news

El País: In a surprising maneouver, the Spanish government rejects the NATO amendment to rise military expenditure to 5% of GDP (article in Spanish). As of the time of the publishing of this article, it's the only government that openly opposed this amendment, claiming that fixing the expenditure to a percentage of GDP is "unreasonable", and that fixing the military capability objectives first and then allocating the funds is "counterproductive".

The Spanish Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, proposes instead to either make a "more flexible formula" that allows to opt out of the 5%, or to allow for a mechanism allowing Spain to reject this 5%. The prime minister reminded Rutte that deciding over the defense budget is each country's own ddecision.

In my opinion, this is a very rare socdem W, probably tied to try and divert progressives in Spain from the corruption scandal unveiled last week affecting some of the closest members of PSOE to Pedro Sánchez. I want to believe that Sánchez is an infiltrated Xi agent, which would explain his massively intelligent maneouvers to not only overcome previous political problems within the PSOE and accusations from the right wing in the country, but to actually come out reinforced (I beg everyone to read the "letter from Pedro Sánchez to the Spaniards" in which he proclaims to be deeply in love with his wife, and the effects it had on public opinion towards the most handsome European president).

Additionally, and more seriously, the PSOE government hinges on a multi-party coalition with parties such as Sumar, Podemos or Bildu, further left than the PSOE, which are more reluctant to accepting the military budgets, and whose few seats are important to maintain stability in the government. Serious disappointment (not surprise though) at Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya and their most popular face Gabriel Rufián for adhering to military budget increases using phrases such as "leftism also means order".

Really feels like we're in a situation where, given these assumptions:

• Iran commits to their stated war goal of punishing Israel until they dare to never strike Iran ever again.

• Iran has sufficient capabilities and internal popular support to do such. (And every analysis I've seen suggests they likely do on both counts.)

Then one of these two outcomes must occur:

• Either, the US enters the war, and Iran's retaliatory strikes on oil infrastructure and trade routes absolutely fuck the world economy, and have a serious possibility of triggering WW3.

• Or, the US doesn't enter the war with Iran, and Israel likely loses an attrition war against Iran. I dont really see how this doesn't eventually lead to the collapse of Israel.

That second option comes with the scary question of "will Israel resort to using its nukes?" So I guess that's another route to WW3.

Idk, I'm no expert and I'm open to hearing other likely ways for this to play out, but this is where my head is at given all the information I've been absorbing so far.

Funniest thing about Israeli interception rates falling dramatically is that it puts the United States in a damned if they do damned if they don’t situation.

Give the Zionist entity more anti-missile munitions and deplete your own difficult to replace stockpile at the cost of becoming basically defenseless against China

OR

Let Iran make the incredibly fragile Zionist entity unsustainable by not giving it the anti-missile munitions it needs and sending the settlers packing.

If they drop a nuke on Fordow they can claim whatever they want to claim about its success because nobody will be able to verify whether it actually damaged the facility via radiation monitoring.

Is it actually plausible that America might really chicken out? Someone pour water on my optimism if it's unfounded