Japan tried to build an operating system for the world, the US intervened

At this point you've completely shifted the goal posts and are no longer arguing your original position.

Sure, my wondering "why are we burning billions in iran" happens to align with iran's interests. It's also directly representative of my own interests. The fact that some subset of people will be swayed by propaganda does not constitute a valid argument against a given position.

If we uniformly apply the same standard you're demonstrating here then your own position would be attributed to being swayed by state propaganda and thus your actions interpreted as helping american propagandists destroy civil society.

tl;dr You're espousing anti-intellectual BS that has no place on HN. Kindly take your braindead political takes back to twitter or wherever the hell they came from.

> No, it was incredibly stupid for the US to do so, everyone who has done more than a cursory look at the results of wargames and previous interventions knew this

And yet there are no sanctions against the US for its obviously reckless interference in other countries.

(throwaway for this comment)

I see this question a lot and as someone who has traveled to and sometimes lived in Hong Kong for the past 20 years, the truth is on a day-to-day level, there isn’t really much change.

I’m sure if you’re an activist there are huge changes. But as a regular person, life feels the same (even my local and expat friends feel this way).

Also one thing to be clear about is Hong Kong never had a democracy. The governor was always appointed by the UK. It was only when the handover was certain, the UK tried to introduce voting. The UK also tried to pressure Portugal to stop giving citizenship to the people of Macau, because the UK didn’t want to do the same for Hongkongers.

« national self-interests … are widely reported » – What's “widely reported” by the propaganda apparatus is often at odds with “national interest”, which is at least something that makes sense, whereas “the self-interest of Europe” is a highly questionable concept. Still, cheap gas from Russia would fit the bill, expensive wars on behalf of the US and the UK do not. Rich people making lots of money from it does not equate to “national interest”.

« assassinations and sabotage in our countries » – They did assassinate a Georgian terrorist, murderer and war criminal in Berlin in 2019 (whom Germany refused to hand over to justice), and a Russian traitor in Spain, and maybe others I'm not aware of. Compare these to the mass murder via US cyber-attack (true one), on March 24, 2015, of 150 people (mostly from Germany and Spain) by crashing an airliner into a mountain, and then ridiculously claiming (via NYT) “pilot suicide” (as they did with Egypt Air 990 on Oct 31, 1999). I ignore the exact motive, but I suspect it had sth to do with Merkel's trips to Moscow earlier that year.

English is indeed not my first language, and yet I know exactly what “hypocrisy” means. You can see an example of it by looking at the top of your reply, where you slyly pretend not to understand that the US had ample motive to destroy the pipeline for geopolitical reasons. It is absolutely not meant as an insult, just an analysis of the rhetorics you're using. After all, such rhetorics and styles of twisted reasoning are often unconsciously absorbed and reproduced due to exposure to propaganda (“free press”).

So you're German?

No disagreement there, if you look at "sanctions" then yes, there have been none of relevance for a very long time.

I guess "tolerable" has more than one meaning, so I should have checked which one was intended before starting my previous comment with just plain "No", but before reading your reply I hadn't considered that.

The lack of sanctions is due to how power works rather than anyone else agreeing with them in any specific case: the USA has got too much of the money that everyone else wants, and too many weapons which everyone else wants pointed in the right direction rather than to find they're now standing in a position to read the sign saying "front towards enemy" with a wire trailing off to a nearby bush.

This does not change that it was incredibly stupid for the US to attack Iran in particular, so stupid that it cost the US a significant part of its own matériel, made the remaining matériel less scary as a threat, and reduced the economic relevance of the USA's money, all at the same time.

Every US leader before Trump made sure to not damage those things, and thus retained both hard and soft power. Trump's throwing both away rapidly, at such a pace that it's no longer inconceivable that the rest of the world will be able to sanction the US without fear of what retaliation may result. Consider that Trump's poor choices mean in particular that the EU got away with telling Trump to take a hike over Greenland, and China got away with telling Trump to take a hike over tariffs. With the kind of damage he's doing to the USA's power, this shift may be shockingly sudden when it does happen, with nobody being able to see exactly how close the transition is even 12 months before the world order changes. (I am not saying this is 12 months away today, I'm saying nobody will know even when it is 12 months away).

So, stuff is shifting today specifically because of the USA's "reckless interference in other countries", with emphasis on the "reckless" part. There is a degree of governmental tolerance for the "interference" part, out of fear, meaning the condemnation (such as it is) is somewhere between "toothless" and simply not joining in with the misadventures. Trump appears to be trying to punish every nation who didn't help him attack Iran, but between them and all the nations the US failed to defend from Iranian counterstrikes are rather a lot of nations who are all now looking to each other for military and economic collaborations.

It may not look much on paper; it remains to be seen if it is much in practice. China will of course be happy to substitute for the USA everywhere, but for the rest of us this changes which hyperpower we find ourselves forced to kowtow to, this time less metaphorically and more literally. Reasonable chance a lot of nations make their own nuclear deterrents either way, with all the extra risk that comes with. I didn't want to predict anything past 2031 even before all this geopolitical rifting started.