So, with all the above said as a preface, one object-level topic I’d be interested in seeing more discussion of is the current situation(s) in the Middle East. Some thoughts:
IMO the high bit for whether the war in Iran is broadly good is whether it is tactically successful and efficient in the short term.
Considerations like “this weakens the US position in a hypothetical hot war against China or Russia” or “this will (further) destabilize the Middle East in the long term” seem second-order to whether the war successfully neutralizes an organized, well-equipped, fanatical adversary for a long period of time, or fails to do that and also depletes a bunch of expensive / difficult-to-replace munitions stockpiles.
But how well or poorly things are going on this front is difficult to determine given fog of war and motivated reasoning + propaganda on all sides, and also less interesting for pundits to discuss vs. strategic and geopolitical implications. Prediction markets seem to being doing OK here, but I would be interested in hearing more analysis from the LW commentariat.
I think the most important effect of the war is that it makes Trump less popular/powerful domestically (even if a miracle happens and he gets some sort of deal.) This is good because the less power he has (e.g., Republicans lose the senate in the midterms), the more likely we are to navigate AI development in a sane way. I think if you put any nontivial*weight in short timelines, the AI considerations likely dominate everything else.
*edited any to nontrivial. Like, maybe 10%+ pre-Jan 2029
the more likely we are to navigate AI development in a sane way. I think if you put any weight in short timelines, the AI considerations likely dominate everything else.
I don’t think we’re particularly on track to do anything non-derpy w.r.t to AI either way, but this way of reasoning seems like somewhat naive consequentialism. In general, it’s good for good things to happen even if they are accomplished by bad people, and predicting second-order consequences is really hard.
Also, there are a lot of bad people in power, but for AI to go well, a lot of good things need to happen to allow humanity space and time to flourish in peace. Toppling (or militarily crippling) a fanatical Shia Islamist regime would be an extremely good thing; a bad outcome (which looks somewhat likely at this point) would be if Europe and the third world broadly give in to extortion and pay Iran a toll to pass through the strait. That toll would fund terror all over the world, and would signal to other would-be dictators and future AIs alike that they can successfully take whatever they want through force and threats, and half the world will just roll over and take it.
this way of reasoning seems like somewhat naive consequentialism.
Maybe? It is hard to reason well about these things given my strong emotions towards the admin.
But I do think the current administration is uniquely terrible by American standards.[1] It attracts and gives power to incompetent sycophants with no moral boundaries.
There was something Eliezer said about Bernie Sanders recently that really resonated with me recently:
[T]hank you also for consistently trying to do as seems right to you over the years, a stance that has grown on me as I have had more chance to witness its alternatives.
Having Trump as the president really just seems like it would be terrible for AGI governance because he is a terrible person. I’m sorry, I really don’t think there’s a more “precise” way to put it. Character matters. Trump doesn’t even pretend to be a kind person/is not under much pressure to appear to be nice.
(To be clear, I agree that, all else equal, it would be good for the Iranian regime to fail. Alas, all else would not be equal. While I think it would definitely be bad for your soul[2] to do things in the realm of “sabotage the American economy/military operation in order to make our president look bad,” I don’t think I’m obligated to stop my enemy when he is making a mistake either.)
Re character: I think most Americans (including myself) have been so far removed from true corruption that we have forgotten how bad it can possibly get. Even my state of Illinois, which is notable for its historical machine politics and general corruption (4 of our 11 last governors serving time + many others like Mike Madigan), has still more or less seen forward progress, because the corruption wasn’t bad enough to completely erode politics in the state.
But it CAN get that bad. We’re seeing this now with the Trump admin. I am generally left-leaning, but at this point I think I’d take an honest Republican over a corrupt Democrat—a position I did not hold previously—because corruption eats policy and utterly erodes the foundation upon which we build fair markets and strong institutions.
Toppling a fanatical Shia Islamist regime would be an extremely good thing.
I’m not convinced that it is necessary to topple it. Iran has been Shia for 5 centuries, and during those 5 centuries has attacked its neighbors very little.
Er, something pretty important happened in 1979. Also, the issue is not Shi’ism in general, “Shia Islamism” refers specifically to the flavor of political Islam instituted by the revolutionaries.
1979 can be seen as a return to traditional Iranian governmental policies after an experiment of a few decades with Western policies. Yes, the form of the current government (namely, a republic at least in principle) is more modern and Western than the form of the pre-1979 government (namely, a heriditary monarchy), but the monarch’s policies were more secular and Western than the current regime’s policies.
Islam has always been political in Iran, which has never had anything like the West’s separation between church and state except maybe to some extent during the experiment with Western policies that ended in 1979. We in the West shouldn’t attack countries just for being different from the West.
Toppling (or militarily crippling) a fanatical Shia Islamist regime would be an extremely good thing;
This seems far from certain from the perspective of anyone other than Israel. I mean, all else equal, definitely. But all else is definitely not equal. The most likely outcome even if this were to happen would be a huge increase in regional instability, which really doesn’t seem favorable to Europeans or most others in the surrounding area considering past examples.
That toll...would signal to other would-be dictators and future AIs alike that they can successfully take whatever they want through force and threats, and half the world will just roll over and take it.
But if they don’t pay the toll and support America in forcing it open, they are signaling it’s okay for hegemonic powers to aggress and start wars in any ways they deem fit. Europe has been forced into a lose-lose situation, by USA. It seems pretty clear that the only reason this is at all possible by Iran is because this war is seen by many in Europe and elsewhere as an unnecessary, illegal, and possibly harmful unilateral war of aggression.
Americans often seem blissfully unaware of how dangerous they appear to the rest of the world, and just take for granted that everyone considers them to always be the good guys, just doing good-guy things. America just took over Venezuela, now Iran, then Cuba, then Greenland and Canada. Is allowing all of this to be done unanimously by a great power without any repercussions not a dangerous signal to send? It seems to be a much stronger signal than that of the Strait, and they are to a certain degree opposing signals.
Americans often seem blissfully unaware of how dangerous they appear to the rest of the world, and just take for granted that everyone considers them to always be the good guys, just doing good-guy things.
Sam Kriss had a great recent essay making a similar point.
But if they don’t pay the toll and support America in forcing it open, they are signaling it’s okay for hegemonic powers to aggress and start wars in any ways they deem fit.
The strait is closed because Iran is pointing missiles and drones at anyone who tries to sail through it, including people engaged in commerce that has nothing to do with the US or Israel. Any explanation of causality that doesn’t center on that fact denies the agency of the Iranian regime, and allowing your people to be threatened and extorted just signals that you’re an easy target for anyone who wants to extract something from you by force.
It seems pretty clear that the only reason this is at all possible by Iran is because this war is seen by many in Europe and elsewhere as an unnecessary, illegal, and possibly harmful unilateral war of aggression.
Yes, this might be how many Europeans see it, but that doesn’t make them correct. Iran has been building up conventional weapons and working towards nuclear weapons, lobbing missiles and IEDs at civilian populations in Israel through terrorist proxies, and funding crime and terror all over the world for many years. That doesn’t make the current war strategically wise or good, but calling it a “unilateral war of aggression” is simply wrong.
Americans often seem blissfully unaware of how dangerous they appear to the rest of the world, and just take for granted that everyone considers them to always be the good guys, just doing good-guy things. America just took over Venezuela, now Iran, then Cuba, then Greenland and Canada.
Again, I agree that many Europeans might see the US that way, but so what? That doesn’t make them correct or worth listening to. Committed and principled pacifism would be one thing, but public opinion is often more incoherent and self-serving than that. IMO a lot of Western discourse and public opinion on this kind of thing is better to tune out, because so many people no longer seem capable of acknowledging levels of moral right and wrong, with everything simplified and flattened to “any external or preemptive aggression is always bad”, or polarized through their view on U.S. domestic politics.
Venezuela, Iran, and Cuba are very different from Greenland and Canada (which Trump did not actually credibly / non-jokingly threaten to take by force). And militant Shia Islamism in particular is one of the most pernicious and totalizing ideologies on the planet, far worse than Russian-flavored oligarchy, Chinese communism, generic Third Worldism, or Trumpism, which are all generally bad in various ways, but don’t have the elements of religious fanaticism that make their adherents difficult to negotiate with on reasonable terms[1].
Also, more generally, my view is that public opinion is only valuable and worth listening to as a noisy proxy for democracy, which is itself good only insofar as it is a mechanism for protecting natural rights and legitimizing and limiting state power through the principle of consent of the governed. Trump and co. are certainly not doing well on this front, but neither is Europe lately.
OK yes, Trump is an unreasonable negotiating partner, and there’s a cult of personality around him that maybe rises to the level of religious fanaticism among his remaining true believers, but no one is lining up to be martyred for him in order to get into heaven. Trump himself is deeply flawed and amoral as a person, but Trumpism as an ideology is not that different or worse than many other flavors of conservative / right-wing politics.
allowing your people to be threatened and extorted just signals that you’re an easy target for anyone who wants to extract something from you by force.
Again, this is not what they are signaling if the reason they are willing to pay the toll is because they don’t agree with the war in the first place and don’t want to support America’s part in it. Either way they handle this, they are being extorted by one side or the other.
Yes, this might be how many Europeans see it, but that doesn’t make them correct. Iran has been building up conventional weapons and working towards nuclear weapons, lobbing missiles and IEDs at civilian populations in Israel through terrorist proxies, and funding crime and terror all over the world for many years. That doesn’t make the current war strategically wise or good, but calling it a “unilateral war of aggression” is simply wrong.
Sure, it is debatable. Regardless, I was still talking more about the signal being emitted rather than what is correct or not. Regarding framing it as a “unilateral war of aggression”, The war was clearly a unilateral decision, or bilateral if you want to count Israel as a separate party, doesn’t really change the framing. And USA is 7k miles away from Iran, pretty clearly no imminent threat. Need to squint pretty hard to see how this could be framed as anything other than USA being the aggressor. I mean, why did they attack now? My understanding is because it is a time when Iran is particularly weak and vulnerable. It can be argued that that is the ‘right’ thing to do, but it would still be a war of aggression.
Overall, I just find the response of “What would the AIs think” in defense of America/Israel’s clear and consistent uni/bilateral behavior, at the disapproval of everyone else, a bit comical, as I see it as completely the opposite. If this were so necessary an act, they should have been able to discuss/agree to this, or some other solution, with their allies. That is at least how I would want the AIs to think.
There is only a 34% chance of leadership change. Maybe only 20% of regime change. In the other 80% or so, forcibly opening the Strait seems rough. Experts are pessimistic about US easily taking Kharg Island, and even if the US controls both Kharg (Iran’s export base north of the strait) and other islands like Qeshm (the island in the strait with the largest Iranian military presence), it will probably suffer tens or hundreds of casualties while Iran can still threaten shipping with Shaheds, sea drones, speedboats, and mines. In the median case it seems like the Strait will open sometime between May and December but Iran will have some leverage, possibly extending the toll regime.
Iran losing their existing enriched uranium seems contingent on a deal, because the US plan to build a runway 300 miles inland, use cargo planes to land excavation equipment, invade Iranian bunkers over the course of a week, hope that the uranium is intact, easy to find, and not booby-trapped, distinguish it from decoys, put the uranium in storage casks, and fly it out would be difficult if this were 2003 Iraq when the US had air superiority supremacy. It is just not compatible with how warfare works in Iran in the drone era.
Claude thinks it’s only 20% to work, which seems optimistic
Getting there: Isfahan is more than 480 km (300 miles) inland, hundreds of kilometers from the nearest US naval assets. Al Jazeera The US has moved 82nd Airborne, 101st Airborne, Army Rangers, and Marine Expeditionary Units to the region. Forces would need to be inserted by air — there’s no overland route from a friendly staging area.
Securing the site: Recovering the uranium would require a significant number of ground troops beyond a small special operations footprint — dozens if not hundreds of additional troops to support the core team. They would need to secure the facilities under potential missile and drone fire and maintain a perimeter for the duration. CNN
The actual extraction: Airstrikes alone can’t penetrate the Isfahan tunnels because the facility doesn’t have ventilation shaft openings that serve as weak points at other nuclear sites. CNN This means physically entering and digging through rubble. A former special operator trained for such missions described it as “slow, meticulous and can be an extremely deadly process.” Another former defense official said it’s like “you’re not just buying a car on the lot, you’re buying the entire assembly line.” The Hill
Getting it out: The cylinders would need to be transferred into accident-rated transport casks by specially trained SOF personnel with nuclear materials handling experience. The cargo could fill several trucks, and a temporary airfield would likely need to be improvised. The full operation could run for a week. Israel Hayom
Force protection throughout: There would need to be constant close air support, satellite coverage, and every spectrum of warfare capability to keep Iranian forces away from the site while JSOC and other agencies methodically excavate and retrieve the material. The Hill
My probability estimate
I’d put the chances of a successful physical extraction of most of the enriched uranium at roughly 15-25%. Here’s my reasoning:
The operation is technically feasible — the US military can do extraordinary things — but the risk profile is extreme for what may be an unnecessary objective
Trump himself has wavered, on March 31 suggesting the uranium is “so deeply buried” and “pretty safe” — seeming to lower its priority Foreign Policy
Senior military planners are reportedly skeptical: “I don’t see any senior planning military officer pursuing this,” one former defense official said Al Jazeera
The political environment (Polymarket’s 77% for operations ending by June, plus low public appetite for ground troops) creates pressure to wrap up, not escalate
It looks like the US is at least succeeding at destroying the Iranian military, but it’s unclear what this buys them. Drones are really cheap, so Iran will probably always have those. Therefore I think regime change is necessary for the US to come out ahead.
As best I can tell, the conundrum is that Trump, the international economy, and American voters all want America to be out of the conflict soon, but Israel does not want this, and Israel has outsized influence in not just how American political incentives are determined, but in what information is presented to Trump and other key officials.
A lot of the claims I’ve seen Trump make about the war are clearly false, but not false in a way that he would benefit from lying deliberately. I realize a conspiracy to feed false information to the American executive to keep the war going sounds like a radical possibility,but there is precedent for it.
But the basic picture seems to be that their capacity to launch missiles has already fallen off dramatically. They’re still launching a lot of drones, which have a big cost asymmetry in how easy they are to launch vs. intercept, and they make any land or sea incursions extremely dicey. But they are limited in range and destructive capability against properly fortified targets.
I agree that things don’t look promising for a ground invasion or taking control of the strait. But I’m less sure how militarily sustainable a long stand-off is. The strait being closed is economically and politically painful (for everyone), but in the meantime it seems like the US and Israel can continue launching targeted air strikes and Iran can’t really strike back effectively.
Keep in mind that a lot of targets are not “properly fortified”, be that infrastructure or military facilities, and suicide drones are much harder to hunt down than ballistic missile TELs.
Modern ISR can perform well in a “Scud hunt” scenario, but “Shahed hunt” is a much worse match up.
Decoys would not be a problem for the US. A gamma-ray spectroscope weighs only a few ounces and costs only a few thousand dollars. It is almost certain that no one can produce a substance that looks like U-235 to a gamma-ray spectroscope that is cheaper to produce that highly-enriched uranium.
Seems excessive? A sizeable fraction of the entire Iraq campaign losses, for seizing a single island in an environment where US has sea control, air supremacy and an edge in ISR.
US may struggle to use the island, because of the hard-to-eliminate threat of long range strikes from Iran. But seizing it to deny it to the regime seems like a war goal that could be accomplished with a relatively minor effort.
Iraq was 32,000 wounded and 4,400 killed, and the US has already suffered hundreds of wounded and 13 deaths in the existing Iran campaign without any ground operations. I’m imagining 100 wounded and maybe another 20 KIA if the US holds Kharg for an extended period, not hundreds of KIA.
The issue is it’s not really true that the US has air supremacy. Kharg Island is within fiber FPV range of the mainland, and real-time ISR is not required for Iran to track static targets on the island. Plus Iran is still able to launch larger drones and the occasional missile. So holding Kharg really means denying drone launch points on a ~20 mile stretch of the coast, which for FPVs can just be two guys in a bunker.
The incentive for Iran is enormous given US’s low tolerance for casualties; it’s well worth it to launch 20 $1,500 drones to kill one American.
Apologies, I did misread your original causality claim.
FPVs are less “air force” and more “precision munitions”. You can think of them as of a new “crewed ATGM” variant, command guidance and all.
They work great for precision ground-to-ground strikes, but play little role in what is meant by “air supremacy”. They can’t pose a meaningful threat to most air platforms, and most air platforms can’t effectively hit them. They do nothing to deny US the ability to perform CAS or otherwise hit targets from air.
The main exception to that is helicopters, for the same reasons why ATGMs can pose a threat to helicopters in some circumstances. Specialized FPV interceptors, in hands of skilled operators, can also hit other drones, including heavier fixed wing drones like Shahed or even Reaper—allowing them to intrude on MANPADS territory. But the traditional “JDAM trucks” aren’t in the same bracket as FPV drones.
We also have very little information of FPV crew survivability in an environment when one of the parties has advanced ISR, ELINT included, fast kill loops, and enough air control to drop JDAMs freely. Every reason to expect more attrition on FPV crews, and skilled operators aren’t easy to replace—but quantitively, we don’t know by how much. Might be enough to make “deny the enemy most FPV ops within an area” a viable prospect, but you can’t count on it.
Yeah, I was being sloppy with air supremacy as ability to easily conduct air operations (which the US does 95% have) vs completely deny enemy air operations, which the US arguably can’t do given that Shaheds, reconnaissance drones, and one-way FPVs serve some of the purposes one would previously have needed air support for. I would argue that the increasing range of FPVs, now 40+ km in Ukraine, puts them well beyond what ATGMs are capable of.
There are a lot of variables involved given how fast tech is evolving. If Iran can reliably pilot drones from 500 km away, they wouldn’t be risking skilled operators. If US interceptors work as well as Ukraine’s, they could probably intercept >90% of Iranian FPVs and Shaheds. A lot might hinge on who gets to a milestone like this first.
IMO this is going (predictably) disastrously. Air power is not effective at causing regime change (rally-around-the-flag effect). I think the Iranian public are more likely to mainly blame the guy explicitly saying “we’re going to bring them back to the stone ages where they belong” than the local leadership. It also seems to me that the Iranian leadership would be highly motivated to immediately rebuild any degraded capabilities after the war, in order to rebuild deterrence against future attacks.
There is some talk about a land invasion, but taking an island or two (even Kharg) probably wouldn’t compel them to surrender, while also being highly vulnerable both directly and in terms of logistics to drone attacks; and a full scale invasion would be a massive undertaking and probably not politically feasible (for good reason).
On meta: I’d say the main reason I want some middle east content on lesswrong is that there seem to be lots of relatively more concrete facts about the world that are fundamental to models that I don’t know, and also I don’t know what those facts even are. I cannot even tell you much that is different between, say, Iraq and Iran, or Saudi Arabia, except that probably 2 out of 3 of those are allied against the third?
So, with all the above said as a preface, one object-level topic I’d be interested in seeing more discussion of is the current situation(s) in the Middle East. Some thoughts:
IMO the high bit for whether the war in Iran is broadly good is whether it is tactically successful and efficient in the short term.
Considerations like “this weakens the US position in a hypothetical hot war against China or Russia” or “this will (further) destabilize the Middle East in the long term” seem second-order to whether the war successfully neutralizes an organized, well-equipped, fanatical adversary for a long period of time, or fails to do that and also depletes a bunch of expensive / difficult-to-replace munitions stockpiles.
But how well or poorly things are going on this front is difficult to determine given fog of war and motivated reasoning + propaganda on all sides, and also less interesting for pundits to discuss vs. strategic and geopolitical implications. Prediction markets seem to being doing OK here, but I would be interested in hearing more analysis from the LW commentariat.
I think the most important effect of the war is that it makes Trump less popular/powerful domestically (even if a miracle happens and he gets some sort of deal.) This is good because the less power he has (e.g., Republicans lose the senate in the midterms), the more likely we are to navigate AI development in a sane way. I think if you put
anynontivial*weight in short timelines, the AI considerations likely dominate everything else.*edited any to nontrivial. Like, maybe 10%+ pre-Jan 2029
I don’t think we’re particularly on track to do anything non-derpy w.r.t to AI either way, but this way of reasoning seems like somewhat naive consequentialism. In general, it’s good for good things to happen even if they are accomplished by bad people, and predicting second-order consequences is really hard.
Also, there are a lot of bad people in power, but for AI to go well, a lot of good things need to happen to allow humanity space and time to flourish in peace. Toppling (or militarily crippling) a fanatical Shia Islamist regime would be an extremely good thing; a bad outcome (which looks somewhat likely at this point) would be if Europe and the third world broadly give in to extortion and pay Iran a toll to pass through the strait. That toll would fund terror all over the world, and would signal to other would-be dictators and future AIs alike that they can successfully take whatever they want through force and threats, and half the world will just roll over and take it.
Maybe? It is hard to reason well about these things given my strong emotions towards the admin.
But I do think the current administration is uniquely terrible by American standards.[1] It attracts and gives power to incompetent sycophants with no moral boundaries.
There was something Eliezer said about Bernie Sanders recently that really resonated with me recently:
Having Trump as the president really just seems like it would be terrible for AGI governance because he is a terrible person. I’m sorry, I really don’t think there’s a more “precise” way to put it. Character matters. Trump doesn’t even pretend to be a kind person/is not under much pressure to appear to be nice.
(To be clear, I agree that, all else equal, it would be good for the Iranian regime to fail. Alas, all else would not be equal. While I think it would definitely be bad for your soul[2] to do things in the realm of “sabotage the American economy/military operation in order to make our president look bad,” I don’t think I’m obligated to stop my enemy when he is making a mistake either.)
Although even by global standards it’s quite bad.
i.e., you should not do this.
Re character: I think most Americans (including myself) have been so far removed from true corruption that we have forgotten how bad it can possibly get. Even my state of Illinois, which is notable for its historical machine politics and general corruption (4 of our 11 last governors serving time + many others like Mike Madigan), has still more or less seen forward progress, because the corruption wasn’t bad enough to completely erode politics in the state.
But it CAN get that bad. We’re seeing this now with the Trump admin. I am generally left-leaning, but at this point I think I’d take an honest Republican over a corrupt Democrat—a position I did not hold previously—because corruption eats policy and utterly erodes the foundation upon which we build fair markets and strong institutions.
I’m not convinced that it is necessary to topple it. Iran has been Shia for 5 centuries, and during those 5 centuries has attacked its neighbors very little.
Er, something pretty important happened in 1979. Also, the issue is not Shi’ism in general, “Shia Islamism” refers specifically to the flavor of political Islam instituted by the revolutionaries.
1979 can be seen as a return to traditional Iranian governmental policies after an experiment of a few decades with Western policies. Yes, the form of the current government (namely, a republic at least in principle) is more modern and Western than the form of the pre-1979 government (namely, a heriditary monarchy), but the monarch’s policies were more secular and Western than the current regime’s policies.
Islam has always been political in Iran, which has never had anything like the West’s separation between church and state except maybe to some extent during the experiment with Western policies that ended in 1979. We in the West shouldn’t attack countries just for being different from the West.
This seems far from certain from the perspective of anyone other than Israel. I mean, all else equal, definitely. But all else is definitely not equal. The most likely outcome even if this were to happen would be a huge increase in regional instability, which really doesn’t seem favorable to Europeans or most others in the surrounding area considering past examples.
But if they don’t pay the toll and support America in forcing it open, they are signaling it’s okay for hegemonic powers to aggress and start wars in any ways they deem fit. Europe has been forced into a lose-lose situation, by USA. It seems pretty clear that the only reason this is at all possible by Iran is because this war is seen by many in Europe and elsewhere as an unnecessary, illegal, and possibly harmful unilateral war of aggression.
Americans often seem blissfully unaware of how dangerous they appear to the rest of the world, and just take for granted that everyone considers them to always be the good guys, just doing good-guy things. America just took over Venezuela, now Iran, then Cuba, then Greenland and Canada. Is allowing all of this to be done unanimously by a great power without any repercussions not a dangerous signal to send? It seems to be a much stronger signal than that of the Strait, and they are to a certain degree opposing signals.
Sam Kriss had a great recent essay making a similar point.
The strait is closed because Iran is pointing missiles and drones at anyone who tries to sail through it, including people engaged in commerce that has nothing to do with the US or Israel. Any explanation of causality that doesn’t center on that fact denies the agency of the Iranian regime, and allowing your people to be threatened and extorted just signals that you’re an easy target for anyone who wants to extract something from you by force.
Yes, this might be how many Europeans see it, but that doesn’t make them correct. Iran has been building up conventional weapons and working towards nuclear weapons, lobbing missiles and IEDs at civilian populations in Israel through terrorist proxies, and funding crime and terror all over the world for many years. That doesn’t make the current war strategically wise or good, but calling it a “unilateral war of aggression” is simply wrong.
Again, I agree that many Europeans might see the US that way, but so what? That doesn’t make them correct or worth listening to. Committed and principled pacifism would be one thing, but public opinion is often more incoherent and self-serving than that. IMO a lot of Western discourse and public opinion on this kind of thing is better to tune out, because so many people no longer seem capable of acknowledging levels of moral right and wrong, with everything simplified and flattened to “any external or preemptive aggression is always bad”, or polarized through their view on U.S. domestic politics.
Venezuela, Iran, and Cuba are very different from Greenland and Canada (which Trump did not actually credibly / non-jokingly threaten to take by force). And militant Shia Islamism in particular is one of the most pernicious and totalizing ideologies on the planet, far worse than Russian-flavored oligarchy, Chinese communism, generic Third Worldism, or Trumpism, which are all generally bad in various ways, but don’t have the elements of religious fanaticism that make their adherents difficult to negotiate with on reasonable terms[1].
Also, more generally, my view is that public opinion is only valuable and worth listening to as a noisy proxy for democracy, which is itself good only insofar as it is a mechanism for protecting natural rights and legitimizing and limiting state power through the principle of consent of the governed. Trump and co. are certainly not doing well on this front, but neither is Europe lately.
OK yes, Trump is an unreasonable negotiating partner, and there’s a cult of personality around him that maybe rises to the level of religious fanaticism among his remaining true believers, but no one is lining up to be martyred for him in order to get into heaven. Trump himself is deeply flawed and amoral as a person, but Trumpism as an ideology is not that different or worse than many other flavors of conservative / right-wing politics.
Again, this is not what they are signaling if the reason they are willing to pay the toll is because they don’t agree with the war in the first place and don’t want to support America’s part in it. Either way they handle this, they are being extorted by one side or the other.
Sure, it is debatable. Regardless, I was still talking more about the signal being emitted rather than what is correct or not. Regarding framing it as a “unilateral war of aggression”, The war was clearly a unilateral decision, or bilateral if you want to count Israel as a separate party, doesn’t really change the framing. And USA is 7k miles away from Iran, pretty clearly no imminent threat. Need to squint pretty hard to see how this could be framed as anything other than USA being the aggressor. I mean, why did they attack now? My understanding is because it is a time when Iran is particularly weak and vulnerable. It can be argued that that is the ‘right’ thing to do, but it would still be a war of aggression.
Overall, I just find the response of “What would the AIs think” in defense of America/Israel’s clear and consistent uni/bilateral behavior, at the disapproval of everyone else, a bit comical, as I see it as completely the opposite. If this were so necessary an act, they should have been able to discuss/agree to this, or some other solution, with their allies. That is at least how I would want the AIs to think.
can’t you play the same game in the other direction?
Trump is bad for the usa, therefore we should want him in power since the big labs depend on a wealthy usa.
The US seems to be in a rough spot. Polymarket thinks:
67% for US forces enter Iran by end of April
37% for Strait of Hormuz traffic returns to normal by end of May
34% for Iran leadership change in 2026
29% for Iran to no longer control Kharg Island by end of June
40% for Trump to announce end of military operations by end of April, and 77% by end of June
Assuming no regime change, the US’s objectives are
opening the Strait of Hormuz
removing Iran’s progress towards a nuclear weapon
removing various other military capabilities of Iran and its proxies
There is only a 34% chance of leadership change. Maybe only 20% of regime change. In the other 80% or so, forcibly opening the Strait seems rough. Experts are pessimistic about US easily taking Kharg Island, and even if the US controls both Kharg (Iran’s export base north of the strait) and other islands like Qeshm (the island in the strait with the largest Iranian military presence), it will probably suffer tens or hundreds of casualties while Iran can still threaten shipping with Shaheds, sea drones, speedboats, and mines. In the median case it seems like the Strait will open sometime between May and December but Iran will have some leverage, possibly extending the toll regime.
Iran losing their existing enriched uranium seems contingent on a deal, because the US plan to build a runway 300 miles inland, use cargo planes to land excavation equipment, invade Iranian bunkers over the course of a week, hope that the uranium is intact, easy to find, and not booby-trapped, distinguish it from decoys, put the uranium in storage casks, and fly it out would be difficult if this were 2003 Iraq when the US had air
superioritysupremacy. It is just not compatible with how warfare works in Iran in the drone era.Claude thinks it’s only 20% to work, which seems optimistic
Getting there: Isfahan is more than 480 km (300 miles) inland, hundreds of kilometers from the nearest US naval assets. Al Jazeera The US has moved 82nd Airborne, 101st Airborne, Army Rangers, and Marine Expeditionary Units to the region. Forces would need to be inserted by air — there’s no overland route from a friendly staging area.
Securing the site: Recovering the uranium would require a significant number of ground troops beyond a small special operations footprint — dozens if not hundreds of additional troops to support the core team. They would need to secure the facilities under potential missile and drone fire and maintain a perimeter for the duration. CNN
The actual extraction: Airstrikes alone can’t penetrate the Isfahan tunnels because the facility doesn’t have ventilation shaft openings that serve as weak points at other nuclear sites. CNN This means physically entering and digging through rubble. A former special operator trained for such missions described it as “slow, meticulous and can be an extremely deadly process.” Another former defense official said it’s like “you’re not just buying a car on the lot, you’re buying the entire assembly line.” The Hill
Getting it out: The cylinders would need to be transferred into accident-rated transport casks by specially trained SOF personnel with nuclear materials handling experience. The cargo could fill several trucks, and a temporary airfield would likely need to be improvised. The full operation could run for a week. Israel Hayom
Force protection throughout: There would need to be constant close air support, satellite coverage, and every spectrum of warfare capability to keep Iranian forces away from the site while JSOC and other agencies methodically excavate and retrieve the material. The Hill
My probability estimate
I’d put the chances of a successful physical extraction of most of the enriched uranium at roughly 15-25%. Here’s my reasoning:
The operation is technically feasible — the US military can do extraordinary things — but the risk profile is extreme for what may be an unnecessary objective
Trump himself has wavered, on March 31 suggesting the uranium is “so deeply buried” and “pretty safe” — seeming to lower its priority Foreign Policy
Senior military planners are reportedly skeptical: “I don’t see any senior planning military officer pursuing this,” one former defense official said Al Jazeera
The political environment (Polymarket’s 77% for operations ending by June, plus low public appetite for ground troops) creates pressure to wrap up, not escalate
It looks like the US is at least succeeding at destroying the Iranian military, but it’s unclear what this buys them. Drones are really cheap, so Iran will probably always have those. Therefore I think regime change is necessary for the US to come out ahead.
As best I can tell, the conundrum is that Trump, the international economy, and American voters all want America to be out of the conflict soon, but Israel does not want this, and Israel has outsized influence in not just how American political incentives are determined, but in what information is presented to Trump and other key officials.
A lot of the claims I’ve seen Trump make about the war are clearly false, but not false in a way that he would benefit from lying deliberately. I realize a conspiracy to feed false information to the American executive to keep the war going sounds like a radical possibility, but there is precedent for it.
Right, but they can’t threaten land targets with missiles, apparently? IDK how reliable these sources are or how to interpret them in context:
https://www.csis.org/analysis/assessing-air-campaign-after-three-weeks-iran-war-numbers
https://understandingwar.org/research/middle-east/iran-update-special-report-march-27-2026/
But the basic picture seems to be that their capacity to launch missiles has already fallen off dramatically. They’re still launching a lot of drones, which have a big cost asymmetry in how easy they are to launch vs. intercept, and they make any land or sea incursions extremely dicey. But they are limited in range and destructive capability against properly fortified targets.
I agree that things don’t look promising for a ground invasion or taking control of the strait. But I’m less sure how militarily sustainable a long stand-off is. The strait being closed is economically and politically painful (for everyone), but in the meantime it seems like the US and Israel can continue launching targeted air strikes and Iran can’t really strike back effectively.
Keep in mind that a lot of targets are not “properly fortified”, be that infrastructure or military facilities, and suicide drones are much harder to hunt down than ballistic missile TELs.
Modern ISR can perform well in a “Scud hunt” scenario, but “Shahed hunt” is a much worse match up.
Decoys would not be a problem for the US. A gamma-ray spectroscope weighs only a few ounces and costs only a few thousand dollars. It is almost certain that no one can produce a substance that looks like U-235 to a gamma-ray spectroscope that is cheaper to produce that highly-enriched uranium.
I don’t dispute your larger point.
Seems excessive? A sizeable fraction of the entire Iraq campaign losses, for seizing a single island in an environment where US has sea control, air supremacy and an edge in ISR.
US may struggle to use the island, because of the hard-to-eliminate threat of long range strikes from Iran. But seizing it to deny it to the regime seems like a war goal that could be accomplished with a relatively minor effort.
Iraq was 32,000 wounded and 4,400 killed, and the US has already suffered hundreds of wounded and 13 deaths in the existing Iran campaign without any ground operations. I’m imagining 100 wounded and maybe another 20 KIA if the US holds Kharg for an extended period, not hundreds of KIA.
The issue is it’s not really true that the US has air supremacy. Kharg Island is within fiber FPV range of the mainland, and real-time ISR is not required for Iran to track static targets on the island. Plus Iran is still able to launch larger drones and the occasional missile. So holding Kharg really means denying drone launch points on a ~20 mile stretch of the coast, which for FPVs can just be two guys in a bunker.
The incentive for Iran is enormous given US’s low tolerance for casualties; it’s well worth it to launch 20 $1,500 drones to kill one American.
Apologies, I did misread your original causality claim.
FPVs are less “air force” and more “precision munitions”. You can think of them as of a new “crewed ATGM” variant, command guidance and all.
They work great for precision ground-to-ground strikes, but play little role in what is meant by “air supremacy”. They can’t pose a meaningful threat to most air platforms, and most air platforms can’t effectively hit them. They do nothing to deny US the ability to perform CAS or otherwise hit targets from air.
The main exception to that is helicopters, for the same reasons why ATGMs can pose a threat to helicopters in some circumstances. Specialized FPV interceptors, in hands of skilled operators, can also hit other drones, including heavier fixed wing drones like Shahed or even Reaper—allowing them to intrude on MANPADS territory. But the traditional “JDAM trucks” aren’t in the same bracket as FPV drones.
We also have very little information of FPV crew survivability in an environment when one of the parties has advanced ISR, ELINT included, fast kill loops, and enough air control to drop JDAMs freely. Every reason to expect more attrition on FPV crews, and skilled operators aren’t easy to replace—but quantitively, we don’t know by how much. Might be enough to make “deny the enemy most FPV ops within an area” a viable prospect, but you can’t count on it.
Yeah, I was being sloppy with air supremacy as ability to easily conduct air operations (which the US does 95% have) vs completely deny enemy air operations, which the US arguably can’t do given that Shaheds, reconnaissance drones, and one-way FPVs serve some of the purposes one would previously have needed air support for. I would argue that the increasing range of FPVs, now 40+ km in Ukraine, puts them well beyond what ATGMs are capable of.
There are a lot of variables involved given how fast tech is evolving. If Iran can reliably pilot drones from 500 km away, they wouldn’t be risking skilled operators. If US interceptors work as well as Ukraine’s, they could probably intercept >90% of Iranian FPVs and Shaheds. A lot might hinge on who gets to a milestone like this first.
IMO this is going (predictably) disastrously. Air power is not effective at causing regime change (rally-around-the-flag effect). I think the Iranian public are more likely to mainly blame the guy explicitly saying “we’re going to bring them back to the stone ages where they belong” than the local leadership. It also seems to me that the Iranian leadership would be highly motivated to immediately rebuild any degraded capabilities after the war, in order to rebuild deterrence against future attacks.
There is some talk about a land invasion, but taking an island or two (even Kharg) probably wouldn’t compel them to surrender, while also being highly vulnerable both directly and in terms of logistics to drone attacks; and a full scale invasion would be a massive undertaking and probably not politically feasible (for good reason).
On meta: I’d say the main reason I want some middle east content on lesswrong is that there seem to be lots of relatively more concrete facts about the world that are fundamental to models that I don’t know, and also I don’t know what those facts even are. I cannot even tell you much that is different between, say, Iraq and Iran, or Saudi Arabia, except that probably 2 out of 3 of those are allied against the third?