In Reply to: I'm not a Ross Douthat fan posted by ClockBlocker on March 04, 2026 at 11:21:08
The part about a bully smelling weakness thing, being an opportunist liar about neoconservative foreign policy (embraced for the most part by establishment democrats as well, though across an arm's distance), and the boomer fixation on settling the score.
What's next? Most certainly Cuba and Central America for starters. I suggested in an earlier post that Turkey may be the next target for him, primarily because that's the direction Israel seems to be heading, though I'm not sure if there would be any US-centric justification for going in that direction.
I think after Cuba and Central America (including Panama), his attention will go back to Greenland and Canada.
As for the death of Ayatollah ... First off, attacks like this often end up strengthening the nationalists' hand. Even disregarding the claim that the US bombing accidentally killed whoever moderate Trump was thinking as the replacement, I think the concept of reform in the traditionally western direction (say, concepts like human rights and democracy) just got discredited with this attack. So that's the first thing we need to place on the table.
The second thing is, any physical occupation of Iran is bound to fall apart fairly quickly. America will *not* be greeted as liberators, for sure. If the White House is thinking the Kurds can be utilized as a force ... first, I'm not sure if Kurds will eat that illusion up again like they did numerous times in the past, and second, now we're talking about Turkey getting involved with its own agenda, and if and when that happens, the entire middle will descend in a multi-party war, which will make it really really hard for the US to disentangle itself at that point. That'll be one helluva turbocharged quagmire being served.
The other thing is, even if the US comes out of all this mess unscathed and Iran and all the local powers are defeated, that will simply open the doors for Israeli expansion for the greater borders that Huckabee told us about. Once that takes off, the US will have to jump right back in to help Israel achieve that. So there is really no walking away from any of this.
I don't see America being gang attacked. What I see is China finally pulling the chord on the trapdoor US falling wight into the abyss of its debt, its overstretched power, and the US economy finally collapsing because no one bothered to fix the rot that was always there in its foundations. This may, and I am saying this in all seriousness, be the end of the *United* States of America, with smaller regional powers emerging in its dissolution. America will eventually eat itself up from the inside -- what we've been seeing since 9/11 is its self-destructive instincts taking over. History will later remark that the USA was a 300-year blip that grew fast in an opportune moment, then collapsed faster when reality snapped back.