Iranian Nukes and American Boots

A response to Rick Wilson's thoughts on the MAGA civil war and the Iran-Israel shooting war

Oh goodness do I ever have thotz:

First, my priors. I'm a liberal internationalist. I supported the NATO incursion into Serbia and Kosovo to prevent ethnic cleansing and genocide in Europe. I would have supported US troops in Rwanda to stop a tribal genocide and feel Bill Clinton's regret about not doing so. I supported the State Department and the CIA in goosing the Color Revolutions; we should give aid and comfort to resistance to tyranny, provided that resistance is entirely indigenous to the countries in question.

And of course I've been a full throated Ukraine supporter since '14 and Putin's Little Green Men.

But here's where liberal internationalism breaks down: in nations where the opposition is tightly controlled and repressed into a nullity. A color revolution wouldn't work in the Russian Federation. And a color revolution wouldn't work in theocratic Iran. Nor Afghanistan. Nor Pakistan. Nor Iraq.

I'm a liberal internationalist, but what I am not is a goddamn imperialist.

Respectfully, Rick, I think your international worldview is a bit White Man's Burden-ey for my blood, wagging your finger at certain countries and saying no, no, you can't have thaaat, you're not all advanced and rule-based like us Wise, Sober Westerners. Your arguments for why Iran shouldn't have nuclear weapons are pretty weak; your first one you rebutted yourself: What exactly did the Budapest Memorandum gain Ukraine after they gave up their nukes? Your second one is Domino Theory and I don't think it's particularly strong, either. One word: Pakistan. You know that Pakistan's security service, the ISI, is rife with Islamists in the military; this is the country that sheltered OBL for nearly a decade (Pakistan plays a double game with the West so they eventually gave him up). Now Pakistan has threatened to nuke Israel, more than likely an empty threat. Did they give their Deobandi Islamist co-religionists in Afghanistan nukes to deter us? No they didn't.

I'd honestly feel way more nervous if Saudi Arabia or another of the Gulf states got nukes than Iran. The difference between Shi'ite and Sunni Islam is roughly analogous to Catholics and Protestants. Shi'ite Islam is based on a finite number of long-established schools; Sunni imams are more like freelancers and itinerant preachers. While the petrostates seem institutionalist and Western-leaning, support for their regimes is paper thin and it's easy to imagine a fanatical Islamist coup in any one of them. Institutions in Shi'ite Iran are already theocratic. Conservative beats radical.

Does this mean that I somehow want Iran to have nuclear weapons? Of course not; I marched in Nuclear Freeze protests in the 80s and I support current efforts to denuclearize the entire world. I ardently supported the JCPOA. But all placing Iran under an immediate, existential military threat does is increase the entirely cogent reasons that Iran feels it can't survive without them. Sheesh.

No arguments with your analysis if this becomes a shooting war. Nothing like a guarantee that we'll bust the right bunkers and putting a target on our backs might activate sleeper cells in this country so Iran can do a Salman Rushdie on all of us. Not to mention threaten our military bases in Kuwait, Iraq and Saudi Arabia. Our air defenses there aren't as robust as Trump thinks they are.

I agree with your distinction between influencer MAGA and truck nuts MAGA and do think that the truck nutzers will simply assimilate this if Trump TACOs at the end of two weeks. But the problem is that Bibi has a massive boner for those bunker busters. And we can't just give them to Israel; they'd have to be delivered by our B-2s. One US strike op on behalf of Israel would be all it would take.

I disagree a bit about the deep causes of MAGA isolationism. Turning the right wing around from being anti-Russia, a battleship of postwar doctrinal orthodoxy, was an enormous multi-year influence op that had to work on people who wouldn't know Ukraine from Belarus. I think the failures in Iraq and Afghanistan were much bigger factors for the truck nutzers and the pro-Russia slide only began to dig in after the February '22 invasion. I think the more significant split in MAGA isn't between the doctrinally orthodox isolationists (influencer / "intellectual" MAGA) and the pro-Russian faction, it's between antisemitic / anti-Israel MAGA and pro-Israel / Christian Zionist MAGA.

Trump's steroidal grifting with the Gulf states has opened the floodgates for the right-wing antisemitism that has always been there, but has been tamped down by the End Times'ers (mostly Pentecostals, the quickest growing denomination) who believe that anything good happening to Israel means that good stuff will happen to "the Church." But if the US will have to put boots on the ground on behalf of its little buddy Israel, it would rip that split into open bloody warfare.