No. of Recommendations: 9
The Gulf states also are de facto under the United States' nuclear umbrella.
They are not. If Iran were to attack one of the other Gulf states (as they have in this war), the U.S. isn't using nukes to protect them. Any more than China is going to use their nukes to protect Iran. Or any more than we've used our nukes now to protect them. They don't want other states in the region to race to nukes.
Again, the key here is to recognize that Iran did not previously break out. They've been within a few weeks of enriching uranium to weapons grade and constructing a bomb for....well, for several years now. But they never did it. Not because they lacked the ability to do it - because they didn't want the consequences of what would happen if they did.
What Trump wants is rare Earth minerals and he wants the NATO scofflaws to take Arctic security seriously. If he can get those two things then he doesn't need to annex Greenland.
It's still the same thing. Whatever Trump's "wants" are with Greenland, he's had the ability to achieve them at any time in the last year and a half. He could have taken measures to annex Greenland, or seize their mineral deposits, or whatever at any point. Within a few weeks, we could have Greenland completely within our control. And we haven't. Which doesn't require denying that Trump has things he wants in Greenland - it simply means that there are countervailing wants that have dissuaded him from just taking what he wants in Greenland.
Which, again, is what's been happening with Iran's program for these last many years. They've wanted a nuke - no one disputes that - but they've also not wanted to deal with the consequences of getting a nuke. So they've refrained from getting a nuke, preferring instead to stay just under the threshhold of breakout.
From the Iranian perspective they've been in a hot war with us that entire time.
It's not a matter of perspective. We weren't actually in a hot war. We weren't doing to them that entire time what we're doing now. We hadn't escalated it into an real hot war. They refrained from doing certain things (like striking other Gulf states' energy facilities or closing the Straits) for nearly all that time because they didn't want to precipitate an actual hot war, because that wasn't in their interests. Now that we've just gone ahead and launched a hot war against them, we've eliminated the escalation threat for most of these things. Once you go to war, you can't threaten to go to war any more - you're already there. So now the strait is closed, because Iran doesn't have to worry that closing the strait would launch a war against them (because the war is already here).
