There is a small part of me that is amused. Yes, they may eventually flatten the entire country, but for generations everyone has known that Iran is the kind of country that will make it hurt out of spite. Iran is laughing through a blood-filled mouth at everything you do because they know that, even in their fall, they are taking America down with them. Trump, you stupid, stupid child. This is not about money. This is ideological.

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…You are aware of BRICS right?

I’m not saying the system was good (far, far from it) but this asshole walked into office and started dismantling 100 years of economic diplomacy and peace through trade. There’s no way you can tell me he isn’t a useful idiot for Russia.

I was thinking about this on the drive home and needed to log in to actually share this bit of craziness.

One of the excuses that they’re using for bombing these school kids is to say that their intel on the area was about ten years out-of-date. Which is funny, because ten years ago was Trump’s first term, and a massive data breach happened around that time that cost U.S. intelligence agencies a huge number of agents.

So, no matter how you slice it, this is on the Trump administration for messing up things he’s too stupid to understand. It takes time to build up assets who can provide information on any given area. It’s possible that there was a school there specifically because they knew the location was compromised.

And even if you want to handwave that data breach as not Trump’s fault, (ignoring the fact that he starting this war). He cut more intelligence jobs when he got into office last year. Who knows what USAID was doing, Who knows what paper projects he cut that had aid in the area or fronts for CIA opperations. His military didn’t have current data on the region becuase everything he has done has fucked up opperations for his military.

Let me post about it so I feel validated by being on the right side. That’ll show em.

Look, I’m not really into how hot you’re being about this. Little nitpicking like that doesn’t strike me as good faith discussion. Especially when I haven’t exactly been adverse to a few of your points. If you want to talk, cool, if you want to argue, scroll on.

Thank you.

Weapony that the former USSR had claim to and would have been a justification for intervention. I’m not going to sit here and pretend I know the nuances of the fall of the USSR. I was 3. But I can see enough to know that at the time, Ukraine made the smart play for the foreseeable future. In 1994. In hindsight, it should have held its nukes. In the moment, throwing down that sword gave it a seat at the world table.

Yeah, I don’t disagree. That’s what happened. They confused economic power with defense. Maybe if it wasn’t putin they were trying to stop it would have been better for them.

They essentially traded a gun for a job and a restraining order. But also consider that the economic ties they gained by giving up their nukes. Bought them time and capital to build up their own military power enough to fight off Russia decades years later. They may not win this, but at the time the only thing they had were nukes.

Ukraine made the choice to try to build itself up more. I don’t fault them for that. Geopolitics is a messy 4-D chess game.

You just can’t really predict individual elements. When they declared independence putin was just a little shit stain and the billionaires in Russia were still fighting among each other to secure wealth and power.

At the time, Ukraine giving up it’s nukes fast tracked it to the 1st world. Yeah, it sucks that it played out this way. But it wasn’t on its face a bad plan.

If they had a 40 year old nuclear arsenal and matching tech they might not be at war right now, but they also probably wouldn’t be Ukraine either.

I still think they’re loosing because Elon musk is a piece of shit. He hobbled their counter offensive that might have given them the breathing room to end the war. War is a collection of key moments and he stuck his dick in the gears during one of them when he shut down starlink

We did send them aid. And then the administration changed. My point is, I agree. You should never trust someone else with your own protection. Ukraine got a major economic boon from disarming. And soft protection but donating to the local police force doesn’t really help in when someone decides to walk into your house anyway.

As a completely irrelevant observer, yeah. Nukes are. If I was a leader of a people and we had one, I would never disarm.

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People that are downvoting this: have you not been paying attention?

We’ve known this for years. Putin loves the book Foundations of Geopolitics. Do you think I like it or something? Or are you just Russian bots? Russia has wanted Iran since at least 1991. They got formal with actual ties in the early 2010s. Putin may not be going to war right now, but this is exactly what he wants.

Yeah right. This is exactly what Putin wants. Russian hegemony by way of Iran in the middle east has been a goal for like 50 years.

It’s why we’re always picking at Iran. US has Isreal, Russia has Iran. This is all just bad political theatre on his part.

He’s thrilled about this because if nothing else, it pushes Iran closer to Russia.