Putin wants Belarus reintegrated with Russia, from December 24th:
Then, just 7-odd hours ago:
While the US is distracted with Iraq, Russia will invade Belarus and take it over. Just watch.
This has nothing to do with Politics or Elections. I’m going to move it over to Great Debates and combine it with the existing thread over there.
It ultimately depends on which war Iran chooses to fight, which battlefields they choose to fight us on, and when they choose to do it.
Let’s not forget the fact that the US military is pretty far from home, and Iran is essentially defending its home. Let’s also consider there are at least two other nations considerably more powerful than Iran who don’t want the United States to win in a war with Iran, so it’s likely that they’d get a helping hand.
And finally, Europe doesn’t need another refugee crisis, as it would only put more pressure on center left regimes that are desperately fighting off nationalism internally and foreign pressure from Russia.
Whatever upside the US would get from a hot conflict with Iran would be short-lived. It might last just long enough for the Donald to get a photo op aboard a USS carrier and put up a sign that reads “Keep Iran Great.” But that moment would quickly fade.
That may explain the Trump/Putin conversation a couple of days ago. They were exchanging late Christmas presents:
Vlad: Donny, I need you to look the other way while I repatriate a small Russian territory of no consequence to you.
Donald: Anything for you, Vlad. You know that. I’ll just need you to do me a small favor, tho…
Lol, I would think Putin is smart enough to not even bring up Belarus, saying instead “This guy is bad, Mr President, very bad. I would like to get him, but my hands are tied. But you? You are the only one who can do this, Mr President. And my team has determined he is going to attack an American base in a week, so this… problem… has to be fixed quickly. Imagine saying you saved lives instead of avenging them, Mr President! That’s nice, no?”
Sure, this will convince them to lay off and back down the same way the September 11th attacks made us think twice about our continued involvement in the Middle East. There is no way this does anything but galvanize the anti-American sentiment in Iran, and make them feel the need to escalate their aggression against us.
Russia apparently has called Trump’s decision “short-sighted” and will lead to “grave consequences”.
I think I heard that the justification for the attack was to thwart an “imminent” attack on US interests.
If the attack was “imminent” then killing the general won’t stop it. If it wasn’t imminent, then it was an unprovoked assassination.
The senator from Connecticut (D) on NPR this morning said that Trump’s approach to Iran is all tactics, no strategy. Seems right.
I’ll take “it’s not going to hold off”. Do you have some sick leave you can use and boogie on out of there?
Lol, some wag on Twitter just noted that Trump has implemented the “Ryan Doctrine”, put into place by Tom Clancy’s fictional everyman President, Jack Ryan (uh, spoilers?), where Ryan kills an Iranian leader via drone strike during a televised speech, and then declares that the US will summarily kill anyone it considers a danger to US interests.
Yay!
All this makes strategic sense from Putin’s point of view. Distract from Belarus. Increase oil prices. Fubar the United States. Make their idiot President feel like a man for playing Gavrilo Princip on a massive scale. Start a war which will increase oil prices more, increasing demands to get rid of sanctions.
And more. A lot more.
But, yeah, from the US perspective, Trump’s actions make little sense.
Not so much a white thing as an American thing. I feel your pain.
‘Listen, the Iranians have been around for 2000 years blah blah blah’
Cite?
So . . . why do that second part? Why not just win in the short kinetic part, like you said, and then just not bother with the decentralized insurgency?
So, this bad guy was planning some outrage, and we killed him as a prevention. OK. Who told us about the planning and the immediacy thereof? Sounds like we have really great intelligence sources in Iran.
And these sources? Is this from a different intelligence community than the deep-state corrupted intelligence community that absitively posolutely cannot be relied upon?
The problem for Lukashenko is that he’s been in power for, what, 20 years or more? And during this time, Belarus has been far and away the most pro-Russian former Soviet republic. This is the ‘thanks’ he gets.
It’ll be interesting to see how shutting off Belarus’ energy will be received by people in Belarus and how they react.
Anyone care to speculate on how this compares to the assassination of Ferdinand?
I wonder what Trump’s military advisors think of this.