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#1

Off the Record / Re: Go Persians, go!

Last post by Jacob - Today at 08:39:07 PM

Interesting, Sheilbh. Thanks for sharing that. Do you have a link to the source?

#2

Off the Record / Re: Go Persians, go!

Last post by Tonitrus - Today at 08:36:54 PM

I mean, I think we'd pretty easily replicate the total air superiority we had earlier in the year.  But a SOF-raid with helos would be much different than bombers and stealth fighters.

#3

Off the Record / Re: The China Thread

Last post by Tonitrus - Today at 08:34:30 PM

And then there's a Russia wildcard...I don't think they'd get directly involved...just lots of vocal support for "China's internal affairs"...but could accelerate Navy/Air Force (those out in the Far East not being too busy/helpful in Ukraine) "exercises" in areas of the Pacific that we care about in order to try and be distracting. 

#4

Off the Record / Re: Go Persians, go!

Last post by Sheilbh - Today at 08:34:10 PM

Fair.

And it's a long time ago but I remember reading Guests of the Ayatollah which has a whole section on the disastrous rescue mission

#5

Off the Record / Re: The China Thread

Last post by Tonitrus - Today at 08:29:41 PM

I doubt even we would be able to...I'd expect that at least initially, the USN is going be extremely cautious of PRC anti-ship capabilities.

And we'd need air superiority over the sea area, which will be tough.  I assume if we got involved, Kadena (Okinawa) would be missile saturated and unusable pretty quick...meaning the USAF would be limited to Guam at best...maybe Japan proper (though that would be militarily and diplomaticly risky...Japan may assist overall, I think will be vary wary of impacts on the home islands area)...and PLAN submarines would have our carriers at the top of their hit list. 

#6

Off the Record / Re: The China Thread

Last post by Sheilbh - Today at 08:23:36 PM

Also I think hina would probably be able to sustain a blockade of some sort against anyone but the US (especially because I don't think there's any real ports on the East coast of Taiwan).

#7

Off the Record / Re: The China Thread

Last post by Tonitrus - Today at 08:20:20 PM

If the US begs off getting involved, I doubt Japan and South Korea would even try to sustain Taiwan.  Far more likely they would focus on and accelerate their own defenses (which may include going nuclear).

#8

Off the Record / Re: Go Persians, go!

Last post by Tonitrus - Today at 08:18:20 PM

Having said all that - the attack in Venezuela was extraordinary, so I'm very reluctant to write of the US military.

I think the factor that Caracas is on the coast, and Tehran (and probably other leadership hideouts) are pretty far inland is not an insignificant one in this case.

#9

Off the Record / Re: US - Greenland Crisis Thre...

Last post by Legbiter - Today at 08:01:18 PM

Nice overview of Greenland today (ignore the thumbnail clickbait).

[After a decade of costly and inconclusive ventures: the failure to impose an outcome in Yemen, the inability to subordinate Qatar through coercive isolation, the underwhelming regional returns of Vision 2030, and the growing economic and strategic rivalry with Abu Dhabi, Saudi policymakers appear to have reached a different conclusion about what is the best path they have to accumulate regional power in current conditions. A consolidating relationship with Turkey, renewed investment in Islamist and anti-Zionist legitimation, a deliberate freeze of normalization with Israel, and public confrontation with the UAE across multiple theaters are all clear signs of such a major strategic pivot. And behind it all, a strategic wager: the American-led conditions that made Gulf alignment rational are thinning, and Saudi Arabia intends to lead the region in whatever post-liberal world comes next. Riyadh is no longer a conservative stakeholder seeking to preserve an inherited hierarchy. It is acting as a revisionist manager—prepared to challenge old partners, reorder alignments, and redefine the principles around which regional politics are structured.]

#10

Off the Record / Re: Go Persians, go!

Last post by Sheilbh - Today at 07:57:29 PM

How so?

May be overstating it but I thought this was interesting by Hussein Aboubakr Mansour from a couple of weeks ago, via Adam Tooze framing the argument and the shift from the Emirati alliance into a closer working with Turkey, a more explicitly religious and anti-Zionist line sems clear. Plus I think while the Axis of Resistance still existed the possibility of alignment between Israel, Saudi and the UAE was plausible - having destroyed the Axis of Resistance, I think Israel's also destroyed the basis of that rapprochement.

I still think aspects of Project 2030 have been surprisingly (to me) successful (I think particularly the propaganda side of things) but I think it's also clear they're trying to defend oil prices as structurally key to their economy.

For more than a decade, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates functioned as the central axis of what was called moderate Arab politics. They coordinated on Yemen, jointly confronted Qatar, underwrote counterrevolutionary reaction after 2011's Arab Spring, and presented themselves to Washington as the region's most reliable Arab partners. Now, Saudi Arabia is changing this course and is repositioning for regional primacy in a Middle East it believes will soon look very different.

After a decade of costly and inconclusive ventures: the failure to impose an outcome in Yemen, the inability to subordinate Qatar through coercive isolation, the underwhelming regional returns of Vision 2030, and the growing economic and strategic rivalry with Abu Dhabi, Saudi policymakers appear to have reached a different conclusion about what is the best path they have to accumulate regional power in current conditions. A consolidating relationship with Turkey, renewed investment in Islamist and anti-Zionist legitimation, a deliberate freeze of normalization with Israel, and public confrontation with the UAE across multiple theaters are all clear signs of such a major strategic pivot. And behind it all, a strategic wager: the American-led conditions that made Gulf alignment rational are thinning, and Saudi Arabia intends to lead the region in whatever post-liberal world comes next. Riyadh is no longer a conservative stakeholder seeking to preserve an inherited hierarchy. It is acting as a revisionist manager—prepared to challenge old partners, reorder alignments, and redefine the principles around which regional politics are structured.

The immediate trigger was the developments in Yemen, which began last month. Emirati-backed forces advanced into Saudi-controlled territory in the south, seizing energy infrastructure with minimal resistance. Riyadh responded with a sustained counteroffensive that pushed Emirati proxies back and signaled a willingness to contest Emirati positions across the theater. The military clash was quickly accompanied by an information war. Saudi-aligned media accused the UAE of promoting secessionism, undermining Arab territorial integrity, and acting as a conduit for Israeli nefarious plans. Emirati outlets countered by portraying Saudi Arabia as reckless, ideologically Islamist, and unfit to manage regional stability.

This confrontation with the UAE and the end of the Saudi-UAE relationship as a stable axis are the first visible expressions of a broader regional system transition: from a region organized around managed alignment to one structured by open competition among status-seeking middle powers within conditions of competitive multipolarity in which conflict is not episodic but structural.

[...]

What is emerging is not multipolarity in the classical sense—a stable distribution of power among great-power blocs--but something more fluid and less predictable: a post-liberal environment in which the American rule-based hegemony that once mediated competition has ended. Or to put it in other terms, America's hegemony is no longer rule-based. Access to markets, capital, and security guarantees can no longer be secured through institutional compliance. They must be bargained for, repeatedly, from a position of leverage.

[...]

Saudi Arabia's pivot must be read against this backdrop, and against a second, equally decisive factor: Trump's unilateral reordering of global energy markets. Saudi regional strategy rests on oil rents; without elevated oil revenues, domestic and regional expenditures become unsustainable. American policy now threatens that foundation with structural oversupply into a market already suffering from price volatility, undermining OPEC+ leverage precisely when Riyadh needs it most. The turn toward agenda control, symbolic custodianship, and selective mobilization is not ideological regression into a primordial Wahhabi Islamist DNA that reasserts itself. It is an adaptation to a new reality—one in which American actions have become unpredictable not only in the security domain but in the economic base that makes Saudi power possible.

[...]

The combined effect is the collapse of residual bipolarity. A system that had been organized around the two former bounding forces—American management on one side and Iranian-led resistance on the other—has lost both. With fewer external constraints and fewer systemic ceilings, competition becomes direct, positional, and difficult to contain. States accumulate influence less through institutional standing than through control over corridors, investment pathways, narrative platforms, and conflict portfolios. They seek veto points, cultivate leverage across arenas, and treat symbolic issues as instruments of statecraft.

[...]

Saudi Arabia's portfolio is anchored in wealth, scale, and symbolic authority. It is the only Arab state that combines demographic weight, financial capacity, and custodianship of Islam's central holy sites. These attributes generate a form of mass legitimacy unavailable to its Gulf peers, non-Arab states, let alone a small Jewish state, and impossible to replicate through material investment. Riyadh can mobilize regional publics, shape discourse, and redefine political priorities in ways that smaller states cannot. Its control over religious infrastructure further embeds Saudi authority into the everyday political economy of the Muslim world.

These structural assets translate easily into symbolic capital. Saudi Arabia realized that it is uniquely positioned to claim custodianship over regional "moral" files—above all Palestine—and to convert that claim into agenda-setting power, which ultimately makes an anti-Zionist posture more advantageous than a normalizing one. Narrative mobilization is therefore not ancillary to Saudi strategy but integral to it. In a system where legitimacy is increasingly contested, the ability to define what counts as stability, fragmentation, normalization, or betrayal constitutes a form of hard power by other means. Riyadh's current heightened propaganda activities reflect an effort to turn this symbolic advantage into a durable instrument of system management.

[...]

Several of the region's most consequential disputes now turn on a single question: which political units in the Middle East are permitted to consolidate, and which must be kept fragmented and permanently constrained. Unlike what Saudi and Qatari propaganda claim, the real answer is not doctrinal but strictly contingent. Every major actor endorses sovereignty when consolidation would produce a friendly power, and resists it when consolidation would generate a rival capable of locking in an adverse alignment. Fragmentation is not an ethical category. It is an equilibrium outcome in arenas where no coalition can impose a preferred settlement and where permeability itself becomes leverage.

[...]

Iran is where end-state preferences diverge sharply. The Islamic Republic has been severely weakened: its regional network has been degraded, its deterrent architecture disrupted, and its domestic stability stressed by sustained domestic pressure that might, as I type these lines, overthrow the regime. Israel's strategic horizon with Iran is regime change. Jerusalem is not merely trying to reduce Iranian projection or capabilities; it is trying to break the Islamic Republic once and for all without the capacity to regenerate. That is why regime change is central to Israeli victory, whether framed as an explicit objective or as the acceptable terminal outcome of sustained military pressure. Israeli messaging toward Iran's protest movement has always reflected this orientation.

Arab preferences are different. Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states do not want regime change in Iran. They want an Iran that is humbled, constrained, deterrable, and internationally isolated—not a collapsing state whose internal convulsions spill outward and whose succession produces unpredictable escalation. But neither do they want a secular, wealthy, internationally reintegrated Iran—economically normalized and capable of stable relations with the West and Israel—which would become a serious competitor for regional primacy with fewer structural constraints and greater attractiveness to capital. Riyadh prefers a weakened, isolated, "Islamic" Iran: this justifies Saudi Arabia's own religious securitization and ensures Iran remains a pariah rather than a competitor for Western investment. The Gulf preference, in other words, is managed containment: weaken Iran's projection and keep it boxed, but avoid the systemic risks of regime implosion and the strategic risks of Iranian normalization.

Moreover, Riyadh's calculus cannot be divorced from oil market dynamics, especially following the developments in Venezuela and how American actions have introduced serious instabilities into that calculus.

Venezuela holds the world's largest proven reserves. Under Maduro and sanctions, production collapsed from roughly three million barrels per day to under 800,000. The removal of Maduro and the installation of an American-aligned successor government opens the possibility of Venezuelan production rehabilitation at scale—a massive supply injection, sold at steep discounts to rebuild market shares, into a market already suffering from fears of oversupply and price volatility. Iran presents the same logic at an even greater magnitude. If the Islamic Republic falls amid the current protest wave and a successor regime normalizes with the West, Iranian production could return to four million barrels per day or more without sanctions constraints. Taken together, the normalization of both Venezuelan and Iranian output would structurally undermine OPEC+ leverage and place sustained downward pressure on prices, precisely when Saudi Arabia needs elevated revenues to fund its ambitious projects, which are already struggling, and defend its regional position in a time of intensified competition.

Saudi Arabia simply wants Iranian oil out of Western markets. A pariah Iran under sanctions is a gift to Saudi market share and pricing power. The current developments are a long-term threat to oil rents that makes Saudi regional strategy possible in the first place. The Saudi pivot is also a hedge against an American-led reordering of global energy markets that Riyadh cannot predict or control.

[...]