The Great Miscalculation
Of Khameini, Winnie the Flu and others
I don’t have any particular insights or knowledge about the Iran war, but I do have some longer term thoughts.
It turns out that Western Democracies do not have to cower and pay Danegeld to terrorists and barbarians. The combination of Israeli PM Netanyahu and US Preisident Trump has shown that there is an alternative. That alternative is killing the leaders of the people who say they want to kill you unless you do as they say. Dead people, amazingly, have very little ability to wage war and dead leaders are unable to make rabble-rousing speeches. Moreover, while one dead leader may be a martyr, dozens of them dying looks more like loserdom and (almost) no one wants to identify with dead losers. It seems that Khameini was unable to grasp the rules had changed and paid the ultimate price. It couldn’t happen to a more deserving person.
As I wrote back at the end of January, just over a month ago
I predict that Iran is going to fall. It’s going to be really messy but it isn’t going to affect America much at all.
That post also talks about Iran’s general lack of air defenses and the priorities of the attackers and how the CIA and Mossad have countless agents inside Iran to provide targeting data. All of that seems to have been right. The Mullahs and their regime can do nothing to stop the US and Israel from hitting anything they want to. That doesn’t mean they can’t inflict some casualties in return, but those casualties are likely to be minimal. The main concern for people outside Iran is to what extent Iran is able to continue attacking its Arab neighbors and shipping passing through the Straits of Hormuz. It seems likely that disruption will be of relatively short duration. The Straits and the Gulf States are basically the hostages the Iranians had against widespread attack. Unfortunately for Iran it looks like much of their offensive abilities have been neutralized and most of what they do manage to launch gets shot down. So yes, it’s not great to be a Gulf State civilian, but so far it seems to be more inconvenience than actual danger
That leads to the Mullahs’ other hope for survival, globalizing the war through “spontaneous” demonstrations and protests as well as telling all their proxies that they have to engage NOW.
They’re trying to shift the battlefield from the actual battle to the battle of ideas online. (It doesn’t help that many of their influential boosters are morons and/or frauds, from Candace to Scott Ritter.) This is why they tried—and are still trying—to flood the zone with obvious lies. It’s why they’re desperate to kill US servicemen. Their only hope is to frag US public support faster than their missile stockpile runs out. Read their spokesmen, like Marandi, and it’s all Epstein-conspiracy garbage—because it’s their only chance.
The problem the Mullahs have is that this isn’t working. The indiscriminate drone and missile fire on the gulf states seems to have caused them all to unify into an anti-Iran coalition for the first time in decades (if not ever). The Hez(no)bollah rocket attacks on Israel seem to have basically caused the Lebanese government to say “it’s all them, don’t get us” and for civilians to pack up and go and refuse to be human shields. And it looks like Hez(no)ballah is losing leaders again, so my guess is they are going to stop attacking pretty soon. The strike against the RAF base in Cyprus (possibly by Hezbollah?) seems to have simply provided the excuse to 2 Tier to U turn again and tell the nice Mr Trump that it’s fine to use British bases to attack Iran, sorry for the misunderstanding, even though this naturally upsets his left wing MPs.
Their stooges in Pakistan attempted to storm the US Consulate there and were repulsed by the Marine guards. The Pakistan authorities do not seem to be siding with the protestors, much to the sadness of the MSM. In fact MSM in general seem to be doing as the Saulstack post above suggests and doing their best to report much protesting against the attacks while skipping over the celebrations from exiled Iranians and others celebrating the deaths of the Mullahs and the likely overthrow of their regime.
However I don’t think this is going to work. Everyone knows Iran has been sponsoring terrorism all over the globe - remember the bombing in Buenos Aires in 1994? - and it has been hanging homosexuals and mistreating women all the time too. Sure there are some idiots who try to argue that the poor widdle Mullahs are oppressed brown people who deserve a pass, but none of them are in a position of power in the US or Israel and the leaders of those two countries have repeatedly shown that they don’t care about the clamoring of the UN and other international bodies. Fundamentally Iran has been pissing off its neighbors and the world in general for decades, with the threats of destabilizing the global economy through blocking the Straits of Hormuz and exporting terrorism as reasons why it, in turn, cannot be safely hit back at.
It turns out that, as Israel showed last year, Iran’s Russian and Chinese air defenses aren’t up to scratch against a real military. They definitely aren’t up to scratch against two. That means that the missile and attack boat threat against shipping is substantially reduced - my guess is that by next Friday, if not sooner, the surviving Mullahs and their IRGC stooges will be unable to project force much beyond the lethal range of, say, an AK-47 and so ships will be free to export Kuwaiti, Iraqi, Qatari etc. oil and gas without worrying about being struck by missiles, torpedoes, mines etc.
The last couple of years of destruction of HamAss, Hez(no)bollah and Syria have cut the regimes ability to threaten terror significantly and last summer’s raids put a major crimp in their plans to become a nuclear power and terrorize that way. Finally the Venezuela action made it extremely clear that Latin American countries that buddy up to the IRGC will face abrupt changes of leadership so the global network or terror and oil smuggling suddenly shrunk to a merely regional one. All in all, it turns out those threats that they used to have are no longer very threatening.
Which means that the only other protection Iran had was its alliances with Russia and China
Winnie The Flu Hardest Hit?
And that’s a problem. Russia doesn’t have any spare capacity, it’s committed to invading Ukraine and is completely bogged down there. Russia can send thoughts and prayers, but apart from possibly drones, it cannot send any hardware and, as we have now seen repeatedly, Russian Air Defense systems are not good against Israeli or US air attacks. Allegedly Russia and/or Belarus sent a few thousand enforcer troops to help the Basij and IRGC shoot Iranian protestors, but those enforcers are not able to defend against bombs and air attacks and, in fact, may well be some of the casualties from those attacks, along with their new buddies in the IRGC and Basij.
That means that the Chicoms are the only country that could realistically come to Iran’s assistance. But short of the West Taiwanese deciding to open a second front against the US, there are distinct limits to the assistance they can provide. The USN is now effectively blockading Iran so freighters full of weapons are unlikely to make it to port. And if they do make it to port, they probably won’t make it off the dock and will provide an exciting fireworks display instead when the ship and/or cargo gets a visit from a friendly American missile. There are in fact reports of mysterious massive explosions in various remote parts of Iran that may be the US removing previously supplied Chicom weapons. Flights into Iran are contra-indicated and transfers via Russia are going to look like Russian transfers and get hit the same way.
The problem for West Taiwan is that if it gets a little too sporty, it faces the prospect of a de facto oil embargo and as of right now it almost certainly doesn’t have the oil stockpiles it needs to survive even a short term one. Sure it can survive for a couple of weeks to a month, but despite all the solar panels and EVs, if there is a significant disruption then the economy literally runs out of fuel because it simply doesn’t have a couple of months supply of diesel. And those supplies get even shorter if it tries for large scale naval operations because most of the PLAN uses diesel or similar.
I have no doubt that given a year or two to prepare, the Chicoms could stockpile enough oil and coal that they could last longer, but although they were stockpiling fuel a bit in 2025, they just lost Venezuelan and Iranian oil supplies. Sure they seem to have partly replaced those with Saudi and additional Russian supplies, but replacement does not mean additional, and, more importantly, as the first link above says, they haven’t yet finished building the infrastructure to store more. Moreover, while they have Russia over a barrel, Saudi Arabia is going to be expecting market price for its oil. West Taiwan certainly can afford to pay market price, but having to do so for ~10% of its oil that it previously got for very cheap adds to the difficulty of building up stockpiles for the future. Summing up that means they remain vulnerable, and, as I said back a couple of years ago1 in January, Winnie the Flu is not a risk taker.
Not only that but Winnie the Flu is still removing top military leaders. I feel that Winnie the Flu and his fellow Chicoms are struggling more than most to keep up with the frenetic pace of action in Trump 2.0. In any “normal” US presidency, there would be significant pauses between operations that would allow other countries to figure out what was coming next and prepare. Trump 2.0 isn’t doing that and that means that plans to spend, say, six months stocking up on oil no longer work.
The Instapundit sees this pressure on the Chicoms as a beneficial side-effect:
Trump wants to weaken China without going to war with China. He has now cut off two major suppliers of oil to the PRC, which produces hardly any oil of its own. (It’s worse than that, because China wasn’t paying for that oil with dollars, and now it will need dollars to buy oil elsewhere.) That applies a squeeze to an already squeezed CCP, and will make Xi’s position, domestically and internationally, weaker. Also the military excellence recently displayed has to inspire second, third, and fourth thoughts about invading Taiwan.
I think there may be more to it than that. He is in fact taking out West Taiwanese allies one at a time and strongly incentivizing everyone to reduce business with the Chicoms will doing more business with the US. That squeezes them even more.
This also, BTW, impacts Cuba, which is steadily going titsup.com while everyone’s attention is on the Middle East. It turns out that the US Navy can do two or three things at once and enforcing an oil blockade on Havana is dead easy. I assume the top Castro-ites are have serious conversations about how they can safely get out of the country before they get am Easter-tide Romanian Christmas.
One other thing that Trump 2.0 has made clear is that when he gives you a deadline and an agreement to sign on to, if you try to weasel out you get whacked. That applied to Maduro and the Mullahs. He has not, yet, given the Castro-ites a public deadline, but I don’t think anyone doubts that he has every intention of ensuring that Cuba undergoes regime change in the near future, and that certainly includes the heirs of Fidel themselves.
Going back to Russia. I strongly suspect that President Trump is trying to split Russia off from West Taiwan. That may be a challenge, but unlike my friend Nicki Kenyon, I don’t think chaos in Iran is going to benefit Putin
I do not expect Russia to be able to install a friendly puppet there because I strongly suspect that the goal of the current war is to totally eliminate the Mullahs, the IRGC and the Basij as well as all the corrupt oligarch class that supported them. Russia will have zero influence on the various groups that emerge from the wreckage because they will all be groups that the mullahs oppressed. It is possible that Russia will benefit from higher oil prices, but not as much as Nicki thinks because Russia’s customers have shrunk and the “shadow fleet” is under considerable pressure. The only real major customer for Russia now is West Taiwan and for all the obvious reasons, the Chicoms are going to demand significant discounts to market price for Russian oil.
However, Trump does like making deals. I expect that someone on the Trump team is going to give Putin a deal of the “you can’t refuse it” kind any day now. The deal is going to look something like this.
Stop invading Ukraine and give some territory back (how much TBD but significant)
Stop supplying China with cut price oil or other cut price resources
Don’t assist the mullahs, the Cubans, the Venezuelans etc.
In exchange we will let you sell gas to Europe and sell your oil to anyone at market price
By the way, here are some pictures of buildings in Moscow, and some technical characteristics of bunker busting bombs
I do not know whether Putin will take this deal. If he withdraws from any part of Ukraine he will face significant push back in Russia. But after recent reverses on the ground in Ukraine - Ukraine has retaken control of 100-400 km22 in the last month - and continuing destruction of Russian industry, and manpower, he may be willing to accept a deal.
Now of course it takes three to tango here, and Ukraine may not be willing to join in without significant Russian withdrawal and some kind of solid guarantee that Russia won’t simply try again in a few years, but Ukraine is also in poor shape after 4 years of war. This last winter has in fact been hard on both sides and so I suspect there is a point that both sides can accept and call a win. Note that I disagree with chunks of this foreign affairs piece in that I think it understates Russian casualties and overstates remaining Russian power but I tend to agree that Ukraine is not at all close to winning, where by winning I mean regaining most of the territory it lost to Russia.
However, see Iran, if such a deal is offered to Putin, it will have a time limit. And some serious teeth in the event that the deal is not taken by the time the limit expires. Teeth being far greater support for Ukraine and a willingness to enforce NATO blockades of Russian oil exports from western ends of Russia, among other things. The mullahs appear to have tried to run the clock on negotiations even though President Trump told them that they had until the end of February. Putin would be wise to bear that in mind.
My bet is that Putin will do just like the mullahs and misread Trump. He will look at how he has strung Trump along for the last year and assume he can continue to do so. And Trump will supply Ukraine with target data and GPS etc. tricks such that Ukraine’s missiles can hit anywhere and everywhere in Russia. Along with guidance on how to spoof Russian radar and quite possibly some explicit tips and hints about how to penetrate reinforced concrete bunkers.
Thank Sinwar
It seems to me that a major reason why President Trump is willing to take out dictators is that he has seen how well this worked for Israel. Israel almost certainly would not have thought of it prior to October 7 and October 7 was Sinwar’s bright idea. After that, the Israelis discovered that eliminating the top leaders of their enemies was remarkably effective. Indeed, given the Chicom and Iranian funded anti-Semitic protests in the West, Israel was forced to take out leaders. It did so and found when it did it that the resulting panic and chaos was extremely beneficial. Taking out successive waves of top leaders drastically reduced the ability of the enemy to coordinate a response or to conceal it, and that meant it was far easier to take out the fanatical lower layers still trying to do things.
The US in Venezuela is trying a slightly different tactic - take out one leader, tell the replacement that they will gradually reform or they get similar treatment - and it is possible that once Iran’s missile and drone threat appears to have been thoroughly neutralized the US will try the same thing to the handful of remaining members of the current ruling regime. But, based on other comments, I suspect the preferred outcome is for the Iranian people to rise up and kill the regime survivors3.
However, if it weren’t for Sinwar, I suspect none of this would have happened, so in a twisted way we can thank him for causing the downfall of his own terrorist organization, his allies and his sponsors. Well Done! Rot in hell!
Update/PS: I’m not the only one thinking that the Chicoms are part of the losers here - Steven Mosher thinks so too.
Really it’s only been two months, but it surely seems like it’s been a lot longer
Exactly how much depends heavily on how accurate Russian claims of control were before hand. Ukraine has certainly taken some back and also cleaned up a lot of gray areas that Russia said it controlled, but probably didn’t really.
That’s my preferred outcome too
Lots of balls in the air. Good job tying them together.
Another reason that the remaining Iranian Islamics won't be in a hurry to cozy up to Russia: Russia has shown itself to be unable to protect them, Vlad presents as weak, in a part of the world where the impulse is to follow the "strong horse".