America Is Now a Rogue Superpower

China is not going to militarily take over Taiwan. The most likely outcome now is a "three state" China where it joins the fold voluntarily and becomes a puppet state of China. Given the way the world has gone, it's the only rational choice.

Good points, except this one:

  > And Europe and the US will likely make peace with Russia over Ukraine because of spiralling energy costs thanks to America's reckless misadventure in the Gulf.

MAGA is investing hard in trying to kill the EU from within by exporting conservative dipshit organisations, blue-printed from the USA. I see al kinds of recruitment going on here. If they succeed there is a small chance Europe will betray Ukraine, but right now the momentum is going into the other direction. What events have shown is that criminal games are incompatible with civil society, and European leaders are finally learning to understand that you can't play with autocrats like Trump, Putin and Orban, because for the latter, their only modus is to exploit, to loiter, to steal, to create conflict, to escalate, to play the victim, to up their game. End game: everything ends in ruin. Crime knows only one game: zero sum. People are starting to understand it.

The US cannot ruin Iran short of the widespread use of nuclear weapons.

Air power has never resulted in regime change. Never. It takes boots on the ground and one just needs to look at a map. Iran is surrounded on 3 sides by mountains and the Gulf on the fourth.

Iran's drones and ballistic missiles are incredibly cheap, well-defended and impossible to meaningfully disrupt. The interceptors used to stop them are running out and increasingly ineffective. I think I read that the ballistic missile strike rate on Israel is now over 50%. What does it take to launch drones or even a ballistic missile? A cheap modification to any truck, basically.

The US cannot forcibly open the Strait of Hormuz because that would put them in close range to Iranian drone and missile strikes that the US doesn't have the weapon systems, interceptors and munitions to defeat. It's suicide.

Any escalation will end up much worse for Iran's neighbors than Iran because Iran is already built for economic isolation and self-reliance, thanks to years of criminal economic sanctions. You want to hit Iranian desalination plants? Well, that'll invite a hit on desalination plants in other Gulf states and that's going to end up much worse for them. Why? Remember those mountains I mentioned? They're covered in snow. Iran has ski resorts. Many people don't realize that. What does that mean? Just like California, they get significant freshwater from snow melt.

A ground invasion of the Iranian mainland has no staging ground. For Kuwait, we used Saudi Arabia. You can't stage across the mountains so you need an amphibious landing, much like D-Day. And it would need to be probably as complex and large. We simply don't have the ships, the soldiers or the logistics for that.

Basically, we have no options. This was unwinnable before we even started. This is why every president since Reagan refused Israel's attempts to start a war with Iran. Until Trump.

I honestly think he'd been fooled into thinking he could do a decapitation strike on Iran like Venezuela and get a friendly regime. That was never going to work. Iran has almost 50 years of hardening and maintaining a regime to resist US interference.

The one thing this administration seeems to care about is gas prices. This is why Iranian exports haven't been blocked. China is still getting oil from Iran. In fact last week the US lifted sanctions on Iranian oil, which was previously being sold below market. In January, Iran was selling oil for $48/barrel. Now they're selling it for >$100.

China has a massive reserve (~1.4 billion barrels) and has suspended exports of refined oil products. Countries friendly to us in the region are in for a world of hurt, most notably the Phillipines and Vietnam (Japan seems to have significant reserves like China, at least for now).

This war of choice on Israel's behalf has alienated and weakened Europe, the Gulf states and Asia. Iran is being smart about all this and allowing non-US oil to traverse the Strait, further putting a wedge between those countries and the US.

The US started it, has no path to victory and doesn't even know what victory is. It's up to Iran when this ends now and they're going to exact a price that will put them significantly ahead of where they were before this started. Ending of sanctions, tolls on ships traversing the Strait and/or reparations.

IMHO it's the biggest geopolitical mistake in US history and it's not even close.

1. your conclusion is based on a remark by one hardly representative american journalist. you said yourself this has been going on since the 40s. it's cycles of "oh no, crazy republican goes to war", then reasonable democrat continues the war. we know the drill.

  > China has played much much better chess so it's not surprise they're benefiting.

They didn't play chess at all, but unlike the USA, they didn't poop on the board and didn't smudge the other players with their drool. We are forgetting now that the belt and road initiative, as well as the wolf warrior diplomacy, had put China on the lowest rankings in global perception. China had to do literally nothing to "play better", and they were smart enough to do so. The USA committing suicide--yeah, what can you do about it?