Kyle Haynes

A lot of important people’s total failures of imagination fucked us all.

Oh no whatever will we do

This’ll help gas prices

Sometimes I think back on the fact that like half the country’s reaction to a group called black lives matter was basically nah that’s a bridge too far for us. Not even the group’s positions or rhetoric…the name was objectionable. They literally refused to accept that black lives matter.

This uh…looked intentional

I’m sorry…what? There’s a thing called the “National Energy Dominance Council?”

Anyway I hereby propose that all the gender studies faculty whose depts are being shuttered just be immediately absorbed into political science.

Sure a demented narcissist is torching constitutional democracy and the entire international order, but on the bright side, after 7+ years of parenthood, I’ve finally got my pancake recipe totally dialed in.

Between this and Rubio trying to distinguish between regime change and changing leaders we’re really burning through abuses of the English language that’d make Orwell blush.

Effective coercion also requires making credible promises that you won't exploit the target's acquiescence. Listing the ways Trump has destroyed the credibility of any such promises would cause bluesky's servers to crash.

That doesn't mean I'm all that optimistic. Just saying though.

Norms are violated all the time. The implications depend on what follows. If violations go unpunished, the norm dies. If they're punished, it can often strengthen the norm. Lots of other actors around the world have a big say in whether Trumpism actually destroys international order as we know it.

"Forget about next" is Trump's entire foreign policy in a nutshell.

Mullin won’t be any better, but this helps remind the entire administration, to to bottom, that accountability might still be a thing and they could still be held to account for all the terribly illegal shit they’ve done and, more importantly, are still thinking about doing.

This seems…pretty simple given that the US military has been preparing for precisely this kind of operation for literally decades. It also killed a hundred some schoolgirls so maybe mention that part too.

Kinda seems like everyone concluded in June that we had overestimated Iran’s retaliatory capabilities and Tehran was really a paper tiger. And then catastrophically overcorrected.

When race war is a dominant strategy

Hiring incompetent people is a central feature of autocracy. People with no career prospects outside the regime will be much more loyal.

Good thing our dear leader has a reputation for promptly paying up on debts

I don't know why but the "more actions to come" part really sends me

Re: Rubio’s comments, we should be clear the US also got dog walked into bombing Iran back in June

Perhaps

At this point it’s basically a coin flip between protracted civil war and rapid consolidation of power by whichever mid-level commander in the IRGC is most able/willing to murder all his peers.

It can’t be emphasized enough that he gives zero fucks what actually happens in Iran.

This is pretty terrifying considering his definition of “two weeks”

The next three years are going to give us countless illustrations of how “windows of opportunity” work in international politics.

I don’t think an invasion of Taiwan will be one of them. But this administration is definitely doing everything it can to prove me wrong.

Ironically, considering how he’s polling on every other dimension, this might actually suggest a slight rally effect

Strongly disagree. See, e.g. below. But that’s at least a plausible position. The idea that such an order never existed post-45 requires a wildly blinkered understanding of, well, all of human history.

bsky.app/profile/mcop...

The Rules-Based Order Is Dead. Good. The rules-based order was a polite fiction based in a fundamental misunderstanding of contemporary geopolitics.

A lot of y’all are gonna be very unpleasantly surprised at what truly unrestrained international politics really looks like.

www.liberalcurrents.com/the-delusion...

A quagmire has never really been much of a possibility simply because he gives zero fucks what happens in Iran as long as he can say he won. He’s more than happy to let the whole place burn while he turns his attention to the next shiny thing he sees on TV.