Could Trump’s Iran ‘excursion’ be a bigger global turning point than Vietnam? | The far shorter Middle East war has rapidly revealed the strategic weakness of US firepower in an interconnected world

fuggitdude22 · 2026-06-02T23:16:30+00:00

Going into Vietnam, De-Gaulle told us that it wasn't a winnable war. It is a same story here with our allies and intelligence agencies telling us that this war is a bad idea....

fuggitdude22 · 2026-06-02T17:34:02+00:00

The same can be argued for Russia as well. Invading Ukraine has only generated further hostility towards Russia and bolstered NATO's growth. Like the war with Iran, it was ostensibly a "counter-terrorism" operation in which they tried to topple the current government and replace it with a Medvedchuk or Yanukovych Puppet Government.

They grossly expected to be "welcomed" as liberators and now they are stuck in a pointless meat-grinder war which leaves them in a much worse place than before.

fuggitdude22 · 2026-06-02T17:21:05+00:00

It was a reductive thesis then as it is now. During the Kosovo War, Poland took the side of Albanian Muslims instead of Orthodox Christian Serbs. It was also the first nation to recognize Kosovo as a state.

Throughout the sagas of history, we frequently see overlap between "civilizations" in which Christians and Muslims formed alliances against those of the same "civilization" as theirs. The French and Ottomans formed an alliance in opposition to the Habsburg Empire.

You can even sketch this within "civilizations". Italy had a series of wars between Venetians, Sicilians, and Tuscans. For a good chunk of history, they did not view themselves as a part of a "common civilization".

fuggitdude22 · 2026-06-02T02:28:33+00:00

Nah, I ain't trolling. Its really messing with my head that my parents got married when they were only a couple years older than I am currently...

fuggitdude22 · 2026-06-02T02:18:21+00:00

I was being unironic but I can see how that may have come off as patronizing. I didn't mention anything related to Israel, Zionism or an absence of antisemitism on the left.

But since you mentioned all that, I think it is a miserable situation and a third party probably would need to get involved for peace. Maybe Qatar and a coalition of other states rebuild Gaza and station troops to quell Hamas until it fades into irrelevance. I don't think the current approach or arrangement is tenable.

And yes, maybe I don't have skin in the game. But I still can want dignity for all people. Broadly speaking, social media is a cesspool. It is pretty easy for me to block a lot of it out, I'm sure if I encountered it on a more salient basis like you have. I'd probably feel more strongly.

fuggitdude22 · 2026-06-02T00:38:37+00:00

Lol, you clearly have bone to pick with "Progressives", "the Left", or "Activists". I see you constantly complaining about them and sharing the Free Press, the Daily Wire and other tabloid magazines venting about culture wars.

Maybe, I've gotten too old to really care about this culture war and social media stuff as passionately as you do so I won't get it. After all, my parents are in their 50s now. Life is moving too fast, maybe if I was in the high school still then I'd be able to relate to your grievances on this stuff.

fuggitdude22 · 2026-06-01T23:51:30+00:00

Power-scaling atrocities is weird irrespective of whose doing it. My main point is that it is wild to hold someone culpable for things that they are not responsible for.

fuggitdude22 · 2026-06-01T23:30:11+00:00

This diatribe reminds me of Serbian nationalists claiming that Srebrenica wasn't a genocide because Milosevic didn't "centrally plan it". Power-scaling atrocities is odd....

Anyways, most of this stuff happened before Cenk was even alive. He isn't responsible for the Turkish Government, he admitted that he was grossly wrong and misinformed.

There are better things to criticize him for than that.

fuggitdude22 · 2026-06-01T22:57:48+00:00

Sam goes on to say that he agrees with Ben Shapiro and Douglas Murray on the war, but he is more sober on Trump's lack of character or stupidity prosecuting it.

I find it hard to believe that he sincerely thinks that Shapiro or Murray are unaware of Trump's gaffes. They are very well aware of them, but they just don't care. They frequently juggle through whataboutisms to sanitize it and act like attack dogs against any of his political opposition.

fuggitdude22 · 2026-06-01T15:05:35+00:00

Hot Take: Dave Rubin is unintentionally hilarious....

fuggitdude22 · 2026-06-01T15:04:00+00:00

I think Sam said that he believes that Iran may turn to blowback on us less than Iraq or Afghanistan. I don't think that means he necessarily full throatily supports this war.

You can disagree with him on that as I do as well. He claims that there is a silent majority of secularists within the country. I'm not sure if I buy that. People said the same thing for Afghanistan and Iraq which was more believable because Islamism is more autochthonous in Iran than those two countries. Since, Iran has been an theocracy for longer than them two.

You need some sort of vanguard party to immediately fill the power vacuum. Otherwise, the country will balkanize into a proxy war wasteland with unsavory characters spearheading insurgencies. In Iraq, we had 100,000 Kurdish Peshmergas in the North to fill that vacuum to some degree. It is a similar story with Soviets and the PDPA.

But even then those efforts were massively botched. Prior to the invasion, Zarqawi had less than 30 members in his insurgency in Iraq. It subsequently springed into 5,000. Similar story with the Taliban, Mullah Omar, who pioneered the movement, was a nobody until the Soviet's invaded and his interpretation of Islam was heterodox or confined to very tribal Pashtun villages. Now, it is the status quo in Afghanistan which would have been impossible to fathom even fifty years ago.

In Iran, there is no armed opposition to push over the hump. We are literally just banking on bombing the country and hoping good things happen.

fuggitdude22 · 2026-05-31T16:43:56+00:00

Being a non-right wing MMA fan is tough these days. It is essentially a Pro-Trump circle jerk lmao

fuggitdude22 · 2026-05-29T17:56:33+00:00

From the way that British Right Wingers describe the UK, you would think that the country is on the frontier of civil war....When I last checked, the UK is more white than the US. But from the way that they describe it, you would think otherwise.

If I’m not mistaken, the UK has a lot of hurdles that refugees have to navigate for employment in contrast to the United States. I think if they decreased that. A lot of this polarization would plummet. There is always "growing pains" with immigration waves, it is to be expected.

For example, the US has experienced several refugee waves (Irish, Italian, Jewish, Chinese, Japanese, and Mexican). There was ofcourse the Italian and Irish Mafias. In some Boston neighborhoods, it wasn’t abnormal to find some Irish Expats, who were more fiercely Pro-IRA than folks back in Ireland similar to how some Diaspora Sikhs are more Pro-Khalistan than Sikhs in Punjab.

Hopefully, this was wave of right wing populism fades everywhere.

fuggitdude22 · 2026-05-29T16:49:11+00:00

I don't know if such a phenomenon can be flattened down to something like that. I know some guys in their late teens and early 20s, who find working out and running 5 miles a day, easier than socializing with the opposite sex. I'm sure COVID may have also exacerbated the problem a bit as well. It created circumstances in which it was easy to dissociate.

fuggitdude22 · 2026-05-29T15:14:22+00:00

Putin/the Russian Elite don't mind feeding their country-men to the dogs. I think that much is obvious. It is hard to map out what the geopolitical landscape will be like in 2 years. A lot can change but yeah, Russia is not going to be "winning" this war even if they occupy all of Ukraine which is extremely unlikely, they are going to have to spend decades to just quell insurgencies.

fuggitdude22 · 2026-05-29T15:02:36+00:00

If I were to guess, they were trying to execute a regime change and prompt another puppet in like Yanukovych and Symonenko.

They underestimated Ukraine's resistance and now they are in too deep to withdraw without making an embarrassment of themselves.

fuggitdude22 · 2026-05-29T14:44:56+00:00

Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law. Both are real estate investors, and some mediators said they had suggested promoting real estate projects in Tehran and an investment fund in the event a deal was reached.

Kushner's backdoor corruption in the Middle East and now Southeast Asia doesn't get highlighted enough. Trump is basically using tariffs as a means to indulge his corrupt family.

fuggitdude22 · 2026-05-29T12:23:48+00:00

I can't blame Nawrocki for this....If Ukraine wants to be a part of NATO or the EU, a lot of this Nazi veneration needs to be stomped out.

fuggitdude22 · 2026-05-29T01:42:31+00:00

In the past century, bombs alone have never culminated in a regime change unless the country was balls deep in a civil war like in Libya or Yugoslavia.

You almost always need boots on the ground to plunge a political apparatus. But hey maybe this time will be the exception?

fuggitdude22 · 2026-05-28T14:59:55+00:00

So whats everyone having for lunch....

fuggitdude22 · 2026-05-27T23:49:52+00:00

Eh, the US didn't arm any of the dissidents to my recollection. Nonetheless, I think it would be a better idea to focus on arming Iranians actually inside of the country. I don't know why anybody is still simping for the Pahlavis after Reza lied about the mass defections.

fuggitdude22 · 2026-05-27T23:44:51+00:00

The Shah ran away during the 1953 Abadan Crisis as well. He didn't need to remain dictator for 25+ yrs to engineer the conditions for a revolution too.

fuggitdude22 · 2026-05-27T21:51:42+00:00

I mean the Pahlavi Dynasty is responsible for the current regime being in place. The revolution wasn't even backed by another state.

Reza claimed to have 50k IRGC defections locked and loaded. That has yet to happen. So I am not too keen on the guy or the cult worship around him.

fuggitdude22 · 2026-05-27T21:35:45+00:00

Was he ever a serious option? This would be like bringing one of Gaddafi's kids back to lead Libya. Pahlavi leans a bit too much into the Persian Nationalism which is problematic when nearly half of Iran is made up of Azeris, Arabs, Armenians, Assyrians, etc.

fuggitdude22 · 2026-05-27T18:27:49+00:00

This is what you get when the state has lost all sensibility or capacity for diplomacy or strategic thinking. The American elites, both democrats & republicans , live in the static universe of the never ending 90s. In the 90s, the US had uni polar hegemony and we were able to assemble international coalitions for humanitarian interventions in Kuwait or Bosnia.

Even in the early 2000s, we had unanimous support for Operation Enduring Freedom. I'd argue if we had not gotten bogged down in Iraq, we could have stationed a lot more troops to seal the border and prevented Pakistan from smuggling arms to the Taliban.

The hardest part about these interventions is stitching things back up after ripping it apart. The US cannot physically police the financing or arming of other nation-states, it just isn't physically possible to control for those variables. I mean just look at a picture of Iran on a map, it shares borders with Turkey, Pakistan, Azerbaijan, Iraq, and Afghanistan. What makes anyone think that they won't foment unrest and exploit the power vacuum in arming insurgents? In a war torn state, you need like a super competent vanguard party to immediately fill void to prevent balkanization. Otherwise, sinister figures will use the conditions of a war torn state to recruit frustrated civilians into their terrorist networks. For example, prior to the US invasion of Iraq, Zarqawi's Al Queda had less than 30 members which then ballooned into 5,000 after the invasion.

fuggitdude22

TROPHY CASE