501–510 of 769 posts
Not an American but live here. But I don’t understand the fixation of US in middle east theatre. With the abundance of onshore oil through fracking revolution, presumably US doesn’t need to police the Middle East. The president himself said US doesn’t need their oil. So what is this conflict all about? Is there bigger geopolitical price tag attached to victory in Iran? Or US is just besieged by corruption to the exte…
Not an American but live here. But I don’t understand the fixation of US in middle east theatre. With the abundance of onshore oil through fracking revolution, presumably US doesn’t need to police the Middle East. The president himself said US doesn’t need their oil. So what is this conflict all about? Is there bigger geopolitical price tag attached to victory in Iran? Or US is just besieged by corruption to the exte…
The Occam's razor explanation is that it's all about Israel. They're the only country that actually benefits from all these misguided Middle Eastern adventures, and it's not like it's just one, there's a pattern and it's always the same
Not an American but live here. But I don’t understand the fixation of US in middle east theatre. With the abundance of onshore oil through fracking revolution, presumably US doesn’t need to police the Middle East. The president himself said US doesn’t need their oil. So what is this conflict all about? Is there bigger geopolitical price tag attached to victory in Iran? Or US is just besieged by corruption to the exte…
The US doesn't need more oil, but if Iran were to cut off oil supply from the Persian Gulf it would make oil prices significantly more expensive by reducing total available worldwide supply. The US economy, for the better or worse of it, depends on cheap oil to supply energy for commerce and transportation, and if that becomes more expensive, people stop traveling, trucks stop shipping, energy stops being produced an…
Not an American but live here. But I don’t understand the fixation of US in middle east theatre. With the abundance of onshore oil through fracking revolution, presumably US doesn’t need to police the Middle East. The president himself said US doesn’t need their oil. So what is this conflict all about? Is there bigger geopolitical price tag attached to victory in Iran? Or US is just besieged by corruption to the exte…
The US doesn't need more oil, but if Iran were to cut off oil supply from the Persian Gulf it would make oil prices significantly more expensive by reducing total available worldwide supply. The US economy, for the better or worse of it, depends on cheap oil to supply energy for commerce and transportation, and if that becomes more expensive, people stop traveling, trucks stop shipping, energy stops being produced an…
From what I can tell, it's as much extremism of "democracy", religion, and a version of "manifest destiny" as anything else
Not an American but live here. But I don’t understand the fixation of US in middle east theatre. With the abundance of onshore oil through fracking revolution, presumably US doesn’t need to police the Middle East. The president himself said US doesn’t need their oil. So what is this conflict all about? Is there bigger geopolitical price tag attached to victory in Iran? Or US is just besieged by corruption to the exte…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Clean_Break:_A_New_Strategy_...
The TikTok deal happened because too many young people were being exposed to anti Zionist content. It’s illegal to criticize Israel in many regions of the US, but not illegal to criticize the US. It’s illegal to boycott Israeli companies in many states, but not US companies. This war on Iran hurts everybody because of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, except for Israel who now has a severely diminished adversary to their regional dominance. It’s not even a secret, Israeli’s boast about this on social media and have a whole hit list of countries they want the US to attack. Turkey is next on the list so expect to start seeing more seemingly random antagonistic rhetoric from the US about Turkey.
Not an American but live here. But I don’t understand the fixation of US in middle east theatre. With the abundance of onshore oil through fracking revolution, presumably US doesn’t need to police the Middle East. The president himself said US doesn’t need their oil. So what is this conflict all about? Is there bigger geopolitical price tag attached to victory in Iran? Or US is just besieged by corruption to the exte…
Maybe I’m missing the subtler geopolitical point here, but I don’t think it’s about oil. It’s about preventing Iran from getting nuclear weapons and threatening the region via their missiles, drones, and proxies. Whether they succeed at it or not is an open question, but it seems clear that’s what it was about. Take operation midnight hammer last July. That was clearly only about the nuclear issue.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This logic doesn't hold under closer scrutiny. The timeline to expand missile production is on the order of years . This isn't the 1940s anymore where you can convert every car factory into making tanks and missiles. The idea of a war economy is wildly outdated. Either you have enough stockpiled until your weapons manufacturers can scale their production, or you're just out of missiles. Being out after some weeks of…
> This logic doesn't hold under closer scrutiny. The timeline to expand missile production is on the order of years. You're missing the whole point. The point is not that missiles are easy to build. The point is that military interventions planned not only to prop up logistics but also to accommodate for supply constraints. There is no plan on earth that consists of firing a constant barrage of expensive missiles, an…
It’s just silly to think that the US has the domestic manufacturing base left to do such a thing short of generational scale timelines. The line workers you need in those plants are in grade school today. Better start introducing machine shop again!
Trump could have decided day one of his admin he wanted to do this, told everyone, and held off until the last day of his presidency to fire the first shot. At best you’d get a couple more weeks of ammo.
It’s a pure fantasy to think US arms manufacturers - even given a blank check and nationalized - could get a supply chain going in under a few years. We do not even have the semi-skilled manufacturing talent to spin up such a base, much less the latent capabilities to easily pivot.
Sure there is no plan. Having one would not have helped much either. You can’t plan your way out of having spent three generations outsourcing your industrial base.
The WWII comparisons are laughable. Today the US would still be getting factories on-line by the same time the atomic bombs were dropped. We would have a whole cycle just learning how to build things again - much less actually build them.
To build ammo at a “all out war” scale you would need entirely different weaponry designed foremost to be rapidly built. You cannot rapidly scale up manufacturing of current designs. If we could, we already would have since there is effectively an unlimited decade out backlog of demand for just Patriot missiles and has been for close to half a decade already. The common rebuttal that a factory would need 30 years of increased demand to make the investment worthwhile proves the point.
Not an American but live here. But I don’t understand the fixation of US in middle east theatre. With the abundance of onshore oil through fracking revolution, presumably US doesn’t need to police the Middle East. The president himself said US doesn’t need their oil. So what is this conflict all about? Is there bigger geopolitical price tag attached to victory in Iran? Or US is just besieged by corruption to the exte…
Not an American but live here. But I don’t understand the fixation of US in middle east theatre. With the abundance of onshore oil through fracking revolution, presumably US doesn’t need to police the Middle East. The president himself said US doesn’t need their oil. So what is this conflict all about? Is there bigger geopolitical price tag attached to victory in Iran? Or US is just besieged by corruption to the exte…
It’s simple. Oil is traded in USD. A large share of the oil is produced in the Middle East. If oil stopped trading in USD the value of our currency would plummet. So we have a strong interest in all oil exporters.
Not an American but live here. But I don’t understand the fixation of US in middle east theatre. With the abundance of onshore oil through fracking revolution, presumably US doesn’t need to police the Middle East. The president himself said US doesn’t need their oil. So what is this conflict all about? Is there bigger geopolitical price tag attached to victory in Iran? Or US is just besieged by corruption to the exte…