Iran attacked, the US blocked and countered, attacking the source of the attacks.
> “Iranian forces launched multiple missiles, drones and small boats as USS Truxtun (DDG 103), USS Rafael Peralta (DDG 115), and USS Mason (DDG 87) transited the international sea passage. No U.S. assets were struck.”
Step 1 appears to have been US ships entering the strait. Iran claims they fired on a tanker but who's to say.
I guess you could say the "first step" was the the ships being there to be shot at, if you were trying really, really hard to spin it as the united states being the aggressor.
Also maybe Trump doesn’t want chaos but I doubt he runs the show so much at this point.
I mean, what's Trump going to do? Murder Iranian leaders harder?
It is really strange how when you offer to negotiate with the leaders of a country as a pretext to assassinate them... twice... it becomes difficult to negotiate with those who replace them.
Nobody could have seen this coming.
Whatever the case, I'd love to hear your Asian proxy war plan. Japan and Korea vs China?
Regarding Asia, look at US' vying to have unfettered access for its Air Force over the Strait of Malacca, despite popular disfavor by Indonesians, after a $15 billion energy deal with their government. The US having command over the South Korean military - in what world is that in South Korea's interest? Vietnam's new dependence on US LNG as a result of the attack on Iran. Look at the disputes in the South China Sea despite the disputants having China as their biggest trading partner, and the disputes rising exactly at the time of the US' pivot to Asia. Same pattern with Taiwan - a plan that has been in place for decades but which has become a political token coinciding with the pivot to Asia.
Japan and Korea vs China sounds absurd doesn't it? Why would they pick a fight with their biggest trading partner, who also appears much stronger than them militarily? Surely it's not in their interest right? Yet that's exactly what we've been seeing (belligerence from Japan's PM over Taiwan is a case in point). Does rising belligerence against a key trading partner/US geopolitical rival sound familiar?
Meanwhile Russia can't defeat Ukraine but Europe is convinced it has to arm itself and join the proxy war. This aligns with the 2026 National Defense Strategy - feeding proxies into wars against US rivals, what the US euphemistically refers to as "'burden sharing".
You put a lot of faith in Russian rhetoric. They've made many hollow declarations before and during the war, particularly around territorial integrity and western support. Meanwhile Putin has made all sorts of claims to contradict this casus belli you cling to, e.g. Russia has a historical right to Ukraine. And I won't even start with Medvedev.
> It's strange to me that you think that the US had nothing to do with expanding NATO
I don't recall saying the US had nothing to do with it. But this wasn't the unilateral action by the US that you asserted. And Russia doesn't have veto power over NATO or Ukraine or Georgia. Their warmongering threats don't suddenly mean their neighbors are no longer sovereign. Nor does it mean "it's someone else's fault that they are forced to invade". And yes, the same also applies to Trump's stupid Monroe Doctrine 2.0.
> Japan and Korea vs China sounds absurd doesn't it?
Yes, it does. And brave rhetoric from politicians doesn't somehow equate to the US puppeteering them into a proxy war. You seem to think that US power is awful and should be resisted but when Russia tells its neighbors not to join a defensive alliance, the smaller countries should oblige. And that Japan has to walk on eggshells around China because of its military inferiority.
In any event, your only evidence of an impeding proxy war is Japanese "belligerence" and US influence. Unremarkable.
both can be true at the same time: russia does not have veto power and nobody can stop russia from invading ukraine if russia wants to keep ukraine from nato. unfortunately, being morally right does not protect you from a bully
> Russia stated that Ukraine joining NATO would start a war. The US began that process knowing Russia's reaction. Russia did what it said it would do.
Russia did not threaten anyone with war over the prospect of NATO membership. In the first years of the war, Russia did not even acknowledge that those were Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine. Russian government claimed that it was a civil war.
> This has nothing to do with reality.
> ...
> Russia did not threaten anyone with war over the prospect of NATO membership.
As much as I hate Putin and his regime, we have to admit Russia did indeed said that it views the NATO expansion as an existential threat.
From Putin's 2007 Munich speech [1]:
> It turns out that NATO has put its frontline forces on our borders, and we continue to strictly fulfill the treaty obligations and do not react to these actions at all. I think it is obvious that NATO expansion does not have any relation with the modernization of the Alliance itself or with ensuring security in Europe. On the contrary, it represents a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust.
The speech obviously did not make a direct threat, this is a political speech after all, but the message was crystal clear for most, take for example the letter [2] Burns (US ambassador to Russia from 2005 to 2008) sent after the Munich's speech to Condoleeza Rice in which Burns warned of serious consequences arising from NATO’s eastward expansion to include Ukraine and Georgia:
> Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests. At this stage, a MAP offer would be seen not as a technical step along a long road toward membership, but as throwing down the strategic gauntlet. Today’s Russia will respond. Russian-Ukrainian relations will go into a deep freeze. . . . It will create fertile soil for Russian meddling in Crimea and eastern Ukraine. (letter to Condoleeza Rice, February 2008)
[1] https://securityconference.org/en/publications/books/selecte... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Munich_speech_of_Vladimir...
[edit]: formatting
And then Ukraine accession disappeared from the policy menu. Then Putin annexed Crimea. Pretending Putin invaded Ukraine with any more strategic coherence than Trump going into Iran reveals a reality-defying bias in a source.
Pretty much every country that has joined NATO since the end of the Cold War has seen a flood of such threats, Finland and Sweden most recently[1]:
"Finland's accession to Nato will cause serious damage to bilateral Russian-Finnish relations and the maintaining of stability and security in the Northern European region. Russia will be forced to take retaliatory steps, both of a military-technical and other nature, in order to neutralise the threats to its national security that arise from this."
Burns and many other Western diplomats have been surprisingly ignorant of such games, treat Russians as primitive savages who are incapable of manipulating people (despite it being a deeply ingrained feature of their culture), and take their words at face value, which produces the kind of memos Burns wrote. The 2008 decision to deny Georgia and Ukraine entry into NATO is nowadays widely considered a mistake. The views Burns held and promoted in the memo made the war more likely instead of preventing it.
The US strikes on Iran were paused temporarily because Kuwait and Saudi Arabia refused permission to use their bases for that purpose. Now permission to use those bases has been secured (probably in exchange for protection guarantees and other political concessions) so the strikes can resume.
(I'm not claiming that any of this is a good idea, just explaining the state of affairs.)
Iran is a terrorist state
* Oil futures (not spot price) have been completely detached from reality, with credible evidence of corrupt insiders making money by front-running Trump’s social media posts
* Negotiations never went anywhere; despite Trump’s social media claims (see point 1), they barely even got to the negotiation table
* There is no potential for an exit that doesn’t leave us worse off than where we started, because Iran is control of whether the conflict continues, not the US, and it’s in their best interest to continue the conflict until they get major concessions (like permanent ability to tax the straight)
In short, the Trump administration is a clown show whose only really competence is corruption.