DESCRIPTION

The Trump administration is desperately searching for a way to end the Iran war on favorable terms. President Trump has indicated that he would take steps after the mid-term elections to bring the war to a victorious conclusion. That is not going to happen, however. The United States has no way of winning its war against Iran.

————————————————————
CHAPTERS

0:00 Intro
0:27 Trump's Post-Midterm Iran Plan
1:59 What's Happened Since February 28th
2:37 The Four U.S. and Israeli War Goals
4:47 What the War Has Cost So Far
6:09 Iran's Demands
9:53 Iran's Slow Walk on the Nuclear Issue
12:56 The Strategies the U.S. Has Tried
19:09 Trump's Four Options
20:58 Option 1: A Three-Day Bombing Campaign
25:25 Option 2: The Blockade and Bessent Strategy
27:51 Option 3: Diplomacy
29:56 Desperation in Washington and Israel
31:27 Option 4: A Nuke on Pickaxe Mountain
34:09 How a Nuclear Strike Would Work
36:55 Would It End the War?
38:20 The Wider Costs of Going Nuclear
40:43 Where That Leaves Us

————————————————————
MUSIC

"The Ice Giants" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Music modified (edited/remixed) from the original.

YouTube channel member @KamranRazvan asks: What does the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty actually offer a non-nuclear state if international law has no real enforcement?

My answer starts with a distinction between great powers and minor powers. Great powers create international institutions, write the rules to serve their own interests, and break those rules when they conflict with their national interest. No higher authority can punish them. The UN Security Council veto is the clearest example. Minor powers don’t write the rules, and they almost always have to obey them, because the great powers that built the institutions have the economic and military might to enforce them.

The NPT, created in 1968 by the United States and the Soviet Union, shows the pattern. Washington, Moscow, and today Beijing all have an interest in keeping non-nuclear states from getting the bomb. They enforce the treaty, not the institution itself. North Korea is the glaring exception.

In this episode I answer a question from channel member @hassanakram8328 , who asks whether it was worth it for Britain to fight World War I and World War II, and whether Britain should be helping Ukraine against Russia today. My answer is that Britain had no choice. Both wars were extremely costly, but staying out would have cost more. In 1914 and 1939, Britain had to choose between two bad options, and fighting was the less bad one. I explain why Britain, an island, repeatedly abandoned its policy of “splendid isolation” whenever a potential hegemon threatened to dominate Europe, from Napoleonic France to Imperial Germany to Nazi Germany. I also explain why the same logic led the United States into both world wars. I close with Ukraine. Russia is not Napoleonic France, Imperial Germany, or Nazi Germany, so the logic that brought Britain into the world wars doesn’t apply.