Subject: Re: Starmer chooses his side: Iran
Right, because the Mullahs in Iran have been a beacon of hope, freedom and light for the entire world since 1979.
Dude. Seriously?

Dude. Seriously? You think that the issue is just whether the existing regime in Iran is good or bad or downright evil? Before we go blowing things up, we need to have a plan for what follows - and "anything is better than the current system" is not a plan.

The US has thousands of reasons to eliminate the Ayatollah and his entire regime. To say otherwise is to ignore our shared history since 1979.

Really? Other than metaphor, what is the legal justification for an invasion of a sovereign state without any sanction by international body?

I suppose if one takes the view that the US is an irrational actor this makes sense. But we're not, so it doesn't.

Except it can make sense, because the US being an irrational actor is not the only way this makes sense. The U.S. has made it abundantly clear that it will no longer act in Britain's interests. Or any other country's interests. It will act in the U.S.' interests. We have always prioritized our own interests, of course - but we have now signaled very clearly to the rest of the world that whatever importance we used to place on the interests of our allies and fellow liberal democracies has now been downgraded, close to near-zero.

So now it is entirely rational for other countries to question supporting the U.S. in ways that they did not need to when it could be assumed that we would at least be cognizant of other countries' situation.

The Bad Orange Man that is leading the rest of the world to support Iran and ignore, oh, pretty much everything else is now basing its decisions on "popularity".

It's not basing those decisions on "popularity" in the same sense as "high school" popular. Trump has alienated the electorate of many (most?) European countries by dismissing their interests and criticizing their nations. He has signaled to them that the U.S. no longer is going to concern itself with their well-being, and indeed no longer regards them as allies but something closer to parasitic rivals. Going forward, we are now perfectly willing to damage their economies, injure their domestic industries, impose punitive measures against their trade, because we have the power to do so and because it benefits us to disregard their well-being. So those electorates are rationally assessing whether it is in their interests for their nations to closely cooperate with the U.S. - which gets expressed to their leaders in the form of support for such cooperation or not.

They used to be more unreservedly willing to be part of Team U.S.A. - Leader of the Free World and all that - because they could count on us to be a good Leader and look out for their interests as well as our own. But we've spent the last year demonstrating that's over - our interests are the only ones that count. America First. Well, these sorts of things will start happening a lot more frequently....