If the administration decides to end this stupid war just so they can cash out some profitable bets... I don't even know what I would think. The whole thing is so stupid it makes my head hurt.
I think the main reason is that they were all too incompetent to realize what the effects of the war would be on the global financial system. The bets were probably just a happy opportunity for corruption.
> The whole thing is so stupid it makes my head hurt
Look on the bright side, at least the malicious actors aren't able to competently implement their goals.
The economic effects impact the rest of the world much more than the US, which may have been somebody's planning point, although on the surface they seem to be too stupid to come up with this idea.
The US/North America is petroleum-product-independent-ish. We produce approximately as much hydrocarbons as we use. We also could produce a lot more but tar sands, shale oil, etc. are more expensive to produce and not very profitable at $60/bbl but it's there ready for the taking. When you're talking about how we aren't it's about how certain refineries are tuned for which type of oil and how we import unrefined and export the refined products, etc... but we're not RUNNING OUT of oil or energy.
Many places in the rest of the world aren't like that and will suffer much greater losses while the US is relatively strong. Of course we're all linked, but a power hungry dictator might only really care who's on top in a relative sense even if everybody is dragged down.
Getting yourself installed as president while knowing you are incompetent (I mean, look at all those bankrupt businesses, he should know) is nefarious in itself. His entourage is nefarious for supporting the incompetency for their own gain.
Competent enough to receive money, not competent enough to run a country well. But now we're getting into very subjective stuff, I'm sure his handlers are quite OK with what he's doing. It doesn't matter it all looks super suspicious, they are confident they won't face any consequences.
If you're incompetent maybe you don't know you're incompetent? I think probably a lot of people told him, but he's also very stubborn, so. He's been rocking that god fucking awful spray tan for decades now.
I mean, Christ, we have good spray tans, I know we do.
One of the few conspiracy theories I kinda believe is that Trump's 2016 presidential run was a grift and he expected to lose.
Everything since has just been an inability to admit he was in over his head, plus trying to get out of trouble for all the crimes he did. He (and Clinton) just underestimated how susceptible the US was to a demagogue. If you look at his face after the win was announced on election night, and after the first meeting with Obama for the transition, I think it shows plainly on his face.
their goal is to tank the market, make fast stacks of $$$, and then buy up everything.
this isn't new, the techo-feudalism has been pretty clear since Thiel got his man (JD Vance) into the VP slot.
the Israelis also figure he's probably not gonna last through the mid-terms, so they want the US to do their dirty work while they still have leverage over him via Epstein files. Russia wants the US to get into a similar long-slog war, and is desperate for high oil prices.
It's not really up to the US and Israel when this war of choice ends anymore. It's up to Iran. And Iran, justifiably, is going to demand their pound of flesh. That could require some combination of ending the (criminal) sanctions, de-militarizing the Gulf and reining in Israel.
The problem is all of these things are politically untenable. This is the only reason why I think this war could continue long term because Trump simply cannot back down.
I think the recession from this could actually get so bad that there's now a nonzero (but still small) chance Trump gets removed from office, either by impeachment or by being 25A'ed.
It is hard to adequately state what a geopolitical disaster this was and it is I think quite easily the biggest mistake by an administration in the entire history of the US. I'm not exaggerating.
Still nowhere near as bad as the Vietnam war. Arguably not even as big a mistake as the CIA coup against Mossadegh, which is the poisoned tree from which the present situation grows.
I wonder how the coup in Cuba will turn out. That has to happen before the midterms, and he's unlikely to wait for Iran to resolve.
I think is a worse disaster than Vietnam. Why? Because the Vietnam War was localized. It was devastating to the people who got drafted and obviously devastating to the Vietnamese as well as the Cambodians that Nixon and Kissinger decidedly to relentless bomb for literally no reason. There was internal dissent but that was, saldy, quashed quite successfully.
The US simply doesn't have the military capability to invade Iran. It's surrounded by mountains so there's no land staging area like we had for Iraq in 1991. Am ambphibious landing would have to be on the scale of D-Day. Personnel-wise, the military is a lot smaller than it was in 1991 too.
This is why I laugh when people panic "they're going to invade" when 5000 Marines and 2-3 amphibious landing ships are moved to the Gulf. Those are so incredibly irrelevant and wholly insufficient for any kind of ground invasion that the worse they can do is be the Bay of Pigs 2.0.
The Iranian national project has been to resist American imperialism for the past almost 50 years. The military is distributed. Lots of it is under mountains or otherwise reinforced from air bombardment and missiles. Drones are incredibly cheap to produce and there's no viable path to stop the production and launch of ballistic missiles and drones.
That's how bad a decision this is. There is no viable military path to "victory" (whatever that means here). There is no way to invade, no way to hold the country militarily and no way to manufacture regime change.
Other countries in the region are way more vulnerable to loss of infrastructure (eg desalination plants). Iran has desalination plants too but it also gets a lot of drinking water from snowmelt. Many Americans are surprised by that. Iran has ski resorts. That's how mountainous it is.
Israel has been begging the US to topple Iran for 40+ years and every president has refused. Because it's completely unviable. Until this one.
There are really three wars being fought here and the objectives are different in every case. Israel wants to turn Iran into Somalia, which is to say a fail-state. The US wanted regime change. Iran simply wants to survive. And it will.
So this is why you see Israel escalate to drag the US into a war it doesn't really want. And if Israel succeeds and somehow the regime does topple it will create a massive refugee crisis that will likely topple the governments of most of Iran's neighbours. Israel is completely fine with that. The US isn't.
Every country in the Gulf had essentially been converted into a US client state other than Iran. We went so far as to put a former al-Qaeda lieutennant in charge of Syria. A likely consequence of this move is US influence in the region is going to massively decrease because the myth of the American security guarantee has been broken.
While the war is still poular with Trump's base we'll see how long that lasts when gas hits $8/gallon and food inflation hits 20%.
The Arab allies are going to be plenty pissed if US leaves without degrading Iran. They were doing fine before the US intervened, now they are worse of than they were before.
The Arab allies (aka client states) thought they had a lot more influence over America than they really do; it just happened that a lot of their asks aligned with Israel's asks. When push comes to shove and America has to choose between satisfying Israeli interests or the Arab states, not both at the same time, they're going to become disappointed. Both want Iran dealt with, but I think the tension will reach a breaking point over what the final result is meant to be. Israel would love for Iran to be a failed state like Somalia, as mentioned above, with a power vacuum they can fill and huge amounts of refugees streaming out and destabilizing their neighbors. The Arab states obviously don't want that, they want Iran stabilized with a compliant predictable government. There is approximately a zero percent chance of that happening, so they're going to be sorely disappointed.
One complication is that the sheiks are heavily invested in US tech companies and Kushner's ilk is heavily invested in the Middle East. So neither would want the other to crash and burn but can use the threat of financial pull out as a weapon.
Isn't the problem that they can't end the war unilaterally? The Iranian regime is justifiably pissed off and is still flinging drones and rockets towards any viable target, and any ceasefire will be with acceptance of their terms. The Trump/Netanyahu collection of dumb ego won't be able to accept being dictated terms.
So like in Game of Thrones, we hope a Jamie Lannister shows up...
This was my thought as well. Trump today claims he had long discussions with Iranian leadership over the weekend and Iran claims such a thing never happened.
Not only is Iran justifiably angry at its attackers, they have no reason to trust a ceasefire would be respected, and, furthermore, despite damage taken, stand to gain quite a lot if the war progresses as it has. Currently Iran is exporting more oil than ever before[0]. If the war continues as is they stand to emerge a much, much more dominant power on the world stage. Essentially being to BRICS what the GCC countries have been to the US (although much better defended).
Even the threats against their energy infrastructure can't really be backed up effectively. Iran has intentionally built its energy infrastructure to be highly distributed. Meanwhile Israel's infrastructure is highly centralized, with a small number of power plants providing massive proportions of the nations infrastructure. All this meaning that Iran can retaliate much more effectively the they can be harmed.
In the enlightened POTUS' own words (yes, he wrote in all caps):
> I AM PLEASED TO REPORT THAT THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, AND THE COUNTRY OF IRAN, HAVE HAD, OVER THE LAST TWO DAYS, VERY GOOD AND PRODUCTIVE CONVERSATIONS REGARDING A COMPLETE AND TOTAL RESOLUTION OF OUR HOSTILITIES IN THE MIDDLE EAST. BASED ON THE TENOR AND TONE OF THESE IN DEPTH, DETAILED, AND CONSTRUCTIVE CONVERSATIONS, WHICH WILL CONTINUE THROUGHOUT THE WEEK, I HAVE INSTRUCTED THE DEPARTMENT OF WAR TO POSTPONE ANY AND ALL MILITARY STRIKES AGAINST IRANIAN POWER PLANTS AND ENERGY INFRASTRUCTURE FOR A FIVE DAY PERIOD, SUBJECT TO THE SUCCESS OF THE ONGOING MEETINGS AND DISCUSSIONS. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER! PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP
I think one way to understand Trump is that he is a compulsive and successful gaslighter. Behaviorally, he is a very interesting case for psychologists. He should be in future textbooks as a case study.
he's a textbook narcissist and everyone has known that since well before he got elected the first time.
the "interesting case" is how he somehow managed to convince the average american that he has anything in common with them, even as he insulted everything they stand for, constantly. there is the real psychological case study.
> how he somehow managed to convince the average american
Unless you have dealt with a narcissist in real life you don't really get to comprehend the reality of them and their methods. On the other hand, once you know, most of them are so transparent.
The bet amounts are small relative to the political scandal that would follow top administration officials who have decision making power.
If there is insider trading it's most likely low-level staffers or friends of officials who speak too freely.
If a high ranking official wanted to make a lot of money on these moves in an untraceable way, there are numerous financial market opportunities. The amount they could make on betting markets is peanuts and too easily tracked.
She should have been tied to a wooden post and shipped out of DC on an uncovered railcar for labelling a peaceful protester assassinated by ICE a "domestic terrorist".
Her scandal was not being subtle enough with the theft of government funds for Trump's taste, and he found a way to get rid of her that he could claim he had no part in.
We've been through this already, someone placed a $30k bet (payout around $400k) that Maduro will leave office by the end of January hours before the US raid took place.
Have you noticed any meaningful scandals back then?
The article isn’t implying that Trump is going to seek a ceasefire because of some puny bets on Polymarket, it’s implying that someone (or multiple people) close to Trump heard he was considering a ceasefire and placed a bet before Trump posted about it and the odds went up. Or they at least knew that him posting about it would affect the ours enough to make money, whether he plans to negotiate a ceasefire for real.
That would be darkly hilarious, but I think it could also be the opposite way around: That there is a ceasefire shaping up, and some of Trump's staffers couldn't hold it anymore and placed bets using their knowledge - therefore accidentally "leaking" the plans.
He's made billions in just crypto schemes. Then the bribes to pardon people. It just gles on and on. He never provided evidence that he didn't accept the salary, just said he donated it to federal agencies, which you cannot even do.
Note that in addition to specific programs that accept donations, this list includes "Gifts to the U.S. Government" with no strings attached and "Gifts to Reduce the Public Debt".
The amount of money to be made on these markets is in the tens of millions at best. This administration doesn’t care about that. I understand why you feel that way, the numbers are just too inconsequential to even move the needle.
Bit players with knowledge that have been perennially underpaid by the us govt. however, mortgage-saving money. I don’t blame them. Do you?
“I’m aware of a big decision and I can make 23k off of it, probably.” Do it up, congress has been living off insider trading for a century, let the little guy get theirs.
Until gambling commercials are banned in the same way cigarette commercials were banned, we’re all just yelling at the wind.
> The whole thing is so stupid it makes my head hurt
Look on the bright side, at least the malicious actors aren't able to competently implement their goals.