Mastodawn

ACOUP is grimly pessimistic about the Iran war: "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." https://acoup.blog/2026/03/25/miscellanea-the-war-in-iran/

Miscellanea: The War in Iran

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 spec…

A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry

MidgePhoto 1d ago

@cstross thing is, at this point, for all three participants to suffer losses of force and wealth is going to cause quite limited sadness in most of the rest of the world.

I mean, it is clearly _bad_ and we are all suffering and will suffer more as collateral damage, but to whom better could it happen?
Well, Russia, obvs.

@cstross Mutual ruin is the expected outcome of wars.

The US is the Oil Empire; people who are not in the US tolerated that and the consequent post-war order because it was, by and large and on the whole, beneficial. Open trade, freedom of the seas, all that stuff.

An authoritarian US is not beneficial and the exceptionalism that went into supporting an expectation that the US would not go there is stone dead. Everyone else now wants to end the Oil Empire even without the food security issues.

@cstross My expectation is that the US is going to collapse its economy committing genocide against Iran. Once the US economy goes down, a period of global rearrangement happens, only it's going to be happening in a context of repeated famine as the weather gets more angry than hitherto. (Israel does not survive US collapse.)

I think it's also notable that there is no way out of this that doesn't involve "and a miracle"; none of the better scenarios are plausibly materially possible.

Frank Skornia 1d ago

@graydon @cstross As an USian, this has pretty much been my nihilistic prediction since the morning after the 2024 election.
The US needs a serious and brutal kick in the nuts for us as a nation to realize that the Republicans are a suicidal death cult running full bore to slave-feudalism. I think one of the first things I said that morning was that I can't wait for all those Republican voters to be in the position where they're have to consider eating their children to survive.

@fskornia @graydon @cstross Have you met republican parents? theyre probably looking forward to it

@cinebox @fskornia @graydon @cstross There was this TV show in 2016 that got cancelled after its first season called 'Incorporated', that was really Cyberpunk As Fuck, where this fella had infiltrated into a corp as an executive, and the life of the corpos was more or less 1990's suburbia, while the masses of the population lived more or less like refugees. One of the episodes had an in-universe ad for a Chinese charity to help USAmerican families that today sounds like a "joke".

Charlie Stross 1d ago

@cinebox @fskornia @graydon Not being American, I'm happy to say that I haven't met them face-to-face—just observed them from a distance.

Angus McIntyre 1d ago

@graydon @cstross I don’t know if it’s even worth trying to enumerate all the possible bad outcomes, or guess which one is most likely, because the Brains Trust in the White House will almost certainly find a way to engineer something even more stupidly catastrophic than whatever worst-case scenario you can come up with.

Colman Reilly 1d ago

@angusm @graydon @cstross I’ve stopped trying to predict because they seem to take disappointing me as a challenge.

N4RSE - Jim 19h ago

@angusm @graydon @cstross “Brains Trust?” You’ve seen the movie “Idiocracy”? Just as predicted we voted the idiots in. I’m pretty sure their brains are pretty much null and void.

Charlie Stross 19h ago

@jcwiii @angusm @graydon I haven't seen the movie. (Not going to, either: it's a movie.)

@graydon @cstross in related news: https://theintercept.com/2026/03/19/air-force-academy-charlie-erika-kirk/

Air Force Academy Prepares Ideological Overhaul, With Erika Kirk Bringing “Bold Christian Faith”

As the Air Force Academy dismantles DEI, critics warn the military is becoming "a Christian nationalist praetorian guard.”

The Intercept

@moz @cstross The US right has been planning on a theocracy for three generations.

They can't give up patriarchal white supremacy and continue to exist; by alternative phrasing, their cultural continuity arises from being free to torture children. Once they are not, they either extirpate whatever functioning social power prevents them from torturing children or their cultural transmission ceases.

I would wish the majority of the US population could get their heads around the problem.

jonathankoren™1d ago

@graydon @moz @cstross I wouldn't say the US was planning on a theocracy for three generations. That seems to misinterpret history.

The alignment with evangelical christians were purely a GOTV effort. Mainstream conservatives never gave a shit about bible thumpers, just like how evangelicals never gave a shit about abortion until they needed a new boogieman to keep the coffers full after segregation was eliminated.

What's happened is that two generations now have been raised on christian nationalist propaganda, and the ones in on the joke have all died off, and so now there are only true believers. The first generation never had any intention of giving power to the nut jobs, but yet here we are, and as long as the line goes up, then it's all good.

@jonathankoren @moz @cstross The US Right that you have now is, as you note, all true believers, and the true believers have been planning this for generations as their numbers have increased.

(If you're not a true believer you presumably observe all the falsified axioms and alter your positions away from the paleo-conservative views of 1970.)

Billy Smith 1d ago

@graydon @jonathankoren @moz @cstross

Also, remember that the USAF were tracking the Evangelical Christians who were deliberately trying to join the regiments that control the USA nuclear weapons.

There were news articles warning about this years ago.

Algaeman 1d ago

@graydon @moz @cstross Living in a fearful environment encourages conservative values. The more dangerous and chaotic the society becomes, the more people are willing to sign away their rights in the hope of safety. It takes conscious social effort to move toward liberal, equitable values

atopoeia-o 1d ago

@graydon @moz @cstross The US still has a few centuries to go. "We're" going to get stronger+stronger tho' to your point... am not sure who is included in the "we" group.

If the US weather starts to fade "we" already have right of claim to Canada by way of previous administrations (dating back to Churchill). Not sure about Grønland but Canada, yes.

I think Mexico+Southern Texas are at risk but most of the US is likely going to stay strong and in play over time. For a few centuries.

Token Sane Person 1d ago

@moz @graydon @cstross One characteristic of fascist dictatorships is that they promote based on ideological purity rather than ability, and since the two are negatively correlated they actively select for incompetence. This shows up in both Nazi Germany and the USSR, and the USA is going the same way.

Olivier Roux (moose)1d ago

@cstross I’d say he’s rather realistic, sadly.

@otolithe @cstross Optimistic.

He's assuming the US will look at the cost of occupying Iran and either not want to do it, realize it can't do it, or try to finesse something, and that this unbearable cost will constrain politics and policy.

He's not looking at the other two obvious alternatives, which are kinetically induced infrastructure collapse and maintaining it for the couple years necessary for 90% population reduction, or the more impatient approach and using nukes.

Jim Hubbell 1d ago

@graydon @otolithe @cstross
Whatever the possible options are, trump will pick the worst one.

Tubemeister 23h ago

@Dougfir @graydon @otolithe @cstross I’m reminded of that saying, the US can be trusted to do the right thing, after all other options have been tried.

Martin Vermeer FCD 1d ago

@cstross At least he displays, as John Kenneth Galbraith called it, the attributes of competence

https://fediscience.org/@martinvermeer/116291188069274150

Toni Aittoniemi 1d ago

@cstross Great read!

WellsiteGeo 1d ago

@cstross To quote the Oracle at Delphi, "if you invade, you will destroy a great empire".

About 55 BCE, IIRC. But it was in Latin, so Trump wouldn't understand it, at any level.

Brian Gordon 1d ago

Great points in the article. This one, for example...

"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."

🍿

Isaac Ji Kuo 22h ago

@elasticsoul @cstross That's definitely a desire, but there's also the serious possibility that Iran can't actually do it.

I mean, you could say the same about Iran wanting to make attacking Iran a prime minister-ending mistake, but here we are after numerous Israeli attacks on Iran over the years, and none of them ended Netanyahu's reign.

I see this as quintessentially a geopolitics "game". Iran has the advantage mainly because EVERYONE blames Trump (and Netanyahu) for all this.

This is

Isaac Ji Kuo 21h ago

@elasticsoul @cstross compounded by Trump going out of his way to insult other countries and their leaders, making it politically impossible for them to help him as begged.

And it is furthermore compounded by Trump going out of his way to display pathetic weakness, by unilaterally lifting sanctions on Iran in exchange for absolutely nothing.

So, even if Iran can't do anything to seriously end Trump's presidency, Trump's firehose stream of self-owns gives them every incentive to keep on taking

Isaac Ji Kuo 21h ago

@elasticsoul @cstross wins, and no incentive to "play ball" with Trump's desperate begging for negotiations he pathetically lies about happening.

In the meantime, all this _actual_ winning is helping the Iranian regime consolidate power internally.

Grievous Angel 18h ago

@cstross They’re going to go nuclear to save face aren’t they.