A) the US ruling class is scrambling to find a thesis to maintain some form of large scale dominance in the face of inexorable decline in the economy and on the battlefield. I think they may have gotten to the point where they are jumping between theses rapidly at this point. Some of these include a crypto-currency future, a multi-polar regional hegemony model, an AI-driven autonomous weapons platform, AGI/ASI runaway power scaling, technofeudalism, and a return to the robber baron / company town era.

B) They have been actively building the domestic military force for the next showdown with the population. ICE is only the half of it. The various local PDs, combined, are bigger than most national militaries. Then there’s the Nat Guard, then there’s domestic deployment of paid mercenaries, then there’s the domestic deployment of the Banderites and the IDF, and finally the deployment of the US military directly. They have everything they need to quell a resistance.

C) But it looks like they are also seeing a resistance IN the military. The clogged toilets and laundry fires are evidence, but so are the purges and the use of absurd rhetorical filters like claiming Armageddon is the goal and waiting to see who complains so they can purge them. I think they’re still seeing a situation where if they try to move too quickly before purging the military fully they’ll have a coup on their hands.

They have no intention of having their forces wiped out by a foreign adversary before they can be deployed domestically against a resistance. This conflict with Iran may have shown their limits, but that doesn’t mean they won’t continue to operate within those limits with wild and reckless abandon.

Well, in a multi-polar world, the US could be content with just dominating half of the globe’s industry. Or they could be laying the ground work to eventually destroy the East’s energy infrastructure at a later date

This unlocked a new potential US strategy for me. Someone below mentioned that maybe this was to push out one faction of the international bourgeoisie for another. What if it’s not that but instead…

What if the realization is that the US built its post-WW2 wealth by being the only industrial economy untouched by the war. This meant that everyone who needed help rebuilding had to go through American physical industrial capacity. It was achieved through total war in Europe, that is to say the destruction of physical industrial capacity across the entire subcontinent.

So what if the idea with Iran is to actually achieve the exact same outcome without the need to fully destroy all the physical industrial capacity? What if the goal is for the US to be the only country who’s energy logistics is left standing. It doesn’t matter how many factories Europe has if they can’t power them. With US energy reserves and access to oil and gas reserves across the entire Western hemisphere, the US could in theory be the only place with enough energy to handle the industrial needs of the North Atlantic alliance and their vassals and subjects.

I know that there are power issues in the USA, but I am also aware of a massive amount of capital that has recently been gathered to develop power projects across the country.

I know that Venezuelan crude is very costly to refine, but a higher cost doesn’t matter as much if it means being the only country with a reliable energy platform.

Essentially I am proposing that the US may be engaging in what could be called a logical or economic deindustrialization, like what they did to Latin America over the last few decades, applied to as much of the world as possible, without needing a total war to destroy the physical industrial capacity.

This would be inline with what we speculated was true about the strategy during the Biden administration and the destruction of Nord Stream 2 - raising energy prices on European industry to make them more dependent on the US and applying sanction chains to punish anyone buying Russian energy.

Yes, there are lots of detailed problems with this including rare earths and energy diversity and refinery capacity and lots of other things.

I don’t think this analysis is beyond the pale, but it is a hugely risky move.

Skipping past all the questions of viability, I have a question beyond that - if it turns out to be viable and the US starts reindustrializing, does the world decide that the risk is too high and intervene?

I fully agree with your assessment. As is my habit, I take the position of assessing reality as it is, as you did, but then asking about what each outcome would tell us.

So let’s say spec ops fails in their mission. Surely that would tell us your assessment is correct. But then, if WE can make that assessment, what does that tell us about the decision making process? Does it mean they had faulty intelligence? Does it mean they were deceived by a particular party (and which party)? Does it mean they did it anyway to achieve some other goal we didn’t see or consider? Or does it mean that they decision making process has broken down more thoroughly and more quickly than expected?

Let’s say spec ops succeeds in their mission. It’s not like any of the physical aspects of your analysis would have been wrong. I mean, maybe all the uranium is in one place, and maybe it is in portable containers so it can be trucked around. But also, what would a success tell us about imperial intelligence capabilities and about intelligence infiltration in Iran? What would it tell us about spec ops capabilities? What would it tell us about how the empire might make further moves?

I’m not asking for answers here. What I want to do is call out your very clear-eyed assessment of the situation and remind us all to pay attention to what happens and remember this assessment so we can use it to better understand what’s actually happening and what it means for the future.

The pressure on the empire increases

Very concerning

Some are demanding the reinstatement of all treaties. Some say that most treaties were signed under duress after the illegitimate use of violence created conditions of dispossession and displacement. There are other positions. They are not all mutually exclusive.

Would respecting the treaties be sufficient for sovereignty? I don’t know, but my limited understanding is that it is a necessary condition but not a sufficient condition.

I think this is also missing a critical piece - the interaction between force projection and intelligence.

Iran went hard out of the gate to disable significant portions of enemy military installations, and the US pulled a lot of materiel out in response. If the high value assets are moved out of reach, and Iran knows it, then there’s fewer high value targets to hit.

But also, by lulling the enemy into a false sense of security, the enemy can be induced to engage in activities that otherwise they would not. Things like repair, recovery, or even potential cases of hardened underground facilities becoming activated and thus revealing themselves. Iran may be observing the enemy to see where they move their attention when the threat is reduced, which provides them with invaluable intelligence.

It’s a form of limited non-nuclear MAD. If you show your opponent that you will respond to their actions in kind, it forces them to consider equal or great retaliation when calculating the benefit of any given action. If they attack air defense, their air defense will be attacked. If they attack civilians, their civilians will be attacked. We’d all be better off if the agressor stopped attacking altogether, but in the absence of that, proportionate response seems a valid strategy, particularly with the West and its proxies.

https://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2026/03/15/765419/Most-missiles-used-in-war-are-a-decade-old-US-does-not-dare-enter-Persian-Gulf-IRGC-Spokesman

The Islamic Revolution Guard Corps (IRGC) has revealed that the majority of missiles so far launched against American and Israeli targets during Operation True Promise 4 have been manufactured approximately ten years ago, with more advanced weaponry held in reserve

“The missiles currently used belong to a decade ago,” Naeini emphasized. “Many of the missiles we have produced since the 12-day war until the Ramadan war have not yet been deployed”.

Hot damn.

Not just their head of state, also his daughter, son-in-law, and grandchild. Also multiple leaders from one chain of command across 3 layers.

That would be like killing Trump, Ivanka, Jared, their child, AND Vance, Mike Johnson, and McConnel all in a single night.

That’s not what extortion is. Extortion is when you threaten someone so that they do something to benefit you. Cuba is not threatening it’s doctors, and it’s not trying to get the doctors to do something that benefits Cuba, other than just be doctors who get paid to be doctors.

As for the cab driver story, yeah, the country is being starved of everything. If you want money, you get it from the rich American tourists. That’s how every poor country has always worked with white tourists. Poor in China? Do work for the American tourists, they have no idea how much anything costs locally.

That’s just Cuba being poor because the US is extorting them. The US is saying we are going to keep starving your children, your sick, and your elderly unless you do what I say.

Are they firing from that point much? Seems like one of the least defensible launch sites.

I think it only makes sense in a European worldview. The idea that the decision making problems are algorithmic or mathematical in nature and this abstractable, universalizable, and permanent is a fantasy.

The more abstraction a higher order system has, the less it is able to respond to changes in the lowest order systems. Highly effective mathematical abstractions for decision making will solve a lot of problems in the short term, mostly problems that exist due to inefficiencies that mask solution spaces from us currently.

But once those short-term problems are solved and the inefficiencies in solution searching are gone, the hard problems will still remain.

Good post. Thank you.

I am of the opinion that Iran is currently pushing to establish its national security. That will require, at minimum, driving out any military installation that can be used to attack it or neutralize it. This will be a difficult task, but it appears that this been under careful strategic and tactical analysis for a long time, possibly 2 decades.

It requires speed. The boundary between Iran’s force projection and the empire’s force projection, a sort of Iranosphere, needs to expand far enough to ensure that imperial force projection is costly, obvious, and detectable early.

Working against this is the empire’s two pronged attempt to neutralize Iran. First by destroying their force projection capabilities - launchers, launch sites, missiles and drones themselves, munitions production capacity, etc. Second by destroying society’s ability to function and thus serve the functions that support the force projection - food, water, medicine, communication, leadership, planning, intelligence, etc.

So far, Iran has been moving faster than I expected. But the empire may have yet more moves available to them. We don’t know. So we wait, watch, and pray.

Oh. Sailors disguised as fishermen in fishing boats are often used to lay mines. No wonder China behaves the way it does in the SCS

MAD is established doctrine. Anyone who scrambles their strategic nuclear assets is immediately subject to MAD. That’s why it’s called MAD.

If the US uses tactical nukes in a way that no one can tell until they’ve been deployed, then I don’t even know. That’s a nightmare scenario. MAD doctrine in theory would apply, but it is a massive gray area.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cly093xxlzzo

Many countries agreed to a release from the strategic reserves

Well. That’s it for him. Trump doesn’t like people taking superlatives away from him