The Mind Scourge@TheMindScourge
While comparing the current Iran War to the Suez Crisis is perhaps natural, there is a much better comparison at hand
Suez revealed that Britain was now a secondary power within a world dominated by two superpowers, and that London would no longer exercise the same degree of agency that it had previously enjoyed (note that the other two participants, Israel and France, reached different conclusions and remained independent actors. But for the UK it was this searing, formative moment of decline)
That doesn’t really describe what’s happening today. No great power is going to intervene and compel the US to stop. The UN is completely sidelined
The much better comparison is the Boer War, a colonial war that the British thought they would win easily, but ended up lasting years, consuming thousands of lives, and the equivalent of billions of dollars.
Kipling wrote that it had taught Britain “no end of a lesson”
The same might well be true for the US
But the lessons might be very dark indeed