If Washington’s participation in Israel’s June 2025 war with Iran elevated U.S. military force to a perfectly viable instrument of the United States’ Iran policy, the success of current talks would signal the formal undoing of that logic. But should the failure of talks pave the way for another full-scale war, the United States and Israel will be fighting an Iran vastly different from June. For the Iran of today appears to have made its peace with the grim conclusion that while a decisive slog with Israel and the United States is sure to be agonizing, it is preferable to the recurring attrition of repeated wars and a chronic strategic vulnerability that only emboldens adversaries to target Iran and its regional allies.
Both!!! The subject we are speaking of is inherently contradictory.
You call it contradictory. I call it over determination. Everything the US government is doing it would do even if Trump wasn’t acting at the direction of Putin. We’ve seen proxy wars before. We’ve seen how the US manages them. Ukraine is entirely explainable through the calculus of historical US proxy wars, and particularly proxy wars with Russia/USSR. The conflict with Iran is explain able without an appeal to Russian conspiracy.
This is over determination at it’s most essential. It becomes contradictory and irrational when you add in the puppet conspiracy. Without that conspiracy, it’s all explainable with what we know about the US bureaucracy, military strategy, and geopolitical conditions.