EDIT: Correction, I was banned from Lemmy Zip, the confusion stems from my inability to see Lemmy Zip communities in the search anymore leading me to think it was Lemmy ML which has a community of the same name.
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Meanwhile On Grad
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That's not a serious examination of international politics. Fuck, man, there was opportunity for outright realignment even after the fucking Iraq War. Even in the 2010s Rouhani openly espoused a reconciliatory line.
Fuck, man, have you forgotten the treaty that Trump ripped up?
... in which case demilitarizing would be immensely fucking stupid.
Putin wants wars to shore up his domestic legitimacy and power.
Trump wants wars to shore up his domestic legitimacy and power.
Institutions do not act in their own interests. Institutions act in the interests of the decision-makers, and between the minority status of the Dems and the fucking spinelessness of the GOP, the main decision-maker in the US with regards to foreign policy at the moment is Donald Trump.
The only difference between Trump and Putin is that Trump is significantly stupider. Not less malicious, not less opportunistic, not less willing to break formal-or-informal agreements with countries for the sake of militaristic fascist chest-beating.
Shit, that's fair, the Nuclear Disarmament Treaty. It just feels completely overshadowed by them arming Hamas to attack the music festival jump starting the genocide by Israel which is the defining event of the last 3 years, among a thousand similar operations stretching back decades.
In 2009 they had a spy convicted of smuggling NATO activity intel to Iran who presumably would resell it. Same year paid $32,000 for a hit in California on an Iranian-German dissident an activist. In 2010 in a port in Nigerian, an Iranian shipment of 13 cargo containers of guns, grenades, rocket launchers, etc was confiscated and not long after a smuggled stash of just under ~$10M USD equivalent, believe to be in connection to a large shipment of Heroin. In 2011 a car salesman from texas was shown to be in contact with the IRGC in a plot to bomb a restaurant in Washington DC. A couple of months later they attempte the assassination of Adel al-Jubeir, Saudi Ambassador while in the USA. Around the same time they successfully assassinate security official Hassan M. al-Kahtani in Pakistan. The list of escelations of conflicts just keeps growing longer and longer, more and more every year after that.
Sure, but every regional power is playing those dipshit games. It certainly hasn't stopped us from aligning with Saudi Arabia - or Israel, for that matter.
The public-facing and clandestine ops sides of relations are often entirely divorced - hence why even close allies like the UK and the USA can end up supporting opposite sides in global spook shit.
Iran is hostile to our interests - but not nearly to the degree that US politics - especially Republican politics - have treated it as, and Iran's first and foremost interest in its international diplomacy is the preservation of its shitty Islamic Republic.
As far as "Let's not be enemies" goes, we already make far worse compromises. Neutrality with Iran is (or would have been, since that's a distant prospect now) more-than-worth an increased ability to refocus on China and Russia.