Debt Rattle April 12 2026
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A Pure SHOCK to the US: IRAN Harshly Refused to Release U.S. POWs amid a Breakdown in Negotiations
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#BORZZIKMAN
why am i not surprised:
https://wanaen.com/iran-crowned-freestyle-wrestling-champions-of-asia/
Yes, missile destroyers clear mines. The H-60 helicopter they carry has a half dozen mine sweeping kits to choose from depending on conditions.
The Mongols, Drones, and the Future of War
The $500 Weapon That Changes EverythingJay Martin
In under 70 years, an unknown confederation of nomadic tribes built the largest land empire in human history.At its peak, it covered everything from the Pacific coast of China to the borders of Poland, and from Siberia down to the Persian Gulf.
That was East Asia, Central Asia, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe.
It was five times larger than the Roman Empire at its peak. And it all happened in the span of one lifetime.
“God alone knows who they are and from where they came.”
Russian chronicler describing the Mongols’ arrival.
The Mongol armies arrived so swiftly and conquered so decisively that the civilized world had no framework for what was happening to it.
They swept out of the steppe like a weather system — by the time you understood that something was coming, it had already arrived.
What is so notable is that the Mongols did not conquer a collection of disorganized, defenceless people. They overthrew the wealthiest empires the world had ever known. And they did it quickly.
The scale of what they conquered is difficult to overstate.
The Khwarezmian Empire, stretching across modern-day Iran, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan, had taken over 150 years to build. There were over two million people, wealthy trading cities, and standing armies. The Mongols dismantled it all in two years.
The Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad — seat of Islamic civilization for five hundred years, home to over a million people and the largest library in the world — fell in thirteen days.
The Song dynasty in China – three hundred and nineteen years old. A hundred and twenty million people and an economy that produced a third of the world’s GDP — three times the output of all of medieval Europe combined. A civilization that had invented gunpowder, movable type, and paper money.
In 1279, all of China fell to the Mongols.
A Minor Adjustment
How? How does a collection of nomadic tribes from the barren steppe dismantle the wealthiest civilizations on earth?
Most historians point to a minor adjustment in military technology.
The stirrup.
Stirrups existed before Genghis Khan. But the Mongols weaponized them in a way no army had done before.
With both feet planted firmly in iron stirrups and mounted on hardy steppe horses, Mongol warriors could fire arrows at full gallop with devastating accuracy. They could stand, pivot, and even ride backwards while loosing volleys into a pursuing enemy. They could cover distances that no infantry-based army could match, arriving at the walls of cities before scouts had time to deliver a warning.
The stirrup didn’t just improve cavalry. It created an entirely new kind of warfare — one that made the existing military paradigm obsolete overnight.
Erik Prince — the founder of Blackwater, the most elite private military force ever assembled — made an observation recently that stopped me in my tracks. He said, reflecting on the current conflict in Iran, that the introduction of drone warfare onto the modern battlefield represents “the greatest swing in the pendulum, since Genghis Khan put stirrups on horses.”
Now, when most people hear “drone warfare,” they think of a Predator or a Reaper — a $28 million aircraft operated by the U.S. military from a facility in Nevada. That is not what Prince is talking about.
He is talking about a $500 commercial quadcopter fitted with a 3D-printed munition that can be assembled in a garage and destroy a $3 million tank. He is talking about Iran’s Shahed drones — which cost somewhere between $20,000 and $40,000 to produce — being shot down by $5 million Patriot interceptor missiles.
He is talking about the U.S. Navy spending over a billion dollars in munitions to defend against Houthi drones that cost less than a used car.
This is what Prince means by stirrups.
The empires the Mongols conquered had operated for centuries under a simple assumption: more wealth meant larger armies, stronger weapons, and military dominance. Genghis Khan wiped that assumption out with a piece of bent iron that cost almost nothing and fit in the palm of your hand.
The stirrup didn’t give the Mongols a bigger army. It gave a smaller, poorer force the ability to defeat a richer, more established one.
Prince argues that is exactly what drones are doing today. The battlefield no longer belongs to the nation that spends the most. It belongs to the nation that adapts the fastest.
If he is right, we need to think very carefully about what comes next.
Winning by Not Losing
Here is a question most people never consider. What is the difference between winning a battle and winning a war?
The Americans have the most powerful military the world has ever seen. This is not a matter of opinion. In terms of technology, firepower, logistics, training, and the ability to project force anywhere on the planet, the United States military is without peer.
And yet.
The American military won every significant battle in Vietnam, Iraq and Afganistan… but lost all three wars.
The lesson is as old as warfare itself. When a smaller, weaker force is attacked by a superpower, it does not need to win. It needs to not lose.
Survival is victory.
If you are still standing when the great power loses its appetite for the fight — when the cost in blood and treasure exceeds the political will to continue — you have won. Not by defeating your enemy, but by refusing to be defeated.
Iran cannot defeat the American military. No honest assessment of the balance of forces suggests otherwise. But Iran does not need to defeat the American military. Iran needs to endure it. Every day the conflict continues without a decisive American victory, Iran’s strategic position improves. Every day the Strait of Hormuz remains contested, the cost to America — economic, political, and reputational — compounds.
And that brings us to a curious parallel in modern geopolitics…
America’s Suez Moment?
Most people assume that the transition from the British pound to the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency happened at the end of World War II. It seems logical. Britain was shattered. America was ascendant. The Bretton Woods agreement in 1944 appeared to settle the question.
But if you look at the actual balance sheets of central banks in 1945, you will not find a sudden pivot. Despite being battered — infrastructure destroyed, resources depleted, debts staggering — Britain had won the war. And after a century and a half of trusting the pound sterling, the world’s central banks did not have sufficient incentive to go looking for an alternative.
Until 1956.
In 1956, Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser made a calculation. He assessed that the United Kingdom — once the most powerful empire in human history — was too weak to defend and maintain its occupation of the Suez Canal.
The Suez Canal was not an ordinary waterway. It was the artery through which two-thirds of Europe’s oil supply travelled. It connected Britain to what remained of its trade interests in the Middle East, the Indian Ocean, and Asia.
Whoever controlled the Suez Canal controlled the flow of energy to the Western world.
President Nasser nationalized it.
The United Kingdom, unwilling to accept this humiliation, mobilized what had once been the most powerful navy on the planet and moved toward the canal alongside France and Israel.
But this was 1956, not 1856. The Royal Navy was short of resources. Without American manufacturing support — the same support that had sustained Britain through two world wars — they lacked the firepower for a sustained campaign.
So Britain did what it had done throughout World War II. It appealed to the Americans for help.
President Eisenhower, however, saw the situation differently. He worried that Britain attacking Egypt would push the entire Arab world toward the Soviet Union in the middle of the Cold War. This was against the US interests.
Frustrated with the careless nature of Britain’s military pursuits, he responded strategically and sent a message to the rest of the world.
He blocked $561 million in IMF standby credit that Britain desperately needed. He froze $600 million in Export-Import Bank loans. And he ordered the US Treasury to prepare to dump America’s holdings of British sterling bonds — a move that would have collapsed the pound overnight.
Britain’s Chancellor warned the Prime Minister that without American financial support, the country would be unable to import sufficient food and fuel within weeks.
The message was simple. Withdraw from the Suez Canal, or we will destroy your currency.
The British Navy retreated home. Tail between their legs. With the rest of the world watching.
This — not Bretton Woods, not the end of the war — was the moment that central banks around the world truly pivoted from the pound sterling to the American dollar. They watched the previous world superpower, which had dominated the globe for all of recent memory, become neutered. Unable to act without the permission and support of the new greater power.
The Strait
That is why analysts are calling the Strait of Hormuz America’s potential Suez moment.
The Americans have indicated a willingness to withdraw from Iran before the Strait of Hormuz is reopened to international shipping. If that happens — if an unsuccessful military adventure in Iran results in the Americans going home having lost control of the situation, having forfeited control of the Strait to their adversary — it does not matter under what pretense the narrative is spun domestically.
The rest of the world will see what actually happened.
And central banks will do what central banks have always done when they witness that kind of moment. They will adjust.
The Promoter
But here is something else I am thinking about.
The American military is dependent on manufacturing inputs from China. This is well documented. From rare earth minerals to electronic components, the supply chain that sustains American military capability runs through Chinese factories.
Iran is also dependent on China.
Although the Strait of Hormuz is theoretically closed to Western-bound oil tankers, ships have been travelling through it — with Iranian permission. Not just Iranian crude heading out to China, but Chinese cargo ships heading into Iran. Since the war began on February 28th, Iran has shipped at least 12 million barrels of crude oil through the Strait, all of it to China. Meanwhile, China-linked cargo vessels have been transiting in the opposite direction.
There has been much speculation in the United States about whether Iran will run out of missiles.
My question is different. What is on those Chinese cargo ships arriving in Iran?
Reports have surfaced of Chinese-supplied air defence systems, kamikaze drones, anti-ship cruise missiles, and even precursor chemicals for solid rocket fuel being shipped to Iranian ports. Is any of this finding its way onto the battlefield? And if so — what exactly are we looking at here?
I’ll tell you what it looks like to me.
In the 1970s, a boxing promoter out of Cleveland perfected something that would make him the most famous man in the sport — and the most controversial.
He put on some of the biggest fights in boxing history – Muhammad Ali versus George Foreman and Ali versus Joe Frazier. He managed Mike Tyson’s rise to undisputed heavyweight champion, against foes like Buster Douglas and Larry Holmes. He dominated the sport through the 1970’s, 80’s and 90’s.
The promoter’s name was Don King. And he is the most famous boxing promoter who ever lived. King understood something very simple: if you hold the promotion contract on both fighters, you don’t need to pick a winner. You just need the fight to happen.
Why is that controversial?
A boxing promoter’s job is to protect his fighter — to negotiate the best purse, to select the right opponent at the right time, to make sure the terms of the fight favour his man.
It’s a negotiation, and by definition, that means negotiating against the interests of the opponent.
But when one promoter holds both contracts, the negotiation shifts from promoter-on-promoter to promoter-on-fighter. And that’s a fight the promoter wins every time. (This is probably why Don King has been sued over 12 times by fighters.)
If you are not a boxing fan, think of it this way – the parallel would be hiring the same lawyer to represent both sides of a lawsuit. The only person guaranteed to walk away richer is the one collecting fees from both.
But here was King’s real leverage – his contracts required any fighter to agree that if they won, King would promote their future fights too – so he always retained the winning fighter under contract.
It didn’t matter who won. He had already locked up whoever walked out of the ring with the belt.
Is China the Don King of the Persian Gulf?
If the Strait reopens on American terms and Western commerce resumes, China will remain America’s indispensable manufacturing partner. The supply chains don’t change. The rare earth dependencies don’t change. America still can’t build the next generation of weapons systems without Chinese inputs. China keeps the contract.
If Iran wins — if the Americans withdraw and Iran maintains sovereign control of the Strait — China stays Iran’s primary weapons supplier, its largest oil customer, and its most important trading partner. Iranian crude flows to Chinese refineries at a discount. Chinese cargo flows into Iranian ports unopposed. China keeps the contract.
Show me a conflict where one country supplies both sides, and I’ll show you the country that’s actually “winning”.
The question the world should be asking is not whether America can defeat Iran. The question is whether America can afford to fight a war in which its primary economic competitor is bankrolling both corners of the ring.
Honest question — let me know in the comments: what am I missing?
Thats it for today,
Jay Martin
https://jaymartin.substack.com/p/the-don-king-strategy
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When escalation is a game played against you and you have no cards to play
Contact us: info@strategic-culture.suSuddenly, it would seem that there is hope for peace in the Middle East, or at least most of it, as Trump secured what he believed to be a deal with the Iranians. In reality, of course, it was the Iranians who had the advantage all along and gave him the “off ramp” which he desperately needed. The constant threats, with the most recent posting using foul language mocking Islam, all signalled that the U.S. president was losing his mind, tortured by a sense of no one listening to him, like a child in the corner who is forced to be naughty just to get the attention of adults. But there was a point in recent days – perhaps the social media post which used the ’F’ word – where it was clear he lost all control, his threats were empty, and it was Iran which held ALL the cards. And so a provisional deal was struck, which simply accepted a list of demands by the Iranians as a basis for negotiations. This was probably the greatest military defeat in modern times that any U.S. president has had to endure in office, and the humiliation for Trump is axiomatic. What a climbdown. From constantly playing a role in front of the cameras as the victor who is in control to actually being on the losing side which is prepared to do almost anything to get a ceasefire. The recent military operation to attempt to seize uranium involving special forces and Hercules planes, which went horribly wrong when the mission failed and then the subsequent rescue mission also failed, was one final slap in the face for Trump, who must have realised at this point that all of the military briefings that he was given were bad and that most of the people around him who are advising him have no military experience at all and are out of their depth.
But it’s actually worse than that.
In recent days, it has transpired that what we originally thought got Trump into the war in the first place – an out-of-control fixation to bomb Iran no matter what deal was offered, goaded by Israel – was in fact erroneous. There are credible reports now circulating that claim that Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff actually misunderstood what the Iranians had offered them when they were negotiating a deal – a deal which was much better than what was offered to Obama and would have made Trump come out of the negotiations a winner. Many analysts at the time were shocked that Trump’s decision to bomb Iran came about because, they thought at the time, that Iran had made a credible offer too soon and that the Trump team were not interested in peace and so were left in an awkward position, looking like fraudsters. In reality, it now seems, they simply didn’t grasp what was being offered to them, such is their lack of competence and their poor command of the English language. The Iranians are all highly educated and speak English remarkably well, and yet it would seem that the two sides were divided by the nuances of English. The two cronies that Trump sent were simply not bright enough to really see the wood from the trees, and as a consequence the U.S. has lost the Straits of Hormuz to Iran now, the petrodollar is on the way out, a new regime is indeed in place (but one which now favours a nuclear deterrent), relations with GCC countries are irreparably damaged, and a new powerful Iran has emerged from the ashes in the region.
Plain stupidity by Trump and his unique style of running the presidency using friends and sycophants as advisers has got him to a place where even Sky News calls a “massive strategic defeat” for the U.S., as now the ten-point plan not only calls for reparations but also includes the withdrawal of all U.S. troops from the region and all sanctions to be lifted against Iran.
For the U.S. to lift sanctions, it has to be backed by Congress, which is unlikely to do so, although there are some observers who say they might back it just to spite Trump. In reality, it will be UN sanctions which will have to go, but the real blow to the U.S. is that the petrodollar is finished and that America’s influence in the region has been taken over by Iran. Tehran is the new regional power, all thanks to the sensational stupidity of Trump and his airhead cronies.
But there’s more stupidity to come.
Barely a few hours after the plan was accepted by Trump, it transpired that the Americans believed that the ceasefire doesn’t cover Lebanon. J.D. Vance told journalists that this was probably down to a “genuine misunderstanding by the Iranians”, despite it being clearly written in one of the points: “end to all hostilities in the region”.
Ceasing hostilities against all resistance groups in region
And so Lebanon, and what Netanyahu is doing there – deliberately creating a forever war there with Hezbollah so he can continue to stay in power and evade corruption charges – is now the most important part, if not the Achilles heel, of the deal. What are we to make of the explanation of J.D. Vance? Is it a ruse to trick the Iranians, so that Israel can be rearmed? Is all that Trump needs a pause of a few weeks before he believes he can come back with an even more hare-brained plan to “invade” Iran? It’s unclear, although critical observers are beginning to realise the level of incompetence and rank ineptitude on the American side and are starting to use the “idiot” argument to explain most of these grey areas. As was brilliantly summed up by a former CIA director on live TV, Trump was called “a pathological liar, corrupt and incompetent” whose reliance on sycophants who only tell him what he wants to hear got him into the mess he is in today. Trump’s blundering in Iran has made Tehran richer and more powerful than it ever was before and will leave it still able to process uranium. Trump played the escalation game all along with Iranians who were much smarter and always one step ahead, who ultimately turned the same game against him. Tiny Lebanon now takes centre stage.
When escalation is a game played against you and you have no cards to play
China buys 80% of Iranian oil. How is this going to work? While it may help get more ships thru, I doubt they are going to board Chinese ships with Iranian oil.
1 & 2 Rationale?
The US is in the driver’s seat regarding Iran.
None of Iran’s neighbors want Iran’s crazies to have a nuclear bomb.
All the youtube videos saying Iran is winning, will never change these 2 above facts.Iran is losing on all fronts.
The only thing that is unknown, is how long Iran can continue to lose.The US had 2 strategies to choose from:
1. Bomb IRGC Iran first.
2. Blockade Iran.So, why did the US chose 1 & 2., instead of 2 & 1.?
My guess is the US figured doing 1 first, degrading IRGC, would make 2, the waiting time for Iran IRGC to run out of money by blockade, more effective, and maybe happen in a shorter timeline.
The argument for a blockade 2 first, is it is less destructive and cheaper for US and Gulf countries.
But it might take a lot longer.We know which rationale Trump chose.
A man in a hurry, with no time to spare, for sitting around and waiting.Claiming victory, whilst admitting defeat: There is no easy way to open Hormuz
Contact us: info@strategic-culture.suBloomberg: “It is arguably Iran that has secured the most significant strategic victory … There is every sign that Tehran’s ability to control the Strait is increasing”
The defeats which the West keeps on having “[are] above all … intellectual”. And “not being able to understand what they are seeing – means that it’s impossible to respond effectively to it”. So Aurelien has argued. But “the problem goes beyond the fighting on the battlefield, to seeing and understanding the nature of asymmetric wars and their economic and political dimensions”.
“This is particularly the case for Iran, where… Washington appears to be incapable of understanding that the ‘other side’ does have a strategy with economic and political components – and is implementing it”.
“[In line with the western obsession with trivia], all the media concentration recently has been on the movement of U.S. troops to the region and their possible uses, as though that, in itself, was going to decide something. Yet in fact, the real issue is the development and deployment by the Iranians of a new concept of warfare, based on missiles, drones and defensive preparations, and the inability of the West, with its platform-centric mentality, to understand and process these developments [i.e., fully assimilate the strategy behind asymmetrical warfare]”.
Iran’s security concept and model was planned more than 20 years ago. The trigger for the move to an asymmetric paradigm came from the U.S.’ utter destruction of Iraq’s centralised military command in 2003, as a result of a 3-week massive air assault on Baghdad.
The issue for Iran that arose in its wake was how the country might build a deterrent military structure when it did not have (and could not have) anything resembling peer air capability. And when too, the U.S. could look down upon the extent of Iran’s military infrastructure from its high-resolution satellite cameras.
Well, the first answer simply was to have as little of its military structure out in the open to be observed from above. Its components had to be buried – and buried deeply (beyond the reach of most bombs). The second answer was that deeply buried missiles could indeed, in effect, become Iran’s ‘air force’ – i.e. a substitute for a conventional air force. Iran thus has been constructing and stockpiling missiles for more than twenty years. The third response was to divide Iran’s military infrastructure into autonomous provincial commands – to decentralise command centres, with each having separate stockpiled munitions, separate missile silos, and where appropriate, their own naval forces and militia.
In short, Iran’s military machine – in the event of a decapitation strike – was designed to operate as an automated, decentralised retaliation machine that cannot be easily stopped or controlled.
When unable to understand what is before our very eyes, the easiest thing is to reach for that which one knows – a build-up of troops – and to continue doing what hasn’t worked in the past.
In an earlier incarnation, a younger Trump – desperate to be admired as a star in the world of Manhattan real estate – took New York Attorney Roy Cohen to be his personal mentor. “The latter notably was also the lawyer for the city’s five big crime families – who had, with connections such as these, earned for himself the reputation as someone not to be messed with”, Israeli military commentator, Alon Ben David relates:
“In most cases, all Trump needed to do was to introduce Cohen to the other side of the deal, so that the latter would agree to his terms. Sometimes Trump was also forced … to drag the other side to court, where Cohen would bare his teeth to the judges and win. But that was always Trump’s bottom line: win. Not to make the pie bigger, not a win-win for both sides, but a victory for him alone – and preferably with the other side’s surrender”.
Time moves on, and today, as Ben David writes, the U.S. military juggernaut serves as Trump’s ‘Roy Cohen’. He presents the American military might for display to the Iranians in the expectation that they readily will capitulate; else he, Trump, will let go of the leash. Trump complained to Witkoff after the armada of U.S. naval vessels had been assembled off the Persian coast that he was ‘puzzled and confused’ as to why the Iranians had not already capitulated on sighting the collective naval power assembled.
“[The cause for Trump’s puzzlement is that] this time he faces an opponent different from any he has ever known. These are not Manhattan real estate moguls or Atlantic City mobsters, they are Persians, members of a 3,000-year-old culture, and they have different concepts of time and what victory is”.
Trump doesn’t now know what to do: he is confused and at a loss as to how to extricate himself from this predicament. He has threatened Iran, but they don’t capitulate. And as might be expected, Netanyahu, fearing that Washington might enter into negotiations with Iran before Iran’s military capabilities have been completely dismantled, “is pressuring the Trump administration to carry out a short, high-intensity operation that could include ground forces”, Israeli commentator Ben Caspit writes in Ma’ariv.
Whilst Trump is sending mixed messages about the prospects for talks with the Islamic Republic, Israeli officials believe he is considering three options: First to escalate the war by attacking Iran’s energy infrastructure on Kharg Island and at its South Pars gas field, with a second option being a ground operation to eliminate Iran’s highly enriched uranium stockpile.
A third option being considered would be to negotiate an agreement with Iran – but such a prospect would be seen by Israeli leadership circles as a “clear Iranian victory, opening the path for the Iranian Republic to survive”, Caspit writes. “Israel is focused on weakening the regime to the point where it cannot recover – thus it hopes, maybe encouraging future mass protests. This argument is also being used to convince Washington to continue the war”, Caspit emphasises.
A fourth option could be that Trump just declares victory and walks away.
What, realistically, might Trump hope to accomplish if he expands the war?
First, both Israeli and U.S. military officials now consider that toppling the Iranian State is nigh impossible to achieve through airstrikes alone. It has never worked in the past.
Secondly, statements of faith by the U.S. Administration in say the ultimate military seizure of the Strait of Hormuz should be seen more as battle-cries and descriptions of fantasies which reveal a deeper problem–that of strategic lacunae —
“They are not deduced from the facts of the situation, nor do there have to be actual processes capable of making them happen. The truth is what we want it to be; the truth is what makes us comfortable, we prefer the myth to the reality”.
The fact is that there is no easy way to reopen the Strait. Any negotiated reopening would, at a minimum, require substantive concessions to Iran, including explicit recognition of Iranian sovereignty over the waterway.
An attempt to agree a ceasefire to open Hormuz would require it to be applicable across all fronts: it would require Israel to cease operations in Lebanon, for AnsarAllah to similarly halt attacks on Israel, for Iraq to halt its attacks – and for Israel to halt its attacks in Occupied Palestine.
Thirdly, Trump claims that that ‘regime change’ has already occurred because he had not heard the names of the new Iranian leaders before–“These are different people than anyone has ever heard of before, and frankly they’ve been more reasonable. So, we’ve had total regime change beyond what anyone thought possible”. Trump doesn’t know who the ‘new’ third layer of Iran’s leadership are, but nonetheless presumes that they will be more flexible in negotiating with the U.S.. (What is the basis for this ‘faith statement’? No facts needed?)
Fourth, any attempt to open Hormuz by direct military assault would be fraught with the risk of sustaining substantial U.S. casualties: Hormuz is home ground to the Iranians and constitutes a prospective battle for which they have been preparing over many years. The geography of Hormuz alone–narrow waterways, proximity to Iran’s coastline, and dense Iranian defence systems – pose obvious and severe risks. From where would the troops stage? How would they be supplied? How would they be exfiltrated?
Even were U.S. forces to seize Kharg, or one, or all of the three islands adjacent to the UAE coastline, Iran could still attack unauthorised tankers transiting the waterway using surface or submersible drones or missiles launched from mainland Iran.
And even if successful, U.S. military positions on the islands would not solve the core problem – Iran would still have the ability to impose costs (missile strikes and casualties) from afar, and would use this leverage to impose further escalatory steps.
Fifth, as with the suggestion of controlling Iran’s enriched uranium, there is no way to ensure that the reported 430 kg of 60% enriched uranium that Iran has is out of Iranian hands other than seizing it; an agreement on Iran relinquishing it is unlikely, as is seizing it in an impossibly complex military operation –
According to the Washington Post, when Trump requested a plan to seize the enriched uranium from Iran, the U.S. military briefed him on a complex operation involving airlifting excavation equipment, building a runway inside Iran for cargo planes to extract the material, all with the deployment of hundreds of troops.
A U.S. Special Forces military operation to seize this uranium would require meticulous detailing of the site (or sites) where it is held, as well as requiring well-founded staging and ex-filtration plans. Does the U.S. know if this uranium is still in one consignment, or has it been separated?
There is no indication that the U.S. has done the ‘thinking through’ for such an operation – suggesting that this aspect might be lined up as a deception exercise: Mount a small operation close to Isfahan, pretend to have seized the uranium, and skedaddle away quickly before Iranian forces kill American troops.
And finally, regarding the destruction of Iran’s missile capabilities, there is simply no way to achieve this. Iran’s magazines and production facilities are dispersed across the extent of the country and buried deeply. Maybe to lie would be Trump’s best option to produce a ‘win’ on this issue.
Iran has launched the extensive machinery of its ‘Mosaic’ system of long-term, pre-planned military actions. This is the point – Iran’s strategic counterattack was not conceived to lead to any negotiated compromise, but rather to create the circumstance by which it can escape the western-imposed ‘cage’ of endless sanctions, blockades, isolation and siege.
The uncomfortable reality for the U.S. and its allies is that every available counter-military or diplomatic response to Iran’s strategic counterattack carries significant downsides.
The war is Trump’s and the U.S.’ to lose. Trump now realises the war is lost – it may be lost, but it is not over. It may last for some time.
After a month of war, “it is arguably Iran that has secured the most significant strategic victory”, notes Bloomberg – with its ever “tightening grip over traffic through the Strait of Hormuz”:
“There is every sign that Tehran’s ability to control the Strait is increasing … The near-total closure of Hormuz since [early March] … has proved an exceptionally effective asymmetric weapon in Iran’s fight against two of the world’s most powerful military forces”.
Claiming victory, whilst admitting defeat: There is no easy way to open Hormuz
Just catching up on telegram. There are also over the side mine sweeping kits. Makes any platform a minesweeper. Thats what happens when you just make shit up to match your narrow mind. Peckerhead.
“Iran’s crazies”
wes, please explain what you mean if you’ve a moment.
everything i’ve seen up to this moment is quite lucid.
“Iran’s crazies” could have put blown up dimona seven times over already.
why haven’t they?
is it perhaps that they lucidly understand wind currents, both physical and metaphorical?
again, everyone loses in war, and anyone reading this is losing a lot.
even those who “profit” suffer unimaginable losses.
i guess this is what happens when we rely on “they, the people” to decide the important stuff.
anyhoo, nice wind tonight..
U.S. strategic defeat to Russia
U.S. strategic defeat to Iran
U.S. collapse in corruption and deception
tdk:
From what I understand, none of Iran’s neighbors are comfortable with Iran taking steps towards having a nuclear bomb.
Iran has been threatening all of it’s neighbors with these steps while at the same time saying they are not building a nuclear bomb for nearly 50 years now.
They all want the uncertainty to stop.In addition neither Russia nor China want Iran to have the bomb.
Russia only building a certain type of nuclear power plants.
China not allowing NK to export nuclear bomb stuff.When in doubt, actions speak louder than words.
Also the crazies could suddenly change and then be weeks away from having the bomb.By the crazies, I am talking about the religious mullahs and their IRGC who protect them.
These ruling elites represent only a small percentage of Iran’s 90 million people.That is why Iran’s ruling elites scare their neighbors so much.
Their hold onto power is rather dicey.I think this is why Russia and China are staying on the sidelines.
They too would prefer an Iran without the bomb.
They would be quite happy if the US does the dirty work and forces Iran to stop acquiring the bomb.Naturally making money from the war, is business as usual with no honor involved.
A buck, is a buck!Cited Articles:
A number of written articles cited by Michael tonight, give good counter arguments from a number of different points of views.
All are worth reading.With so many monkey’s involved in this fight, there are a lot of banana peels for everyone involved to slip on!
NY’s Mamdanie Taxing Gold & Silver:
New York’s Mayor Mamdani and NY State want to tax New York’s gold and silver bars trading on the CME hooing to raise $1.2 billion each year!
Noteworthy, all five of New York’s surrounding neighbors have recently removed taxes on gold and silver!
A broke socialist chasing fool’s gold!
Now, you see it!
Puff!
Now, you don’t see it!Iran:
Iran is “failing to loose”!
Unlike the Toronto Maple Leafs, “successfully snatching defeat from the jaws of victory”!
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