askchapo

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.

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.