This week's summary of the situation is in spoiler tags below:
preamble
Diplomacy between Iran and the US has begun in... perhaps not earnest, but it's certainly started. Iran's very reasonable requirement that the Zionist occupation stop ethnically cleansing Lebanon and withdraw has caused a great deal of consternation throughout their population, and several analysts have suggested that Netanyahu being forced to accept Trump's (and therefore Iran's) demands spells the end of his leadership in the coming elections; then, the occupation is expected to "mellow out" and the conflicts and genocides slow and stop. This view is only really impactful if you believe that, rather than the US and Zionists being in a strongly mutually beneficial relationship based on geopolitical, financial, and clandestine goals, that instead Netanyahu is a devious mastermind bending any and all in the US to his whims. I don't believe this; and, if anything, the events of at least the last three years prove that he's really quite stupid, with "Israel" being in its worst position in decades under his rule.
Nonetheless, Iran has made the issue of Lebanon a not-quite-red-line (an orange line?). It hasn't stopped them from going to Switzerland and beginning negotiations, but they still want to strongly express their discontent by harnessing the newfound superweapon that is Hormuz. Similarly, threats by Trump and others to restart the war if Iran doesn't bend to their whims have been met with formal stoppages of negotiations, but it appears technical teams are still talking to each other and working things out. Trump's threats are fairly idle at this point because most in the US military must know that there's essentially zero effective military actions left to them with their current munition stockpiles.
Trump let slip that the US has about 3-4 weeks of oil reserves left, which aligns moderately well with the projections of analysts like Yves at Naked Capitalism (it's now expected in late July rather than early July as was originally forecasted months ago). This means that even if the negotiation process goes off without a hitch, that there's going to be a period of at least a few weeks where the US is out of reserves but is waiting for new shipments of oil to physically traverse the distance between Hormuz and the US continent. And many analysts have pointed out that it's going to be a long time - at least a few months, and perhaps more like 9 to 12 - before Hormuz flows pick up to pre-war levels, due to logistics companies and insurance companies wanting to be sure that their property isn't going to be blown up mid-transit. Regardless, the fact that the timetable is now so tight could indicate that the Trump admin has finally realized that it cannot outbluff and outwait Iran, and will give them a good deal out of necessity, even if this means forcing their unsinkable aircraft carrier to stop bombing children for five consecutive minutes.
However, there is a palpable anxiety throughout Iran right now, especially due to controversy over the degree to which Khamenei actually agreed with the current course of events. This does seem to be confirmed by his wording (to paraphrase): "In principle, I took a different view, but allowed the President to proceed." Many inside Iran now have more fear that their politicians will not push hard enough for a good deal than that they'll return to war, with all that may imply. This isn't an unfounded fear, especially given how suddenly the 12 Day War ended despite Iran's strengths being medium-and-long-term attrition (now confirmed by this latest war). This is one of those events that reveals how the Supreme Leader in fact doesn't have complete dictatorial power unlike how he's conceived of in much of the West, and that even during existential wars, major concessions have to be made to democratically elected leaders. Though, this could also be a clever move to shift blame explicitly onto the Reformist elements if the deal collapses.
Last week's thread is here.
The Imperialism Reading Group is here.
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The Zionist Entity's Genocide of Palestine
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against the temporary Zionist entity. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA reports on the Zionists' destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news.
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
Mirrors of Telegram channels that have been erased by Zionist censorship.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it's just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a 'propaganda tax', if you don't believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
https://xcancel.com/mdburnell/status/2071040036041027894
see also https://hexbear.net/comment/7267683 for the supposed effectiveness of US Strikes
Honestly, while there's certainly some critique to be leveled at Iran for not striking back at the US harder, I feel like the notion of this tit-for-tat pattern being particularly bad for Iran is predicated on assuming that the US will be able to just keep it up forever - which is plainly not the material reality. Having a portion of the US Navy on forever-deployment, aside from making those ships unavailable for any other naval action (like, say, against China), is going to lead to maintenance problems later down the line, and these strikes are going to continue eating through valuable American munitions. In an actual large-scale sustained campaign, it would at least be conceivable for the US to suppress or destroy enough Iranian air defense in order to switch to cheaper closer-range munitions (although I still feel that the extent to which this actually happened during the 40-Day war was overstated), but with these occasional little strikes? They're just not involving the critical mass of aircraft for that, so it's likely it's still mostly stand-off stuff. And as can be observed, they're pretty much all against coastal targets - so, any cope of "well we didn't destroy anything military, but at least we did a war-crime and wiped a bunch of their industry out!" isn't even applicable here. And, again, since the strikes are small-scale, they stand no chance of actually meaningfully suppressing Iranian ability to hit ships in the Strait - you'd need the commitment of a whole bunch of planes bombing targets all across the shoreline, which is very far off from the individual localized strikes the US is actually doing.
And at the end of the day, US escorts cannot restore traffic in the Strait to even a modicum of its pre-war scale, it may be enough to keep the markets delusional and stocks up
, but it does very little to address the actual real material shortages which will happen. And it's also unsustainable - look at the sheer scale of assets they need to deploy to get one tanker through: https://xcancel.com/MenchOsint/status/2071003861540635058
All of this is going to have maintenance costs for an airfleet that is already in bad shape (https://hexbear.net/post/8715849/7231598, https://hexbear.net/post/8771608/7241055) (plus, it's also pretty ironic to be burning a whole bunch of fuel in order to get oil out, although in the end it still probably ends up being a favorable trade, oil tankers are big - it's really the airframe wear-and-tear that's likely to be the real cost)
I see a similar pattern in the Ukraine war, where a lot of people are very concerned about Russian attrition, and ignoring what it has done to the West (and obviously also to Ukraine). Having the imperial powers stuck in a bunch of forever-quagmires slowly grinding their resources away, while obviously not the happiest experience for the country having to fight them, is still a good thing from a global anti-imperialist perspective, now that the West's quagmires are against actual industrial powers and the attritional calculus really does not favor them. Every munition expended in these conflicts is one that's not going to be used against someone else, and given that both of these conflicts also involve oil/gas access to the West being cut off, they're also simultaneously destroying the very economy that could replenish these munitions!
To add on to this section, what's Iran supposed to do with more strikes anyway? They've already destroyed some oil infrastructure in the region and significantly destroyed US bases. The Iranians can't just fully destroy Saudi Aramco and commit unlimited war crimes against Israel.
At some point they have to negotiate with the Americans, they have to care about international opinion, and they have to leave room for escalation when the US breaks the ceasefire. Iran can't just burn the entire region to ash around it.
If the US is merely striking mountains and failing to knock out a radio tower, maybe there is a deeper logic in the lack of tat for tit?
Perhaps the US intentionally failing to do any damage, just a show for the peanut gallery? Letting the US do this means a PR loss for Iran but maybe it’s worthwhile to suffer a PR loss if it means (1) the US is burning up missile stock for no gain, (2) Iran is able to conserve drones and missiles, increasing its advantage in real military terms, (3) the chilling effect on shipping is achieved anyway, and (4) the greater peace process which is beneficial to Iran is allowed to proceed when bombing Bahrain again is just diminishing returns.