wtf duplicate post
I’ve said it before here, and here it is again. Leave it to Trump to create a conflict with Iran in which Iran comes across as the good guy. Only you, Donnie, only you.
Iran has no reason to cooperate. From their perspective, they’re already at war. I don’t know why people can’t understand how regimes can interpret extreme economic sanctions and embargoes as acts of war when our own country was attacked by Japan, which pushed us into the largest war in human history, over an embargo.
If Trump plays his cards right, he can be known as the POTUS who let North Korea AND Iran develop nuclear weapons.
I think that will ultimately be his legacy, which puts him in political alignment with some of the idiotic vagabonding anti-American pseudo-intellects I used to occasionally run into in hostels when I was traveling the globe trying to find myself in my wayward youth. “Ye know, mate, maybe the best solution for global peace is for all countries to have nukes.”:rolleyes:
Well, this will be a good follow-up to your last sentence, asahi: Putin signs bill suspending participation in nuclear treaty
So thanks to the US, the nuclear arms race is back on.
Is there some kind of ANTI- Nobel Peace Prize?
Now is not the time to take our American eyes off of the important issues facing us. Do you know that there are Central Americans who are coming across our southern border to find employment by American companies picking our vegetables?
We could make one. I propose the “LeBon Warmonger Prize” as a name. We can shorten it to LeBon Warmonger in popular media and refer to winners that way, i.e. LeBon Warmonger Donald Trump, etc. Once the brand is established, I’d expect “LeBon” to even get dropped occasionally, especially in casual conversation.
Iranian supertanker stopped in Gibraltar at the request of the US. Now Spain is maybe mad at the UK.
Stellar foreign policy and deft diplomacy are not this administrations strong points IMO.
To be fair, Spain is mad at the UK about *everything *regarding Gibraltar. Regardless of the validity of any particular complaint, this is just their latest excuse to raise the subject.
Acknowledged, but this particular exacerbation’s root cause is the US so it’s noteworthy IMO.
I’m guessing that even tho he’s retired his words carry weight in Iranian society and that’s why we’re hearing about
Ravenman wrote about escalation earlier and I disagreed with some of what he wrote; however, perhaps one area where I would agree is that generally speaking, yes, he’s correct in arguing that Iran also has a responsibility to avoid war if and where they can do so without laying prostrate and sacrificing their sovereignty.
I think it’s understandable that Iran perceives the US as a danger to its regime, which is not to say that I like their regime or agree with their responses to date, only that I understand some of them. With that disclaimer out of the way, the most important obligation Iran has is to offer the US (i.e. Trump) a face-saving way back to the negotiating table. I expect a certain amount of trash talk, but on the side they should be making it clear that they’re willing to de-escalate if the US is willing to do so in kind.
I’ve already expressed my fears about our administration. My fear with Iran is that they will assume that Trump will offer no concessions and seek to humiliate Trump, which would be a grave mistake on their part, IMO. On the reverse side of that coin, I hope that if/when Iran does offer diplomacy, Trump’s diplomatic team can recognize that overture when they see it. I’m not at all confident that they can. To the Trump hammer, everything looks like a nail that’s sticking out.
If I’m gauging this correctly, Iran will not seek to humiliate Trump unless he opens the door for it unwittingly, and even then I think they’ll show restraint at this point. Poking is gonna happen, but not provoking. They are going to be very low-key simmer about this until they have a weapon assembled; then they’ll just tell Trump to go fuck himself, IMO. And I think they’ll have a nuclear weapon assembled before the end of the year.
This part kind of cracked me up:
I think that going forward, Iran’s position will be that it will keep the enriched uranium and whatever else it has developed since the end of sanctions and the negotiating point will be that it will cease to go forward if Trump is willing to negotiate and get back to the framework. But it’s not going backwards – this is exactly what North Korea has done with Trump. Just as Korea is not going to de-nuke itself, Iran is not going to reverse and go back to where things were with Obama. I think American negotiators - not just in Trump’s administration but in others as well - seem to fundamentally not understand how this kind of negotiation process works.
In short, the diplomatic lesson for us is this: When you fuck someone on a deal, there’s a consequence for it.
I agree Iran will not step backwards. They might step back, but not backwards.
Trump isn’t the only American president who has tried to overplay the military strength card in handling foreign adversaries, but he has overplayed it more than any other in recent memory. Not a coincidence that the guy whispering in Trump’s ear (Bolton) was part of the second worst offending administration in this regard (GW Bush).
When you take away diplomacy and use coercion as your primary negotiating tool, then adversaries respond hyper-defensively. You can’t use military diplomacy unless you’re either bringing a diplomatic component to accompany military force to the table (which is what Obama did with Iran and Bill Clinton did with North Korea), or unless you can live with the consequences of militarism (GWB didn’t do so well).
What Trump’s administration may be starting to reckon with is that while Iran’s position is desperate, they’re not going to play the waiting game. They’re not going to just wait it out and get weaker in the process; they’re in a position to cause a royal mess and they’re going to start doing just that unless we back off. In a war with Iran, what’s certain is that Iran would probably make the global economy suffer. What’s less certain is when their regime would fall. And even if it falls, the economic disruption could (and probably would) last long after the regime is vanquished. This is what probably just dawned on John Bolton and Mike Pompeo. Or maybe it didn’t, but someone in the White House dared to ask the right kinds of questions and they didn’t have the answer.