> Freedom of navigation is a core global principal
And Iran has been respecting that principle for decades. So why exactly did the US and Israel (and GCC countries) think that the status quo would remain even if they keep antagonizing Iran? Imagine getting bombed during negotiations - not once, but twice in a single year! Their sovereignty was being disrespected, so now they're understandably establishing a new status quo.
And btw, if Iran and Oman cooperate, there is no threat to "freedom of navigation" under international law.
In a nutshell: play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
Moreover, USA has been the first who has stopped respecting the freedom of navigation, by implementing a blockade of Cuba and preventing the oil tankers to reach Cuba, already since February, before the Iran war.
USA does not respect any international law, but it demands from others to do this.
Iran has been keeping it open to avoid attacks. Their first order of business if they get nuclear weapons would be closing the strait and implementing a far more massive toll. They already have ICBM capable of hitting Europe. This isn't really America's problem though, the price of oil won't go parabolic, it will fracture. That's what the current price action is leaning towards. So cheaper oil in the Americas and vastly more expensive oil in Europe.
Absolutely none of that would happen. It's in Iran's interests to keep the oil flowing at a fee that everyone can stomach and that doesn't offend the sensibilities. $1 a barrel for a year of unprovoked war crimes costing them hundreds of billions of dollars, with the cost effectively shared by all, fits this description. Nor has Iran responded with the kind of zero-sum, suicidal, totalitarian foreign policy that is always attributed to them by their enemies. Serious commentators have all remarked at how restrained they've been during this war. It's almost as though sane people who intend to come to a realistic agreement that everyone can live with are running their foreign and defence policies.
Iran has been funding and arming groups which threaten maritime security for a while now. They also have been obviously attempting a nuclear weapons program while saying if they achieve their aim that they will do crazy shit.
I guess the games you think are stupid depend immensely on your priors.
Are you referring to Ansar Allah? Do you know why they decided to shutdown Bab Al Mandab?
So we are going to ignore the JCPOA? Also, the rumor is that there is another player in the region who has undeclared nuclear weapons and refuses IAEA inspections. Should we bomb them next?
Nukes is irrelevant. If someone dies it doesn't matter at all if it was a nuke or a conventional weapon. Nukes can do a lot more damage in one go, but if you are killed by something else you are just as dead. Iran was clearly working on killing people by non-nuclear means as well.
Oman isn’t the only country in the region, and any country should expect their ships to sail peacefully. Last I checked it’s the US and Israel at war with Iran, not others - no justification for charging transit fees.
Second, you’re ignoring decades of history and picking an arbitrary point to say that’s when some animosity started. Nobody forced Iran to build all these missiles and to try and build a nuclear weapon or kill their own people or fund actual terrorist groups as designated by the United States and European Union. If you drag out negotiations long enough you never get bombed! What a thought lol.
They’re still not getting money from the US. Those aren’t American ships sailing through the Strait. Striking military bases is legitimate morally though Iran’s “government” should just surrender and turn themselves in, but it doesn’t provide justification for launching indiscriminate strikes against other countries.
> Nobody forced Iran to build all these missiles and to try and build a nuclear weapon or kill their own people or fund actual terrorist groups as designated by the United States and European Union
Iran has absolutely run its strategy as a basket case. But proxies aside (which is a big aside), they were fairly self contained until we started hitting them. At least this time around.
Their missile program is a direct response to the section of the Iran-Iraq war where Saddam flew long range bombers for terror raids (hmm who does this remind me of?) and Iran had no answer beyond shelling border cities with 155m.
Fairly self contained is an understatement. They proved time and again over the course of the past few years that they were not only pragmatic, but also a much more rational actor than Israel and the US.
Iran has fomented discord in a number of countries, most notably Syria and Lebanon. I think they are “rational” in the sense that they are pursuing their goals of eliminating US influence over the Middle East - but many other states in the MidEast would see that goal as “irrational” in itself.
> They proved time and again over the course of the past few years that they were not only pragmatic, but also a much more rational actor than Israel and the US
When? When they drip fed Hezbollah's missiles into Israel's air defences? When they left their ships in port to get bombed? When they convened an in-person meeting at the Supreme Leader's residence? When they didn't even reprimand Hamas after October 7th?
Iran has acted according to its regime's interests. But I wouldn't say they prosecuted their goals rationally, pragmatically or even particularly effectively.
Who directly in this war has conducted them rationally at at all times? Did Iran drip feed missiles to Hezbollah and Yemen, perhaps. That sort of tactic was used at a much larger scale when US provided arms to Iraq against Iran in their war in the 80s. Israel attacks against it’s neighbors and caused mass refugee flows is also mostly a result of UK, US and France’s foreign policy in the early 20th century when Israel was being established. Israel funded by US of 300 billion dollars is also a kind of proxy.
It’s hard for most people to have actual objective views and see things from multiple perspectives and your statement is showing clear bias in this regards.
> Who directly in this war has conducted them rationally at at all times?
At all times? Nobody. Until last summer, the most strategically buggered was Hamas. Their miscalculations directly lead to a weaker position and a negative return on their goals.
That changed following last year’s airstrikes—then it was Iran. (Though in relative terms, probably still Hamas.) Since this war, it’s might be the U.S.
> That sort of tactic was used at a much larger scale when US provided arms to Iraq against Iran
We didn’t maintain Iraqi arms as a deterrent against Iran. Drip feeding arms into a war of attrition to be a pest has strategic rationale. Drip feeding arms, arms meant to intimidate through the prospect of overwhelming force no less, into air defenses below replacement rates is just dumb.
> Drip feeding arms, arms meant to intimidate through the prospect of overwhelming force no less, into air defenses below replacement rates is just dumb.
That probably depends on the cost of the arms, the cost of the interceptors, and any number of other externalities or indirect goals. If you can reliably induce high end interceptors to fire against cheap rockets (granted, that's a big if) you are definitely winning the immediate economic exchange.
> If you can reliably induce high end interceptors to fire against cheap rockets (granted, that's a big if) you are definitely winning the immediate economic exchange
Tactically sensible. Strategically foolish.
The deterrent value of Hezbollah’s arsenal was in overwhelming Israeli defenses and causing loss of life. That is what democracies, first and foremost, respond to. (Second being cost of living.) Spending a potent deterrent to play economic attrition with Israel, a rich country with a richer friend, was stupid.
Oh absolutely. But being an idiot with proxies isn't really reason to threaten total war. You go after the proxies and maybe hit ports and production facilities in Iran that arm them. Then commit to keep doing that every time the proxies act up. Nobody needs to liberate Lebanon or Yemen. And nobody needs to try and change the regime in Tehran.
First, look at a map. The strait is entirely contained by Omani and Iranian waters.
Second, I don't have much else to say to you if you actually think that assassinating a head of state in the middle of active negotiations is anything but vile & uncivilized behavior unbecoming of a "civilized" superpower.
Ultimately, this is going to be a major strategic loss for the US and Israel. They have achieved none of the goals stated at the outset of this "operation", outside of perhaps diminishing the Iranian missile manufacturing capabilities & stockpile.
> First, look at a map. The strait is entirely contained by Omani and Iranian waters
The UAE has a stake, too.
> don't have much else to say to you if you actually think that assassinating a head of state in the middle of active negotiations is anything but vile & uncivilized behavior unbecoming of a "civilized" superpower
This statement weakens your argument. (It's also not in line with this forum's guidleines around arguing in good faith.)
If you want evidence that bombs do not settle the issue, you can consider the current Iran war. The US and Israel have dropped a rather impressive number of bombs on Iran. As far as I know, most of them worked. But whatever issue the leaders of the US and Israel thought they were going to settle is most definitely not settled. The regime has changed from Ayatollah Khamenei to Khamenei, the US’s military position is dramatically worsened, and, while Iran has a lot of rebuilding to do, they are arguably in a strategically stronger position than they were before. Maybe you think Iran’s continued existence “can’t happen period”, but Iran still exists and the US’s ability to anything about it is very much in doubt.
It's so fascinating to read comments like this and realize we live in completely different worlds, wouldn't you agree?
On one hand, I see the US parked 3 aircraft carriers outside of Iran, loaded up ground-based bombers, blew up most of Iran's existing leadership and completely destroyed their air force, navy, and is (well was, until yesterday when Iran capitulated) conducting bombing campaigns on HVTs, military infrastructure, missile launchers, and production facilities and yet, since they haven't destroyed all of the missile launchers in the first 5 weeks of the war I now read, from you, that Iran is "in a strategically stronger position than they were before", and the US military position has "dramatically worsened".
How can this be? Where do you get your news from? I'm curious to read what you are reading about this war. It's mind-blowing how different and counterintuitive it is. Like how is the US military in a dramatically worse position? What specific factors are you talking about? Missile capabilities? Air defense? Did Iran recently sink a US aircraft carrier? I would think if something dramatic happened I'd read about it somewhere but I haven't heard of anything majorly bad happening to the US during the course of this war.
If Iran is in a strategically stronger position, why did they need fewer missiles and missile launchers and less military equipment to get stronger? Are you saying by destroying their equipment and killing their leaders that they grew stronger and more capable? If that's the case, why didn't they just kill their own leaders and dismantle their military equipment themselves?
I think we don't have different facts or sources so much as different perspectives.
There's a Starcraft-like perspective in which you're right. The US has repositioned a bunch of long-range-attack units and has consumed a lot of single-use weapons, with which we have removed most of Iran's defense towers and generally destroyed a good deal of their fixed military assets. Maybe the US has reduced the other team to a mostly a bunch of drones. It looks like the US's team will definitely win.
But there are quite a few things about this analysis that don't really apply to the real world. First, we're not playing last man standing. The US's goal isn't to wipe Iran off the map -- it's goal is (hopefully) to ensure stability for itself and its allies and to let the probes (commercial trade) go around the map freely. But the US has not even come close to removing enough of the Iranian forces to allow weak units to go through the strait safely (or even perhaps strong units). Secondly, one needs to count units more carefully: Iran has on the order of 1M military units left -- the US has destroyed several thousand big, obvious, expensive units but has barely touched the total. Sure, the US also has a lot of military units, but they are not in Iran and it would be an utterly terrible idea to send hundreds of thousands of troops.
Additionally, one needs to zoom the map out. There are lots of other important things going on. Just one of them is that there has been a standoff for decades across the Taiwan Strait. It's been fairly stable because no one involved wants to start a shooting war that they will lose (yes, all parties can easily lose simultaneously). The US gets significant economic value from having Taiwan be independent and friendly to the US. But a bunch of those single-use weapons used in Iran and some very high value US units had previously been near the Taiwan Strait are are not any more.
Also, the US lost some very very high value units that it no longer has the ability to rebuild (cough, AWACS, cough).
Here's some good reading for a less tongue-in-cheek perspective:
> Also, the US lost some very very high value units that it no longer has the ability to rebuild (cough, AWACS, cough).
We can build them if we want since we built them before.
But the US is likely moving away from AWACS toward other platforms precisely because they're big easy targets, especially when they're sitting on the ground at an air base. It's unfortunate but not a big deal - we would expect a country armed with thousands of missiles who is then launching them toward both military and non-military targets to land some hits. Aerial refueling tankers are actually the weak link if I had to guess.
But the reporting around these developments and activities doesn't always hit the mainstream media so the sources can be a little lackluster. That's what I have so far though ^^
> Iran
I'm not sure how you are defining military units, but the only ones that really matter much now are missile launchers which are used to disrupt the free transit of oil through the Straight. It has only been a few weeks. The US can just slowly blow these up over time and end most of Iran's capabilities here. The main issue is the cost to the international community for doing so which subsequently affects the US, albeit less so than most other countries.
But there are many options here. The US for example just forced Iran to agree to a ceasefire and to stop attacking ships in the Straight. I don't mean to suggest Iran doesn't also have capabilities, but the commentary on this is very one-sided in favor of Iran and I think that needs, well, it needs balance and it also needs additional thought. Too many people are so caught up in hating Donald Trump that they're not thinking clearly. (not you in particular or anything)
> Taiwan
Agreed it is incredibly important. Likely the US has judged the risk of China attacking Taiwan at this juncture to be acceptably low. Although it's also worth noting that in the past 6 months (just because I forget the timeframe) the US has put the hammer on both of China's primary oil trading partners. You can't fly jets and operate tanks without oil and that's not going to change anytime soon. It's very nuanced. I agree all parties are likely to lose in an engagement there - it would be a nightmare depending on what China actually did and could immediately involve the US, Japan, SK, and NK along with China in a very nasty war.
> the only ones that really matter much now are missile launchers which are used to disrupt the free transit of oil through the Straight.
I’m still not an expert, but the strait is narrow and there are plenty of weapons that don’t need a “missile launcher”. You can have fun reading through here:
Lots of these weapons have more than enough range to shoot clear across the strait and even to hit ships from concealed inland sites.
A poorly armored vessel transiting the strait goes on a narrow, fixed route along a for a shockingly long distance, and basically all of it is within a few miles of Iran’s coast. This isn’t like a rogue country trying to blockade the open ocean — it’s more like if about half of the Eastern bank of the Mississippi decided to blockade shipping, which would have been eminently doable with Civil War-era weapons.
Missile launchers, projectile launchers, doesn't matter. They fire and then in response they are on the receiving end of a US missile. You know we like detect the launches right? Of course Iran can move them around and conceal them and such but they're not perfect about it. Otherwise we wouldn't have destroyed any at all.
They can lob missiles or rockets or whatever they want at ships in the Straight, that's true enough, but the US can continue to degrade that capability over time. And if Iran doesn't stop we can just escalate further and maybe they won't have any fuel or electricity or running water and as they sit there and launch projectiles they continue to run out of them until they really can't do much. Of course there is pressure from the global economy to get Iran to stop this, but the US is largely immune to that pressure, excluding the desire to keep allies happy and stable. Who cares if gas is $6/gallon life goes on. Maybe MAGA anti-war protestors can trade in their trucks for Hondas.
This is very rich given that the US, is the only country to use nukes, and Israel has illegal nukes and wont even accept inspection. Nobody charged anyone to cross a strait until your pedophile leaders decided to kill a head of state and bomb a school full of children
They aren't illegal. The nuclear non proliferation treaty is an optional treaty. The nukes are only illegal if you sign it. Israel hasn't. Most countries sign the treaty because it comes with a lot of benefits, but you don't have to take the carrot.
Therefore Iran and North Korea and any others have the right to make nukes.
USA has lost long ago the moral authority to demand from others to not make nuclear weapons.
USA were supposed to be the "good guys", who will not abuse their monopoly on having the most advanced weapons, so that the weaker countries should feel safe enough that they do not need such weapons themselves and that they should respect the non proliferation principles.
However, with all the unprovoked wars started by USA during the last quarter of century, which have caused not only huge damages to the attacked countries, leaving them in a much worse state than before, but which have also irreparably destroyed important parts of the cultural heritage of the entire humanity, nobody can believe any more that it is fine to be helpless against USA, by not having nuclear weapons.
Nobody has done more against the non-proliferation treaty than USA.
Exactly. 39 days (so far) of bombing will only convince Iran and other countries around the world of why they need to obtain nuclear weapons at any cost. It is existential.
This current US administration is incredibly shortsighted.
Or other countries will see what happens when you try and get nukes and decide they want no part in it.
And i dont just mean the war, some estimates say iran has spent 2 trillion dollars trying to get nukes. If they spent that on conventional defense they wouldnt have been invaded.
> Therefore Iran and North Korea and any others have the right to make nukes.
Unlike Israel, they signed the treaty in question though.
More to the point though, just because something is technically "legal" doesn't mean other countries aren't allowed to be mad about it. Any sort of massing weapons or weapons of mass destruction
development program is going to make other countries nervous, especially when those countries have a history of threatening mass destruction on their neighbours.
Oh come on man, nobody in the west wants those nutjobs to have nukes. Nobody gives a shit about morality or whatever, if you're our enemy and you try to get an advantage over us were going to slap you on the nuts if we can.
You know it's a proper witch-hunt when a bunch of bandwagoners start defending Iran's right to have nukes. Everyone's forgotten Iran is our (the West) enemy, by their own choice. They used to be our ally, then religious fanaticists took over and here we are.
Fuck Iran. They want to be our enemy, this is what happens to our enemy. They could have chosen to not be annoying counts but just like damn near everyone else in the middle East they're incapable of just shutting the fuck up and sitting down and letting things go, they just have to stir shit.
Iran funded Hamas which led to the attack that started the Gaza war, they're funding Hezbollah leading to the Lebanon thing. Iran is at the center of this entire conflict and all you fools are too busy frothing at the mouth over how Israel is defending themselves to recognize that they are in fact defending themselves.
I’m not going to litigate World War II use of atomic weapons, but suffice to say their usage was justified both morally and strategically.
> leaders decided to kill a head of state and bomb a school full of children
Iran murdered 30,000 of their own people. When we kill 30,000 Iranians we can have a discussion. Until then we don’t intentionally target civilians and even the Iranians know this, which is why they dragged a bunch of people out under the point of a gun and made them hold flags on bridges so we don’t bomb them. So you believe something the Iranian government as murderous and hate-filled for America as it is doesn’t even believe about the US lol.
> I guess Saudi Arabia, UAE, Kuwait, Iraq, and Qatar don’t exist lol
All of those countries except Iraq facilitated this war, the weapon launches were overwhelmingly from land bases on their territory. If they want to talk with Iran about discounts for expelling american airbases, I'm sure they could find an audience.
They won't be paying, no worries there. But separately that excuses attacking actual military infrastructure, it doesn't excuse intentionally attacking civilian targets as Iran has demonstrably done.
You can be pro-IRGC and be critical of their actions too. I'm constantly reminded as an American that "it's my duty as a Patriot to be extra critical of my own country's actions". No reason you can't do the same for the countries you support or owe allegiance to.
All of those gulf countries would face mass, mass casualties if Iran had chosen to target desalination plants. They are smart enough to know what did and didnt happen regardless of your level of understanding.
> I guess Saudi Arabia, UAE, Kuwait, Iraq, and Qatar don’t exist lol. They’re not just attacking ships in one tiny area - ships have to pass through bidirectionally which affects trade for everyone. Stop trying to defend this stuff.
You must have a real problem with the concept of the Panama Canal.
It's comparable in that it's a nearly-identical construct that functions in an actually-identical way. Constructing the Strait of Hormuz was cheaper than constructing the Panama Canal.† That doesn't change anything about the fact that it exists.
† Cheaper in an abstract sense. In a more literal sense, the tolling authority, Panama, didn't have to pay for the canal; it was built by the United States.
February 2026: USA blocking all oil tankers from going to Cuba, which has caused much more damage to the ordinary citizens of Cuba, than isolated incidents have done to other countries.
Any idea why they decided to shutdown the strait for the first time in decades? Or did they just suddenly wake up one day and decide that piracy is their calling?
And that deployed ship will do nothing. The only way forward is a negotiated agreement.
I’m no expert, but I think this is a matter of international politics. Imagine if Iran had closed the strait last year. I suspect a rather large coalition would have shown up, quite quickly, to do their best to reopen it. But instead almost every relevant player is pissed off at the US and Israel and has no desire to join in the hostilities.
Not to mention that Iran did not want to have thousands of fancy missiles and bombs lobbed at them, but since that happened anyway, why not close the strait?
> But instead almost every relevant player (...) and has no desire to join in the hostilities
Almost correct, but days ago there was an UN meeting where a resolution to bring forth a naval response from many countries to reopen the Strait by force was voted, and it was vetoed by China and Russia (IIRC also by France).
That news became old very quickly, but it was a move done to force USA to concede a ceasefire because it made the US the only player who could make an offer with Iran to reopen the Strait, even if in undesirable terms.
The fact that this meeting happened and a resolution was blocked made Trump and the US incapable of blaming the EU of not helping reopening the Strait.
I said that was part of the reason, not all of it.
> And there's no incident ever in Iran related to US imperialism?
I'm not sure what you're asking or why. There have probably been things that have happened inside Iran due to US imperialism. Not sure how that relates to the idea of the US creating self-deprecating propaganda?
So you think "Death to America" and "Death to terrorists and evil" are the same? Do you think saying "criminals should be punished" is similarly wrong to say? Honest question, as I'm confused about your moral boundaries.
"Terrorism" is inherently a subjective, ideological label, just a vaguely threatening name for the Big Other. A classic in the genre, along with "Red Menace", "Yellow Peril", "Rogue State" etc etc.
The Iranian version of this propaganda technique is the "Great Satan".
They're all just big scary terms to throw around and justify ones deeds.
To the Iranians, the Americans are the terrorists blowing up their bridges. Now what?
Fair enough. If you think terrorist and satan have equal grounding in reality then we'll just have to chalk the disagreement up to a difference in priors.
> Imagine getting bombed during negotiations - not once, but twice in a single year!
All other problems with the Iran war aside, there's absolutely nothing unusual about this, this is standard. Countries that go to war with each other are almost always mid-negotiations. Usually negotiations of some level go on throughout a war as well.
They bombed the negotiators who were in a third country who were hosting negotiations.
That's totally different from war continuing while negotiations take place. That's more like something the bad guys would do in a Game of Thrones plotline.
1. A non-trivial proportion of us voted for Trump.
2. Blatantly kidnapping and assassinating heads of state is the culmination of US foreign policy and not an anomaly. The machine is working as designed.
The only foreign policy blunders I would attribute to Trump are the completely unnecessary spats with Canada and Denmark/the EU, although neither blunder seems to have made a dent in the ass kissing.
As opposed to the West’s genocide of millions upon millions of natives across their colonial projects? How about the millions killed as a result (directly or indirectly) of wars of aggression in the global south? Or perhaps the ongoing & unrelenting support by the West of genocide in Gaza?
Or are we not allowed to compare these things because of who the perpetrators are?
And, in the case of colonial crimes, don’t tell me to “let bygones be bygones” until apologies have been made and reparations disbursed.
In the meantime, the West is complicit and can instead direct their holier than thou attitude and patronizing lectures inwards.
The people who voted for Trump are going to tell you how to be civilised. It is peak irony. So many rights are going to be taken over time and there doesn't seem to be self-awareness. Oh well, self-inflicted damage.
Setting aside the ridiculous nature of this move towards OS-level verification, NixOS (and Guix) is the last distro to worry about when it comes to age verification.
Why? Given the nature of how NixOS works (config-driven), the maintainers have plausible deniability: if push comes to shove, they can shift the burden to users and have them enable the age verification service as part of their NixOS config.
Okay, but why do this now? If it’s such an important feature and unrelated to the barrage of legislation, why was this not implemented a few months or years ago?
Because someone came with a pull request for this; this additional field was meant to support a feature in something else they were working on (an xdg portal). It was a simple PR that addressed a need that the programmer had. And it was accepted.
I run Proxmox at home, but now that I have been drinking the NixOS koolaid over the past 2 years, all of my homelab problems suddenly look like Nix-shaped nails.
Well it looks like we might soon be able to have the benefits of NixOS while also having bhyve (and presumably Sylve): https://github.com/nixos-bsd/nixbsd
I have the same thing with proxmox especially after I realized how well it integrates with proxmox backup server. And I haven't even gotten into clustering yet. It really is a very solid product.
But the only real world impact is that the device that was used to stream that 4K content gets blacklisted at the hardware level.
To workaround this, piracy groups try to batch 4K rips because they know that the device will be burned soon after they upload the content. They then acquire another device, and the game of whack-a-mole continues.
Personally, I don’t see the need for this with NixOS. Setting aside the fact that Omarchy is way too opinionated (Basecamp installed by default?), NixOS is already quite composable, so you can easily build a well-formed experience out of isolated NixOS modules.
And Iran has been respecting that principle for decades. So why exactly did the US and Israel (and GCC countries) think that the status quo would remain even if they keep antagonizing Iran? Imagine getting bombed during negotiations - not once, but twice in a single year! Their sovereignty was being disrespected, so now they're understandably establishing a new status quo.
And btw, if Iran and Oman cooperate, there is no threat to "freedom of navigation" under international law.
In a nutshell: play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
reply