4,683 karma · joined June 28, 2019
e.g.
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/oracle-opens-first...
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/2/21/us-sanctions-inflic...
Maybe the strategic balance creates a situation where it's advantageous for Iran to pull US in regardless of non-involvement. They don't do well against Israel alone (see rather low damage of 4 separate large scale attempts at attacking Israel directly), but US is so much easier to pressure via the Gulf. Indeed, this scenario doesn't quite need Israel.
So US risked getting pulled in not due to attacking in June 2025, but because the cheque given to the Gulf was starting to expire, the power balance was objectively swinging in favor of Iran at the location where Devereaux sees as the most important part of the Middle East. Now, say there are powerful states who feel they are in a decent position now but also that the strategic balance would slip away. What do they tend to do? Devereaux can consult his WW1 history.
(Running X11 right now, I'll switch when the distro forces me to, in hope I'll get a bug free experience after everyone else runs it)
>But we're in an era of less and less responsible government oversight
The era doesn't matter. The incentives are so bad, eventually you'd get a horrible result even with oversight. These markets are prone to this and shouldn't exist.
'Solid compression' (as WinRAR calls it) is still optional with RAR. I recall the default is 'off'. At the time, that mode was still pretty good compared to bzip2.
Second, had NPT been enough, why was JCPOA necessary? Because NPT was not near enough to stop a determined state. NPT 'limits' do not limit enrichment. They just state enrichment must be done for civilian purposes and leave no enforcement mechanism. JCPOA also had no real enforcement mechanism starting in 2026. Iran could have simply taken all the money, buy weapons (legally), reach the legal max (which is basically infinity in 2031, a bit less earlier), and pressed forwards immediately. There was simply no way to enforce (some people think _this_ operation is too risky! Now lets give Iran over a trillion dollars and years to prepare).
Third, you're just wrong about current negotiations. Iran explicitly demanded 20%[0], beyond the JCPOA and with no civilian use.
Look, JCPOA debates always end in the same way. The advocates are asked how the original deal was enforceable in any way past 2031 (or even 2026) and they have to deploy word salad because the actual answer is 'Iran could have easily built a nuke, inspectors just allow us to see it but they would have been no way to do something about it'. It would be more honest if many of them just admitted they wanted to allow Iranian nukes.
[0] https://xcancel.com/laurnorman/status/2028050672583618946
e.g. Dichronauts examines the 2+2D case which turns out to be very different from 4D or 3+1D.