America Is Now a Rogue Superpower
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_C...
The think tank (Brookings Institute) which he is part of laid out the Iran strategy "Path to Persia" something like 15 years ago.
I think he does recognize that the US needs Europe for projecting power, so that part is genuine. The US could not prosper against a hypothetical Eurasian union.
Not sure what to make of this. Maybe it is supposed to appease the EU (you still have allies in Washington), maybe it is a wakeup call for the deep state to pull the brakes.
I don't think the deep state is any discernible single group, but rather whoever we want to point the finger at on a particular topic.
That includes for example powerful figures in the Pentagon or intelligence agencies that remain from one admin to the next. These people all have agendas of their own, and they network as people do. Dick Cheney was a deep state figure across a couple of decades, often working in the shadows. So was Rumsfeld. So was Kissinger across a few decades during his prime power/influence years. They all had long-term agendas, their ideas about the world, and extremely deep connections throughout the Federal Government.
It's not a mysterious conspiracy. It's just people with power/influence pursuing outcomes that they'd like to see happen, and working with other like-minded people to get there.
The rest of just call his "surgery at a hospital".
My point is that you've just described in nefarious terms the "civil service" or the "administrative state". Every government department is full of career civil servants who will go through many administrations. Only the very top officials in any department are political appointees. We're talking the secretary, their deputies and some positions under those.
Government simply cannot function without career civil servants who end up becoming subject matter experts in what they're administering.
Or, you know, you can nerfariously say "deep state".
And, we have to get rid of it because it's not in the Constitution? You know what else isn't in the Constitution? DHS. The IRS. ICE. An enormous number of other agencies.
The Constitution gives very little guidance on the Executive Branch, other than the President and Vice President. That does not mean that hiring people in federal agencies is unconstitutional! It just means that the Constitution is silent on the topic, neither requiring nor prohibiting very much.
We are not going to either amend the Constitution nor abolish the civil service just because some pseudonymous online account says we should.
>We are not going to either amend the Constitution nor abolish the civil service just because some pseudonymous online account says we should.
Did not you participate in the mass crying out on this very site when DOGE had been firing the "civil servants"?
Are you a law clerk for Clarence Thomas?
People like Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheneye were part of a criminal conspiracy to rob the America people and destabilize the US to make it ripe for further hijacking.
That's the deepstate -- it's everything you mentioned above + a criminal conspiracy mindset.
A member of the 'deep state'; however, is ideologically driven. If their favorite party is in power, they use their job to push their ideology to its limits. If the opposition party won the election; then they view their role as a means to 'resist', 'thwart', or otherwise delay any policies the elected officials try to implement.
Their general view is that their own opinions are superior to those of voters.
The point of my comment is that Republicans have this habit of describing perfectly ordinary and normal things in nefarious tones to make them sound sinister. The real problem is people are so gullible in falling for it.
What you're describing is a federal employee. The kind that takes a massive pay cut, and loses out on paycheck stability (due to government shutdowns), because they at least start out earnestly attempting to improve the system.
How they define "improving the system" varies by ideology, but career civil servants, in wanting to follow their definition of improving the system, are ideologically driven.
What you're describing is still just "A collection of civil servants that aren't disillusioned and dead inside"
Sure, but a bunch of stuff isn't supposed to change just because the president changes. It's supposed to take laws to change it, or even amendments. If those haven't been passed and the President tries to do that stuff anyway, we should want our civil servants to resist that.
The contrary notion is the Unitary Executive, which is that the president should be absolute dictator of what the executive branch does, with legality to be sorted out elsewhere even in egregious cases. This notion is very bad and we should not let it become normal, especially in a world where we've already seen absolutely insane rulings that place the president personally above the law.
If the executive is empowered by the legislative, we should not want civil servants to do gladly do every thing a president might ask of them. If the president is instead possessed by default of unlimited power to direct the executive branch and it's the legislative branch's job to reign in that boundless power (until the president ignores the law, then it's the judicial's job to finally make the executive knock it off one or more years later) then we would want totally obedient (to the president) civil servants. However, this latter idea is stupid and bad, so, we should want civil servants that don't treat the president's word as law, but the law as law.
Trump ran on vanquishing the deep state because all he cares about is personal loyalty, not loyalty to the country, the Constitution, or objective fact.
And so many of you bought it.
Because statecraft isn't gig work.
The same thing it's always been: The military-industrial complex.
> MAGA was sure it was backroom democrats.
It's not that hard to distinguish "them", just look at how fast the mainstream media threw Biden under the bus over Afghanistan withdrawal.
1)POTUS orders the withdrawal.
2)Generals botch the withdrawal on purpose.
3)Mainstream media (left and right) eviscerates the POTUS. This sends a strong message to this POTUS, as well as any subsequent Presidents: "Don't mess with the profits of the complex or else."
This was the tipping point for me when I realized that the deep state is not a just a bogeyman conjured up by the right wingers. Should you cross the complex, it will just as easily come for you even if you're a Democrat that's been in politics for 50 years.
Finally, the Atlantic is as establishment as it gets. No matter which party is in power, their editorial board serves the ruling class, of which almost nobody on HN is a part of.
Whether their interests align with yours or not you can ascertain just by looking at approval ratings of the US Congress.
So, what was this about not being a bogeyman being conjured by right again?
Rampant, uncontrolled consolidation of media, PACs, lobbying, and granting cushy jobs to retired congresspeople all give the wealthiest individuals extremely outsized control over what happens in the US government.
> Even the threat of terrorism from the region was a consequence of American involvement, not the reason for it. Had the United States not been deeply and consistently involved in the Muslim world since the 1940s, Islamic militants would have little interest in attacking an indifferent nation 5,000 miles and two oceans away. Contrary to much mythology, they have hated us not so much because of “who we are” but because of where we are. In Iran’s case, the United States was deeply involved in its politics from the 1950s until the 1979 revolution, including as the main supporter of the brutal regime of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The surest way of avoiding Islamist terrorist attacks would have been to get out.
This is absolutely correct and it's wild we now live in a time when mainstream media just comes out and says it.
I agree with two general themes of this article:
1. This administration has done more to destroy American's global power than any other in history and it's not even closer. We live in a time when Europe is questioning its position of being America's dog. The Gulf states are questioning what they get out of America's security guarantee if America can't or won't protected them; and
2. Russia and China are huge winners here. China simply has to do nothing and not interrupt the US while they're making a historic and unprecedented mistake. And Europe and the US will likely make peace with Russia over Ukraine because of spiralling energy costs thanks to America's reckless misadventure in the Gulf.
This is going to end very badly for the US and it will (IMHO) go down as the biggest own-goal in American history.
From what I can tell, The USA is either going for force a regime change or it's going to ruin Iran. Where will China get oil from then? You might say Russia but that's a precarious situation for them to be in.
Iran being a quagmire that erode's America's global power.
Air power has never resulted in regime change. Never. It takes boots on the ground and one just needs to look at a map. Iran is surrounded on 3 sides by mountains and the Gulf on the fourth.
Iran's drones and ballistic missiles are incredibly cheap, well-defended and impossible to meaningfully disrupt. The interceptors used to stop them are running out and increasingly ineffective. I think I read that the ballistic missile strike rate on Israel is now over 50%. What does it take to launch drones or even a ballistic missile? A cheap modification to any truck, basically.
The US cannot forcibly open the Strait of Hormuz because that would put them in close range to Iranian drone and missile strikes that the US doesn't have the weapon systems, interceptors and munitions to defeat. It's suicide.
Any escalation will end up much worse for Iran's neighbors than Iran because Iran is already built for economic isolation and self-reliance, thanks to years of criminal economic sanctions. You want to hit Iranian desalination plants? Well, that'll invite a hit on desalination plants in other Gulf states and that's going to end up much worse for them. Why? Remember those mountains I mentioned? They're covered in snow. Iran has ski resorts. Many people don't realize that. What does that mean? Just like California, they get significant freshwater from snow melt.
A ground invasion of the Iranian mainland has no staging ground. For Kuwait, we used Saudi Arabia. You can't stage across the mountains so you need an amphibious landing, much like D-Day. And it would need to be probably as complex and large. We simply don't have the ships, the soldiers or the logistics for that.
Basically, we have no options. This was unwinnable before we even started. This is why every president since Reagan refused Israel's attempts to start a war with Iran. Until Trump.
I honestly think he'd been fooled into thinking he could do a decapitation strike on Iran like Venezuela and get a friendly regime. That was never going to work. Iran has almost 50 years of hardening and maintaining a regime to resist US interference.
The one thing this administration seeems to care about is gas prices. This is why Iranian exports haven't been blocked. China is still getting oil from Iran. In fact last week the US lifted sanctions on Iranian oil, which was previously being sold below market. In January, Iran was selling oil for $48/barrel. Now they're selling it for >$100.
China has a massive reserve (~1.4 billion barrels) and has suspended exports of refined oil products. Countries friendly to us in the region are in for a world of hurt, most notably the Phillipines and Vietnam (Japan seems to have significant reserves like China, at least for now).
This war of choice on Israel's behalf has alienated and weakened Europe, the Gulf states and Asia. Iran is being smart about all this and allowing non-US oil to traverse the Strait, further putting a wedge between those countries and the US.
The US started it, has no path to victory and doesn't even know what victory is. It's up to Iran when this ends now and they're going to exact a price that will put them significantly ahead of where they were before this started. Ending of sanctions, tolls on ships traversing the Strait and/or reparations.
IMHO it's the biggest geopolitical mistake in US history and it's not even close.
Regarding countries friendly to the US - watching just how many foreign leaders have been diplomatically blunt or even hostile with the US has been interesting. Even the Australian prime minister, a famously boot-heeled position, has been publicly critical of the US.
Right now in Australia we are paying $3.30 AUD for a litre of diesel. That's over $8.50 USD per gallon.
They have no air force left, no navy, realistically no way to defend any of their infrastructure, yet apparently, there is no way they can be undone?
What do you think the entire freaking world is going to do if their economies start failing because Iran is blocking the straight of Homuz? Will we all just die or will other countries get involved and start making sure it opens? Will the trillions of dollars the gulf states have just sit there idly while Iran ruins their ability to sell oil ? I don't think so. Right now I think Iran has some leverage, there is maybe even some sympathy directed their way, but in my view it's limited. People right now are unhappy about what the US did, and maybe blame them for high oil prices etc, but at some stage, if it's between Iran existing, and peoples ability to eat, I think I know which side people will choose.
I do worry something like this could really be the start of WW3 though because I don't think China will allow Iran to topple, so it's a precarious situation.
Right now, the question seems to be more about whether or not the neighbors are willing to take the hit, and whether or not the world will tolerate the economic devastation, not whether or not the USA can inflict a lot more damage.
We spent 20 years and $8 trillion on the War on Terror. The Taliban was in charge of Afghanistan before we started. they're in charge now.
Iran is a country of 93 million people in a country 5 times as large as Texas whose entire economy is built to withstand economic pressure who view the US as the Great Satan and who can blame them given all we've done to them since 1953. However unpopular the current regime may be, the US is more unpopular.
The US did not consult any allies (other than Israel, of course) so most of the world is taking a "you broke it, you bought it" stance. Iran is saying if your country doesn't provide material support to the US invasion, your ships can go through, which will further undermine support.
It's interesting that Russian and American militaries are kind of victims to corruption but in different ways.
In Russia, generals basically stole money for tanks they never got built and nobody really found that out until Ukraine. Russia is sort of a paper tiger now.
In the US, the leeches we have are defense contractors who are sucking more than half a trillion dollars a year in weapon systems from the government coffers. We build really expensive things that... don't really work that well. We have anti-missile systems that are a coin toss at working against cheap Iranian missiles, which we're also running out of interceptors for and replacing them will take years. We have no answer for the drone threat that is incrdibly cheap, easy to scale production and almost impossible to disrupt the production and launch of because the Iranians have buried bases and facilities deep underground for obvious reasons.
In Iraq we turned drones into mobilee assassination vehicles (ie Reaper drones with Hellfire missiles) but those drones are $10M+. The "enemy" turned around and basically bought off the shelf commercial drones and turne them into suicide drones for $10-30k each and can produce hundreds if not a thousand or more per month.
You will not find any military planner or general that isn't a snivelling toad to the administration that thought this was a good idea or that there was any path to victory, whatever "victory" means here, which we still don't know.
So my answer to you is... just look at a map. How do we invade? Where? To what end? What happens when they start raining done drones on us that we can't defend against sufficiently? We can't occupy a country this large even if we can take it over. Conservatively we'd need 1-2 million troops for that.
Put it this way: Ukraine is a fifth the size of Iran and has half the population and there was no way Russia, who has access to a much larger army thanks to a draft, could occupy and control Ukraine long term even if they could topple the regime.
To occupy Iran we'd need to accept casualties in the tens of thousands. We haven't seen casualties like that since Vietnam, possibly WW2. This is also a war that hasn't gotten Congressional approval yet. Why do you think that is? I know. Because that resolution might fail then what. This war was historically unpopular for a war before it started. How popular will it be when we have $8 gas and the bodies start rolling home? What do you think will happen in the midterms?
Despite the buffoonery and sheer incompetence of this administration as well as the pack of moronic sycophants around the president, I'm actually surprised it went this far.
Take even more moderate objectives like Kharg Island. Well we have to go through the Strait for get there. We can air drop enough troops to take it but then what? How do we supply it? Waht if Iran starts raining drones down on it? It's only 8 square miles. There's nowhere to hide there. And then what? Iran just blocks ships departing from a US-controlled Kharg and removes more oil from the global market.
Their Navy doesn't matter. Their Air Force doesn't matter. You can if necessary lay mines with fishing boats. But you don't even need to lay mines. You simply have to say you will and insurance premiums go 10x and ship owners refuse to travers the Strait.
The US may still be the 800 pound gorilla in the room but absolutely everybody who isn't Israel hates us thanks to this war as well as the tariffs fiasco. I haven't seen a single realistic achievable and worthwhile military scenario out of this from anyone who knows anything about military planning and logistics. I really do think Trump thought he could do Venezuela 2.0.
A good way to get a feeling for that is usually to read back in a posters comment history.
> China has played much much better chess so it's not surprise they're benefiting.
Maybe public diplomacy is simply adjacent to local politics to the US. I still think this will backfire spectacularly over the medium term.
I don't agree with what's going on in Iran, I'm just thinking that regardless of whether or not it's a good idea, if the USA is basically in control of all meaningful oil exports, then it's game over for any significant Chinese military action because, they won't have the oil to run their aircraft carriers etc (they don't have nuclear carriers).
I think I understand their logic, but I might agree with others who say this is going to be an extremely bloody / unpopular war with very little justification for it's existence.
A positive story for China might be: a.) building port complexes and other industrial facilities is something China export as construction, engineering and financial services; b.) oil is a global commodity and a rising price everywhere doesn't create a relative disadvantage.
Cheaper weapons have shown to be effe tive in holding off a technologically superior force, and China is both great at producing them and happy to sell them to spec.
The US not being able to produce weapons at a fast enough cadence to refill the stockpile is an indicator that US weapons manufacturing is currently unsustainable, and prohibitively expensive. Both are weakness.
The US has shown that it cannot maintain moderate effort on two fronts. Not only is it financially almost unable to do so, only by the good graces of being the reserve currency, it would significantly struggle to maintain distributed engagements - this is military intelligence if an adversary wanted to engineer multiple conflicts requiring US attention globally to spread the US thin.
A year ago, when discussing AI adoption in an European business, the idea of looking at Chinese providers or Mistral was not seriously considered. The obvious answer was Microsoft/Azure and OpenAI.
That has changed nowadays. As a direct consequence of the behavior of the American government towards its "allies".
You can extrapolate from that. This isn't about short term oil supply problems when the whole world (lead by China) is moving to renewables anyways. It is about long term strategic consequences.
I think the over-reliance mistake won't be made again for a long time.
I don't disagree that it's beneficial for China, likely in the short term, but I also don't think a lot of countries are just happy to go full Communist party either.
It is nice that some Trump supporters are seeing prices at the pump and are having second thoughts about their Dear Leader. But a) it's disappointing that that's what it takes, and b) he still has a rabid base of people who love him despite his policies being the exact opposite of what they need to prosper (not to mention many of his policies being the exact opposite of what he campaigned on).
So we can only assume that renewables will continue to be kneecapped in the US at least for the next ~3 years. Hopefully European countries are fast-tracking renewable projects, but those things take time to build and bring online. (Hopefully they've been doing so since the Ukraine war started, really. The current Iran-related energy crisis is bad, but it's not like Europe had been sitting pretty with energy resources a month ago.)
> And Europe and the US will likely make peace with Russia over Ukraine because of spiralling energy costs thanks to America's reckless misadventure in the Gulf.
Unlike Uncle Sam, the Soviet Union no longer exists, so the Economist, written by well-heeled 30-something media class types, sees nothing to blame.
It has always been in private ownership, never having been owned by a publicly traded company:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Atlantic#Ownership_and_edi...
Currently majority ownership is with Laurene Powell Jobs (widow of Steve Jobs).
More like "members only" for the website where they don't accept "strangers" like they used to do :(
Add-on free bypass
The USA is a rogue terror state and we're living in the aftermath of democratic collapse. Everything we see in the news is theater for the masses.
While the US can demolish high value targets all day long (assuming it can find them), it won't be able to sustain volume. And this is against a dramatically outmatched opponent (in terms of air + navy + intel, not boots on the ground).
China will build a hundred cruise missiles per day and truck them in from factories far away from the coast. The US can build 10-20. China's cruise missiles won't be as good, and they won't need to be. And that's the absolute least of what China will hyper produce in a mobilization to a war manufacturing stance. The US should just wave the flag before the first shots are fired re Taiwan given what we're seeing in Iran, it's over before it ever begins.
The US can't control the Straight of Hormuz properly, without taking losses (which it clearly doesn't want to do). That's a trivial task compared to trying to keep China from controlling the waters near Taiwan. The US won't be able to even get close to Taiwan is what this is demonstrating. China can stand-off the US easily.
The US is showing China and the world that it has zero chance at stopping a takeover of Taiwan.
China should be looking at this Iran mess and moving as fast as it can to launch their invasion. The US isn't ready, and won't be.
The US could put up a big fight at a full war mobilization, given some time to spin up. That scenario will not occur with regard to Taiwan. China has the green light.
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edit:
There was a story about the early days of the invasion into Iraq by the US, after 9/11. It was about the US soldiers rolling into Iraqi towns, cities. They thought the US soldiers were maybe superhuman, or at least had extraordinarily advanced technology. An Iraqi boy wondered if the US soldiers could see through buildings with their helmets and goggles. After all they dispatched Saddam from power so quickly, seemingly so easily - one can understand the wonder.
Then they figured out the US soldiers were just meatbags like any other soldiers. That IEDs killed them just the same, and sniper rounds, and so on.
One of the very large benefits to rarely using your capabilities as a military superpower, is so that your enemies are unsure of just what you're capable of if pushed. And if you're lucky enough to put on a staggering outcome - as in the first Gulf War - in which Russia got to see their hardware decimated by vastly superior US weapons, then you should rest on that perception as long as possible. Iraq and Afghanistan substantially weakened the perception of US military domination (just a Vietnam did before that, for a generation). Iran doesn't show the US to be weak per se, rather, it shows the limits of its present endurance capabilities among other things. And that's what China needs to know.
And of course this happens to major powers from time to time throughout history. Russia goes into Ukraine and gets humiliated, its capabilities at the point of launching that war, were revealed to be embarrassingly mediocre compared to what was thought to exist. Or the USSR and Afghanistan before that.
It is one of the reasons I don’t believe China would take on Taiwan.
Have you even glanced at the current leadership of the US military?
So China might cripple Taiwan but invading it risks being their Vietnam.
That doesn't mean a war won't happen, people make stupid decisions all the time.
conversely the US brass now has a fire lit under its ass due to low ammo stockpiles and and excuse to replenish them faster, develop anti drone tech faster etc.
imagine not having the current embarrassment in iran -- the generals would be complacent, and should a conflict arise over taiwan, they would not be ready.
The US requires an exceptional surge in manufacturing output for ammo.
Another example: Someone will have egg on face for leaving AWACs out on a tarmac (exactly dumb thing that we made fun of russia for doing) and so that seems unlikely to happen, if for no other reason than doctrinally, for the next minimum half decade or so.
I'd like to learn more about this, do you have any sources that I can read?
But given the advances that China has had in EVs, drones, solar, batteries, wind turbines, AI, nuclear energy, smartphones and other advanced industries IMHO it doesn't make sense for them to start a war right now. Better to keep growing their industry and exports and take over Taiwan sometime later.
Most people in Taiwan want to be independent but given a choice between a Gaza scenario and soft-rule from the CCP, they’ll pick the latter.