If I recall correctly, when trade is considered to be zero-sum, the net exporter gains and the net importer loses. Therefore if what’s bad for Israel is what’s good for Turkey and vice versa, this is worse for Turkey.
Maybe I’m wrong - I wasn’t very good at macroeconomics.
It sounds like it’s worse for Turkey than for Israel.
I’m not saying that the US will attack Iran - I’m saying that the US will send ships to patrol the waters where this happened. There won’t be violence unless Iran messes with them, but I don’t see what Iran has to gain either from capturing a single freighter or from an increased buildup of American forces in the region.
I think it’s the other way around - the US is having a hard time suppressing the Houthis because there’s nothing in Yemen that’s worth blowing up other than the missile launchers themselves, which are mobile and easy to hide. Iran, on the other hand, has lots of valuable infrastructure.
This move keeps the U.S. out of the conflict
I’m not sure why you think so. The US usually treats freedom of the seas as a pretty big deal. I don’t think that there will be violent retaliation solely for seizing this ship, but I do expect American naval patrols in the region with authorization to fire on Iranians that try something like this again.
I don’t necessarily disagree with you, although I think Iran has a lot more ambition to expand its sphere of influence than the other Middle Eastern theocracies do and this would naturally bring it into conflict with the USA even if there wasn’t a historic enmity between the two countries. (Consider Russia as an example of a country that the USA had no particular hostility towards, despite the Cold War, but now actively opposes due to its ambitions.)
As the article states, a war with Iran would not be good for anyone but it would be worse for Iran than for the USA. If the USA and Iran were purely rational agents, the USA would push back against Iranian influence and Iran would back down - its options would be to lose without a fight or to lose even more if it fought a war.
Of course in the real world rulers are often irrational, or more concerned about domestic affairs than foreign ones. (Maybe it’s better to rule an Iran battered by war than to be overthrown in an Iran that passively accepts containment.) Even rational rulers can miscalculate or underestimate their enemies.
Still, I think much of Iran’s recent success in growing its influence is due to a lack of political will in the USA for any sort of foreign intervention after Iraq and Afghanistan, rather than to a deliberate decision that allowing Iran to expand its influence is in America’s best interests.
I don’t think it’s technically correct to say that the US armed ISIS; ISIS seized weapons that the US provided to Iraq.
Israel does a pretty good job of opposing Iran, and we can be confident that weapons provided to Israel aren’t going to be used against the US. I think it’s likely that the Houthis are acting up now not because they’re provoked by Israel but because Israel is preoccupied with something else.
As for Saddam Hussein… He did a very good job of opposing Iran. The threat of eight years of war and hundreds of thousands of Iranian soldiers dead would be a very effective stick if we still had access to it. It’s ironic that the weak, pro-Iran government that is the result of US intervention in Iraq seems like it’s worse for US interests than Saddam was.
I wonder if treating the Houthis as Iranian agents and retaliating against Iranian assets directly would be more effective than playing whack-a-mole against these missile launchers without addressing the source of the problem. I assume Biden’s advisors are wondering the same thing, but it’s hard to know where the line between deterrence and escalation is…
Iran has enemies. Many of them are even worse than the Iranians, but maybe the thing to do is to find some sympathetic group, arm them, and let them take the heat, just like Iran is doing with the Houthis…
This doesn’t make British police look very good…
Civilian casualties aren’t the same thing as genocide.
genocide: the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political, or cultural group
When a country with access to the full destructive power of a modern-day military (including nuclear weapons) fights a war in such a manner that at the end of the war there will be more enemy civilians than there were before the war, it is entirely unreasonable to claim that genocide or any attempt to commit genocide is taking place. You might as well call it cannibalism or pedophilia - those are also really bad things that Israel isn’t actually doing.
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I wonder if a lot of people’s idea of war has been shaped by the recent American occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, which were wars of choice where at least in theory American soldiers were fighting largely for the benefit of the natives. Countries that believe they actually need to win and don’t have the option of just giving up and going home fight wars in a very different way. Consider for example World War II, the proverbial “good versus evil” war fought by the generation that originally came up with the comic book characters you read about. The Allies certainly didn’t hesitate to kill enormous numbers of Axis civilians in the course of destroying military targets. (IMO the Allies actually went way too far and a lot of the strategic bombing of Germany and Japan served no military purpose, but I suppose they were more worried about bombing too little than they were about bombing too much.)
This is simply not true. The Ukrainian government (which I trust a little more than I trust Hamas) claims that approximately 25,000 civilians died in the siege of Mariupol alone.
I, uh, wasn’t 7. I was about 10 years older than that and just dumb.
Once when I was still a kid, I told a woman I loved her so much that I could only love her more if she was a robot.
She did not think that was romantic.
The dolphin was diagnosed only a few weeks ago, but it died over two years ago in March 2022.