IMO #3. They'll moan for a bit. Continue firing rockets. A couple weeks of this; Iran will claim that Iran won, Israel will claim Israel won. There won't be negotiations or concessions. They'll continue trying to develop nukes, but these past two weeks has set them back years. Things go quiet. In ten years we'll do this all over again.
The thing people seem to not recognize is: There's basically three countries on the planet capable of actually waging war in the 21st century (US, and Russia/China barely). Every other country is just a proxy for one of these three; their domestic capabilities look more like "throwing a tantrum" than actual war. Israel can't wage war without the US. Iran can't wage war without China/Russia. Currently, the superpower contribution to this fight is just dropping some bombs and diverting a few crates of AK-47s.
There's zero capability for long-term war here. But, there's also too much face-saving for negotiations or concessions to happen. So, the fire mostly quenches into embers; like the middle east has always been.
That seems ideal, but my fear is that Iran won't stop.
It's cheaper to build low precision rockets/drones than the Israeli interceptors, so the war _could_ swing in Iran's favor in the long term.
Additionally, Iranians aren't rising up because they don't want to be seen as being controlled by foreigners, but once the war stops, the Iranian regime will have to answer to its citizens. This means the mullahs have no incentive to stop.
Not only will they not stop, this has massively increased their incentive to successfully create a nuclear program.
In the opposite direction but with the same outcome, the just-barely-enough aid that Ukraine has received after being invaded by Russia, has demonstrated that it's foolish for countries to give up their own nuclear weapons, on the understanding that a friendly superpower will protect them.
This has been a very bad decade of events for incentivizing nuclear non-proliferation. I hate it!
That is certainly the conventional wisdom. But is it right?
Imagine that Iran already had 10 nuclear bombs and the US bombed the production sites with B2s. What would Iran do? They can't drop a nuke on the US, and even if they could, that would just ensure their destruction.
Of course, one could argue that Iran is not rational and that it would nuke NYC even if it meant being destroyed as a country. But if we're assuming that they are irrational, then that's all the more reason to get rid of their weapons, even if it meant taking casualties.
And note that the same calculation applies with Iran vs. Israel. If Israel attacks Iran conventionally, Iran cannot escalate to nuclear without also getting destroyed (since Israel has a larger arsenal).
Moreover, Putin's invasion of Ukraine, actually demonstrates the uselessness of nuclear weapons. Yes, NATO and the US were initially deterred because of fears of Russian escalation, but we've continued to cross "red-lines" in arming Ukraine without escalation (tanks, F16, missile attacks on Russian soil, etc.). I'm pretty confident that Europe at least will continue to support Ukraine with ever more powerful weapons without fear of Russia's nuclear threats.
You don't have to speculate like this. We can just look at how North Korea is treated, now that they do have nuclear capability. From the Iranian (or Ukrainian) perspective, the conclusion can only be "better than us".
In your hypothetical, we're sending B2s to drop bombs on their production sites. In the reality, we would not do that, for the same reasons that we are not sending B2s to drop bombs on North Korea's production sites.
Maybe. It certainly would not surprise me if you're right--that's why it's the conventional wisdom.
But these kind of events--Israel defanging Hezbollah, US destroying nuclear sites--should change our priors. And it might change priors in Iran too. Until we actually sent B-2s in, Iran didn't know whether we ever would. They might have held out hope that we were bluffing--that we would never risk a $2 billion plane (not to mention a crew) on bombing a site that only sets back the program a couple of years.
Now that the US has done it, what's to stop us from doing it again later? Why bother spending so much effort on a program that gets blown up every few years? Maybe they'll just try to hide it better, but can they really rely on not having intelligence leaks, given the massive intelligence failures of the past few months?
And North Korea is not a great example. Even if it's true that their nuclear program has deterred us, they bought it at an enormous cost: North Korea is completely isolated. Iran would like to get rid of the current sanctions and start integrating into the rest of the world. Even if the regime doesn't care about its people, it still wants aircraft parts and oil revenue. The US and Israel would be fine if Iran continued to slowly rebuild its nuclear program, as long as it remained under sanctions. They can just wait five years and bomb again. But is that really a victory for Iran?
My point is that these events might cause Iran to re-evaluate the cost/benefits of their current strategy. They might decide that rushing to build a nuclear bomb is not worth the very large costs.
First of all, I disagree with your characterization of what the conventional wisdom is. I don't think most people are thinking about this at all. Most people will come down on rah rah America or boo war is bad, not "it's bad that specifically only countries that don't have nuclear weapons get attacked, because of the bad incentives".
But if this were the conventional wisdom, I'd say that it's clearly right, and you're doing 5d chess to avoid looking it in the face.
> First of all, I disagree with your characterization of what the conventional wisdom is.
Okay, you could be right about that. I don't know.
> But if this were the conventional wisdom, I'd say that it's clearly right
That's really the crux of the disagreement: I don't see it as being clearly right. Maybe I'm overthinking it. Maybe it's biased reasoning on my part (wouldn't be the first time). But I don't think it is obvious how the Iranian regime is going to react. I don't think any one person inside Iran knows how the regime is going to react yet (maybe not even the Khamenei).
It sounds like you think it's obvious how things will play out. That's cool, but that's where we disagree.
Yeah; I also tend to feel that nukes are vastly overstated in their sovereign defensive capability. Definitely non-zero, they help, but at the end of the day having strong normative political and especially economic ties is vastly more powerful.
Ukraine didn't have nukes. Would they have been invaded if they had nukes? Unclear. Maybe. Maybe not.
Taiwan doesn't have nukes. China wants to control Taiwan so, so bad. But, they're staying at a distance for now. Why? Taiwan is an extremely valuable economic ally of the rest of the world. No one wants to disrupt the status quo. We're too interconnected.
Iraq was reported to have nukes back in the 00s, and this was a reason why the US invaded them. We now know, they never had nukes. Maybe there were leaders in the US who knew this at the time, and just outright lied. But, if not: nukes did not protect them from being rubbleized by the US military industrial complex.
Poland doesn't have nukes. Russia isn't going to touch them, despite bordering deep Russian ally Belarus. What makes them so different from Ukraine? NATO. Political alliances. Ukraine didn't make political alliances. No one gave any thought to Ukraine before and even after Crimea; they were always just a weirdly dysfunctional and corrupt ex-Soviet country that no one cared about. Poland is different; they played ball with the west.
North Korea does have nukes, but they don't really have any significant or interesting way of using them. They could hit SK and Japan, but that's about it. We leave them alone. Why? Well, maybe nukes. But moreso: they're chill. They don't have external ambition. They can barely take care of themselves. They aren't calling for the rubblezation of their enemies anymore. Its not the nukes that keep them safe; its the reality that they're kinda playing ball with the rest of the world, in their own way.
Nukes probably help, but the far more likely guarantor of sovereignty is to be valuable to the rest of the world. Have a democratic government. Communicate. Trade. Address corruption. The main thing that Ukraine, Iran, North Korea, 1950s Vietnam, Syria, Libya, etc all have in common is that they're all backward, isolationist countries that never wanted to join up on the global stage, for either side. NK is the only one that's really managed to stay that way mostly unscathed.
> North Korea does have nukes, but they don't really have any significant or interesting way of using them. They could hit SK and Japan, but that's about it. We leave them alone. Why?
Attacking North Korea means millions of starving brainwashed uneducated refugees flooding into China. China will make any deal to avoid that nightmare, that (and Seoul’s destruction) is why no one bothers with North Korea.
I genuinely do not understand where this take is coming from.
The incentives for having a nuclear program have not changed. Ukraine did not have nukes. Crimea, as a part of Ukraine. Syria. Iraq. Afghanistan. Vietnam. Libya. None of these countries had nukes. They paid for it.
What happened today isn't only not a "massive" change to the status quo, as you seem to think it is. Its so much less significant than what happened to the rest of those countries I just listed. Yet, you used the word "massive". Why? I have no idea.
Iran did not learn any new lessons yesterday. Nothing they didn't already know. The US does not want them to have nukes. We've done everything short of boots on the ground to stop them from having them. They should still want them. They're correct, in the defense of their territorial sovereignty, to want them. But, we'll keep stopping them. That's how it was in the 2000s, the 2010s, its how it is the 2020s, and it's how it will be in the 2030s and 2040s. They keep trying, we keep stopping them. The incentives haven't changed. Nothing has changed. Yet you doomers keep thinking this is the end of the world or its WW3. It isn't.
If anything has changed: Iran just learned that something which took them a decade of development, cost hundreds of lives, and billions of dollars, was stopped by a couple planes from a country half a world away at basically no cost to us, without barely a thought or care. Fox News was tracking these B2s on ADSB a day before they hit Iran; it didn't matter. That's how ahead the US is. The asymmetry here should scare the shit out of them, and the world; that they will never have a conventional nuclear program because they're so unbelievably outmatched and outgunned that if our President has one bad nights sleep he could just wipe out half their country, half of any country, with no congressional authorization, no checks, no balances, just launch a plane and they're dead. Maybe this pushes them to non-conventional means of obtaining nukes; but it shouldn't significantly change their desire for wanting one in the first place. They've always wanted nukes.
Ukraine had nuclear weapons after the fall of the Soviet Union. They were persuaded to get rid of them.
I don't think you're disagreeing with me, you're just comparing to a more recent status quo.
Nuclear non-proliferation was based on the idea that small countries didn't need their own nuclear weapons, because they could ally with a superpower / bloc with nuclear weapons, and piggy-back on those superpowers not wanting to go to war, to avoid nuclear confrontation.
It is true that some countries, like Israel and North Korea, never bought that idea, and went ahead and got their own nukes.
That those countries who didn't buy into non-proliferation have fared better in the last couple decades than the ones on your list who have been attacked with little repercussion, is exactly the point.
Ukraine was willing to give up its nukes decades ago, now it's clear they shouldn't have. Iran was willing to enter into a non-proliferation agreement a decade ago, now it's clear they shouldn't.
But this is a much worse equilibrium than if we could have actually made non-proliferation work. Now every small country should clearly be trying to build nuclear weapons, if they can. And I think that's bad.
Iirc Ukraine had nukes but no way to use them. They didn’t have the keys so to speak so they were basically a storage location. The nukes were worthless as a deterrent.
> Nuclear non-proliferation was based on the idea that small countries didn't need their own nuclear weapons, because they could ally with a superpower / bloc with nuclear weapons
There are dozens of examples of denuclearized countries that are, today, at near-zero risk of being attacked or invaded, possibly because of their political and economic relationship with the United States. Taiwan, Japan, Poland, Canada, Spain, Australia, many others, these are all countries that do not have nukes, have a great political and economic relationship with the US, and are currently at 0% risk of attack or invasion by our shared enemies (ok, you can put Taiwan at slightly higher than 0%).
Ukraine never had this kind of relationship. They tried to play both sides with their denuclearization agreement; that's what screwed them. Other countries picked a side when they denuclearized.
Statistically: There are, I believe, zero examples of a US political or economic ally being attacked or invaded, regardless of their nuclearization status, post-Vietnam. The only example of anyone who is remotely close to this is Taiwan, and even that's very far away from igniting.
> Taiwan, Japan, Poland, Canada, Spain, Australia, many others, these are all countries that do not have nukes, have a great political and economic relationship with the US, and are currently at 0% risk of attack or invasion by our shared enemies (ok, you can put Taiwan at slightly higher than 0%).
Including Taiwan in this list is hilarious.
Poland, Canada, Spain, Australia, and others, are certainly reevaluating the wisdom of their current strategy. That's the whole point I'm making.
No they aren't. Literally none of them are. You just made all that up.
Poland has said that they want nukes, but their specific ask was that US nukes be hosted on their soil; not that they want sovereign nukes under their own control, that the public has heard.
> Taiwan, Japan, Poland, Canada, Spain, Australia, many others (...) have a great political and economic relationship with the US, and are currently at 0% risk of attack or invasion
I'm sorry, are you from the past? You literally listed Canada which Trump threatened with invasion.
The U.S. has no stable economic relationship with any country under the current administration and won't regain the trust for years or decades to come.
There's just these two quite different non-economic relations - not relationships - Israel and Russian Federation. The latter may even be Trump's hallucination but I'm giving him a benefit of the doubt. He finds common language with warmongering dictators.
Analysed logically the aim of your post was a positive message that pushes back against "doomers", yet somehow it left me more depressed about the utter futility and meaningless of existence than any other comment I've read so far.
There is nothing "doomer" about my comment that they replied to! It's just true (as this person agrees) that everyone has the incentive to build their own nuclear weapons, because they can't trust anyone else to protect them. That's just how it is now. And maybe non-proliferation was always a pipe dream. But I do feel like we could have given it a better go!
But it's also just how it is that the biggest countries already had huge nuclear stockpiles. I'm not convinced that small countries trying to build them also is a huge contributor to that base level of risk. But we've been surviving in that state of the world for about three-quarters of a century now.
It can't be the case that being open-eyed about the current state of things is "doomer", right? I'm not speculating impending future doom, just describing current conditions as I see them.
Because you would not want to write the whole git history starting from the commit you want to stash this info one everytime you want to stash additional info …
Appending information to the commit itself creates a new commit and all the commits that are based on the commit will also have to change consequently.
Yeah, git notes are AFAIK stashed into their own hidden branch, referencing the original commit by its hash. That is, the git note points to the commit, not the opposite.
Kind of. The structure is the same and you can check it out if you want, but it's actually a 3rd directory under "refs" - the other two being "heads" (branches) and "tags". That avoids special-casing with trying to hide branches or conflicting with a branch name a user might make.
You can let this context paralyze you into feeling that there's no morally right response to any action anyone takes in this complex world. Or, you can just say: what they're doing is wrong, so we're going to stop it. If you don't learn to do the latter, you'll spend the rest of your life beholden to the tyranny of the people who do.
I think my own thought isn't 'what they're doing is wrong' but 'what they're doing is dangerous'.
Thus in my view it kind of doesn't matter whether what they're doing is right or wrong, and the sensible goal is to simply prevent the dangerous stuff without necessarily judging them. Thus limited bombings focused on nuclear enrichment plants, rather than some wider campaign.
The problem as I see it is that it may not work, and that nuclear bomb development might be quite easy.
Right right; and Americans have not forgotten how "he has nukes" was very much a reason for starting the post-9/11 forever wars across the rest of the middle east. Of course; no nukes were found. If there's any foreign (or domestic) policy decision the vast majority of Americans agree on, its avoiding putting American boots on the ground in the middle east.
1. No one should have nukes.
2. That probably won't happen in our lifetimes, so the second best world is: No one new should have nukes, and those who do have them should have as few as feasible, and fewer every year.
3. Global superpowers, obviously including the United States but others as well, have the moral authority to police the restriction of nuclear weapons development in other countries. We should work with international agencies, we should start with diplomatic solutions, progress to economic sanctions, then progress to unilateral, targeted, kinetic strikes. Try non-violent means first. Minimize loss of civilian life.
4. There is no distinction, in my mind, between "trying to develop nuclear weapons" and "successfully developing nuclear weapons". There is no distinction, in my mind, between 60% enrichment and 90% enrichment, or whatever. Non-nuclear countries should attempt no stage of development, at all, and if they do, should see their efforts stopped by any means necessary. Very hypothetically: If a non-nuclear nation lays a single brick to build a structure destined to aid in nuclear weapons development, I would support destroying that brick; there is no stage too early to intervene. Obviously this is hypothetical and there are realistic feasibility concerns with that, but when speaking morally/ethically.
5. All of this is true regardless of the governance structure or ally/enemy relationship of the country, but it should be obviously true, in triplicate, for a nation ran by religious extremists, who has a history of funding terrorist groups who attack our ships and allies, spanning decades, who tramples on the human rights of women and minorities in their country... to be frank, we have launched full-scale invasions of countries far better. If Iran wants a shred of my pity, their leadership could start by making any effort to join the 21st century in any way except weapons development. But, they don't. Why anyone defends them for any reason is so far beyond my understanding that I'm convinced half the people in these comments are russian disinfo bots.
>4. There is no distinction, in my mind, between "trying to develop nuclear weapons" and "successfully developing nuclear weapons". There is no distinction, in my mind, between 60% enrichment and 90% enrichment, or whatever. Non-nuclear countries should attempt no stage of development, at all, and if they do, should see their efforts stopped by any means necessary. Very hypothetically: If a non-nuclear nation lays a single brick to build a structure destined to aid in nuclear weapons development, I would support destroying that brick; there is no stage too early to intervene. Obviously this is hypothetical and there are realistic feasibility concerns with that, but when speaking morally/ethically.
I see this as an unacceptable position. Sweden will probably develop nuclear weapons, either on its own or with EU partners. I would prefer this effort to not be resisted.
Poland probably will as well. So position 4 is I think insane.
Instead, Iran should be prevented from developing nuclear weapons because they are crazy, and should only be prevented from doing so because they are crazy. There are some current nuclear weapons states that should have been prevented from developing nuclear weapons, but that is tolerable.
Furthermore, I think position 1 is also false, since I believe that nuclear weapons actually provide deterrence and prevent conventional war.
If the Iranians weren't crazy it would be good that they had nukes, and it would stabilize the entire Middle East, reducing the belligerence of other entities.
What? Do you really believe the world seriously beholds itself to "do as I say not as I do"? There's no such thing as international law. There's just self-interested nations who have always only done what is in their best interest. There's no higher authority.
So, in your reality, China says "but, but, you guys got to invade Iraq and attack Iran unprovoked, that means we get to invade Taiwan" and we just have to sit back and let it happen because... reasons. Nope. That's not how it works. We don't hold everyone to the same standards, and we certainly don't hold ourselves to the standards we police the world to hold itself to. That's the way it works.
I don't believe in fair. I do however believe that maybe we can learn and change and expect our leadership to do the same. Cooperation and diplomacy lead to far higher long term returns than might makes right as we have seen time and time again. What we are seeing now however is a policy of maximizing the minimum which will force others to do the same and leads to everyone, including the US, being far worse off.
Please do not lose grasp on what we're talking about here: These were nuclear enrichment facilities with the goal of enriching fissile material for nuclear weapons. These were not civilian, or even conventional military, targets. There is a gulf of difference between one overnight mission to dampen the nuclear prospects of a dictatorial, authoritarian, religious-extremist regime, and China launching a multi-modal invasion of a near-peer ally.
I believe the complete dominance of the preemptive attacks shows how little capability they actually have to use any such weapons and that likely trickles down to any development of those weapons. I no longer believe in the 'They have WMD and will take over the world in days' wolf cries. Iran is not some nice country being picked on, but the entities attacking them also aren't being truthful in their reasons either. I have no love for any of the parties in this fight at the moment. They are all wrong, but one side did throw the first punch so they are, in my view, the most wrong here and the US just backed them.
And I believe that you don't need a modern weapons platform to smuggle one of these weapons into your enemy's territory and cause major damage. Iran has a documented and clear history of funding and outfitting organizations who would love to do exactly that. There's broad global agreement that Iran has the ambition to develop nuclear weapons, and that these facilities were key to that ambition.
Its astounding to me that there's this much discord on these strikes. Sure; everyone sucks, politicians suck, blah blah blah, we're on the same page on that. That's not an excuse to do nothing and persistently disagree with every decision any government makes.
Diplomacy isn't 'doing nothing'. Trump 1.0 destroyed efforts that were working and Israel has proven time and time again that they don't care about diplomacy so long as they have bombs to throw. My points are still valid, this strategy of preemptive attack is a terrible signal to the world and won't solve the long term problem.
> There's no such thing as international law. There's just self-interested nations who have always only done what is in their best interest.
If you think about that a little bit more, you may see that internal laws can change the best interests if coencequences are big enough. And maybe that is the point.
How do you, logically, draw the line from "cavalier use of deadly force" to "our enemies are going to take bolder action against US allies"? That leap of logic doesn't make sense; its a leap of pseudologic someone speaking from fear would make.
If anything, a better standpoint is: Illogical and cavalier use of deadly force should scare our enemies, because it makes expression of our nation's military power more unpredictable. If China invades Taiwan; Trump might just blow up the Three Gorges Dam. Other Presidents might move with care, logic, and intrinsic sanctity for human life; Trump doesn't.
I never suggested that our enemies might move with care, logic, and intrinsic sanctity for human life. I suggested that Trump's disregard for many of these cornerstones of national leadership might cause them to not move at all.
It's literally what you wrote and continue to argue for. But anyways, I strongly disagree with the premise that threats and violence results in deescalation.
Its actually incredible how this exact thing could have been done by any other President and half the people losing their minds about WW3 in these comments wouldn't have even logged on to comment.
But maybe a little harshly: Who cares? Does it somehow raise the moral foundation of the operation if they had nukes? Would the attack suddenly be unethical if it was only against a military target with the public, accepted purpose to, one day, be able to develop precursors to nuclear weapons? Why?
I find it extremely strange that a company leader though it would be ok to just say "our financial situation is in a place where we cannot adequately staff our teams". The market clearly thought it was strange as well, given their stock performance today.
Really bad look and poor leadership from Jassy. There's a good way to frame adoption of AI, but this is not it.
With AMZN commanding 5% of the S&P's entire market capitalization, the market is not some independent entity that AMZN can be compared to; the S&P follows what AMZN does.
I might be misunderstanding, but it sounds like you're claiming that the 95% of the S&P that is not Amazon "follows what AMZN does"? If so, I'd like to hear more about exactly how that works because it sounds very unintuitive, to say the least.
In any case, my point was that objectively, AMZN suffered less today than many other stocks, including many other large cap tech (QQQ) and non-tech (S&P) stocks. Considering those facts, it seems like a stretch to claim "the market clearly thought it was strange as well".
You have what I would describe as a Ben Graham '80s-era view of how the stock market works. The stock market is fundamentally a very different beast post-2008. The top ten companies in the S&P 500 make up 36% of the entire index's market capitalization. In 1980, this number was closer to 15%.
One cannot draw any conclusions about how an individual stock in the S&P 10 performs relative to the overall market, because of how correlated these companies are and how much their combined weight contributes to the overall market. Every company in the S&P 10 is a tech company, except Berkshire. They trade together, and how they trade impacts the entire S&P 500.
When Jassy says something, it impacts Google's stock. When it comes out that OpenAI might have to sue Microsoft, it impacts Amazon's stock. Why this happens only makes sense to wall street's HFT systems which, quite honestly, are likely closer at this point to ASI than OpenAI; albeit totally unintelligible in their motives and reasoning.
Amazon did not outperform the market. The market is Amazon. The S&P 10 is not 10 individual companies; its one company.
> The Delaware legal system is fundamentally broken for defendants.
The entire US legal system is fundamentally and utterly broken.
If you want to make a few thousand dollars, I hate to share this secret thing you can do, but the reality of my experience is that the only thing stopping more people from doing this is, you know, some semblance of morality. Go find any local, smaller nonprofit organization. Volunteer with them for a day or two. Pay $80-$150 to sue them in small claims court for $5000 because <<you can literally make up any reason, you don't need evidence, it doesn't need to have happened, "mental hardship", I'm actually wondering if you hadn't have needed any interaction at all with the organization>>. Have an LLM generate 2-3 emails a week outlining anything at all related to grievance; each one you send to the organization is likely to result in billable legal hours. When the court date gets near, you can file for a motion to extend. Keep sending emails. After 4-6 months of doing this, send them a settlement offer for half of what you originally sued for.
I've seen this essentially destroy one nonprofit; the board was inexperienced in dealing with it, the person doing it had clearly done it before, by the end they'd spent ~80% of their bank account on legal fees, paid out a few thousand in a settlement to the plaintiff, and half the board resigned in burnout.
If you've never came into contact with this kind of weapon before, you might have it in your head "we'll just argue the case, we're clearly in the right" ha. ha. No. You'll never get the opportunity, and the people who do this know it.
If you're now thinking "well, if you're such a small organization why are you paying lawyers at all? We have AI. We'll just file responses on our own" I wish it were the case. But sadly: at least in my state, you can sue organizations in small claims court without representation, but filings made to the court in defense of the organization must be made by a licensed attorney. Asymmetry is built into the system.
The only thing that can protect nonprofit organizations from this, beyond having a massive bank account, is getting a lawyer to donate work pro-bono and/or sit on your board of directors. This is a common thing for nonprofits, for this exact reason, and assuming you're legit and well-known its not too hard to find legal experts who will do this for you.
If you're not a nonprofit, I have to imagine you don't have this angle open to you, and you're just SOL.
>in my state, you can sue organizations in small claims court without representation, but filings made to the court in defense of the organization must be made by a licensed attorney
Same in my US state, which I'm actually using to my advantage — my state's small claims jurisdiction extends up to $25,000 so the defendant (a company) would probably get an attorney anyways =P
Once more people realize that LLMs can already throw together a reasonable case, I think small claims courts are going to be [even more] overwhelmed. On my last visit, I was explaining to many of the attorneys how accessible this all is becoming (none of them read SCOTUS Chief's end of 2023 report "On AI")...
Actually the scariest part is, its probably not even coordinated, at least in any traditional meaning of the word.
The left believes the aggressors are the Trump administration. The right believes its the left and the Biden admin. The real aggressor is the division itself; upstream from both these administrations. Those sad quirks of human nature, tribalism and division, which the algorithms picked up on, which feeds back into content creators biasing toward serving those algorithmic niches, which feeds the cycle further. Russia probably disinfo'd a bit in there, but honestly, they don't even need to; human nature does it itself.
Social media and AI-accelerated tribal bubble reinforcement is going to destroy the world. If you work in social media: Your work is destroying the world. You need to stop. The only way to save modern society is to turn off social media.
The thing people seem to not recognize is: There's basically three countries on the planet capable of actually waging war in the 21st century (US, and Russia/China barely). Every other country is just a proxy for one of these three; their domestic capabilities look more like "throwing a tantrum" than actual war. Israel can't wage war without the US. Iran can't wage war without China/Russia. Currently, the superpower contribution to this fight is just dropping some bombs and diverting a few crates of AK-47s.
There's zero capability for long-term war here. But, there's also too much face-saving for negotiations or concessions to happen. So, the fire mostly quenches into embers; like the middle east has always been.
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