Earlier quoted context omitted.
> what did the US gain out of this? The best steelman argument[1] is that it was a failed gamble. The protests of a few months back (also the improbable success in Venezuela) made them think they could topple the regime. They couldn't. It's been clear for weeks now that the US has lost this war. The only question was how long it would take Trump to disengage and what the trigger would be. And the answers appear to be…
> Which... I mean, steelman analysis has its place. But really no, this was just dumb. I rarely hear people use the term "steelman" while arguing in good faith. It's basically a tacit admission that you are either advancing a position that you don't actually hold (why...?), or more likely you know it's an unpopular position and you want to argue it while having plausible deniability that you may not actually hold it…
The term "steelman" arose from people who misunderstand the term "strawman". Such people coined it out of the idea thinking that a strawman was an an attempt to make an opponents argument look weaker than it is, while a "steelman" elevates it to it's highest state before attacking it.
In reality, a steelman is just another strawman. A strawman was never simply a matter of making your opponent's argument look weak, they're about making a separate argument that your opponent isn't even arguing, and attacking that to make it look like you're winning the argument while not actually addressing the opponent's actual argument/position. A steelman does the same. In other words, they're about fabricating an argument and making it look like it came from the opponent, before attempting to prove it fallacious. They're both failures in logic - a fallacy of relevance.