No Taco: This Is Complete US Strategic Failure | Hacker News Reader

No Taco: This Is Complete US Strategic Failure

phillipspobrien.substack.com

I feel like getting obsessed about the strategic failure of this is missing the forest for the trees.

Why did the U.S. assassinate the leader of a country across the planet in the first place? Because Benjamin Netanyahu wanted us to because he needs our help to create instability in the region so Israel can expand further. That and the billionaire military industrial complex players felt like they wanted some more money.

Name it what it is. Immoral, racist, and a repetition of the same bullshit we’ve been doing in the Middle East for decades. Calling it a strategic failure gives it more value than it deserves.

More people need to read this NYT article. Not only is it astounding the detail and extent of these leaks from the situation room, but what you’re saying is even more true than you might realize.

Netanyahu literally threw a presentation up on a conference call to to persuade Trump to do this for him.

I’m having difficulty getting archive.is to work on my browser right now so here’s the plain link:

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/07/us/politics/trump-iran-wa...

Full article appeared to be accessible to me with a free account, didn't need an NYT subscription to read. Worth the read, thanks for sharing.

EDIT: Worked on my phone, but now on my desktop it's asking for a subscription again. Either way, thanks for the link.

> I feel like getting obsessed about the strategic failure of this is missing the forest for the trees.

Absolutely, but unfortunately I believe you are too.

Headlines on the Epstein files and social media mentions of them are almost certainly down 70%+ since the assault on Iran. It was a great success!

It's a shame too, because the two subjects appear eminently linked, and not just for the distraction effect. There's no real reason people can't be condemning this ill thought out war as being an outright result of the kompromat Mossad has on Trump.

I don't doubt that Netanyahu is the reason, but I can't see how this helps Israel expand.

He didn't need to attack Iran to get to Lebanon. True, Iran would have helped Hezbollah if it weren't kept busy, but he's not going to get his "buffer zone" anyway. It's just an opportunity to harass Lebanon.

He certainly doesn't need to attack Iran to expand in the West Bank. He's building settlements as fast as he can.

Attacking Iran punishes them for October 7th, and delays the next one of those. (Gaza is quiet for the moment, but nothing has actually changed.)

Iran is going to get so many of their demands met by the oil-addicted Western world.

They might even get all sanctions removed.

I’m not even sure Iran realized they had this much leverage before they were forced to use it.

Before, if they try then othercountries can threaten to kill their leader or something.

Huge respect to the Islamic Republic (and its allies!) to have stood up against the Empire.

TACO is misleading. TASAD: Trump Always Seeks A Deal.

He’s objectively terrible at making deals, though. He’s apparently incapable of win-win scenarios. His ego demands that he win while the other party loses, where “winning” is defined as “personally stroking his own ego” and “lining his pockets.” His only negotiation tactic is threats and bullying.

Although, in this case, given recent news about prediction market plays, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the whole farce of a “ceasefire” was just prediction market manipulation. (Well, that and TACO Tuesday so Trump could get out of following through on his threat of genocide. One spot of sanity, if you can call it that, in a shit sandwich of the stupidest US foreign policy blunder since the war in Vietnam.)

Some say the stupidest US foreign policy blunder ever, perhaps even the greatest in all history by any leader, dumber even than invading Russia in winter.

The stupidest US foreign policy blunder... so far. Invading Cuba, invading Greenland and dropping out of NATO are all on deck, so let's not pick a winner just yet.

> apparently incapable of win-win scenarios

And this is exactly the opposite of how trade works. Trade only happens if both parties have something to gain from it.

TASTWDYCPI: Trump always seeks the worst deal you can possibly imagine

And the deal is worse than what we already had before he blew up the entire situation for no reason.

"everything Trump touches dies" (the title of a Republican Strategist's book) seems more appropriate.

Apart from literal deaths, this has torched American military and diplomatic credibility across the globe. It was basically guaranteed to, with the only potential slim upside for America being a demonstration that their military might when applied ruthlessly might dramatically punish their victims as a warning to others. And it has so far failed at that.

TIB - Trump is Bullshitting

This was well described during his first term, https://soylentnews.org/politics/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=..., quoting TFA:

As far as I can tell, the process for playing the president like a fiddle goes like this:

1. Start a conflict where he feels like he can't just bully his way out of it with his usual combination of threats and childish insults.

2. Get him emotionally invested in getting a deal. He won't care whether the deal is any good, just that there is one.

3. In the negotiations, tell him what you want in a way that it sounds like you're making concessions. In fact, you're getting exactly what you want.

4. Let him announce it as a big win for himself. Let him think that he got what he wanted and is the greatest negotiator ever.

5. Periodically send him notes or phone calls telling him how awesome you think he is.

Kim Jong Un did exactly this. So did Xi Jinping. So probably did Vladimir Putin. And I suspect other world leaders have taken note.

^^ This ^^ was in 2020. You can now add the IRGC to the list at the end.

No, pure TACO.

Glad that even right-wing US policy commentators now use that word, I thought only Europeans used for him. The right direction

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