dmac

@Microinteracti1 Perfect But I bet they do nothing but hold meetings and fight over what time to drink tea

Forty nations gathered in Paris today. To figure out how to clean up a mess they had absolutely no hand in making. The Strait of Hormuz has been effectively shut since February 28th, when the United States and Israel launched their air war against Iran and, for reasons that presumably made sense to someone in Washington, assassinated Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. In retaliation, Iran launched missiles and drones at Israel, US military bases, and US-allied Gulf states, and proceeded to mine the strait and attack merchant ships.  A fifth of the world’s oil normally passes through that narrow channel. Not anymore. Enter the adults. France and Britain gathered the nations on Friday to push forward plans to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. The United States, which started the war, was not invited.  Macron and Starmer have been leading what they are calling, with the kind of unimaginative bureaucratic naming that only diplomats can produce, the Strait of Hormuz Maritime Freedom of Navigation Initiative. It would be “strictly defensive,” Macron said. Non-belligerent. Deployed “when security conditions allow.” Translation: when Trump stops blowing things up. Starmer, for his part, said the reopening of the strait was “a global responsibility” and that the world needed to “act to get global energy and trade flowing freely again.”  Which is a very polite way of saying that one country has taken a lit match to the global economy and everyone else is standing around with buckets. France has sent its nuclear-powered aircraft carrier to the region, alongside a helicopter carrier and several frigates. Britain has discussed deploying mine-hunting drones from the ship RFA Lyme Bay.  Germany’s contribution, according to Chancellor Friedrich Merz, will arrive after a peace agreement is reached, with an international mandate, “preferably from the UN Security Council,” and approval from the German parliament.  Merz attended in person. So did Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. Others joined by video. Starmer told parliament he would not join Trump’s blockade. “We are not getting involved in the proposal to blockade the strait, on the contrary, we’re working with other countries to try and get the strait open and fully open for free navigation,” he said.  Meanwhile, Trump told Fox News that “numerous countries” are helping America. He added that “the UK and a couple of other countries are sending minesweepers,” though the British government has not confirmed any such thing.  Starmer said planning is “underway now, with a view to deploying a combined military effort as soon as conditions allow.”  That is the Europe of 2026 in a single sentence. Capable. Organized. Ready to go. Waiting for the Americans to stop shooting before anyone can actually do anything useful.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ Stay connected, Follow Gandalv @Microinteracti1

@Barbara69189470 @Microinteracti1 Bookmark it

@dmac0123 @Microinteracti1

The US debt just crossed $39 trillion. It is growing at $7.5 billion a day. Interest payments alone hit $1.2 trillion last year. More than defence. More than Medicare. And it buys absolutely nothing. No roads. No hospitals. No future. Five years ago the number was $11 trillion lower. The Congressional Budget Office now projects deficits above 6% of GDP every single year for the next decade. Empires rarely fall in a day. They get hollowed out first. Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

@cturnbull1968 Because it was never about uranium

Really looking forward to MAGA explaining why Trump paying $20B, for Iran to give up their uranium, is somehow better than Obama paying just $1.7B for the same thing. Excluding the thousands of deaths and billions in military costs, naturally.

@615vols @pugus1979 And Pelosi never made any money, right? At some point, maybe ppl will realize politics will never improve their personal situation Hate Trump, vote Blue… go right ahead It’ll still never improve until you realize it’s all on you no matter who gets elected

@pugus1979 Seems Trump is the only one increasing his wealth

Me …looking for all that new money I supposedly have.

@pugus1979 Sounds like a personal problem Maybe you should give politics a rest. It’s obviously not helping you

@Microinteracti1 A lot of words here for nothing New more individual alliances will be forged. More modern and with specific allies that doesn’t just mean EU vs US with has potential for lack of consensus Will shift to more Eastern Europe but hand picked otherwise

The Loneliest Superpower on Earth America is becoming North Korea with a better GDP. Sit with that. Not as provocation. As diagnosis. A country that has torched its alliances, taxed its closest friends, threatened to annex its neighbors and walked away from the institutions it spent a century building has made a deliberate choice about its place in the world. Applauded at rallies, repeated in press conferences, performed for cameras with the confidence of people who have never had to live with the consequences of being wrong at this scale. The choice is: alone. And alone feels like strength right up until the moment it doesn't. By the time it doesn't, the damage is already structural. Every single day before this began, billions of dollars moved across the Canada-US border. Every morning, trucks crossed, goods moved, money changed hands, relationships held. That is now bleeding out. Tourism has collapsed. The travelers who used to arrive with money and genuine affection are going elsewhere, to countries that did not threaten to absorb them. The weapons contracts that underwrote American industry and cemented American influence across three continents are being quietly reviewed in defense ministries from Berlin to Seoul. Nobody announces these reviews. They happen in rooms Americans are no longer invited into. The military bases are the same story. Nobody publicly cancels a base. They stop renewing. They start asking questions. They begin building the infrastructure that means they will not need to ask America for anything next time. That infrastructure, once built, does not get dismantled out of nostalgia. This is how empires actually end. Not with a bang. With a series of very reasonable decisions made by very serious people in other countries, each one small enough to dismiss, each one slightly irreversible. There is a village in the mountains of every country in Europe that made this same choice, once. Not geopolitics. Just a village that turned inward, closed the market, pulled back from the road, decided it had enough and did not need the noise from outside. For a while it felt like dignity. Then the young people left. One or two at first, then more, because the young always follow the future and the future had quietly relocated somewhere with a road and a reason. The craftsmen followed, because craftsmen follow customers. The market that came through on Thursdays stopped coming because there was no longer enough to justify the trip. The houses did not fall down immediately. They just stopped being repaired. And the people who stayed told each other this was fine, that they preferred it, that the outside world was corrupt and they were better without it. The outside world did not argue. It simply continued without them. That is the mechanism by which America is currently operating, at a scale that would have been unimaginable two years ago. North Korea chose this mechanism, because the alternative was accountability. The country that once produced steel and traded across Asia now produces propaganda and imports famine relief. The turn did not happen overnight. It happened through a thousand small closures, each one justified, each one making the next easier. The infrastructure of self-sufficiency became the infrastructure of imprisonment. By the time ordinary North Koreans understood what had been surrendered, the price of getting it back had become impossible. Myanmar sealed itself away and emerged decades later to find the world had rearranged its trade corridors around the empty space where Myanmar used to be. Those spaces had been filled and were not available for reoccupation. Cuba still drives the cars from 1962. Not as charm. As evidence of what happens when the compounding runs long enough. These are not cautionary tales about ideology. They are cautionary tales about direction. About what happens when a country holds a position long enough to discover the world was not waiting. Isolation is not a destination. It is a direction. And directions maintained with sufficient conviction always become destinations. In any other functioning democracy, a leader who had done this much damage this fast would already be gone, through the ordinary arithmetic of people who understand what hurts a country and what helps it. Europe remembers what international trust costs because Europe spent decades rebuilding from the rubble of losing it. The countries that clawed their way back from nothing remember exactly what it is worth and exactly what it costs to squander. America, having never rebuilt from rubble, is learning this for the first time. The tuition is enormous. The researchers are leaving. The students are choosing other universities in other countries. The institutions that were magnets for the world's best minds were never great because of their buildings. They were great because of who wanted to come. That reputation is not a faucet you can turn back on. It returns, if it returns at all, over decades, when the conditions that created it are restored. The conditions are not being restored. The allies have started building what they used to have no reason to build. Europe is developing defense architecture, which is great and irreversible. Canada is rewiring its trade toward Europe and Asia. China is walking, unhurried and methodical, into every room America has vacated. These are not acts of aggression. They are acts of adaptation. The world is making sensible arrangements in America's absence. These are countries that named streets after American presidents, countries whose grandparents wept when the Americans arrived. Americans traveling in Europe now reportedly adopt Canadian accents to avoid the conversation, because the conversation when it comes is not gentle and Europeans are not known for sparing people from conclusions they find uncomfortable. The country that liberated a continent, that fed Europe when Europe was on its knees, that built the postwar order with its own money and for all its failures largely meant it, that country's citizens are now pretending to be from somewhere else so they do not have to explain themselves to a stranger in a bar. That is not a data point. That is a civilization telling you something is wrong. America was genuinely extraordinary. Not in the way its politicians perform it, hand on heart, flag in background, but in the actual unglamorous world-historical way. The Marshall Plan was the most strategically generous act in modern history and it worked. The idea that you could arrive with nothing and become something was imperfect, frequently brutal, riddled with contradictions, and real enough that people crossed deserts and oceans and razor wire to test it. That is not nothing. That is, in fact, almost everything. That America still exists. It has not been destroyed. It is being buried by people who have confused its confidence for arrogance and its generosity for weakness and its complexity for something that needs to be flattened into slogans that fit on a hat. Buried things, left long enough, stop being things you can retrieve. They become geology. They become the sediment layer that future historians will drill through and hold up to the light and say: here, this is where it changed. The people doing this call it winning. The rest of America is sitting quietly, trying to find the words to explain to their children that this is not permanent, hoping they are right, suspecting in the honest 3am way that the window is smaller than anyone is saying out loud. It can become permanent through compounding, through the slow arithmetic of a thousand reasonable decisions made by serious people in other countries, each one locking in a future with slightly less room for America in it than the last. The village does not announce its own irrelevance. It just gets quieter, until one day you drive through and the market is gone and the young are gone and the houses are not quite falling down but not quite standing either, and the people who remain tell you they prefer it this way. If this kind of analysis matters to you, subscribe. Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

@MarioNawfal Former CIA guy in a flower shirt living in The Villages knows more than anyone, I’m sure. Including the President and his advisors 😂

🇺🇸🇮🇷 The Pentagon is feeding Trump good news because nobody wants to tell him the truth. Former CIA officer Larry Johnson says the blockade is a lie. The U.S. doesn't have the ships to enforce it. The ceasefire was sought by Washington; Iran just accepted it. Aircraft losses approaching half a billion dollars in a single day. Tomahawks, PAC-3s, and THAADs are so depleted that stockpiles from INDOPACOM and EUCOM are being raided to keep up. "We've made it impossible for our troops to remain in Persian Gulf countries."

@Dr__Defiant @pati_marins64 There’s a very good chance that negotiations with Iranian officials and the IRGC leaders are completely different Guarantee the officials that run the country are ready to negotiate but the military is not

@pati_marins64 This is, unsurprisingly, a lie. It's just to calm the markets, and a futile attempt to numb Iran. We'll see what happens after markets close on Friday. Or when the essential reinforcements arrive in the region.

President Trump: “Iran has agreed not to possess nuclear weapons, and this is good news. We will extend the ceasefire agreement with Iran if necessary. Many great things will happen if a deal is reached with Iran. I will visit Lebanon at the appropriate time. We have very good relations with Iran, and this is incredible.” This part is very interesting: “We have very good relations with Iran, and this is incredible.” I’ve never seen people who have “very good relations” getting bombed. Let’s wait for the Iranian version of the situation, which has become infinitely more reliable than the statements from the American president. Sad, but true.

@pati_marins64 @gggl0rgiggles But you said Iran was winning

@gggl0rgiggles Surely very good relations remembering the recent executions of their leaders during th last negotiations.

@pati_marins64 Well, do you want the Iranian version or the IRGC version? Because they are very different

@__Ellien__ @Microinteracti1 First, you have no idea if he’s giving facts. This guy is nothing but propaganda for clicks Second, I didn’t dispute his “facts” or state an opinion Other than that, good post

@dmac0123 @Microinteracti1 He's stating facts,you're expressing opinions. This is why you can't distinguish between opinions and facts.

While the US and Iran discuss extending their ceasefire, satellite images from April 10 show Iran already clearing rubble and excavating tunnel entrances at missile bases near Khomein and Tabriz. US intelligence estimates roughly half of Iran’s ballistic missile launchers survived the bombing campaign – buried, intact, and presumably ready. The ceasefire extension being floated is two weeks. Iran is apparently using the time productively. Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

@Ukraine_Oracle @Microinteracti1 They’ve lost $0.5-1.0 billion in infrastructure and economic loss with an economy that is close to collapse and the war isn’t even over yet But, yeah, they’re building leverage while clearing rubble 😂

At this stage it's called Leverage and Iran seems to be carrying a fair bit more of it than the US. Iran's demands 1. Commitment to non-aggression. 2. Continued Iranian control over the Strait of Hormuz 3. Acceptance of uranium enrichment 4. Lifting of all primary and secondary sanctions 5. Termination of all resolutions of the UN Security Council and the IEAE Board of Governors 6. Payments of compensation for Iran. 7. Withdrawal of American combat forces from the region. 8. Cessation of war on all fronts.

@ModelsExInferis @Microinteracti1 Take meds for your TDS please

@Microinteracti1 "US intelligence", bit of an oxymoron there given the current administration! I hope Iran teaches the fat orange skid-mark a lesson.

@EErrikson @pati_marins64 Btw, aircraft carriers are designed to operate in open water hundreds miles away That’s what they do They don’t get close to land where they are more constricted in launching aircraft, shooting long range missiles & fighting off short range artillery That’s not a win for Iran

@dmac0123 @pati_marins64 making bases in the region nearly unusable, keeping aircraft carriers hundreds of miles away, causing causing huge economic damage and inflation in the west is not loosing either... Also,whats the source for the one trillion dollar damage?

Asymmetric Warfare and Iran’s Restored Capability Satellite images show that Iran has already cleared the bunkers, silos, and launch pads at these sites in just over 48 hours after the ceasefire. I believe this means they have quickly regained the ability to launch hundreds of missiles per day, at a moment when the coalition’s stock of interceptors is running low. And this is a major problem for the coalition, because in the first 48 hours fo war alone, they launched more than 700 missiles and nearly 1,000 drones. I know Netanyahu and Trump really wanted to win this war, but have they truly understood the kind of war they are fighting? This conflict teaches us a great deal about modern and asymmetric warfare. In conventional war, if a force loses control of the skies, it usually means the destruction of its equipment and military structures, stripping the army of its ability to react. Everything becomes vulnerable, from barracks to small checkpoints. But asymmetric warfare is different. You prepare for a conflict in which you will be heavily bombed and must respond with resilience and gradual deployment, turning the war into a long, exhausting, and attritional struggle. The key point is that the entire structure must be protected in underground bunkers or very well hidden to survive successive waves of bombings. In Iran’s case, a mountainous country, many of these fortifications are built inside mountains, taking advantage of the natural terrain, just as the Vietnamese used the jungle to hide their equipment. These constructions require significant investment and long-term planning, often spanning decades. It is estimated that the Iranian project has cost between $15-20 billion, with dozens of underground bases for storage, maintenance, and assembly of military equipment. In addition to the missile force, the navy and air force also have these underground bases. Continue reading: open.substack.com/pub/global21/p…

@RealDougCasey Ok, Douggggg Hey, everyone. Doug has declared a winner in a 6 week old war that isn’t even over! Go buy his books. They must be great

The U.S. Navy apparently withdrew the Fifth Fleet from Bahrain, at the northern end of the Gulf, before the war, and has since been forced to withdraw over a thousand kilometers away from the Iranian shore for fear of attack. It’s reasonable to believe that the damage done to the USS Gerald Ford was caused by missile strikes, as opposed to a supposed “laundry fire.” The Navy doesn’t want to risk a few million-dollar missiles taking out a $15 billion aircraft carrier with all of its planes. What’s certain is that the US Government has a big problem. It looks like a giant paper tiger that doesn’t dare deploy its high-tech Navy near a hostile shore. What, then, is the good of a navy? The US government has already lost this war. It’s punched a tar baby and can’t withdraw its fist. It’s further bankrupting itself, precipitating the Greater Depression, risking WW3, and destroying its moral standing.

@pati_marins64 For those of you who want more objective info, follow @gummibear737 All Patricia does is run propaganda & state, “Iran reacted to something and so they are “winning” the war” It’s like losing a basketball game 70-2 but saying “Iran won” bc they made one layup against the US

Now full. Part II added.

@EErrikson @pati_marins64 Ummm, that’s called war. Mounting a defense and causing damage is what’s expected Basically, you can congratulate them on trying but Iran “winning” or US “losing” is a preposterous stance especially since it’s not even over and Iran’s economy is close to collapsing

@EErrikson @pati_marins64 Well, if you count $1 trillion in infrastructure loss “winning”, I guess we need to redefine it all Also, it’s not over Iran “surviving” is not US losing If you link Trump’s actions with Venezuela and poss Cuba, it was never about regime change or uranium to begin with

@dmac0123 @pati_marins64 There are reasons why countries loose wars... Quite obviously Iran was underestimated.