I wonder at what birth year over half of people have never seen a western.
Obviously very young people won't - but if we look at people age 25-40, who have had a chance to watch a bunch of movies, I wonder if outside of classic movie afficionados you'll have seen many people see any. The last minor resurgence would have been Tarantino's Hateful Eight and Django Unchained, and I don't think either of those were that massive. Before that you're probably back to Dances with Wolves and Unforgiven, which is now around 35 years ago.
Which would mean that the main cultural touchstone for young people would be Red Dead Redemption 2, released in 2018 and the 4th best-selling game of all time.
(Curiosity triggered because in the most recent University Challenge nobody recognised John Wayne.)
Comment with Just One Thing you've accomplished in the last 24 hours or so. It doesn't have to be a hard thing, or even a thing that you think is particularly awesome. Just a thing that you did.
Feel free to share more than one thing if you're feeling particularly accomplished! Extra credit: find someone in the comments and give them props for what they achieved!
Nothing is too big, too small, too strange or too cryptic. And in case you'd rather do this in private, anonymous comments are screened. I will only unscreen if you ask me to.
Guest Post: eBPF has been widely leveraged to improve network function performance. Can similar benefits be achieved for web servers and microservices?
“Malicious actors have exploited security gaps in foreign-made routers to attack American households, disrupt networks, enable espionage, and facilitate intellectual property theft,” the FCC said. While people will still be able to use foreign-made routers they already own, the ban applies to all “new device models.”
The ban stems from growing concern over the last year that routers were a point of easy-access for malicious actors. TP-Link, a router brand made in China that is a best-seller on Amazon, became the subject of some US political anxiety last year after a spate of cyberattacks.
Any new router made outside the US will now need to be approved by the FCC before it can be imported, marketed, or sold in the country. In order to get that approval, companies manufacturing routers outside the US must apply for conditional approval in a process that will require the disclosure of the firm’s foreign investors or influence, as well as a plan to bring the manufacturing of the routers to the US.
Certain routers may be exempted from the list if they are deemed acceptable by the Department of Defense or the Department of Homeland Security, the FCC said. Neither agency has yet added any specific routers to its list of equipment exceptions.
The FCC’s move follows a decision on Friday by government agencies working on national security that internet routers made overseas “posed unacceptable risks” to the US.
The vast majority of Internet routers are assembled or manufactured outside of the US, often in Taiwan or China. The FCC ban applies even if a router is designed in the US, but built abroad.
Popular brands of router in the US include Netgear, a US company, which manufactures all of its products abroad. One exception to the general absence of US-made routers is the newer Starlink WiFi router. Starlink is part of Elon Musk’s company SpaceX. The company says the Starlink routers are made in Texas.
«
Better late than never? But if there are a gazillion routers still installed, it’s not really a big security move unless you replace all those. And that’s not going to be popular with the ISPs. unique link to this extract
Since roughly the turn of the millennium, Google Search has been the bedrock of the web. People loved Google’s trustworthy “10 blue links” search experience and its unspoken promise: The website you click is the website you get.
Now, Google is beginning to replace news headlines in its search results with ones that are AI-generated. After doing something similar in its Google Discover news feed, it’s starting to mess with headlines in the traditional “10 blue links,” too. We’ve found multiple examples where Google replaced headlines we wrote with ones we did not, sometimes changing their meaning in the process.
For example, Google reduced our headline “I used the ‘cheat on everything’ AI tool and it didn’t help me cheat on anything” to just five words: “‘Cheat on everything’ AI tool.” It almost sounds like we’re endorsing a product we do not recommend at all.
What we are seeing is a “small” and “narrow” experiment, one that’s not yet approved for a fuller launch, Google spokespeople Jennifer Kutz, Mallory De Leon, and Ned Adriance tell The Verge. They would not say how “small” that experiment actually is. Over the past few months, multiple Verge staffers have seen examples of headlines that we never wrote appear in Google Search results — headlines that do not follow our editorial style, and without any indication that Google replaced the words we chose. And Google says it’s tweaking how other websites show up in search, too, not just news.
Like I wrote in January, when Google decided it wouldn’t stop replacing news headlines in Google Discover from The Verge and our competitors, this is like a bookstore ripping the covers off the books it puts on display and changing their titles. We spend a lot of time trying to write headlines that are true, interesting, fun, and worthy of your attention without resorting to clickbait, but Google seems to believe we don’t have an inherent right to market our own work that way.
«
Google might call it a “small” and “narrow” experiment, but that’s only in the context of what Google does; and in that, news headlines are “small” and “narrow”. There will surely be plenty of A/B testing of this, and the outcome will decide whether this is applied to all news, or just forgotten. But why would Google ever give up its delicious, tasty AI? unique link to this extract
The publisher of the Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf and the Irish Independent has suspended one of its senior journalists after he admitted using AI to “wrongly put words into people’s mouths”.
Peter Vandermeersch, the former head of the Irish operations at Mediahuis, said he “fell into the trap of hallucinations” – the term for AI-generated errors – when using the technology.
Vandermeersch, a fellow of “journalism and society” at the European publishing group, has been suspended from his role.
The experienced journalist said he had summarised reports using AI tools such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s NotebookLM, and not checked whether the quotes from those summaries were accurate. He subsequently published them in his Substack newsletter.
The errors were highlighted by an investigation by one of Mediahuis’s own titles, NRC, where Vandermeersch had been editor-in-chief in the 2010s. NRC alleged Vandermeersch had published “dozens” of quotes that were false and that seven quoted individuals in his posts said they had not made the statements attributed to them.
“I wrongly put words into people’s mouths, when I should have presented them as paraphrases. In some cases, it reflected my interpretation of their words. That was not just careless – it was wrong,” Vandermeersch wrote in a Substack post headlined “I am admitting my mistake”.
Vandermeersch added: “It is particularly painful that I made precisely the mistake I have repeatedly warned colleagues about: these language models are so good that they produce irresistible quotes you are tempted to use as an author. Of course, I should have verified them. The necessary ‘human oversight’, which I consistently advocate, fell short.”
Vandermeersch’s Press and Democracy blog writes regularly about “the vital connection between a free press and a healthy democracy”.
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman on Tuesday laid out a sweeping vision for the space agency’s next decade during an event called “Ignition” in which he and other senior leaders set out their exploration plans.
Isaacman and his colleagues shared a number of major announcements, including outlining a nuclear-powered mission to Mars that will release three helicopters there and major changes to commercial space stations. However, most significantly, Isaacman outlined a detailed plan to construct a substantial Moon base over the next decade. He framed it as part of a “great power” challenge, saying that if NASA does not succeed now it will cede the Moon to China.
The base included long-range drones, multiple sources of power, sophisticated communications, permanent habitats, scientific laboratories, local manufacturing, and more. To accomplish this, NASA will work with a broad range of industry partners capable of sending medium-size and large cargos to the lunar surface. Isaacman also confirmed that NASA will no longer build a Lunar Gateway in orbit around the Moon, but would rather focus all of its energy and resources on the lunar surface.
Is this affordable? One of Isaacman’s fundamental beliefs is that NASA does not have a revenue problem. Rather, it has an expense problem.
“For too long we tried to satisfy every stakeholder, and the results of that are very well documented in Office of the Inspector General reports,” he said. “Billions of dollars wasted. Years lost. Hardware that never launched. Fewer flagship science missions. And fewer astronauts in space, which means fewer kids dressing up as astronauts for Halloween. I don’t like it. The president doesn’t like it. The American people have waited long enough.”
«
Would this be the same NASA that has managed to not put any astronauts into orbit around the Moon for more than 50 years, and has had multiple holdups in its latest attempt to reenact that achievement? And that NASA is going to start building a base on the Moon? Because otherwise China will get to sit on a trillion pounds of dust? unique link to this extract
On Tuesday afternoon, OpenAI announced “We’re saying goodbye to Sora,” the video generation tool that it launched at the end of 2024, and centered in a massive licensing deal with Disney only a few months ago. The Wall Street Journal reported the move earlier, saying that OpenAI boss Sam Altman had informed staff that both the TikTok-like Sora app and API access for developers would be discontinued, with no plans to roll the feature into ChatGPT as had previously been rumored.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, as a result, the deal Disney announced in December, saying it would invest $1bn in OpenAI, license its characters for use within Sora, and send AI-generated videos into Disney Plus, is also coming to an end.
…OpenAI hasn’t responded to a request for comment or otherwise explained the shift, but there have been signs that things are changing, following Altman’s declaration of a “code red” a few months ago over possible slippage of ChatGPT vs. Google Gemini.
«
Sora rocketed to popularity – and then vanished completely. People were OK with making AI videos of themselves for about five minutes, but then the novelty wore off, and the question became: what is the utility of this? Why do it? And people stopped using it, but the copyright headache didn’t go away.
Even so, turning away a billion dollars in income – not investment – from Disney is quite a move. Perhaps they didn’t want to have to generate the content because it would be a distraction. unique link to this extract
A professional cornhole player and quadruple amputee has been formally charged with murder and multiple related offenses in connection with a deadly shooting that occurred in Charles County on March 22, 2026.
Dayton James Webber, 27, of La Plata, Md., was arraigned in the District Court of Maryland for Charles County after being located in Charlottesville, Virginia, and arrested following the fatal shooting of 27‑year‑old Bradrick Michael Wells, according to court documents.
…According to the statement of charges filed by Det. M. Bigelow of the Charles County Sheriff’s Office, Dayton Webber picked up two witnesses from work in a vehicle, with Bradrick Wells already in the front passenger seat. The documents state that, while driving, an argument broke out between Webber and Wells.
The witnesses, identified in the charging documents as W1 and W2, told police that Webber pulled out a firearm and shot Wells twice in the head during the argument. The statement of charges says Webber then pulled the vehicle over and asked the passengers to remove Wells from the car, which they refused.
The two witnesses exited the vehicle and flagged down a police officer, the documents state, while Webber drove off with Wells still inside the car. According to the filing, around 12:41 a.m. on March 23, a resident at 10115 Newport Church Road in Charlotte Hall discovered Wells’ body on the side of the road.
The statement of charges notes that both W1 and W2 positively identified Webber as the shooter and Wells as the victim, providing the basis for the murder and assault charges currently pending in Charles County District Court.
Police say that Webber’s vehicle was later located in Charlottesville, Virginia, and Webber was found at a hospital seeking treatment. Webber is currently awaiting extradition to Charles County, Maryland, where he will face formal charges.
Laura Pitel, Anne-Sylvaine Chassany and Sebastien Ash:
»
Volkswagen is in talks with Israel’s Rafael Advanced Defence Systems over a deal that would switch production at one of the German group’s factories from cars to missile defence.
The two companies plan to convert the embattled Osnabrück plant to make components for the Israeli state-owned group’s Iron Dome air defence system, according to people familiar with the plan.
The tie-up would be the highest-profile example yet of the German car industry, where profits have plunged amid rising Chinese competition and a stuttering transition to electric vehicles, seeking partnerships with the booming defence sector.
The two companies hope to save all 2,300 jobs at the plant in the west German state of Lower Saxony, which has been under threat of closure, and hope to sell the systems to European governments.
“The aim is to save everybody, maybe even to grow,” said one of the people familiar with the plans. “The potential is so high. But it’s also an individual decision for the workers if they want to be part of the idea.”
CERN’s “antimatter factory” is the only place in the world where antiprotons can be produced, stored and studied. Two successive decelerators, the Antiproton Decelerator (AD) and the Extra Low Energy Antiproton ring (ELENA), provide several experiments with low-energy antiprotons – the lower their energy, the easier they can be stored and studied. Among these experiments, BASE holds long-standing records for containing antiprotons for more than one year, and the experiment has invented this pioneering approach in order to move on to the next stage: transporting antiprotons to an offline space for more precise experiments as well as sharing them with others. That’s why they developed the BASE-STEP trap: an apparatus designed to store and transport antiprotons.
“Our aim with BASE-STEP is to be able to trap antiprotons and deliver them to our precision laboratories at a dedicated space at CERN, HHU, Leibnitz University Hannover and perhaps other laboratories that are capable of performing very-high-precision antiproton measurements, which unfortunately is not possible in the antimatter factory,” explains Christian Smorra, the Leader of BASE-STEP. “We validated the feasibility of the project with protons last year, but what we achieved today with antiprotons is a huge leap forward towards our objective.”
BASE-STEP is small enough to be loaded onto a truck and fit through ordinary laboratory doors, and it can withstand the bumps and vibrations of transport. The current apparatus – which includes a superconducting magnet, liquid helium cryogenic cooling, power reserves and a vacuum chamber that traps the antiparticles using magnetic and electric fields – weighs 1,000 kilograms [one tonne]: much more compact than BASE or any other existing system used to study antimatter.
“To reach our first destination – our dedicated precision laboratory at HHU in Germany – would take us at least eight hours,” says Christian Smorra. “This means we’d have to keep the trap’s superconducting magnet at a temperature below 8.2K for that long. So, in addition to the liquid helium , we’d need to have a generator to power a cryocooler on the truck. We are currently investigating this possibility.” Nevertheless, the greatest challenge remains on arrival at the destination: to transfer the antiprotons to the experiment without them vanishing.
«
The transfer – only across the CERN site in this first attempt – was of 92 antiprotons. With a mass of 1.6×10^-27kg each, on annihilation by touching matter (using E=mc^2) they’d produce a rather small elimination of 3×10^-8 joules. That would (per ChatGPT, showing its working) lift a speck of dust about three metres. unique link to this extract
Traffic through the Strait of Hormuz is increasingly being diverted into Iranian territorial waters in what has been dubbed the “Tehran Toll Booth”, where the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is understood to be verifying vessel details and, in some cases, extolling a passage fee.
More than 20 vessels of over 10,000 dwt [dead weight tonnage] have thus far made the detour, which goes between Iran’s Qeshm and Larak Islands.
Among them were two “zombie” tankers that transited while assuming the identity of dead vessels.
At least two vessels transiting through the strait are understood to have paid in exchange for safe passage, with one fee reported to have been around $2m.
While the Strait of Hormuz remains dramatically reduced as a result of the conflict, which has seen more than 20 maritime incidents involving commercial vessels and offshore infrastructure since February 28, the pace of vessel transits across the strait picked up over the weekend.
Analysis of Lloyd’s List Intelligence data reveals that at least 16 vessels have transited the strait since Friday. Thirteen vessels headed east out of the Middle East Gulf, while three entered westbound.
Twelve were tracked via Automatic Identification System data sailing through the new route that transits Iranian territorial waters; three either did not have enough AIS data to assess their route or transit date with confidence, while a fourth, an Iran-flagged bulker, transited the strait but stopped near Larak Island.
…On Monday, two India-flagged very large gas carriers transited, signalling their Indian ownership via their AIS signal — a trend that is increasingly prevalent among Indian and some China affiliated vessels.
India’s Ministry of Shipping said the two ships, carrying over 92,600 tonnes of liquefied petroleum gas, had transited and are scheduled to reach ports in the country between March 26 and 28.
Shortages of LPG in India, where the gas is primarily used for cooking has become a hot political issue, forcing the government to engage in talks with Tehran to secure cargoes.
«
The story has a graph of daily traffic through the Strait by sector (chemical, oil, gas, etc). It’s gone from more than 100 to single digits. unique link to this extract
Today [Thurs March 19], an indictment was unsealed charging Yih-Shyan “Wally” Liaw, Ruei-Tsang “Steven” Chang, and Ting-Wei “Willy” Sun, for allegedly conspiring to divert high-performance computer servers assembled in the United States and integrating sophisticated US artificial intelligence technology to China, in violation of US export controls laws. Liaw, a US citizen, and Sun, a citizen of Taiwan, were arrested today and will be presented in the Northern District of California. Chang, a citizen of Taiwan, remains a fugitive.
“The indictment unsealed today details alleged efforts to evade US export laws through false documents, staged dummy servers to mislead inspectors, and convoluted transshipment schemes, in order to obfuscate the true destination of restricted AI technology—China,” said John A. Eisenberg, Assistant Attorney General for National Security. “These chips are the product of American ingenuity, and NSD will continue to enforce our export-control laws to protect that advantage.”
“The FBI’s investigation revealed that Liaw, Chang, and Sun allegedly conspired to sell billions of dollars’ worth of servers integrating sensitive, controlled graphic processing units to buyers in China, in violation of US export control laws,” said Assistant Director Roman Rozhavsky of the FBI’s Counterintelligence and Espionage Division. “Controlling the export of sensitive US artificial intelligence technology is essential to safeguarding our national security and defending the homeland. That’s why combating export violations is among the FBI’s highest priorities, and we will continue working with our law enforcement, private sector, and international partners to bring to justice all who take action to undermine US national security.”
“As alleged in the Indictment, the defendants participated in a systematic scheme to divert massive quantities of servers housing US artificial intelligence technology to customers in China,” said US Attorney Jay Clayton for the Southern District of New York. “They did so through a tangled web of lies, obfuscation, and concealment—all to drive sales and generate revenues in violation of US law. Diversion schemes like those disrupted today generate billions of dollars in ill-gotten gains and pose a direct threat to US national security.
«
Obviously all those Nvidia GPUs had to get to China some way. Whether this is everyone who was doing it may be a different story. unique link to this extract
• Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016?
Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more.
Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified
Current status: wondering if I can design an on-disk (read only)
data structure of some sort that would allow a Python 2 program to
efficiently map an IP address to an ASN. There are good in-memory data
structures for this but you have to load the whole thing into memory
and my Python 2 program runs as a CGI so no, not even with pickle.
(Since this is Python 2, about all I have access to is gdbm or rolling
my own direct structure.)
Mapping IP addresses to ASNs comes up a lot in routing Internet
traffic, so there are good in-memory data structures that are
designed to let you efficiently answer these questions once you
have everything loaded. But I don't think anyone really worries
about on-disk versions of this information, while it's the case
that I care about, although I only care about some ASNs (a detail
I forgot to put in the Fediverse post).
If I'm willing to do this by /24 (and
I am) and represent the ASNs by 16-bit ints, I guess you can do this
with a 32 Mbyte sparse file of two-byte blocks. Seek to a 16-byte
address determined by the first three octets of the IP, read two
bytes, if they're zero there's no ASN mapping we care about, otherwise
they're the ASN in some byte order I'd determine.
If I don't care about the specific ASN, just a class of ASNs of
interest of which there are at most 255, it's only 16 Mbytes.
(And if all I care about is a yes or know answer, I can represent
each /24 by a bit, so the storage required drops even more, to only
2 Mbytes.)
This Fediverse post has a mistake. I thought ASNs were 16-bit
numbers, but we've gone well beyond that by now. So I would want
to use the one-byte 'class of ASN' approach, with ASNs I don't care
about mapping to a class of zero. Alternately I could expand to
storing three bytes for every /24, or four bytes to stay aligned
with filesystem blocks.
That storage requirement is 'at most' because this will be a Unix
sparse file, where filesystem blocks that aren't written to aren't
stored on disk; when read, the data in them is all zero. The lookup
is efficient, at least in terms of system calls; I'd open the file,
lseek() to the position, and read two bytes (causing the system to
read a filesystem block, however big that is). Python 2 doesn't
have access to pread() or we could do it in one system call.
Within the OS this should be reasonably efficient, because if things
are active much of the important bits of the mapping file will be
cached into memory and won't have to be read from disk. 32 Mbytes
is nothing these days, at least in terms of active file cache, and
much of the file will be sparse anyway. The OS obviously has
reasonably efficient random access to the filesystem blocks of the
file, whether in memory or on disk.
This is a fairly brute force approach that's only viable if you're
typically making a single query in your process before you finish.
It also feels like something that is a good fit for Unix because of
sparse files, although 16 Mbytes isn't that big these days even for
a non-sparse file.
Realizing the brute force approach feels quite liberating. I've
been turning this problem over in my mind for a while but each time
I thought of complicated data structures and complicated approaches
and it was clear to me that I'd never implement them. This way is
simple enough that I could actually do it and it's not too impractical.
PS: I don't know if I'll actually build this, but every time a horde
of crawlers descends on Wandering Thoughts from a cloud provider
that has a cloud of separate /24s and /23s all over the place, my
motivation is going to increase. If I could easily block all netblocks
of certain hosting providers all at once, I definitely would.
(To get the ASN data there's pyasn
(also). Conveniently it
has a simple on-disk format that can be post-processed to go from
a set of CIDRs that map to ASNs to a data file that maps from /24s
to ASN classes for ASNs (and classes) that I care about.)
Update: After writing most of this entry I got enthused and wrote
a stand-alone preliminary implementation (initially storing full
ASNs in four-byte records), which can both create the data file and
query it. It was surprisingly straightforward and not very much
code, which is probably what I should have expected since the core
approach is so simple. With four-byte records, a full data file of
all recent routes from pyasn is about 53 Mbytes and the data
file can be created in less than two minutes, which is pretty good
given that the code writes records for about 16.5 million /24s.
(The whole thing even appears to work, although I haven't strongly
tested it.)
Today I made an unpleasant discovery about virt-manager on my (still)
Fedora 42 machines that I shared on the Fediverse:
This is my face that Fedora virt-manager appears to have been
defaulting to external snapshots for some time and SURPRISE, external
snapshots can't be reverted by virsh. This is my face, especially as
it seems to have completely screwed up even deleting snapshots on some
virtual machines.
(I only discovered this today because today is the first time I
tried to touch such a snapshot, either to revert to it or to clean
it up. It's possible that there is some hidden default for what
sort of snapshot to make and it's only been flipped for me.)
Neither virt-manager nor virsh will clearly tell you about this.
In virt-manager you need to click on each snapshot and if it says
'external disk only', congratulations, you're in trouble. In virsh,
'virsh snapshot-list --external <vm>' will list external snaphots,
and then 'virsh snapshot-list --tree <vm>' will tell you if they
depend on any internal snapshots.
My largest problems came from virtual machines where I had earlier
internal snapshots and then I took more snapshots, which became
external snapshots from Fedora 41 onward. You definitely can't
revert to an external snapshot in this situation, at least not
with virsh or virt-manager, and the error messages I got were
generic ones about not being able to revert external snapshots.
I haven't tested reverting external snapshots for a VM with no
internal ones.
Update: you can revert an external snapshot in the latest libvirt
if all of your snapshots are external. You can't revert them if
libvirt helpfully gave you external snapshots on top of internal
ones by switching the default type of snapshots (probably in Fedora
41).
If you have internal snapshots and you're willing to throw away the
external snapshot and what's built on it, you can use virsh or
virt-manager to revert to an internal snapshot and then delete the
external snapshot. This leaves the external snapshot's additional
disk file or files dangling around for you to delete by hand.
If you have only an external snapshot, it appears that libvirt will
let you delete the snapshot through 'virsh snapshot-delete <vm>
<external-snapshot>', which preserves the current state of the
machine's disks. This only helps if you don't want the snapshot any
more, but this is one of my common cases (where I take precautionary
snapshots before significant operations and then get rid of them
later when I'm satisfied, or at least committed).
The worst situation appears to be if you have an external snapshot
made after (and thus on top of) an earlier internal snapshot and
you to keep the live state of things while getting rid of the
snapshots. As far as I can tell, it's impossible to do this through
libvirt, although some of the documentation suggests that you should
be able to. The process outlined in libvirt's Merging disk image
chains
didn't work for me (see also Disk image chains).
(If it worked, this operation would implicitly invalidate the
snapshots and I don't know how you get rid of them inside libvirt,
since you can't delete them normally. I suspect that to get rid of
them, you need to shut down all of the libvirt daemons and then
delete the XML files that (on Fedora) you'll find in
/var/lib/libvirt/qemu/snapshot/<domain>.)
One reason to delete external snapshots you don't need is if you
ever want to be able to easily revert snapshots in the future. I
wouldn't trust making internal snapshots on top of external ones,
if libvirt even lets you, so if you want to be able to easily revert,
it currently appears that you need to have and use only internal
snapshots. Certainly you can't mix new external snapshots with old
internal snapshots, as I've seen.
(The 5.1.0 virt-manager release
will warn you to not mix snapshot modes and defaults to whatever
snapshot mode you're already using. I don't know what it defaults
to if you don't have any snapshots, I haven't tried that yet.)
Sidebar: Cleaning this up on the most tangled virtual machine
$ virsh snapshot-delete hl-fedora-36 fedora41-preupgrade
error: Failed to delete snapshot fedora41-preupgrade
error: Operation not supported: deleting external snapshot that has internal snapshot as parent not supported
This VM has an internal snapshot as the parent because I didn't
clean up the first snapshot (taken before a Fedora 41 upgrade)
before making the second one (taken before a Fedora 42 upgrade).
In theory one can use 'virsh blockcommit' to reduce everything down
to a single file, per the knowledge base section on this.
In practice it doesn't work in this situation:
$ virsh blockcommit hl-fedora-36 vda --verbose --pivot --active
error: invalid argument: could not find base image in chain for 'vda'
(I tried with --base too and that didn't help.)
I was going to attribute this to the internal snapshot but then I
tried 'virsh blockcommit' on another virtual machine with only an
external snapshot and it failed too. So I have no idea how this is
supposed to work.
Since I could take a ZFS snapshot of the entire disk storage, I
chose violence, which is to say direct usage of qemu-img. First,
I determined that I couldn't trivially delete the internal snapshot
before I did anything else:
$ qemu-img snapshot -d fedora40-preupgrade fedora35.fedora41-preupgrade
qemu-img: Could not delete snapshot 'fedora40-preupgrade': snapshot not found
The internal snapshot is in the underlying file 'fedora35.qcow2'.
Maybe I could have deleted it safely even with an external thing
sitting on top of it, but I decided not to do that yet and proceed
to the main show:
Using 'qemu-img info fedora35.qcow2' showed that the internal snapshot
was still there, so I removed it with 'qemu-img snapshot -d' (this time
on fedora35.qcow2).
All of this left libvirt's XML drastically out of step with the
underlying disk situation. So I removed the XML for the snapshots
(after saving a copy), made sure all libvirt services weren't
running, and manually edited the VM's XML, where it turned out that
all I needed to change was the name of the disk file. This appears
to have worked fine.
I suspect that I could have skipped manually removing the internal
snapshot and its XML and libvirt would then have been happy to see
it and remove it.
(I'm writing all of the commands and results down partly for my
future reference.)
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<p class="ljsyndicationlink"><a href="https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html">https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html</a></p><p><a href="https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html"><img src="https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/calendar/S_260325.jpg" align="left" alt="In the words of today's astrophotographer, Rositsa Dimitrova, "What have these silent sentinels watched" border="0" /></a> In the words of today's astrophotographer, Rositsa Dimitrova, "What have these silent sentinels watched</p><br clear="all"/><p class="ljsyndicationlink"><a href="https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html">https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html</a></p>
This post is a set of my observations on the current war in Iran and my thoughts on the broader strategic implications. I am not, of course, an expert on the region nor do I have access to any special information, so I am going to treat that all with a high degree of uncertainty. But I am a scholar of military history with a fair bit of training and experience in thinking about strategic problems, ancient and modern; it is this ‘guy that analyzes strategy’ focus that I want to bring to this.
I am doing this post outside of the normal Friday order because it is an unusual topic and I want to keep making it clear that even as world events continue to happen – as they must – I do not want this blog to turn into a politics newsletter. I simply haven’t had the time to polish and condense these thoughts for other publication – the hard work of much writing is turning 3,500 words (or 7,500, as it turns out) of thoughts into 1,500 words of a think piece – but I need to get them out of my head and on to the page before it burns out of the back of my head. That said, this post is going to be unavoidably ‘political,’ because as a citizen of the United States, commenting on the war means making a statement about the President who unilaterally and illegally launched it without much public debate and without consulting Congress.
And this war is dumb as hell.
I am going to spend the next however many words working through what I think are the strategic implications of where we are, but that is my broad thesis: for the United States this war was an unwise gamble on extremely long odds; the gamble (that the regime would collapse swiftly) has already failed and as a result locked in essentially nothing but negative outcomes. Even with the regime were to collapse in the coming weeks or suddenly sue for peace, every likely outcome leaves the United States in a meaningfully worse strategic position than when it started.
Now, before we go forward, I want to clarify a few things. First, none of this is a defense of the Iranian regime, which is odious. That said, there are many odious regimes in the world and we do not go to war with all of them. Second, this is a post fundamentally about American strategy or the lack thereof and thus not a post about Israeli strategy. For what it is worth, my view is that Benjamin Netanyahu has is playing an extremely short game because it benefits him politically and personally to do so and there is a significant (but by no means certain) chance that Israel will come to regret the decision to encourage this war. I’ll touch on some of that, but it isn’t my focus. Likewise, this is not a post about the strategy of the Gulf states, who – as is often the sad fate of small states – find their fate largely in the hands of larger powers. Finally, we should keep in mind that this isn’t an academic exercise: many, many people will suffer because of these decisions, both as victims of the violence in the region but also as a consequent of the economic ripples.
But that’s enough introduction. What I want to discuss here is first the extremely unwise gamble that the administration took and then the trap that it now finds itself in, from which there is no comfortable escape.
The Situation
We need to start by establishing some basic facts about Iran, as a country.
First, Iran is a large country. It has a population just over 90 million (somewhat more than Germany, about the same as Turkey), and a land area over more than 600,000 square miles (more than four times the size of Germany). Put another way Iran is more than twice as large as Texas, with roughly three times the population.
More relevantly for us, Iran is 3.5 times larger than Iraq and roughly twice the population. That’s a handy comparison because we know what it took to invade and then hold Iraq: coalition forces peaked at half a million deployed personnel during the invasion. Iran is bigger in every way and so would demand a larger army and thus an absolutely enormous investment of troops, money and fundamentally lives in order to subdue.
Via Wikipedia, a map of Iran. This is a very big country. It also has a lot of very challenging terrain: lots of very arid areas, lots of high mountains and plateaus. It is a hard country to invade and a harder country to occupy.
In practice, given that Iran did not and never has posed an existential threat to the United States (Iran aspires to be the kind of nuclear threat North Korea is and can only vaguely dream of being the kind of conventional threat that Russia is), that meant that a ground invasion of Iran was functionally impossible. While the United States had the raw resources to do it, the political will simply wasn’t there and was unlikely to ever be there.
Equally important, Iran was not a major strategic priority. This is something that in a lot of American policy discourse – especially but not exclusively on the right – gets lost because Iran is an ‘enemy’ (and to be clear, the Iranian regime is an enemy; they attack American interests and Americans regularly) and everyone likes to posture against the enemy. But the Middle East is a region composed primarily of poor, strategically unimportant countries. Please understand me: the people in these countries are not important, but as a matter of national strategy, some places are more important than others. Chad is not an area of vital security interest to the United States, whereas Taiwan (which makes our semiconductors) is and we all know it.
Neither is the Middle East. The entire region has exactly two strategic concerns of note: the Suez Canal (and connected Red Sea shipping system) and the oil production in the Persian Gulf and the shipping system used to export it. So long as these two arteries remained open the region does not matter very much to the United States. None of the region’s powers are more than regional powers (and mostly unimpressive ones at that), none of them can project power out of the region and none of them are the sort of dynamic, growing economies likely to do so in the future. The rich oil monarchies are too small in terms of population and the populous countries too poor.
In short then, Iran is very big and not very important, which means it would both be very expensive to do anything truly permanent about the Iranian regime and at the same time it would be impossible to sell that expense to the American people as being required or justified or necessary. So successive American presidents responded accordingly: they tried to keep a ‘lid’ on Iran at the lowest possible cost. The eventual triumph of this approach was the flawed but useful JCPOA (the ‘Iran deal’) in which Iran in exchange for sanctions relief swore off the pursuit of nuclear weapons (with inspections to verify), nuclear proliferation representing the main serious threat Iran could pose. So long as Iran remained non-nuclear, it could be contained and the threat to American interests, while not zero, could be kept minimal.
That deal was not perfect, I must stress: it essentially gave Iran carte blanche to reinforce its network of proxies across the region, which was robustly bad for Israel and mildly bad for the United States, but since the alternative was – as we’ll see – global economic disruption and the prospect of a large-scale war which would always be far more expensive than the alternatives, it was perhaps the best deal that could have been had. For what it is worth, my own view is that the Obama administration ‘overpaid’ for the concessions of the Iran deal, but the payment having been made, they were worth keeping. Trump scrapped them in 2017 in exchange for exactly nothing, which put us on the course for this outcome (as more than a few people pointed out at the time).
But that was the situation: Iran was big and hostile, but relatively unimportant. The United States is much stronger than Iran, but relatively uninterested in the region apart from the uninterrupted flow of natural gas, oil and other products from the Gulf (note: the one thing this war compromised – the war with Iran has cut off the only thing in this region of strategic importance, compromised the only thing that mattered at the outset), whereas Iran was wholly interested in the region because it lives there. The whole thing was the kind of uncomfortable frontier arrangement powerful states have always had to make because they have many security concerns, whereas regional powers have fewer, more intense focuses.
Which leads us to
The Gamble
The current war is best understood as the product of a fairly extreme gamble, although it is unclear to me if the current administration understood they were throwing the dice in June of 2025 rather than this year. As we’re going to see, this was not a super-well-planned-out affair.
The gamble was this: that the Iranian regime was weak enough that a solid blow, delivered primarily from the air, picking off key leaders, could cause it to collapse. For the United States, the hope seems to have been that a transition could then be managed to leaders perhaps associated with the regime but who would be significantly more pliant, along the lines of the regime change operation performed in Venezuela that put Delcy Rodriguez in power. By contrast, Israel seems to have been content to simply collapse the Iranian regime and replace it with nothing. That outcome would be – as we’ll see – robustly bad for a huge range of regional and global actors, including the United States, and it is not at all clear to me that the current administration understood how deeply their interests and Israel’s diverged here.
In any case, this gamble was never very likely to pay off for reasons we have actually already discussed. The Islamic Republic of Iran is not a personalist regime where the death of a single leader or even a group of leaders is likely to cause collapse: it is an institutional regime where the core centers of power (like the Iran Revolutionary Guards Corps or IRGC) are ‘bought in’ from the bottom to the top because the regime allows them access to disproportionate resources and power. Consequently if you blow up the leader, they will simply pick another one – in this case they picked the previous leader’s son, so the net effect of the regime change effort was to replace Supreme Leader Khamenei with Supreme Leader Khamenei…Jr.
But power in the Iranian regime isn’t wielded by the Supreme Leader alone either: the guardian council has power, the council of experts that select the Supreme Leader have power, the IRGC has power, the regular military has some power (but less than the IRGC), the elected government has some power (but less than the IRGC or the guardian council) and on and on. These sorts of governments can collapse, but not often. It certainly did not help that the United States had stood idle while the regime slaughtered tens of thousands of its opponents, before making the attempt, but I honestly do not think the attempt would have worked before.
The gamble here was that because the regime would simply collapse on cue, the United States could remove Iran’s regional threat without having to commit to a major military operation that might span weeks, disrupt global energy supplies, expand over the region, cost $200 billion dollars and potentially require ground operations. Because everyone knew that result was worse than the status quo and it would thus be really foolish to do that.
As you can tell, I think this was a bad gamble: it was very unlikely to succeed but instead always very likely to result in a significantly worse strategic situation for the United States, but only after it killed thousands of people unnecessarily. If you do a war where thousands of people die and billions of dollars are spent only to end up back where you started that is losing; if you end up worse than where you started, well, that is worse.
The problem is that once the gamble was made, once the dice were cast, the Trump administration would be effectively giving up control over much of what followed.
That is notable because Iran did not assume that immediately during the Twelve-Day War in 2025. Indeed, Iran did not treat the United States as a real co-belligerent even as American aircraft were actively intercepting Iranian missiles aimed at Israel. And then the United States executed a ‘bolt from the blue’ surprise attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities on June 22, 2025, catching Iran (which had been attempting to negotiate with the United States) by surprise.
The problem with that strike is that attacking in that way, at that time, meant that Iran would have to read any future attacks by Israel as likely also involving attacks by the United States. Remember, the fellow getting bombed does not get to carefully inspect the flag painted on the bomber: stuff blows up and to some degree the party being attacked has to rapidly guess who is attacking them. We’ve seen this play out repeatedly over the last several weeks where things explode in Iran and there is initially confusion over if the United States or Israel bombed them. But in the confusion of an initial air attack, Iran’s own retaliatory capability could not sit idle, waiting to be destroyed by overwhelming US airpower: it is a ‘wasting’ use-it-or-lose-it asset.
So Iran would now have to assume that an Israeli air attack was also likely an American air attack. It was hardly an insane assumption – evidently according to the Secretary of State, American intelligence made the exact same assessment.
But the result was that by bombing the Iranian nuclear facilities in June of 2025, the Trump administration created a situation where merely by launching a renewed air campaign on Iran, Israel could force the United States into a war with Iran at any time.
It should go without saying that creating the conditions where the sometimes unpredictable junior partner in a security relationship can unilaterally bring the senior partner into a major conflict is an enormous strategic error, precisely because it means you end up in a war when it is in the junior partner’s interests to do so even if it is not in the senior partner’s interests to do so.
Which is the case here. Because…
The Trap
Once started, a major regional war with Iran was always likely to be something of a ‘trap,’ – not in the sense of an ambush laid by Iran – but in the sense of a situation that, once entered, cannot be easily leftor reversed.
The trap, of course, is the Strait of Hormuz and the broader Persian Gulf. The issue is that an enormous proportion of the world’s shipping, particularly energy (oil, liquid natural gas) and fertilizer components (urea) passes through this body of water. The Gulf is narrow along its whole length, extremely narrow in the Strait and bordered by Iran on its northern shore along its entire length. Iran can thus threaten the whole thing and can do so with cheap, easy to conceal, easy to manufacture systems.
And the scale here is significant. 25% of the world’s oil (refined and crude), 20% of its liquid natural gas and around 20% of the world’s fertilizer passes through the Strait of Hormuz which links the Persian Gulf to the Indian Ocean. Any of those figures would be enough for a major disruption to trigger huge economic ripples. And even worse there are only very limited, very insufficient alternative transport options. Some Saudi oil (about half) can move via pipeline to the Red Sea and some Emirati oil can move via pipeline to Fujairah outside of the Strait, but well over half of the oil and effectively all of the natural gas and fertilizer ingredients are trapped if ships cannot navigate the strait safely.
And here we come back to what Clausewitz calls the political object (drink!). Even something like a 50% reduction in shipping in the Gulf, were it to persist long term, would create strong global economic headwinds which would in turn arrive in the United States in the form of high energy prices and a general ‘supply shock’ that has, historically at least, not been politically survivable for the party in power.
And so that is the trap. While the United States can exchange tit-for-tat strikes with Iran without triggering an escalation spiral, once you try to collapse the regime, the members of the regime (who are making the decisions, not, alas, the Iranian people) have no reason to back down and indeed must try to reestablish deterrence. These are men who are almost certainly dead or poor-in-exile if the regime collapses. Moreover the entire raison d’être of this regime is resistance to Israel and the United States: passively accepting a massive decapitation attack and not responding would fatally undermine the regime’s legitimacy with its own supporters, leading right back to the ‘dead-or-poor-and-exiled’ problem.
Iran would have to respond and thus would have to try to find a way to inflict ‘pain’ on the United States to force the United States to back off. But whereas Israel is in reach of some Iranian weapons, the United States is not. Iran would thus need a ‘lever’ closer to home which could inflict costs on the United States. For – and I must stress this – for forty years everyone has known this was the strait. This is not a new discovery, we did this before in the 1980s. “If the regime is threatened, Iran will try to close the strait to exert pressure” is perhaps one of the most established strategic considerations in the region. We all knew this.
But the trap here is two sided: once the strait was effectively closed, the United States could not back off out of the war without suffering its own costs. Doing so, for one, would be an admission of defeat, politically damaging at home. Strategically, it would affirm Iran’s control over the strait, which would be a significantly worse outcome than not having done the war in the first place. And simply backing off might not fully return shipping flows: why should Iran care if the Gulf states can export their oil? An Iran that fully controls the strait, that had demonstrated it could exclude the United States might intentionally throttle everyone else’s oil – even just a bit – to get higher prices for its own or to exert leverage.
So once the strait was closed, the United States could not leave until it was reopened, or at least there was some prospect of doing so.
The result is a fairly classic escalation trap: once the conflict starts, it is extremely costly for either side to ever back down, which ensures that the conflict continues long past it being in the interests of either party. Every day this war goes on make both the United States and Iran weaker, poorer and less secure but it is very hard for either side to back down because there are huge costs connected to being the party that backs down. So both sides ‘escalate to de-escalate’ (this phrase is generally as foolish as it sounds), intensifying the conflict in an effort to hit hard enough to force the other guy to blink first. But since neither party can back down unilaterally and survive politically, there’s practically no amount of pain that can force them to do so.
Under these conditions, both sides might seek a purely military solution: remove the ability of your opponent to do harm in order to create the space to declare victory and deescalate. Such solutions are elusive. Iran simply has no real way of meaningfully diminishing American offensive power: they cannot strike the airfields, sink the carriers or reliably shoot down the planes (they have, as of this writing, managed to damage just one aircraft).
For the United States, a purely military solution is notionally possible: you could invade. But as noted, Iran is very, very big and has a large population, so a full-scale invasion would be an enormous undertaking, larger than any US military operation since the Second World War. Needless to say, the political will for this does not exist. But a ‘targeted’ ground operation against Iran’s ability to interdict the strait is also hard to concieve. Since Iran could launch underwater drones or one-way aerial attack drones from anywhere along the northern shore the United States would have to occupy many thousands of square miles to prevent this and of course then the ground troops doing that occupying would simply become the target for drones, mortars, artillery, IEDs and so on instead.
One can never know how well prepared an enemy is for something, but assuming the Iranians are even a little bit prepared for ground operations, any American force deployed on Iranian soil would end up eating Shahed and FPV drones – the sort we’ve seen in Ukraine – all day, every day.
Meanwhile escort operations in the strait itself are also deeply unpromising. For one, it would require many more ships, because the normal traffic through the strait is so large and because escorts would be required throughout the entire Gulf (unlike the Red Sea crisis, where the ‘zone’ of Houthi attacks was contained to only the southern part of the Red Sea). But the other problem is that Iran possesses modern anti-ship missiles (AShMs) in significant quantity and American escort ships (almost certainly Arleigh Burke-class destroyers) would be vulnerable escorting slow tankers in the constrained waters of the strait.
It isn’t even hard to imagine what the attack would look like: essentially a larger, more complex version of the attack that sunk the Moskva, to account for the Arleigh Burke’s better air defense. Iran would pick their moment (probably not the first transit) and try to distract the Burke, perhaps with a volley of cheap Shahed-type drones against a natural gas tanker, before attempting to ambush the Burke with a volley of AShMs, probably from the opposite direction. The aim would be to create just enough confusion that one AShM slipped through, which is all it might take to leave a $2.2bn destroyer with three hundred American service members on board disabled and vulnerable in the strait. Throw in speed-boats, underwater drones, naval mines, fishing boats pretending to be threats and so on to maximize confusion and the odds that one of perhaps half a dozen AShMs slips through.
And if I can reason this out, Iran – which has been planning for this exact thingfor forty years certainly can. Which is why the navy is not eager to run escort.
But without escorts or an end to the conflict, shipping in the Gulf is not going to return to normal. Container ships are big and hard to sink but easy to damage. But while crude oil tankers are hard to set fire to, tankers carrying refined petroleum products are quite easy to set fire to, as we’ve seen, while tankers of liquid natural gas (LNG carriers) are essentially floating bombs.
The result is that right now it seems that the only ships moving through the strait are those Iran permits and they appear to have a checkpoint system, turning away ships they do not approve of. A military solution this problem is concievable, but extremely difficult to implement practically, requiring either a massive invasion of Iran’s coastline or an enormous sea escort operation. It seems more likely in both cases that the stoppage will continue until Iran decides it should stop. The good news on that front is that Iran benefits from the export of oil from the Gulf too, but the bad news is that while they are permitting some traffic, precisely because high energy prices are their only lever to make the United States and Israel stop killing them, they are unlikely to approve the transit of the kinds of numbers of ships which would allow energy markets to stabilize.
Just as a measure here, as I write this apparently over the last three days or so Iran has let some twenty ships through their checkpoint, charging fees apparently to do so. That may sound like a lot, but it is a quantity that, compared to the normal operation of the strait, is indistinguishable from zero. The Strait of Hormuz normally sees around 120 transits per day (including both directions). That scale should both explain why five or six ships a day paying Iran to transit is not going to really impact this equation – that’s still something like a 95% reduction in traffic (and all of the Iran-approved transits are outbound, I think) – but also why a solution like ‘just do escorts’ is so hard. Whatever navies attempted an escort solution would need to escort a hundred ships a day, with every ship being vulnerable at every moment from when it entered the Strait to when it docked for loading or offloading to its entire departure route. All along the entire Gulf coastline. All the time.
Likewise, even extremely punishing bombings of Iranian land-based facilities are unlikely to wholly remove their ability to throw enough threat into the Strait that traffic remains massively reduced. Sure some ship owners will pay Iran and others will take the risk, but if traffic remains down 90% or just 50% that is still a massive, global energy disruption. And we’ve seen with the campaign against the Houthis just how hard it is with airstrikes to compromise these capabilities: the United States spent more than a year hammering the Houthis and was never able to fully remove their attack capabilities. Cargo ships are too vulnerable and the weapons with which to attack them too cheap and too easy to hide.
There is a very real risk that this conflict will end with Iran as the de facto master of the Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf, having demonstrated that no one can stop them from determining by force which ships pass and which ships cannot. That would, in fact, be a significant strategic victory for Iran and an enormous strategic defeat for the United States.
Peace Negotiations?
Which brings us to the question of strategic outcomes. As the above has made clear, I think the Trump administration erred spectacularly in starting this war. It appears as though, in part pressured by Israel, but mostly based on their own decisions (motivated, it sure seems, by the ease of the Venezuela regime-change) they decided to go ahead on the hopeful assumption the regime would collapse and as a result did not plan for the most likely outcome (large war, strait closure), despite this being the scenario that political leadership (Trump, Hegseth, Rubio) were warned was most likely.
That is a lot of uncertainty! But I think we can look at some outcomes here both in terms of what was militarily achieved, what the consequences of a ‘deal’ might be and what the consequences of not having a deal might be.
The Trump administration has offered a bewildering range of proposed objectives for this war, but I think it is fair to say the major strategic objectives have not been achieved. Initially, the stated objective was regime change or at least regime collapse; neither has occurred. The regime very much still survives and if the war ends soon it seems very plausible that the regime – able to say that it fought the United States and made the American president sue for peace – will emerge stronger, domestically (albeit with a lot of damage to fix and many political problems that are currently ‘on pause’ coming ‘un-paused’). The other core American strategic interest here is Iran’s nuclear program, the core of which is Iran’s supply of roughly 500kg of highly enriched uranium; no effort appears to have been made to recover or destroy this material and it remains in Iranian hands. Actually destroying (dispersing, really) or seizing this material by military force would be an extremely difficult operation with a very high risk of failure, since the HEU is underground buried in facilities (mostly Isfahan) in the center of the country. Any sort of special forces operation would thus run the risk of being surrounded and outnumbered very fast, even with ample air support, while trying to extract half a ton of uranium stored in gas form in heavy storage cylinders.
Subsequently, administration aims seem to have retreated mostly to ‘fixing the mess we made:’ getting Iran to stop shooting and getting the Strait of Hormuz reopened and the ships moving again. They do seem to be asking for quite a bit more at the peace table, but the record of countries winning big concessions at the peace table which they not only haven’t secured militarily but do not appear able to do so is pretty slim.
Now it is possible that Iran blinks and takes a deal sooner rather than later. But I don’t think it is likely. And the simple reason is that Iran probably feels like it needs to reestablish deterrence. This is the second sudden bombing campaign the country has suffered in as many years – they do not want there to be a third next year and a fourth the year after that. But promises not to bomb them don’t mean a whole lot: establishing deterrence here means inflicting quite a lot of pain. In practice, if Iran wants future presidents not to repeat this war, the precedent they want to set is “attacking Iran is a presidency-ending mistake.” And to do that, well, they need to end a presidency or at least make clear they could have done.
Iran is thus going to very much want a deal that says ‘America blinked’ on the tin, which probably means at least some remaining nuclear program, a de facto Iranian veto on traffic in the strait and significant sanctions relief, along with formal paper promises of no more air strikes. That’s going to be a hard negotiating position to bridge, especially because Iran can ‘tough it out’ through quite a lot of bombing.
And I do want to stress that. There is a frequent mistake, often from folks who deal in economics, to assume that countries will give up on wars when the economics turn bad. But countries are often very willing to throw good money after bad even on distant wars of choice. For wars close to home that are viewed as existential? Well, the ‘turnip winter‘ where Germans started eating food previous thought fit only for animals (a result of the British blockade) began in 1916. The war did not end in 1916. It did not end in 1917. It did not end until November, 1918. Food deprivation and starvation in Germany was real and significant and painful for years before the country considered surrender. Just because the war is painful for Iran does not mean the regime will cave quickly: so long as they believe the survival of the regime is at stake, they will fight on.
There is a great deal of ruin in a nation.
Strategic Implications
So my conclusion here is that the United States has not yet achieved very much in this war on a strategic level. Oh, tactically, the United States has blown up an awful lot of stuff and done so with very minimal casualties of its own. But countries do not go to war simply to have a war – well, stupid fascist countries do, which is part of why they tend to be quite bad at war – they go to war to achieve specific goals and end-states.
None of the major goals here – regime change, an end to Iran’s nuclear ambitions – have been achieved. If the war ends tomorrow in a ‘white peace,’ Iran will reconstitute its military and proxies and continue its nuclear program. It is in fact possible to display astounding military skill and yet, due to strategic incoherence, not accomplish anything.
So the true, strategic gains here for all of the tactical effectiveness displayed, are functionally nil. Well what did it cost?
Well, first and foremost, to date the lives of 13 American soldiers (290 more WIA), 24 Israelis (thousands more injured), at least a thousand civilian deaths across ‘neutral’ countries (Lebanon mostly, but deaths in Kuwait, Iraq, Qatar, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, etc) and probably at least a thousand if not more Iranian civilians (plus Iranian military losses). The cost of operations for the United States is reportedly one to two billion dollars a day, which adds up pretty quickly to a decent chunk of change.
All of the military resources spent in this war are in turn not available for other, more important theaters, most obviously the Asia-Pacific (INDOPACOM), but of course equally a lot of these munitions could have been doing work in Ukraine as well. As wars tend to do, this one continues to suck in assets as it rumbles on, so the American commitment is growing, not shrinking. And on top of spent things like munitions and fuel, the strain on ships, air frames and service personnel is also a substantial cost: it turns out keeping a carrier almost constantly running from one self-inflicted crisis to the next for ten months is a bad idea.
You could argue these costs would be worthwhile it they resulted in the destruction of Iran’s nuclear program – again, the key element here is the HEU, which has not been destroyed – or of the Iranian regime. But neither of those things have been achieved on the battlefield, so this is a long ledger of costs set against…no gains. Again, it is not a ‘gain’ in war simply to bloody your enemy: you are supposed to achieve something in doing so.
The next side of this are the economic consequences. Oil and natural gas have risen in price dramatically, but if you are just watching the commodity ticker on the Wall Street Journal, you may be missing some things. When folks talk about oil prices, they generally do so via either $/bbl (West Texas Intermediate – WTI – one-month front-month futures) or BRN00 (Brent Crude Oil Continuous Contracts). These are futures contracts, meaning the price being set is not for a barrel of oil right now but for a barrel of oil in the future; we can elide the sticky differences between these two price sets and just note that generally the figure you see is for delivery in more-or-less one month’s time. Those prices have risen dramatically (close to doubled), but may not reflect the full economic impact here: as the ‘air bubble’ created by the sudden stop of oil shipments expands, physical here-right-now prices for oil are much higher in many parts of the world and still rising.
Essentially, the futures markets are still hedging on the idea that this war might end and normal trade might resume pretty soon, a position encouraged by the current administration, which claims it has been negotiating with Iran (Iran denied the claim). The tricky thing here is that this is a war between two governments – the Trump administration and the Iranian regime – which both have a clear record of lying a lot. The Trump administration has, for instance, repeatedly claimed a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia was imminent, and that war remains ongoing. The markets are thus forced to try and guess everyone’s actions and intentions from statements that are unreliable. Cards on the table, I think the markets are underestimating the likelihood that this conflict continues for some time. Notably, the United States is moving assets into theater – an MEU, elements of the 82 Airborne – which will take some time to arrive (two weeks for the MEU which is still about a week out as I write this) and set up for operations.
In either case, while I am not an expert on oil extraction or shipping, what I have seen folks who are experts on those things say is that the return of normal operations after this war will be very slow, often on the order of ‘every extra week of conflict adds a month to recovery’ (which was Sal Mercogliano’s rule of thumb in a recent video). If the war ends instantly, right now, ship owners will first have to determine that the strait is safe, then ships will have to arrive and begin loading to create space in storage to start up refineries to create space in storage to start up oil wells that have been ‘shut in,’ some of which may require quite a bit of doing to restart. Those ships in turn have to spend weeks sailing to the places that need these products, where some of the oil and LNG is likely to be used to refill stockpiles rather than immediately going out to consumers. For many products, refineries and production at the point of sale – fertilizer plants, for instance – will also need to be restarted. Factory restarts can be pretty involved tasks.
Meanwhile, disruption of fertilizer production, which relies heavily on natural gas products, has the potential to raise food prices globally. Higher global food prices – and food prices have already been elevated by the impact of the War in Ukraine – are pretty strongly associated with political instability in less developed countries. After all, a 25% increase in the price of food in a rich country is annoying – you have to eat more cheaper foods (buy more ramen, etc.). But in a poor country it means people go hungry because they cannot afford food and hungry, desperate people do hungry, desperate things. A spike in food prices was one of the core causes of the 2010 Arab Spring which led in turn to the Syrian Civil War, the refugee crisis of which significantly altered the political landscape of Europe.
Via Wikipedia, a chart of the food price index, with the spikes on either side of 2010 clearly visible; they are thought to have contributed to the intense political instability of those years (alongside the financial crisis).
I am not saying this will happen – the equally big spike in food prices from the Ukraine War has not touched off a wave of revolutions – but that it increases the likelihood of chaotic, dynamic, unsettled political events.
But it does seem very clear that this war has created a set of global economic headwinds which will have negative repercussions for many countries, including the United States. The war has not, as of yet, made Americans any safer – but it has made them poorer.
Then there are the political implications. I think most folks understand that this war was a misfire for the United States, but I suspect it may end up being a terrible misfire for Israel as well. Israeli security and economic prosperity both depend to a significant degree on the US-Israeli security partnership and this war seems to be one more step in a process that very evidently imperils that partnership. Suspicion of Israel – which, let us be honest, often descends into rank, bigoted antisemitism, but it is also possible to critique Israel, a country with policies, without being antisemitic – is now openly discussed in both parties. More concerning is polling suggesting that not only is Israel underwater with the American public, but more Americans sympathize with Palestinians than Israelis for the first time in American history.
Again, predictions are hard, especially about the future, but it certainly seems like there is an open door to a future where this war is the final nail in the coffin of the American-Israeli security partnership, as it becomes impossible to sustain in the wake of curdling American public opinion. That would be a strategic catastrophe for Israel if it happened. On the security side, with Israel has an independent nuclear deterrent and some impressive domestic military-industrial production the country is not capable of designing and manufacturing the full range of high-end hardware that it relies on to remain militarily competitive despite its size. There’s a reason Israel flies F-35s. But a future president might well cut off spare parts and maintainers for those F-35s, refuse to sell new ones, refuse to sell armaments for them, and otherwise make it very difficult for Israel to acquire superior weapons compared to its regional rivals.
Economic coercion is equally dangerous: Israel is a small, substantially trade dependent country and its largest trading partner is the United States, followed by the European Union. But this trade dependency is not symmetrical: the USA and EU are hugely important players in Israel’s economy but Israel is a trivial player in the US and EU economies. Absent American diplomatic support then, the threat of economic sanctions is quite dire: Israel is meaningfully exposed and the sanctions would be very low cost for the ‘Status Quo Coalition’ (assuming the United States remains a member) to inflict under a future president.
A war in which Israel cripples Iran in 2026 but finds itself wholly diplomatically isolated in 2029 is a truly pyrrhic victory. As Thucydides might put it, an outcome like that would be an “example for the world to meditate upon.” That outcome is by no means guaranteed, but every day the war grinds on and becomes less popular in the United States, it becomes more likely.
But the United States is likewise going to bear diplomatic costs here. Right now the Gulf States have to shelter against Iranian attack but when the dust settles they – and many other countries – will remember that the United States unilaterally initiated by surprise a war of choice which set off severe global economic headwinds and uncertainty. Coming hot on the heels of the continuing drama around tariffs, the takeaway in many places may well be ‘Uncle Sam wants you to be poor,’ which is quite a damaging thing for diplomacy. And as President Trump was finding out when he called for help in the Strait of Hormuz and got told ‘no’ by all of our traditional allies, it is in fact no fun at all to be diplomatically isolated, no matter how powerful you are.
Of course the war, while quickly becoming an expensive, self-inflicted wound for the United States has also been disastrous for Iran. I said this at the top but I’ll say it again: the Iranian regime is odious. You will note also I have not called this war ‘unprovoked’ – the Iranian regime has been provoking the United States and Israel via its proxies almost non-stop for decades. That said, it is the Iranian people who will suffer the most from this war and they had no choice in the matter. They tried to reject this regime earlier this year and many were killed for it. But I think it is fair to say this war has been a tragedy for the Iranian people and a catastrophe for the Iranian regime.
And you may then ask, here at the end: if I am saying that Iran is being hammered, that they are suffering huge costs, how can I also be suggesting that the United States is on some level losing?
And the answer is simple: it is not possible for two sides to both win a war. But it is absolutely possible for both sides to lose; mutual ruin is an option. Every actor involved in this war – the United States, Iran, arguably Israel, the Gulf states, the rest of the energy-using world – is on net poorer, more vulnerable, more resource-precarious as a result.
In short, please understand this entire 7,000+ word post as one primal scream issued into the avoid at the careless, unnecessary folly of the decision to launch an ill-considered war without considering the obvious, nearly inevitable negative outcomes which would occur unless the initial strikes somehow managed to pull the inside straight-flush. They did not and now we are all living trapped in the consequences.
Maybe the war will be over tomorrow. The consequences will last a lot longer.
It took me about an hour and a half to walk about four miles today. I had a couple of hours to get from 72nd street down to 4th street, so I figured I might as well go on foot to use the time. I didn't get a lot of thinking done, which I put down to having to keep dodging and weaving through crowds - that kind of thing's easier when there's nobody in my way, on foot or any other method of transportation. Which is on me for sticking to a busy street at a busy time of day than walking a few blocks over and trying on that.
There's also my head's not here or there, and I need to find some space to drift.
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sore