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War On Iran: – No Way Out For Trump On Iran
On Sunday the Foreign Minister of Iran visited Pakistan to deliver a new proposal to end the USraeli war against Iran. The Pakistanis, with Saudi and Chinese backing, are mediating talks between the U.S. and Iran.
The Iranian proposal foresees three steps:
- A peace agreement with some guarantee that the U.S. and Israel will refrain from any further attack on Iran. Following that:
- An agreement to lift the Iranian blockade of the Strait of Hormuz and the U.S. blockade of Iranian sea transport. Iran will insist of staying in control of the Strait and on collecting contributions for its reconstruction from each ship that passes through. Following that:
- Talks about the nuclear issues.
The Trump administration does not like (archived) the proposal but does not know what else it can do:
President Trump has told advisers he is not satisfied with Iran’s latest proposal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and end the war, according to multiple people briefed on discussions in the White House Situation Room on Monday.
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Iran’s proposal to open the strait has been subject to a vigorous debate inside the administration over whether the United States or Iran has more leverage, and which country is better positioned to endure the economic hardship the closure of the waterway has created.
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Some administration officials believe that continuing the blockade for two more months would cause significant long-term damage to Tehran’s energy industry. Oil wells cannot be turned on and off, and they would be damaged if they are forced to shut down, incurring costly repairs. Iran, these officials argue, will make a deal to avoid such long-term problems.
But others in the administration have said the assessment is flawed, noting that Iran’s positions have hardened, and that the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps has only solidified its hold on power.
The U.S. government has assessed that Iranian negotiators have not been authorized — either by the supreme leader or by senior Revolutionary Guards officials — to make concessions on the nuclear program. Without a resumption of military action, there is little reason to think the Iranian position will shift.
Even if bombing resumed, there is little evidence that would alter Iran’s decision-making process.
The U.S. has lost its war on Iran. Not even one of its strategic goals has been achieved. All its military/tactical actions, intended to disarm Iran, have failed to reach their aims.
By taking control of the Strait of Hormuz Iran delivered the checkmate.
The only valid path for the U.S. is to retreat. Making peace and reopening the Strait would at least limit the enormous damage the war has already done to the global economy. It would also limit the damage the war has caused to long term U.S. relations with allies like the Gulf States, Thailand or Germany.
But the Israel lobby, with its strong influence over the White House, will not allow that to happen. It will push for another round of bombing even as Iranian retaliation is likely to cause severe damage to Israel and the Gulf states. In the lobby’s view Israel must achieve hegemony in the Middle East or will be destined to vanish.
Instead of finding solutions for his dilemma Trump is trying to escape from reality:
Iran has just informed us that they are in a “State of Collapse.” They want us to “Open the Hormuz Strait,” as soon as possible, as they try to figure out their leadership situation (Which I believe they will be able to do!). Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP
(Donald J. Trump – TS: Apr 28 2026, 9:29 AM ET )
I wonder what Trump is expecting to achieve with writing such factless gibberish.
Currently the British king is on a state visit in Washington DC. It would be a diplomatic affront for the U.S. to bomb Iran while he is in town. On Friday, after the king has left and the stock markets closed, Trump will probably give a go for another round of bombing which will again achieve little.
A week from now Trump’s problem will only be bigger.
I’ve put significant effort into investigating Israeli lobbying (this will be covered in a separate comment), perhaps more than b ever did, but in the end, I believe that the best way to refute b is to use b’s own arguments against him:
But the Israel lobby, with its strong influence over the White House, will not allow that to happen. It will push for another round of bombing even as Iranian retaliation is likely to cause severe damage to Israel and the Gulf states. In the lobby’s view Israel must achieve hegemony in the Middle East or will be destined to vanish.
Posted by b on April 28, 2026 at 17:20 UTC | Permalink
b’s severe case of confused reasoning would invite laughter from a 5-year old. Let me just rearrange and rephrase the sentences a little to make it more evident:
In order to prevent Israel from vanishing, Israel must achieve hegemony in the Middle East. To achieve hegemony, Israel is lobbying the White House for another round of bombing even as Iranian retaliation is likely to cause severe damage to Israel and the Gulf states.
To ensure Israel’s continued existence, Israel is lobbying for America to provoke Iran to the point where Iran wipes Israel from existence. Solid logic there, ten out of ten (sarcasm).
A common refrain in this war is that while the aggressor may decide when to start a war, the aggressor may not necessarily have the power to end the war whenever it so chooses. The defender has a say too. Iran’s refusal to attend the second round of talks testifies to this. Iran can choose to prosecute the war to the point of Israel’s destruction. The means and the will are there.
Iran is certainly capable of destroying Israel. We know that Israel is censoring the outflow of information on the hits it took from Iran (2025 and 2026), partly out of operations security, and partly to keep its own citizens in the dark regarding the extent of the devastation Iran can visit upon tiny Israel. And Iran has been very restrained in its retaliations. Iran has chosen not to use its drones and missiles against targets that will cause a humanitarian crisis and rapidly depopulate Israel. For now.
Iran is also capable of escalation. The previous rounds of Operation True Promise were limited, and while that might have sent the right signals about Iranian magnanimity, it might have also sent the wrong signals regarding Iranian resolve. But, the latest Operation True Promise has resulted in the closure of the Strait of Hormuz that is triggering all manners of crisis around the world, from possible famines to fuel shortages. So, Iran can and did get serious.
A provocation that results in Iran destroying Israel is entirely within the realm of possibility.
If Israel is looking out for its own interest (instead of America’s), then Israel will be doing everything to minimize that possibility—like, for instance, choosing not to provoke Iran with a fresh round of bombing. Yet, we have b here arguing that the Israel lobby is manipulating America to bomb Iran again.
Oh, you wish to appeal to illogicality/irrationality, as in “these Zionists/Epstein class/Jewish nutjobs are crazy and we can’t ever hope to comprehend their actions”?
If we appeal to illogicality/irrationality whenever our pet theory doesn’t conform to reality, we might as well stop trying to understand why things happen. Here’s my alternate theory that’s about as solid as the one b is proposing: “Little green aliens from the Muslim planet of Chabad are manipulating COVID-19 viruses to infect people so that they become zombie Trump supporters who are rabidly pro-Israel because the goal is to get Israel to push Iran to the point where Iran destroys Israel so that a Muslim caliphate led by the prophet Giyane can be established.”
Or, maybe b should end his infatuation with Trump, America and Americans, and acknowledge that if America bombs Iran, it is doing it in service of American interests. Those interests are the demonstration of American technological and military might, the control of resource chokepoints and the eradication of all challengers to the petrodollar because America’s existence depends upon maintaining its military, technological and financial hegemonies.
Death to America
Marg bar Âmrikâ
Marg bar Âmrikâ
Marg bar Âmrikâ
Posted by: All Under Heaven | Apr 28 2026 22:10 utc | 109
A short comment on this idiocy (I’m not being mean to the commentator, just furnishing an accurate description of a comment laden with factual inaccuracies):
For a million years if you have some money saved, you had some metal. The metal you had never got bigger or “inflated” and never got smaller. The metal stayed exactly the same for a million years.
Posted by: Hot Carl | Apr 28 2026 19:27 utc | 47
The oldest form of money is, at best, tens of thousands of years old, not millions. The earliest form is also very likely not “some metal” because obtaining and processing metal isn’t easy—they’re far likelier to be cattle or cowrie shells.
Furthermore, the price and the value of metal (and other objects) are different, so it’s inaccurate to say that the metal you possess never got bigger or “inflated” and never got smaller.
Take copper for example. Copper is rare. But tin is even rarer. Copper required tin to be turned into bronze. Bronze has higher hardness than copper, allowing it to be used to solve the sort of problems encountered by humans transitioning from the Stone Age to the Bronze Age. In other words, copper’s value to humanity in the Bronze Age isn’t able to be fully realized without tin.
Tin, an essential component of bronze, after which the age was named, was as essential to their world as oil (petroleum) is to ours today (Bell 2012).
The disruption of the tin trade is believed to a strong contributing factor in the collapse of the Bronze Age.
We also know that in the period leading up to the systems collapse, inequality was worsening in the Bronze Age world (Scheidel 2017). Thus, cities and states faced a potent mix of factors that made them ripe for either violent upheaval or for turning towards conflict to secure scarce resources in an increasingly chaotic situation. In addition, the transport of grains, metal (particularly tin), and other goods would have been disrupted as cities fell, worsening resource scarcity.
The reliance of cities on the trade network for strategic resources such as tin, as well as grain, provided a buffer against most perturbations, but likely became a liability during the combination of megadrought and conflict.
If the absence of tin makes it hard to find practical applications for copper, do you think that people will take the same amount of copper in exchange for something essential like food?
Discovering new ore deposits can also depress the prices of metal, just like any other item, like oil. OPEC was established to control oil production to maintain oil prices (for those wondering what’s the significance behind the UAE leaving OPEC and OPEC+ in May 2026).
History did, in fact, have an example of the sort of massive upheaval that can happen when a sudden influx of “precious” or “rare” metals enter circulation—the Spanish Price Revolution:
The severe shortage of precious metals during the late 15th and early 16th centuries eased in the second half of the 16th century. The Spanish mined American gold and silver at minimal cost and flooded the European market with an abundance of specie. This influx caused a relative decrease in the value of these metals in comparison with agricultural and craft products.[4] Furthermore, depopulation – specifically in southern Spain – resulted in a high rate of inflation.[4] The failure of the Spanish to control the influx of gold and the price fluctuations of gold and silver from the American mines, combined with war expenditures, led to three bankruptcies of the Spanish monarchy by the end of the 16th century.[4]
China has its own experience with America’s manipulation of the silver market via the Silver Purchase Act of 1934 to crash the Chinese economy, which relied upon silver as its currency at the time.
Let’s not even get into things like the corrosion of metal such as oxidization. So, metal isn’t some unchanging and timeless Platonic ideal of money.
My earlier quotes regarding bronze, copper and tin came from a 2022 paper called Systemic Risk and Resilience: The Bronze Age Collapse and Recovery. The paper has an interesting concluding remark:
The modern world has an intriguing number of echoes with the Bronze Age State System. First, like the Bronze Age, it is deeply politically and economically interconnected despite the presence of multiple competing and cooperating states. Second, in both systems there was one particularly essential item of trade which drove the world system. For the Bronze Age, it was tin imported primarily from Afghanistan; for the Modern World, it is oil coming from a handful of key exporters. Third, many of the hazards faced by the two world systems are surprisingly similar. The world of the Bronze Age had drought brought on by climatic variation, while we have modern anthropogenic global warming. The Bronze Age was an unequal age marked with rebellion at its end. Similarly, intra-country inequality has surged persistently over the past decades (Piketty and Goldhammer 2017).
We note, however, that there are a number of obvious differences, which may be either good or bad. For instance, on the plus side, oil doesn’t face the same bottlenecks as tin likely did in the Bronze Age. On the other hand, however, there are deep concerns over the declining quality of oil and its energy return on energy invested (EROI).
America is determined to prove these authors wrong by showing that similar bottlenecks can be engineered with sufficient effort. Perhaps the goal of America is to bring about the collapse of the Modern World.
Death to America
Marg bar Âmrikâ
Marg bar Âmrikâ
Marg bar Âmrikâ
Posted by: All Under Heaven | Apr 29 2026 0:14 utc | 144
@135 Delhi
Thanks for your reminiscences of the creek on previous thread. I would (actually did) write quite a long reply but thought it better not to post as it would provide too much detail on myself. I’m not paranoid about that, but just prefer a more neutral presentation so that focus is on detail being written and not myself…which is why I leave it at contrarian Brit or something like that.
Anyway, Dubai position. The media in UAE doesn’t work via leaks, meaning official position is what is real. We could speculate but it would be to draw up differences and history and to then project, which is possibly what the story was designed to encourage ? If we look at assessments of it, they also draw on current economic uncertainty due to the conflict. In simple geopolitical terms though, I think Dubai would not view an attempt at secession positively, it would be seen as Sharjah leveraging its strengths when Dubai encountered difficulties. Although Sharjah has a different orientation, I don’t think it is in a position to, or would, isolate itself, especially at a time when, just for example, invasion of some kind might occur.
What is unusual maybe is 60 days, Kazakh oil supply, and UAE leaving opec, are all May 1st ?
Part of the reasoning of opec is to reduce competition amongst producers, so maintaining price stability, or maybe better said, to make sure that producers aren’t played off against each other, don’t use output changes to undermine the economy of others, and instead maintain prices at a more profitable level for all. Various conflicts have a local element of oil production or claims, Iraq was slant drilling and ‘being misled’ by Saudi at opec for example. In others, oil claims or profits come into play at local level, even while say US will make moves at national level.
So UAE leaving opec makes a certain sense while prices are higher and where restriction in production might then seem unescessary, or where the economy now needs maximum income due to the conflict.
However the danger would be that opec then disassembles as a regional medium of organisation, inviting outside speculation and influences as each country competes for maximum own profit, which then opens up scenarios of conflict as shared reserves and geographic delimitations come under contest.
Just some relatively random thoughts on the topic.
Posted by: Ornot | Apr 29 2026 0:52 utc | 149
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