They legitimately thought it was going to be like the Portuguese seizure of the Straits of Malacca in 1511 or the Barbary Wars.
Sadly, the Iranians neglected to bring war elephants and instead opted for Shaheds.
You are talking to an agnostic ethnic Jew.
This seems accurate. What needed to happen was a president that cared enough to have a SecNav who was focused on procurement and a budget that provided the space for it.
And that did not happen and now we are here. But, like, Trump is a lot of why that didn't happen, soooooooooo....
Hanoi, famously bombed back into the Stone Age and famously *not* a death zone for American pilots whereover dozens of B-52s were shot down.
This is why you don't wage aggressive war for no reason at the drop of a hat: it's violence for the sake of violence, you are not prepared, and you will accidentally blow up innocent girls.
This is probably incorrect, the narrative was always more for external consumption than a sincere expression of Khamenei's beliefs.
What *is* true is that he seems to have been a restraining hand at the ship of state, at least as far as taking actions that could overthrow the Islamic Revolution:
I would not be shocked if "reparations sound like DEI" is an actual sentence that is uttered in the White House.
Exactly, there always have been. Indians made up a large chunk of the colonial administration and for many years the Gulf was subordinate to the Indian Viceroy in Calcutta. Oman bordered Pakistan at Gwadar until 1958.
More recently it's more about Indian wage laborers than bureaucrats, of course.
"Teaches Heidegger" is not an immediate red flag, but adding in "translates Dugin" implies a strong interest in the far right basically by default.
"What do you mean, I'm just a philosopher" is a poor response if your interests are Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Alfred Rosenberg.
Yeah. On the whole it's a net good, but the companies are definitely in a hole vis a vis margins. Looking at Jinko for instance, you have a negative operating margin for like two years? So it really depends on the volume being shipped and how much prices rise.
Nope, not at all. Just pointing out the thin ice that the firms in question are operating on and why a surge in orders may not have terribly beneficial implications for the PRC.
just a gentle reminder that the strait is 30 miles wide so "mined" is a distribution and it is a very wide one.
It honestly depends, Chinese solar is engaged in its own deflationary death spiral.
I'd be stunned if this doesn't help them finally raise prices, but given how much overcapacity some Chinese solar firms have who knows if that'll be enough.
For those of you who think this will not hit the US or Canada, please recall who North America's largest trading partners are (left: US, right: Canada)
Trying to imagine explaining this to someone in the Obama admin:
"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Container ships on fire in the Strait of Hormuz. I watched interceptors glitter in the dark near the Burj Khalifa. All those moments will be lost in time, like petroleum in the acid rain"
the 'jesus was fictional' stuff backprojects *our* cultural beliefs about the importance of Jesus into the 1st century AD. 'there was a local teacher/preacher in Palestine called Josh' was not an unusual thing!
Yes, it's really more about this. Nobody sets out to disprove the existence of Gautama Buddha or Zarathustra (despite them also being obscure but almost certainly real figures in the historical record) because most people don't have an ax to grind against Buddhism or Zoroastrianism.
The intense irony of the Dust Bowl is that it replaced unsustainable Okie "ways of knowing" (smallholder farming) with sustainable industrial agriculture.
I suppose technically a BYD Seagull is a "Chinese electronic gadget" as well, which Americans do not have access to.
Recall that China has more nuclear states on its borders than any country in the world (India, Russia, Pakistan, and North Korea) and a strategic rivalry with the US, and it becomes much clearer why they want to complete a buildup sooner rather than later.
The Chinese stockpile is meant as insurance against other nuclear powers trying to bully it, but I find it very unlikely that Xi Jinping wants nuclear war. Given the USSR was potentially planning pre-emptive strikes against Chinese nuclear facilities in the 1960s, the PRC's posture is reasonable.
This is vestigial from the Cold War, frankly. Eisenhower started it with massive retaliation ("if the Soviets march through the Fulda Gap, we will annihilate Warsaw"), and the subsequent arms race entrenched it.
The modern US's lack of nuclear posturing is more indicative than official policy.
Not to be that person, but there's a reason the entire Battle of Midway (1942) fleet was built from 1934-1939, and why Congress passed the Two-Ocean Navy Act in July 1940 rather than December 1941.
And modern ships take far longer to build than in the 1930s.
Again, there were/are plans but they assumed a fundamentally different (not insane) strategic environment for such a war
there was no plan for "YOLO Iran war with only bibi," hence why the best they came up with in a couple weeks was "uhhhh bomb stuff I guess"
The idea that there was ever a point where working class households could live comfortably with only the dad working is a fucking lie, a core tenet of fascism and happily repeated by a lot of people who consider themselves leftist or feminist. It’s so wrong that if you say it I think you’re stupid
*taps sign* China is a real place with actual people and policies, not somewhere for you to project your feelings about the United States onto.
I have a globe from 1942 that I sometimes bring out to show to students and it's always quite the revelation.
Hard to imagine a world map that bears *less* resemblance to today's.
Yeah, part of the efforts of 'back off' signalling is that Iran would really like this to de-escalate. They do not want to go for broke because broke is a very real option for them.
They want to signal they'd do it if you made them. And...you know...they might. But might not. 🤷♂️
This means he is less likely to declare victory and go home, which of course also means Iran will continue to hold Hormuz hostage for a while.
he did not want anarchist communes. he did not want mom and pop shops. he *fucking hated* the petite bourgeoisie — way more than he did the high bourgeoisie, whom he saw as necessary and, in their way, deserving of the respect and adversary gives to a worthy foe. he wanted something all-encompassing
