Subject: Re: Iran - The Difference in Assessment
Oh, okay. I must have missed the giant show of force the Chinese made to keep their ally in the fold.

There was no giant show of force, because China's alliances aren't predicated on a giant show of force. Venezula is China's ally not because China has forced them to be by military might, but because Venezuela is a socialist dictatorship that has relied on hostility to the U.S. for nominal legitimacy and has deep economic and investment ties with China.

At least, that's what they were before we removed Maduro. Today, they are a socialist dictatorship that has relied on hostility to the U.S. for nominal legitimacy and has deep economic and investment ties with China.

You see? China didn't need to use s show of force to keep their ally in the fold, because their alliance is based on geopolitical and economic factors. The U.S., on the other hand, can only get Venezuela to do things only on matters of oil exports (for the most part), and even then only for the exact length of time that we maintain a significant naval presence in their vicinity.

Sorry, but they aren't in the same zip code as "right". In fact you can draw a bright line between the JCPOA and Obama's coddling of the mullahs to October 7th.

I think you misunderstand my point. They were "right," in the sense that there was not an easy an effective alternative solution to the Iran problem in the form of military invasion. They were right in recognizing that the likely outcome of a military invasion is that the situation doesn't get any better, and we end up wasting enormous resources to come out the other side with the exact same problem we had going in. To wit, an authoritarian dictatorship that both desires to present a security threat to its neighbors and has a large enough economy to be able to acquire the means to present that security threat no matter what the U.S. does.

Trump thinks that there was a military solution to that problem that Obama and Biden were too "weak" to implement, rather than being too "smart" to implement. We'll see. It's early days, but again the initial effects of the war are to show that Obama and Biden were right not to attack Iran. We've blown tens of billions of dollars in military resources and caused the biggest oil crisis in generations, and at least as of time of writing we have pretty much the exact same regime in place now as when we went in.