Iran War

[Sheilbh]

Hasn't that been the purview of Russia, China, and their fellow travellers?

Yeah - also Latin American and Asian thinkers and politicians. A fair few Europeans (especially French) too. I have a bit of an old school third worldist view - I even specifically went to Bandung to visit the conference museum when I was on holiday in Indonesia (because I'm a nerd ) - so I'm not unsympathetic to a multipolar world.

But I also think what you think about it kind of doesn't matter - it is just reality. The single biggest fact driving this, and I think the central fact in our world is China. The "West" represented two thirds of global GDP in 1990, it's now about or just under a third - it's not our world anymore, which I think is a cause of a lot of our morbid symptoms. But I don't for one second mourn the demise of the 1990s, I think it was, to nick a bit of Auden, a low, dishonest decade.

Whether we are, as a world, capable of building something new and more enduring - and a more just, democratic distribution of global power - is uncertain but we're going to have to try because that's the world that's coming.  I think that is the challenge and I think Western countries need to be in a position to advance their own interests but also engage with the rest of the world as equals, who also have their own interests which we need to take account of and work with as equals.

[DGuller]

This was impossible to foresee.

It's like Iran closing the strait.  How could one predict that?  You'd have to know what Iran did in the past to guess that and no one can predict the past.

In order to foresee problems with China, you have to be some incredible genius that knows fiendishly complicated things. Like that China exists and it may have some interest in shipping.

To be fair, fighting the last war is a very common mistake in war planning.  For all his faults, Trump didn't overlearn from the past wars.