Originally Posted by
ORAC
They’re not giving Trump even the fiction of an off ramp…..
For no particular reason (maybe being ex-Navy I can empathize with the crews stranded on board the ships?) I've been pondering the way forward for all of this (nope, no ideas tbh) but I can't help the feeling that the reason we are where we are now is that Iran has looked at how "small" Ukraine has faced down "big" Russia, a Russia that has no appropriate response which will lead to a victory for them.
So, based on that, Iran sees a similar setup evolving here with "small" Iran facing down the "big" USA as, just as Russia is finding with Ukraine, to date, the US seemingly has no appropriate response which will lead to a "victory" either. And I see Israel as being "part of the USA" here.
The big difference is that Putin seemingly can afford to sit it out indefinitely as long as he can protect himself from his fellow Russians by hiding in his bunkers. DT, though, has a little thing such as the mid-terms and then on to worry about - and the fact that much of the world is clearly rather bored by DT's antics - something they have made quite clear. There seems to be quite a global feeling of "we'll work together ......... but not with the US/DT" developing.
So ........ maybe the US will finally start to drift away (short attention span in the WH?) and then the "44 nation mixed taskforce" mentioned by
BonnieLass at Post #5803 can get on with it. After all, again as
BonnieLass mentions in that post, quite a few commercial ships have recently made it through despite the double blockade. So ...................... it seems that even Iran itself sees no value in stopping those ships and, thereby, upsetting a range of countries in the process - but that only works if the US keeps out of it.
And once the "big" USA is completely out the picture, maybe Iran and the rest of the world will decide, despite the dire warnings from people like
gums, that the status-quo is the best of what is a range of poor options - certainly in the short/medium term.
Then, once all this has settled down, the world can, once again, try and figure out what to do re Iran's nuclear programme - but maybe not quite as
gums suggests - as nice as his approach appears on paper. After all "Epic Fury" seems to have turned into pretty much "Epic Waste-of-Time"!
How that strategy eventually happens we'll have to see but nothing is going to happen until the US changes it's general position and I don't see any "figuring out" of the basic question, Iran's nuclear programme, happening while the present occupant of the WH is about.
Anyway, I guess I can dream on..................................!
