Outside euro-centric circles, the start of the (2nd) Sino-Japanese war in 1937 has long been considered the start of WWII.
Russia losing Iran as a supplier of Shaheeds is a minor hassle, and likely a temporary one. Iran's production of Shaheeds has been outstripped by Russia since the end of 2023.
As for the war proving Trump isn't pro-Putin, let's put that to rest. Trump has spent more time consulting Putin about this war than Congress. And that has resulted in Trump lifting sanctions on Russian oil sales.
That's the most pro-Putin move you can make. Because it also means that hunting down the shadow fleet might be coming to an end too (we'll see what the Europeans think about that).
I’m confused regarding your earlier support for these strikes given that you’re now acknowledging that thousands of deaths and billions of dollars will result in no “decisive results” other than pushing the world a step closer to a mass global conflict.
I don’t think Noah ever “supported” the strikes. But in any case, decisive is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Destroying Iran’s ballistic missile supplies and its navy, as well as killing a bunch of IRGC is a great outcome.
Khamenei said, "'Death to America' isn't just our chant, it's our policy." It would be disrespectful of us not to take him at his word and crush that evil regime.
I think you are arguing the wrong point here. There will always be hateful rhetoric, personal and international. If our country feels it proper to respond with lethal attacks to all such rhetoric, then we will be a most warlike nation. (And given the lack of popular support for such policy, this would be most unwise, even if this were to suit your tastes.)
The salient point here remains the extent of the Iranian nuclear threat. If that could actually be removed, I would agree that great cost would be worth it. But can and will that threat be removed?
Shutting up offensive voices is not the point. Shutting down actual threats is.
This is a subtly different point than @Louis Woodhill made. Not whether we ought to smack down foul trashtalk, but rather whether we should smack down regimes that fund terrorists.
That's a lot less clearcut. But setting aside all else, there is the matter of practicality. Will the American public back such a war? Can such a war be waged without the public's backing? America's enemies are quite aware that, whatever glory the US may have at the outset, long term partisan resistance has a track record of vastly outlasting the public's patience.
One murky thing that is worth considering. If a right wing government were trying to build a case for a crisis that justified the cancellation or negation of elections, this kind of situation could present fertile ground. Probably not simply because the government wants to squish a terrorist mongering nations and the public does not. But if the conflict creates downstream crises, the resulting chaos -- and likely left wing overreach in reaction? I can imagine the arguments in front of SCOTUS referencing classical republics and the extent to which ours was intended to be a classical republic.
Very long answer, but me, I don't want to see us go the route of attacking terrorist nations. Not in direct battle anyway, especially when there is so little evidence that the American public supports anything of the sort.
This is a bit of a different situation. The Taliban was happy to lurk in the countryside, have only a limited influence, and wait. The Iranian government needs to control a huge country and a huge population, partly very hostile to it.
Thank God social media wasn't around during WWII, people like you would have had a grand old time; "Pearl Harbor showed the Japanese have a superior force and are better prepared, we've lost enough young American men already, we need to begin peace talks NOW!"
This is just nitpicking, but the intelligence on the Iranian targets was probably mostly by Mossad and I have little confidence in the CIA having that kind of goods on the Chinese. Beyond that, it's just frightening for Amodei and others, on arguably the most important point as argued in this post, to have to deal with a guy who threatened invading Greenland by calling it "Iceland" five times in a row and his second in command in war, who looks and acts like Göring 2.0.
"[I]f America could assassinate Xi Jinping and the entire CCP Central Committee in the early days of a war over Taiwan, that could be an effective form of deterrence."
This is easily understood as way too risky with a nuclear power, so it has very little deterrent effect.
Agreed. Just taking a wild guess here, but the Moduro snatching was probably a 50/50 proposition. Snatching a Chinese leader would be more like 95/5 against. Even if successful, what would be the point of doing so?
There is a lesson from WW2 that wasn't in the recap in the piece.
Nothing Japan did on land in 1941 vs. the Western allies was novel.
They had been fighting in China for 4.5 years at that point. Japan's tanks in Malaya. The moves in the Philippines. All of that was very similar to battles they had fought before in China. Both the US and the UK had military observers with the Chinese. The foreign concessions in China were not attacked until Pearl Harbor. The Chinese themselves were constantly telling the Us and the UK, "this is how Japan fights". Japanese troops travel light which makes them not road bound and able to move quickly over bad terrain.
Chinese troops were generally poorly trained, poorly armed, and poorly fed, China's challenge was how to fight with such a huge qualitative inferiority. The Chinese even won occasionally. They did it by figuring out where the Japanese were going. Japanese troops generally sustained themselves by capturing supplies, so leave nothing in front of them. Japanese attacks are strongest at the start so don't offer battle st their jumping off points. Instead, figure out the objective, pre position as many Chinese troops as possible around the objective, wait for the Japanese to walk there, and only then counterattack. The Japanese will be at the end of their supplies and vulnerable.
Now however bad British and American colonial forces were in Malaya and the Philippines, they were miles ahead of Chinese troops in terms of equipment and training. The problem was that the British and the Americans ignored everything they had seen with their own eyes in China. Japanese success in China was blamed on Chinese incompetence rather than Japanese skill.
When Japan attacked the West, the allies tried to meet them head on, right at the border. They were repeatedly surprised when Japan went off road.
It was a master class in refusing to Integrate anything from military observers.
It is notable that William Slim is the only Western general who bothered to ask the Chinese how they'd won some of their few victories.
I would say there would be a lesson about ignoring a conflict and a method of fighting because it is inconvenient.
I was mostly putting this out there as a "The more you know," but for today's context I feel like the lesson is about drones.
Ukraine shows that cheap 2000$ drones rule the battlefield. Iran has these capabilities. We can destroy the factories and block most of them, but we are putting down incredibly expensive weapons to do so. (This isn't even mentioning China which can produce more drones in one province than the rest of the world combined)
But all of the US military production and contracting is optimized to produce a few very sophisticated and expensive weapon systems.
There was a news article when this war started extolling a new US disposable drone that cost "only" 35,000$ per drone. That shows that we aren't really learning much.
The $2000 drone and the $35000 drone don't have the same payload, range and other capabilities. "Drone" is a very generic term, like "vehicle", and sizes and capabilities vary. A FPV drone is cheaper that a small plane, much like a car is usually cheaper than a truck.
American LUCAS is very similar to Russian Geran-2 (both developed from Shahed), and the unit cost of a Geran-2 made in Russia is estimated to be between 20-50 thousand USD, which is in the same ballpark. If the US, with its much better paid workforce, can produce a LUCAS for 35 thousand USD, it would actually be somewhat impressive.
"If America could assassinate Xi Jinping and the entire CCP Central Committee in the early days of a war over Taiwan, that could be an effective form of deterrence."
Err, would this not have a meaningful risk of triggering nuclear retaliation? Decapitating the government of a nuclear power?
At the very least, I'm pretty sure nukes would be on the table, and that's not a risk I'm (and hopefully the American government) willing to take.
Too soon to tell. China is very good at using proxies to draw American arms and attention away from the Pacific. Russia is basically a wholly owned subsidiary of the CCP. Who is going to rebuild Iran when Trump decides this war isn’t so good for markets or his approval rating? China. And China knows that Trump’s attention span and tolerance for pain is actually very low (TACO). What does this all mean? <checks notes> I have no idea. Autocrats are notoriously hard to predict, they are surrounded by sycophants and closed off from dissenting views. And that describes both Trump and Xi.
I've never understood why China wouldn't just let Russia get clobbered over Ukraine, further degrading Russian military power and humiliating Putin. Would a much weaker Russia be a good thing for China?
That is correct. Ditto with, for instance, North Korea. Putin and Xi want there to be more authoritarian states in their orbit, both to extend their power bases, and deter internal liberal movements.
At the outset of Trump's first administration I wrote a brief essay I called, "Donald Trump’s historical doppelgänger," < https://www.blog.williamdoneil.com/?p=77 > comparing him with Wilhelm II, King of Prussia and German Emperor (1859-1941, r. 1888-1918). Reading it now nine years later I see little needing alteration. Wilhelm of course is infamous for the "blank cheque" he issued supporting Austria-Hungary's reckless attack on Serbia, which many historians see as central to initiating the First World War of 1914-1918. Yet beyond that one feckless act, Wilhelm had done a great deal over the preceding 25 years to destabilize the European political system and erode the fragile barriers to conflict. Exactly as I feared in 2017, Trump is treading very much the same path. The one cause for hope that I see is that Trump will not have a quarter century to do a thorough job of it. But what of those who come after?
Enjoyed this read, Noah. Don't forget about Pakistan here. They're probably the most exposed in a real Hormuz closure... more than Japan or China. Running a structural gas deficit, nearly all LNG sourced from Qatar and UAE, zero bypass options, no storage buffer. If this drags past 30 days, you're looking at blackouts and industrial shutdowns. And that kind of instability gets scary fast in a nuclear-armed country with a fragile government.
When the 12 day war concluded, I was surprised that Israel called it quits after accomplishing just partial destruction of Iran's nuclear program (with a bit of help from our Massive Ordnance Penetrators). Maybe they wanted to wrap things up in Gaza first.
Now we have further destruction of Iran's capabilities, but our involvement is unpopular and Trump is looking for an exit. But I think at some point Israel is going to need to put boots on the ground to really dismantle the nuclear program. I don't think this thing is going to be over soon, but maybe gets another hiatus.
What we are witnessing is not a precursor to a new great conflagration, but rather the same, tedious American habit: manufactured crisis for the sake of maintaining global hegemony and ensuring the continued enrichment of the the good 'ole US of A. Another war that will result in manu, many dead Iranians and not much more. What a waste.
The thing about Monday Morning Quarterbacking the late 1930s is that countries doing different things at various times (standing ground in Munich, France invading Germany in Sept. 1939 while the army was in Poland, Soviets not allying with Germany in 1930, France defending successfully, Hitler changing Barbarossa schedule, Pearl Harbor not happening or going differently) may have either prevented WWII or started it in a different what that made it better for one side or the other and led to a different outcome. So rather than saying we may be in "foothills," to me the real question is whether specific decisions (how we've approached defending Ukraine, how/whether Europe rearms, 10/7 and its aftermath including the destruction of Iranian proxies and military power, Japanese and Taiwanese decisions re armament, and Xi's purges and such) are making war more or less likely and/or putting one side in a better position. Hard to say without the benefit of hindsight, but these things do matter!
And here’s where you lost the narrative …”probably made the great powers of the day more willing to roll the dice and test their strength against each other.”. This is not serious commentary.
It matters whether the Iranians who want a democratic republic are killing the psychotically murderous theocratic Iranians ...or vice-versa. Not that we or the Israelis have conducted this action in a way that could possibly ensure the better of the two outcomes.
My two cents worth is that China, the Gulf States and maybe even India have had it with Iran and look forward to the day when Iran is pacified and the Persian Gulf well into the Arabian Sea flows freely.
Outside euro-centric circles, the start of the (2nd) Sino-Japanese war in 1937 has long been considered the start of WWII.
Russia losing Iran as a supplier of Shaheeds is a minor hassle, and likely a temporary one. Iran's production of Shaheeds has been outstripped by Russia since the end of 2023.
As for the war proving Trump isn't pro-Putin, let's put that to rest. Trump has spent more time consulting Putin about this war than Congress. And that has resulted in Trump lifting sanctions on Russian oil sales.
That's the most pro-Putin move you can make. Because it also means that hunting down the shadow fleet might be coming to an end too (we'll see what the Europeans think about that).
100%. I don't understand Noah's take on Trump / Putin at all.
It's called wishful thinking.
I’m confused regarding your earlier support for these strikes given that you’re now acknowledging that thousands of deaths and billions of dollars will result in no “decisive results” other than pushing the world a step closer to a mass global conflict.
Hey, the blue sky leftists were against it as well so Noah had no choice but to cheer it on.
I don’t think Noah ever “supported” the strikes. But in any case, decisive is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Destroying Iran’s ballistic missile supplies and its navy, as well as killing a bunch of IRGC is a great outcome.
For whom?
We killed hundreds of thousands of Taliban fighters. (Let's pretend there was no collateral damage)
What good did that do for the us or for Afghans?
Khamenei said, "'Death to America' isn't just our chant, it's our policy." It would be disrespectful of us not to take him at his word and crush that evil regime.
I think you are arguing the wrong point here. There will always be hateful rhetoric, personal and international. If our country feels it proper to respond with lethal attacks to all such rhetoric, then we will be a most warlike nation. (And given the lack of popular support for such policy, this would be most unwise, even if this were to suit your tastes.)
The salient point here remains the extent of the Iranian nuclear threat. If that could actually be removed, I would agree that great cost would be worth it. But can and will that threat be removed?
Shutting up offensive voices is not the point. Shutting down actual threats is.
Iran directly funded and continues to fund attacks on its enemies. It’s not rhetoric.
This is a subtly different point than @Louis Woodhill made. Not whether we ought to smack down foul trashtalk, but rather whether we should smack down regimes that fund terrorists.
That's a lot less clearcut. But setting aside all else, there is the matter of practicality. Will the American public back such a war? Can such a war be waged without the public's backing? America's enemies are quite aware that, whatever glory the US may have at the outset, long term partisan resistance has a track record of vastly outlasting the public's patience.
One murky thing that is worth considering. If a right wing government were trying to build a case for a crisis that justified the cancellation or negation of elections, this kind of situation could present fertile ground. Probably not simply because the government wants to squish a terrorist mongering nations and the public does not. But if the conflict creates downstream crises, the resulting chaos -- and likely left wing overreach in reaction? I can imagine the arguments in front of SCOTUS referencing classical republics and the extent to which ours was intended to be a classical republic.
Very long answer, but me, I don't want to see us go the route of attacking terrorist nations. Not in direct battle anyway, especially when there is so little evidence that the American public supports anything of the sort.
And the people who take over after him are going to feel what exactly about about America?
The regime has not been crushed.
This is a bit of a different situation. The Taliban was happy to lurk in the countryside, have only a limited influence, and wait. The Iranian government needs to control a huge country and a huge population, partly very hostile to it.
Reminds me of the saying from a Taliban member… “you Americans have the watches; we have the time.”
Thank God social media wasn't around during WWII, people like you would have had a grand old time; "Pearl Harbor showed the Japanese have a superior force and are better prepared, we've lost enough young American men already, we need to begin peace talks NOW!"
Because ... Iran attacked and sank our Pacific Fleet? How did the news media miss that ...
What?
How are those two positions contradictory?
This is just nitpicking, but the intelligence on the Iranian targets was probably mostly by Mossad and I have little confidence in the CIA having that kind of goods on the Chinese. Beyond that, it's just frightening for Amodei and others, on arguably the most important point as argued in this post, to have to deal with a guy who threatened invading Greenland by calling it "Iceland" five times in a row and his second in command in war, who looks and acts like Göring 2.0.
"[I]f America could assassinate Xi Jinping and the entire CCP Central Committee in the early days of a war over Taiwan, that could be an effective form of deterrence."
This is easily understood as way too risky with a nuclear power, so it has very little deterrent effect.
Agreed. Just taking a wild guess here, but the Moduro snatching was probably a 50/50 proposition. Snatching a Chinese leader would be more like 95/5 against. Even if successful, what would be the point of doing so?
There is a lesson from WW2 that wasn't in the recap in the piece.
Nothing Japan did on land in 1941 vs. the Western allies was novel.
They had been fighting in China for 4.5 years at that point. Japan's tanks in Malaya. The moves in the Philippines. All of that was very similar to battles they had fought before in China. Both the US and the UK had military observers with the Chinese. The foreign concessions in China were not attacked until Pearl Harbor. The Chinese themselves were constantly telling the Us and the UK, "this is how Japan fights". Japanese troops travel light which makes them not road bound and able to move quickly over bad terrain.
Chinese troops were generally poorly trained, poorly armed, and poorly fed, China's challenge was how to fight with such a huge qualitative inferiority. The Chinese even won occasionally. They did it by figuring out where the Japanese were going. Japanese troops generally sustained themselves by capturing supplies, so leave nothing in front of them. Japanese attacks are strongest at the start so don't offer battle st their jumping off points. Instead, figure out the objective, pre position as many Chinese troops as possible around the objective, wait for the Japanese to walk there, and only then counterattack. The Japanese will be at the end of their supplies and vulnerable.
Now however bad British and American colonial forces were in Malaya and the Philippines, they were miles ahead of Chinese troops in terms of equipment and training. The problem was that the British and the Americans ignored everything they had seen with their own eyes in China. Japanese success in China was blamed on Chinese incompetence rather than Japanese skill.
When Japan attacked the West, the allies tried to meet them head on, right at the border. They were repeatedly surprised when Japan went off road.
It was a master class in refusing to Integrate anything from military observers.
It is notable that William Slim is the only Western general who bothered to ask the Chinese how they'd won some of their few victories.
what is the application of this lesson to today's context?
I would say there would be a lesson about ignoring a conflict and a method of fighting because it is inconvenient.
I was mostly putting this out there as a "The more you know," but for today's context I feel like the lesson is about drones.
Ukraine shows that cheap 2000$ drones rule the battlefield. Iran has these capabilities. We can destroy the factories and block most of them, but we are putting down incredibly expensive weapons to do so. (This isn't even mentioning China which can produce more drones in one province than the rest of the world combined)
But all of the US military production and contracting is optimized to produce a few very sophisticated and expensive weapon systems.
There was a news article when this war started extolling a new US disposable drone that cost "only" 35,000$ per drone. That shows that we aren't really learning much.
The $2000 drone and the $35000 drone don't have the same payload, range and other capabilities. "Drone" is a very generic term, like "vehicle", and sizes and capabilities vary. A FPV drone is cheaper that a small plane, much like a car is usually cheaper than a truck.
American LUCAS is very similar to Russian Geran-2 (both developed from Shahed), and the unit cost of a Geran-2 made in Russia is estimated to be between 20-50 thousand USD, which is in the same ballpark. If the US, with its much better paid workforce, can produce a LUCAS for 35 thousand USD, it would actually be somewhat impressive.
"If America could assassinate Xi Jinping and the entire CCP Central Committee in the early days of a war over Taiwan, that could be an effective form of deterrence."
Err, would this not have a meaningful risk of triggering nuclear retaliation? Decapitating the government of a nuclear power?
At the very least, I'm pretty sure nukes would be on the table, and that's not a risk I'm (and hopefully the American government) willing to take.
Even Trump (the guy who panics at every stock market crash) isn’t going to risk nuclear war.
Noah that’s way too far fetched 🤔
Too soon to tell. China is very good at using proxies to draw American arms and attention away from the Pacific. Russia is basically a wholly owned subsidiary of the CCP. Who is going to rebuild Iran when Trump decides this war isn’t so good for markets or his approval rating? China. And China knows that Trump’s attention span and tolerance for pain is actually very low (TACO). What does this all mean? <checks notes> I have no idea. Autocrats are notoriously hard to predict, they are surrounded by sycophants and closed off from dissenting views. And that describes both Trump and Xi.
Russia is allied with China in recent conflicts, but it is far from a wholly owned proxy, and they are far from friends.
I've never understood why China wouldn't just let Russia get clobbered over Ukraine, further degrading Russian military power and humiliating Putin. Would a much weaker Russia be a good thing for China?
CCP can not risk Putin falling and succeed by a pro western leadership.
That is correct. Ditto with, for instance, North Korea. Putin and Xi want there to be more authoritarian states in their orbit, both to extend their power bases, and deter internal liberal movements.
Best way to insure Taiwan is safe is to help Ukraine win (or at least have a honorable peace).
💯. Mick Ryan is great on this.
This means more Chinese control over Iran and potential for radar, military basis or military access to sea ports.
At the outset of Trump's first administration I wrote a brief essay I called, "Donald Trump’s historical doppelgänger," < https://www.blog.williamdoneil.com/?p=77 > comparing him with Wilhelm II, King of Prussia and German Emperor (1859-1941, r. 1888-1918). Reading it now nine years later I see little needing alteration. Wilhelm of course is infamous for the "blank cheque" he issued supporting Austria-Hungary's reckless attack on Serbia, which many historians see as central to initiating the First World War of 1914-1918. Yet beyond that one feckless act, Wilhelm had done a great deal over the preceding 25 years to destabilize the European political system and erode the fragile barriers to conflict. Exactly as I feared in 2017, Trump is treading very much the same path. The one cause for hope that I see is that Trump will not have a quarter century to do a thorough job of it. But what of those who come after?
Enjoyed this read, Noah. Don't forget about Pakistan here. They're probably the most exposed in a real Hormuz closure... more than Japan or China. Running a structural gas deficit, nearly all LNG sourced from Qatar and UAE, zero bypass options, no storage buffer. If this drags past 30 days, you're looking at blackouts and industrial shutdowns. And that kind of instability gets scary fast in a nuclear-armed country with a fragile government.
When the 12 day war concluded, I was surprised that Israel called it quits after accomplishing just partial destruction of Iran's nuclear program (with a bit of help from our Massive Ordnance Penetrators). Maybe they wanted to wrap things up in Gaza first.
Now we have further destruction of Iran's capabilities, but our involvement is unpopular and Trump is looking for an exit. But I think at some point Israel is going to need to put boots on the ground to really dismantle the nuclear program. I don't think this thing is going to be over soon, but maybe gets another hiatus.
What we are witnessing is not a precursor to a new great conflagration, but rather the same, tedious American habit: manufactured crisis for the sake of maintaining global hegemony and ensuring the continued enrichment of the the good 'ole US of A. Another war that will result in manu, many dead Iranians and not much more. What a waste.
The thing about Monday Morning Quarterbacking the late 1930s is that countries doing different things at various times (standing ground in Munich, France invading Germany in Sept. 1939 while the army was in Poland, Soviets not allying with Germany in 1930, France defending successfully, Hitler changing Barbarossa schedule, Pearl Harbor not happening or going differently) may have either prevented WWII or started it in a different what that made it better for one side or the other and led to a different outcome. So rather than saying we may be in "foothills," to me the real question is whether specific decisions (how we've approached defending Ukraine, how/whether Europe rearms, 10/7 and its aftermath including the destruction of Iranian proxies and military power, Japanese and Taiwanese decisions re armament, and Xi's purges and such) are making war more or less likely and/or putting one side in a better position. Hard to say without the benefit of hindsight, but these things do matter!
But you see, this doesn't allow us to blame the US and Israel for every bad outcome, so it can't be an explanation.
And here’s where you lost the narrative …”probably made the great powers of the day more willing to roll the dice and test their strength against each other.”. This is not serious commentary.
What would be the point in "testing their strength against one another? Lost me there too.
can you explain why not?
the word “probably” is the first clue. And for gods sake no country “rolls the dice” to test their strength.
isn't that what every war is?
The powers of WW1 certainly did, look how good it turned out for them.
Really disappointed to read Noahpinion supporting Iran War and looking forward to the day where he writes about how he got it so wrong.
This will be the sequence of recent Iranian history.
Iranians kill Iranians. Americans and Israelis kill Iranians. Iranians kill Iranians.
I do not know why we needed to insert ourselves in the middle there.
It matters whether the Iranians who want a democratic republic are killing the psychotically murderous theocratic Iranians ...or vice-versa. Not that we or the Israelis have conducted this action in a way that could possibly ensure the better of the two outcomes.
We couldn't do so anyway. We don't have the resources to guarantee the desired outcome.
My two cents worth is that China, the Gulf States and maybe even India have had it with Iran and look forward to the day when Iran is pacified and the Persian Gulf well into the Arabian Sea flows freely.