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Why: I think it's mostly a matter of trump wanting to make a name for himself outside of his maga cult. Neocons never liked him, and he hopes this might change it. Plus, a dose of realpolitik in an effort to seem tough usually works.
When: It will have to end soon, otherwise he'll be shitting in his base. However, while wanting to pull back he'll realize he has two choices:
How: Airstrikes will continue until the paragraph above has been addressed. And since Trump never reads history, he's probably way too optimistic, never realizing this simple fact: No country/regime has ever unconditionally surrendered because of conventional airstrikes and bombardment alone.
To quote Sarah Paine (renowned military scholar and historian), once you put your enemy on death ground, meaning they will have to fight on or (probably) die, they will not surrender. Trump never offered the Iran regime an offramp, and while it sucks to be in Iran right now, they have no incentive to surrender.
There's also nothing to indicate that Iran would completely reopen the strait even if the US up and fucked off. What incentive do they have at this point to return to the old status quo?
And even if Iran changed their minds, it's not like the mines will just disappear
They didn't release mines (yet) though? Or am I out of the loop?
The US sunk 16 of their mine laying ships and has been having to shoot down mine laying drones. No one really going through so no real idea about how many if any mines have gotten through.
Is that verified and were the ships actually in operation? All I saw was "inactive mine-laying ships"
The count I saw is that Iran has something like 450 ships in operation prior to the start of this war.
There have been some, but I'm not sure to which extent.
If the US fucks off, then Iran is left in a powerful negotiation position. They could use this incident to help normalize relations with other gulf states by pointing out how the US and Israel started the fight, then left them all high and dry. They could make non-agression and safe passage deals with the gulf states as well as exhert real pressure against the normalization of relations with Israel.
And just like that...
Exactly! In for a penny, in for a pound. Iran will likely punish their neighbors who've been hosting US bases further before a ceasefire.
Long term it's better for Iran if stuff keeps flowing through and nobody moves away or pipelines around the Strait.
Before that was just economically infeasible, but now it's being shown as a massive vulnerability and there's no going back.
Unless Iran can make it look so expensive by comparison again.
When you say "his isolationist base" I know that was a talking point early on. Will any part of his base hold him accountable for literally anything ever, though? I would've assumed his base is now ecstatic about doing some warmongering no matter what he said five minutes ago?
Time will show. There are some shitheads, such as Nick Fuentes, who have publicly disavowed Trump, and even Alex Jones is having a hard time defending Trump these days. Defection are happening, but any long term effect will probably be seen via a slow trickle and not a sudden drop in approval rating.
The truth is, most people don't stay up to date on the news, so while the base probably won't notice that the current Trump talking points are inconsistent at best, come a year or two and they will probably notice that they are objectively worse off after Trump decided to spend billions on a war with Iran for dubious benefits. We will never see a point of "That's it, fuck you!" on xitter. Suddenly the support will lose critical mass and fade into the background just like the teaparty did.
I'm cautiously optimistic stemming from the fact that ideologies based on hate never succeed in the long run. They either fizzle out, eat themselves, or on rare occasions implode spectacularly.
Nice choice of words. Now I have a new band to listen to.
This has historically not been the case. Trump supporters are more likely to say things are "great" when asked how the presidents policies have affected them. They are entirely divorced from reality and hang on the presidents words as if their lives depended on it. They accept what he says as truth, and without fail his lackeys repeat those words/lies, things like, "the dow is over 50,000!" that we heard bondi say the other day in a hearing. I think people should be more informed how this is historically similar to nazi germany's rise to power.
They're also likely to say "Biden's policies" were terrible and "trump's policies" are the best even if they describe Biden's actual policies as "trump policies" and trump's actual policies as "Biden's policies".
I think that most Trump voters support isolationism symbolically. They want a leader who prioritizes them rather than perceived others, but they don't actually have a strong opinion about specific foreign policies per se. Attacking Iran does challenge that symbolism, but in the absence of direct effects on their own lives, their trust in Trump's established "America first" reputation will go a long way.
A lot of his base believe that the reason the US goes around the world plundering and killing is for the benefit of the people in those countries. It's utterly delusional, White Man's Burden bullshit but that's what the media says and they're gullible enough to believe it (as are some liberals tbh). The main thing they want is to stop carrying this imagined White Man's Burden. They don't give a single shit about what kind of harm is inflicted on foreigners, they just don't want to feel like they're paying to help foreigners (or anybody else).
All that adds up to, if Trump does terrorist strikes that kill schoolgirls and destabilize countries to the benefit of absolutely no one, they don't care. At best, they might care a little about US troops who are killed because they don't see them as subhumans (like they do foreigners), but even then it's a toss-up because they might decide to want vengeance.
There is an "isolationist" current because they can see the failure of the occupation of Afghanistan but they also have incoherent worldviews and little ability to resist propaganda. So they blame that failure on "woke" and on it being nation-building, without realizing that the "woke" was just a pretence and also that Bush also claimed he didn't want to get involved in nation-building because of Vietnam.
Going by the polls, roughly one in ten or perhaps more Americans have changed their mind about him already. They're mostly independents, but he has also lost most of the literal actual Hitler-hailing nazis, which is a serious blow to his people power.
Some of the more Libertarian ones are rallying around Thomas Massie. He seems like one of the few American politicians who are actually somewhat honest.
Sounds like putin and ukraine. Just gotta keep killing people to save his ego
Except Ukraine was minding its own business, while Iran was busy arming terror groups across the middle east
Are you forgetting WWII? Japan was setting up for a big American invasion of their islands, expecting millions dead, and then we dropped a nuke. Japan still refused, so we dropped another nuke. Then they surrendered.
You're assuming that we won't use nukes, simply because it's immoral and a huge escalation over nothing. Now look who's giving the orders. An immoral pedophile who hates anyone mentioning how he's a pedophile. He'll do ANYTHING to stop people from mentioning he's a pedophile. I think that includes nukes. This is the same guy who used the phrase "We're gonna bomb the shit out of them!"
That's why I said "conventional", which nukes aren't
The netherlands surrendered after the bombing of Rotterdam by germany in WW2. This was with conventional weapons.
The surrender wasn't unconditional. Germany accepted a surrender which did not include Zeeland in the armstice. This includee any maritime and air assets in the region.
Also, Netherlands had an offramp by surrendering. See my comment about being on death ground above.
Its not quite accurate to say bombing alone, yhe only condition Japan had when they tried to surrender before the bombs was the emporer, and that would have gone away as the Soviets got closer.
That situation was different though. Japan was 100% getting invaded and they knew that when the bombs were dropped. Maybe not right away, in the very immediate term. Iran does not believe the US will execute a proper invasion as it has not been credibly threatened. If Iran believed that invasion was imminent, then the calculus would be different.
The Japanese fascists didn't give a shit about the people getting nuked. If they did they would have started the war in the first place. The most the nukes gave them was an excuse, they could pretend that's why they surrendered to make themselves look better. The only thing they cared about was their own skin. The reason they didn't want to submit to unconditional surrender was because they didn't want to hang.
The desperate hope that they had been hanging on to was that they could negotiate with the USSR to mediate the surrender (in fact, the USSR was just buying time as they moved troops to attack). This hope was prolonged because Truman pulled out of a joint statement with the USSR calling for surrender, and the reason he did that was because he wanted an opportunity to use the bomb.
The USSR declaring war is the thing that removed the last hope the Japanese fascists had for a conditional surrender. They were then allowed to save face by claiming they cared so much about sparing the people from nukes. Because really the only reason the US was so insistant on unconditional surrender in the first place was because it would sound more badass in the papers and help Truman get reelected. Dropping the nukes also served as a way to justify the costs of the program, and to intimidate the Soviets.
The projections for a possible invasion were all invented after the war as a talking point. No such projection existed during the war, nor was any invasion planned.