them. The economy in the US was already in a bad shape by all accounts, and such a massive energy price shock could be the catalyst for a financial crisis. Even the whole AI based economy, which is the only sector doing well, need massive amount of energy for data centers. If energy prices keep shooting up, which they almost certainly will, the cost of operating all this infrastructure will skyrocket.
One worry for countries like Cuba and Venezuela is that the US might try settling for becoming a regional power, and as they retrench from being a global hegemon, they will double down on brutalizing Latin America. Whether they will have the resources to do that, and the necessary domestic social cohesion remains to be seen. Overall, I do think that the days of the US playing world police are now over.
Makes me think of the point you made here:
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.
That’s my thinking as well. The US finds itself in a scenario where there’s no good outcome. With Ukraine being a proxy war, the US could always just walk away. But with Iran, it’s a direct conflict and even if the US decided to pack up and leave, Iran can just keep the strait closed until they get reparations. So, Americans can’t end this was on their terms. And this is going to be a colossal drain on resources for them. The economy in the US was already in a bad shape by all accounts, and such a massive energy price shock could be the catalyst for a financial crisis. Even the whole AI based economy, which is the only sector doing well, need massive amount of energy for data centers. If energy prices keep shooting up, which they almost certainly will, the cost of operating all this infrastructure will skyrocket.
One worry for countries like Cuba and Venezuela is that the US might try settling for becoming a regional power, and as they retrench from being a global hegemon, they will double down on brutalizing Latin America. Whether they will have the resources to do that, and the necessary domestic social cohesion remains to be seen. Overall, I do think that the days of the US playing world police are now over.