this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2026
34 points (100.0% liked)
askchapo
23245 readers
115 users here now
Ask Hexbear is the place to ask and answer ~~thought-provoking~~ questions.
Rules:
-
Posts must ask a question.
-
If the question asked is serious, answer seriously.
-
Questions where you want to learn more about socialism are allowed, but questions in bad faith are not.
-
Try !feedback@hexbear.net if you're having questions about regarding moderation, site policy, the site itself, development, volunteering or the mod team.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
In my view, there are 3 overarching options that are abstract and then we have to get more granular.
High level option 1: This was the optimal strategic move for the US based on the state of play.
High level option 2: This was incorrectly believed to be the optimal strategic move for the US based on faulty or incomplete intelligence and analysis.
High level option 3: This was correctly believed to be a suboptimal (or worse) strategic move for the US but the military is unable to prevent itself from throwing the game.
If it's 1, we have a lot of thinking to do. Maybe it was a "now or never" sort of thing. Maybe there's value in destroying the world's energy economy. Maybe there's a wunderwaffe on the way. Maybe they needed to neutralize Iran before they went after China.
If it's 2, we have a lot of thinking to do. What would it mean for the US to lose ground here? How will they respond? What opportunities does it open for other adversaries and will they take it? Where did the faulty intelligence come from? Is the intelligence community blinded by ideology and incompetence or were the counter-intelligence capabilities of the axis of resistance that much better?
If it's 3, we have a lot of thinking to do. Is POTUS and SecDef actually running the show from a position of ideological blindness? Did they purge enough top brass that the system is incapable of self-correction? Are we at the stage where everyone is lying to the chain of command to keep their jobs, and thus top brass, through their own ideological blindness, have created a death spiral for their own situational awareness?
In any case, it's not the Epstein Files.
If it was optimal, then the US thinks this hurts China or they think it makes their own position stronger for a hot conflict with China. That could mean they have to protect Israel at all cost and it was now or never, or it could mean that Iran would join in China's defense with full capability and the US needs to degrade Iran's capabilities on a schedule before the US attacks China, thus reducing the threat Iran poses in that scenario. Perhaps US/Israeli intelligence is deeply infiltrated into Iranian operations and it's only a matter of time before the US fully disables Iranian power and turns the place into a protracted civil war.
If it was suboptimal, perhaps Israel is going rogue and feeding bad intel to the US so that they can expand their territory, not realizing Iran was as strong as they are. Perhaps Israeli intelligence is subverting Israeli leadership deliberately. Perhaps Israeli intelligence has been fooled or compromised by resistance counter-intelligence and made to believe Iran was far weaker than it was. Perhaps US intelligence was fooled directly.
If the military can't control leadership from taking actions that are known to be deleterious to US strategy, then perhaps it means that Trump personally fired everyone that could stop him. Perhaps Trump's team is composed of sufficiently effective people that they soft-couped the country. Perhaps the military leadership was always mostly eschatological and just a few key purges were all that was needed to establish a leadership that would knowingly order the US's own destruction if it aligned with their vision of holy righteousness.
There's a lot of known unknowns. There's a probably a bunch of unknown unknowns.
Don't try to be precise and accurate. Just try to be accurate and allow your understanding to have a broad enough scope to be flexible as more evidence emerges. This is a situation to navigate dynamically, not to pin down and examine surgically.
The "now or never" thing is true in the broader sense, whether or not it was the driving factor in starting this war. As China has driven forward in the course of development, the era of US global hegemony is existentially threatened. The United States cannot compete with an industrialized country with four times the population. Put simply, that's four times the labor, four times the research, four times the machinery, four times the economy, four times the culture. It is a childish analogy, but the best way to describe the US's position is in the late-game of a round of Sid Meyer's Civilization, where your neighbor is less than 10 turns away from a science / culture victory and the only option left to delay your loss is the use of nuclear weapons.
The US has been trying to grapple with this reality for at least a decade now, in various manifestations. From the Yglesias galaxy-brain take that we need "One Billion Americans," to the military-industrial complex think tanks churning out papers that if we fail to contain China's development now, it will be impossible in the future. In fact, I believe this is one of the biggest unspoken factors in the AI race. Knowing that it is impossible to out-compete China in terms of human labor and academic research, the ruling class hoped to fill the one billion person gap in intellectual and economic capacity using computers.
Surely this isn't the only reason for attacking Iran, but the broader situation only presented two outcomes. Accept China as a peer, or even more capable counterpart in the world system, or destroy it before it is too late. To the western ruling class, the first option is completely unacceptable, so something along these lines was inevitable.
case in point https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/03/us-israel-iran-war-christian-rhetoric
But
I tend to lean a little of B a little of C, depending on which individuals youβre asking