I can't think of a single way in which the United States came out ahead in the war. We have

* Demonstrated that the US simply can't offer any meaningful security guarantee to it's middle east partners.

* Permanently ceded de facto control over the straits of Hormuz to Iran

* Significantly strengthened the hardliners in the Iranian regime and cleared the way for them to have absolute power by eliminating all moderates

* Spiked inflation at home and doubled down on pissing off pretty much every single country except Russia by heaping sky rocketing energy costs on them

* Exposed the perilous state of of the defense industrial base (in spite of us spending more than the next 10 countries combined). We simply can't produce enough military hardware to sustain a sustained conflict with a country like Iran. I shudder to think just how badly we will be outmatched in a shooting war with China.

All of this to get to a point where we are negotiating a deal which is worse than what we already had with the JCPOA.

I think we will look back on this as the US version of the Suez crisis, the beginning of the end of the US empire.

The US oil industry is making massive amount of money directly from the people of the US on the inflated prices, since their domestic supply and refineries are unaffected. It also perfectly matches the actions a foreign country trying to harm the US would take. There's so many terrible options to choose from!

The saving grace is that China (well modern living CCP members) have never had an armed conflict. China's military ranks are people who got there by playing politics and bending exercises to their benefit rather than showing battlefield competence. There are no war vets or experienced players.

So while they might have incredible man power and manufacturing capability, everyone in that first battle will be seeing battle for the first time in their life.

IMO the last point is a definitely plus. Defense procurement is a feeding trough for the incumbents. Exposing the current state is a required first step for any meaningful transition (not sufficient and will probably not happen this time, but required nevertheless). My 2c.

Short, medium and long-term this will spur the world to move off of fossil fuels. I'm not a fan of war, especially this stupid one, but that one benefit may be, unintentionally, worth it.

>I shudder to think just how badly we will be outmatched in a shooting war with China.

A study a few years ago gave the US just 1 week before all its missiles were depleted with China in just a naval war.

It's not over yet, but the status quo is certainly a loss for the US. Which to me indicates Trump won't stop here, he needs something he can at least spin as a win.

I think Trump is about to lose patience with Iran again and we're in for a second phase of this war. What that looks like afterwards is anyone's guess. I'm not very optimistic.

It's not impossible that if the IRGC can't make payroll that things start to change from the inside, like what happened in Serbia. I'm not going to bet on that outcome though.

Your top point is honestly the biggest.

Until this year, US military bases were seen as an asset. They were thought to deter attacks, and in the case of someone being crazy enough to attack the country that hosted a US military base, they sold the promise of a quick and decisive response.

But for countries in the Middle East, every base was nothing but a liability with nothing but a long list of detriments. The bases got attacked and destroyed with basically zero effort whatsoever, local militaries had to step up to defend the US bases on their own dime and with their own people putting their lives on the line, and the bases basically just served as provocation and ended up with the countries being attacked as "punishment" for letting the US military operate on their land. And the US put in the bare minimum effort, if any, to defend the countries being attacked. It was basically "that's on you. Buzz off".

Europe is now being threatened with having their US bases cut back/removed entirely and I'm not sure if people are even worried anymore. People have been using the term "paper tiger" to refer to Russia these past 4 years because their efforts at war have been absolutely embarrassing. Somehow the US has made Russia look competent, and despite being against all the BS America did in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc, I didn't think America would somehow show itself to be more rotted out from the inside than Russia. I always assumed the US was competent, albeit war hungry. But somehow competence has completely vanished.

And right now, East Asian allies of the US operate under the very wrong assumption that the US will back them up if China/Russia/North Korea tries something. And now that those countries know the US won't do shit, there's a non zero chance that they've taken war plans from purely hypothetical plans to "we could actually do this" plans.

Capital flight away from government debt offerings could also be happening:

https://www.ft.com/content/2e0185d1-3229-463c-8391-6dd09fe11...

Then the causal chain is War in Iran -> Oil Price increase -> Inflation & Fed Rate fears -> Treasury sell-off. Geopolitical risk creates inflation shock, and if bonds sell off on war news, their utility as a portfolio hedge weakens, and capital holders start looking for new assets (stocks and property). Also, the exodus from bonds first results in a pile of sidelined capital whose eventual rotation into stocks and property and gold leads to more market instability down the road.

Also, Russian and Iranian windfall oil profits are up along with those of Exxon, Chevron, Shell etc., the arms producers like Lockheed are booming, and for some reason, ‘prediction markets’ (gambling interests) also:

https://vestedfinance.com/blog/us-stocks/who-made-money-from...

> I can't think of a single way in which the United States came out ahead in the war.

I wouldn't jump to conclusions yet. The war is not over. I wouldn't even be so sure as to say Iran is in a good place right now.

Iran can absorb more pain than the US, but even that has a deadline. For the US, the only pain is inflation, which is more a matter of political capital than anything tangible. Trump is a lame duck president so I think he's more than happy to spend his political capital on this.

It's different for Iran. The main concern with a prolonged conflict is a lack of oil storage space. Once the tanks are full you have to cap the wells which is nigh disastrous for Iran because of the cost and difficulty of reactivating those wells later on.

To be clear, I'm not saying the US is going to come out victorious. But war is complex and it's a folly to predict any outcomes this early on.

The US was not supposed to come out ahead. This is crony capitalism. Think about all the money Trump JR can make selling drones and all the VC companies benefiting from defense spending!

It's actually very difficult to implement a change in our timeline on such a complex issue without causing a mix of positive and negative effects relative to your desired goal. It's very hard to impute whether anyone in the White House actually had a successful causal motive->plan->implementation->effect loop deliberately, but there are always high points, even of grotesque failure.

Obviously it's not NET positive, but if I had to highlight one positive for the US from their perspective, setting most of our guided munitions on fire overnight breaks the military, and the suspicion is that it breaks the military at a time when China is not quite yet prepared to invade Taiwan. It is now in a widely acknowledged catastrophic munitions stockpile crisis which Congress will have to fix via large, sustained investment; Increasing procurement rates for many systems by an order of magnitude on the low end. A year ago, and 10 years ago, and 25 years ago, it was in a severe munitions stockpile crisis according to everyone who's ever ran a wargame or tried to figure out deterrence policy for a non-nuclear shooting war

After the Cold War, we basically reduced most munitions stockpiles to a level consistent with a Desert Storm scale operation, but kept paying exorbitant amounts of money to keep defense contractors technically alive, producing a handful of units a year at costs that pay for the overhead of existing. In areas like naval procurement, the contradictions entailed by this approach combined with neoliberal austerity posturing and a lackadaisical response to delays, have combined to turn almost every major shipbuilding effort since the Cold War into an expensive failure. We are spending a remarkable amount of money on military equipment and probably getting 5% of what we would get if we spent twice that much and emphasized industrial performance rather than contractor sustainment.

A year ago, Congress and the Pentagon were carefully ignoring this for political reasons, while the MIC & foreign policy blob believes China was looking at it as an opportunity.

> middle east partners

Well, European partners are looking, too - and they are drawing logical conclusions, such as producing more interceptors locally rather than wait years for the first batches of PAC-3.

How the US is ahead:

There is a ready list of American and European IRGC sympathizers. They would rather have the status quo of the Carter disaster than to give a green light to a no-RoE takeover of Iran.

Deny (or strip) them clearances, access to intelligence, and/or influence over defense policy.

I find it so interesting that you believe the Supreme Leader was a moderate. Also that somehow, the almost complete dismantling of the Iranian military resulted in Iran having more control over the straits of Hormuz. "The end of the US empire" so dramatic! fun stuff

i dont understand why the hardliners are bad they were right. the war waged against them was threatened to be nuclear "an entire civilization will die tonight". the country threatening iran unjustly is indeed the great satan. no justification except for being egged on by our hyper aggressive expansionist apartheid proxy israel. we should pay reparations.

Probably going to juice EV sales is the only positive I'm taking away from this. Trump might end up being the person who tipped the balance and kills the ICE car.

(Once ICE cars fall below a certain percentage, they will have structural disadvantages to EVs because ICE engines are so expensive to design.)

Google searches for the epstein files went down significantly.

When the position of the United States gets hurt, it means "liberals" get hurt - where "liberal" means anybody who might believe in lofty ideals like Constitutional rights or simply hasn't thrown in their lot with a hollow New York con man. I have tried and tried to steelman, but from everything I can tell this is really the only concrete policy mandate behind Trumpism. It's a societal death cult. Heaven's Gate didn't think they were killing themselves either.

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>I can't think of a single way in which the United States came out ahead in the war.

The stock market did, which is amazing if you're the top 10% of asset owners who own 50% of the country's wealth.

>except Russia by heaping sky rocketing energy costs on them

Russia doesn't benefit from this energy spike, since its biggest customers, China and India, have long term contracts that Russia can't just rip and renegotiate to charge spot prices, since they're in a pickle right now and depend on imports to keep the war going while not being able to sell to too many nations so they're stuck watching potential earnings go past them.

I'm sure you've at least heard what the United States' leaders have to say. To paraphrase Trump, "stopping nuclear proliferation to a group of lunatics that support terrorism". And also (still paraphrasing Trump), "the US doesn't need this as much as the rest of the world." So, perhaps this doesn't put the US ahead relative to other countries, but it puts them ahead of the counterfactual nuclear wasteland they could become.

Whether or not you believe the United States' leaders, whether or not you think there was a better way for them to achieve their goals (something something Obama deal) is up for debate. But it's very facetious to say you "can't think of a single way in which the United States came out ahead in the war," when the United States' leaders have been publicly announcing it for nearly a year.

The United States is simply an imaginary entity. Some people have been winning for quite a while.