Quote (fender @ Nov 28 2020 08:22pm)
first of all, the "child-like equivalence" you mention there is one that no one, except you, has made. you either intentionally misread my post, or simply misunderstood it. my point was not that it's 'fine' for them to want nukes because other shit countries have nukes too, or that if THEY can't have any, nobody should - you're being obtuse. what i'm saying is that it makes a lot of SENSE for them to want them because of the position they are in, which brings me to my next point: the US under trump already made them a 'pariah state', put crushing sanctions on their whole population (including vital medication), and cornered them in a way that it makes absolutely no sense for them to abandon their nuclear ambitions. from their perspective, being a nuclear power is the only thing that'd protect them from an invasion and occupation like in iraq for example.
in the recent past they had proven that given a reasonable alternative, there were enough moderate forces in the country willing to try that. the iran deal demonstrably stopped their nuclear program in exchange for a relief of sanctions and normalisation of diplomatic relations with the west. trump's unilateral decision to abandon it, something that not only the whole international community (with the exception of israel's right wing government and US neocons), but even many of his own advisors implored him not to do, has significantly strengthened the radical forces in iran and severely (and somewhat understandably) undermined the public's trust in the west - which makes it questionable if they would ever agree to a similar deal, when adults return to the negotiating table, in the forseeable future.
this administration has offered them no alternative, no way out of their economic and political isolation, so it's a bit rich to act like their only logical next step (as predicted by everyone even remotely familiar with the matter) was some risky 'calculation' they made while dismissing other, reasonable paths...
most importantly, no matter to which degree you concur with this very basic analysis of the situation, i don't think there is ANY scenario in which murdering one of their generals or scientists every couple of months would advance the alleged goal of stopping their nuclear program, weaken their hardliners, or sway public opinion in iran in favour of diplomatic solutions. again, escalation is the point here, and it's not that hard to see.
These countries have agency of their own, all with competing agendas. You are so Eurocentric in this as to almost be racist.
Iran is a pariah because Iran has made it state policy to export the Shia revolution. They support, explicitly, revolution in the Gulf states. They exert significant control over politics in Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria. Blow-back to Iranian imperialism is to such an extent that the Gulf States once supported a rabid dog in Saddam Hussein rather than risk Iranian domination.
Iran was given a huge windfall via the Iranian nuclear deal. They promptly funneled it into proxies wars abroad. They overextended, the deal was scrapped, and now they are back where they started. We can and should blame Iran's leaders for the incompetence, paranoia, and short-sightedness that came to pass, but there is blame to go around for the incompetent American and European negotiators who put the framework of the deal in place to begin with. In the history of politics, we have never gotten so close to "solving" international relations as with game theory and political realism (in many ways the precursor). And yet it was thrown to the winds in order to gift the regional hegemon a stronger position to no tangible benefit. Iran acted predictably, Israel and the Gulf States responded predictably, and here we are. The base currency of politics is power. Iran had little power or no leverage through which to use it, so much so that they were facing significant domestic unrest, a collapsing economy and a fragile political order. The deal conferred economic strength, political legitimacy, and validated the hard-liners in control. It did not lead to a resurgence in power for the "moderates", as was hoped, as they were always directly under the thumb of the conservative faction and never had any legitimate authority.
There is no diplomatic path forward that weakens the hard-liners. They are completely, systematically in control of the country. There is no burgeoning democratic movement without political revolution. But there is hope. Iran's economy is relatively developed, and its population expects a certain level of prosperity. Iran needs to be isolated, its ability to exert influence cut-off, and its political leaders starved of domestic legitimacy by inflation and scarcity. These are precisely the things that had the hard-liners on the ropes to begin with. If Iran insists on waging proxy wars, their generals should be murdered. If they insist on developing nuclear weapons, their scientists should be targeted and their sites bombed.
It is very possible for authoritarian, repressive regimes to experience economic growth and "globalization" while maintaining a tight grip on the population at home. We have seen this in Russia and China only recently. We are not going to increase liberalization in Iran by giving them more resources any more than giving Russia a trillion dollars tomorrow would overthrow Putin or more than WHO membership made China a responsible member of the international political order. It is beyond belief that we are still discussing these things today, almost a century after appeasement was tried and catastrophically failed in the run-up to WWII. We saw the same situation play out during the French invasion of Italy in the 15th century, which Machiavelli was kind enough to document at length. These are not new situations, if you want to constrain a strong regional power, you unite its weaker neighbors against it and provide them support. This had largely been accomplished, and was temporarily undone by the ramifications of the Iranian peace process, which saw the United States and Europe "pivot" to Iran at the expense of the existing alliance structures in place.
This post was edited by bogie160 on Nov 29 2020 01:28am