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Comment by inglor_cz | Hacker News Reader

Netanyahu could also simply retire, he has been in politics since the 1970s.

But he would probably end up in jail on corruption charges, which is why he perseveres.

At this moment I wonder if the entire region would be better off if the Knesset passed a law "Netanyahu is universally pardoned, but must GTFO of the country and leave politics entirely". Cynical, but maybe the result would be worth it.

On a more positive note, I can see Iran dropping their nuclear program. It is expensive and the same money could be diverted to the drone and missile program, which is what led to them not losing the war.

Meanwhile, Russia has a very extensive and expensive nuclear program, and it didn't help them against Ukrainian drones burning and exploding strategic factories a few kilometers from the Kremlin. The threshold for an actual use of nukes is very high and they are losing a lot of their deterrence value.

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I Netanyahu retires, Eisenkot or Bennett take up the mantle, which is arguably worse. But he's got no reason to retire, given how he's polling now.

Iran isn't going to drop their nuclear program. They know full well that IF this deal actually works out (it won't, but just for the sake of argument...), they can go back to their clandestine enrichment program and nobody will actually look very hard (just like before). It'll be a return to normalcy, except they'll also be exacting tolls on the strait and building up with that new fat wad of free cash. And if it doesn't work out, they just stand firm until the USA gets tired and goes home with a fig leaf "we won" as November nears. Either way, similar result.

Russia is going to lose this war in a slow and grinding attrition that will smack of Afghanistan, that's not in question. But their ambitions aren't going to die. When they're ready again a decade later (and if NATO is still a thing), they'll grab a chunk of NATO land and extend their nuclear umbrella over it, daring the paper tiger to do something.

> Eisenkot or Bennett take up the mantle, which is arguably worse.

As far as I'm aware there is no reason to believe so

https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/politics-and-diplomacy/art...

I think the question was "in what sense are Eisenkot and Bennett worse"?

I remember Bennett's shuttle diplomacy between Russia in Ukraine in 2022 and he struck me like a person who values peace more than Netanyahu does.

I meant the worse part

If you are right about Russia losing the war of attrition (I am not certain, though I certainly hope so), this will result in some internal unrest. The Muslim part of the Caucasus may well secede, places like Dagestan have negligible ethnic Russian population anyway. The next leader will have a lot of work on his hands just to keep the federation intact and Russian politics at least a bit independent on China.

Ultimately, a younger Russian leader who does not live in the past like Putin does may realize that Russia now has fewer people than Bangladesh or Indonesia and cannot afford old-style wars of conquest anymore.

Russia has extended a surveillance pantopticon over the North Caucasus with Chinese tech and disarmed its population. Local ethnic elites and their families have grown rich through relationships with Moscow and only stand to lose all those luxuries through separatism. I don't believe that those republics breaking away is as likely as one would have thought in the early millennium.

> "Netanyahu is universally pardoned, but must GTFO of the country and leave politics entirely"

Such an option was offered to him and was refused.

The drones and missiles helped them to not lose the war, but they were significantly damaged by the initial strikes. A nuclear capability might have been sufficient deterrent to prevent those.

There is no amount of nuclear capability that can stop a party you are major threat to from attacking you. See Hamas attacking Israel. Of course Iran will still enrich uranium because they are an excellent negotition leverage.

I think if Washington and Mar-a-Lago got nuked it might stop attacks?

Trump has already tried to use the US' nuclear arsenal, which (according to accounts) caused the Chief of Staff to evict him from the situation room. I don't think nuking US soil (however dirty it already is) will tip the scales in Iran's favour.

It also might not. Nuclear powers have lost a lot of "smaller wars" since 1945. Given that most wars are of the smaller variety, and that the threshold of nuke use is very high, it makes sense to think of the economy of the entire arsenal. Especially if your national economy is on the weaker side.

Too many people looked at Gaddafi's fall and Kim's endurance and made a short generalization "it pays to have nukes". But there is nuance in that contrast - if Libya was a friend of China and directly bordered it, no one would dare attack it the way it was attacked, nukes or not.

Iran's largest leverage is in controlling Hormuz and threatening Dubai, Qatar etc. with destruction of their oil and water infrastructure. All of this can be done cheaply with conventional weapons. If they ever use nukes, though, they can expect to be nuked in response.

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