Bret Devereaux argues that the Middle East is a region composed primarily of poor, strategically unimportant countries:
The entire region has exactly two strategic concerns of note: the Suez Canal (and connected Red Sea shipping system) and the oil production in the Persian Gulf and the shipping system used to export it. So long as these two arteries remained open the region does not matter very much to the United States. None of the region’s powers are more than regional powers (and mostly unimpressive ones at that), none of them can project power out of the region and none of them are the sort of dynamic, growing economies likely to do so in the future. The rich oil monarchies are too small in terms of population and the populous countries too poor.
In short then, Iran is very big and not very important, which means it would both be very expensive to do anything truly permanent about the Iranian regime and at the same time it would be impossible to sell that expense to the American people as being required or justified or necessary. So successive American presidents responded accordingly: they tried to keep a ‘lid’ on Iran at the lowest possible cost.
The Epsteins who run the US have condemned the world to a Second Great Depression and mass famine. Welcome to the new Russo-Chinese Empire.
A Data Secrets Lox post, ‘The “I don’t think (clearly very important thing) matters much’ came out just before Brad’s post. I wonder if he was inspired.
The win conditions for the countries in this war are way too lopsided to break in America’s favor. The Jews is not worth the squeeze.
One wonders what the Israelis plan on doing as the walls close in, and I can’t say I relish the prospect.
“None of the region’s powers are more than regional powers (and mostly unimpressive ones at that)”
I guess I am more impressed with Iran’s regional rocketry than the author.
” disruption of fertilizer production,… has the potential to raise food prices globally. Higher global food prices … are pretty strongly associated with political instability in less developed countries. …. A spike in food prices was one of the core causes of the 2010 Arab Spring which led in turn to the Syrian Civil War, the refugee crisis of which significantly altered the political landscape of Europe.”
We could see five years of global economic disruption.
Iran may have been too powerless to be called a regional power before this war, but they were always very good at systematic thinking, engineering, and chess. Bucky Fuller would say that Iranians are good at doing more with less. Now all that preparation has culminated in a situation where Iran can spend $100,000 on a flare-equipped missile that provokes the UAE into spending $100,000,000 on interceptor missiles. Maybe Iran can’t project military power farther than Diego Garcia, but within the range of its missiles it seems to be much more formidable than most Westerners had realized.
In which he repeats “teh People are ekshully American sympathizers, Regime is Sauron” meme once more.
The problem with acoup.blog is that Devereaux definitely can research and think for himself… right until the moment any subject touches some tripwire of MiniTru (be it $CURRENT_THING or cone-sensus of Marxism academia). Then he twitches, goes into full glass-eyed «Yes – Dnyarri – I – wish – to – know – about – flowers» zombie mode and remains in it.
Of the Current Thing, see for example this: Miscellanea: Understanding the War in Ukraine.
The whole package, pope-of-the-world attitude, eye-watering amount of democratically democratickled democracy* and even occasional strawman. Plus a fine collection of clown memes, from same old “Teh People everywhere are ekshully loyal NPR Americans in funny hats” to “no-fly zone” (though at least without “durr lebensraum”). On the upside, he gives nice links, including some to the hivemind components far upstream of Cloaka Maxima (like @ ProfTalmadge).
As to the Marxism academia, since it’s all-consuming, its poison pops up randomly even when talking about ancient India. Which makes his musing on any subject not already familiar to the reader rather untrustworthy.
* (as Pelevin noted, it’s not even a misuse, but a full homonym, in meaning #2 derived from “demo version”)
Bob Sykes says:
Hilarious as this image may be, you miss the internal tensions of hegemony: general “deep” oligarchs vs neocons vs theocracy. The former is indeed remarkably degenerate, the second dangerously stupid, but antinomian theocratic plague remains the greatest long term threat to everyone.