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How Serious Does it Have to Be For Americans to Get Worried?
Putin has lifted the ban on supplies of S-300 air defense missile systems to Iran, effective immediately. The S-300 is Russia’s top-of-the-range air-defense system. Anyone really think those sanctions will just snap back?
The moves come after world powers, including Russia, reached an interim deal with Iran on curbing its nuclear programme and signal that Moscow may have a head-start in the race to benefit from an eventual lifting of sanctions on Tehran. The Kremlin said Putin signed a decree lifting Russia’s own ban on the delivery of S-300 anti-missile rocket system to Iran, removing a major irritant between the two after Moscow cancelled a corresponding contract in 2010 under pressure from the West. A senior government official said separately that Russia has started supplying grain, equipment and construction materials to Iran in exchange for crude oil under a barter deal.
Sources told Reuters more than a year ago that a deal worth up to $20 billion was being discussed with Tehran and would involve Russia buying up to 500,000 barrels of Iranian oil a day in exchange for Russian equipment and goods.
The batteries must presumably be operated by Russian crews before Iranian teams could be trained in their use. In other words, if the US or Israel attempted to destroy the missiles and caused Russian casualties, you’d have a direct superpower confrontation.
I know going on about Hillary’s campaign video three days running makes me sound obsessed, but it spooked me. It seems to me that anyone who has even the vaguest sense that these events are really happening would find that video astonishing. I keep thinking: the ad was extensively tested. A very significant number of Americans must like it and think it’s appropriate. The only way I can understand that is that is to imagine they literally have not heard that any of this is happening–or somehow don’t see it as connected to the United States. How else can it be explained?
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A significant number of us are fat, dumb and happy which Dean Wormer said was no way to go through life…or was that fat, drunk and stupid. Hardly matters. I wonder if HRC would be somewhat less awful than BHO on foreign policy but also fear that the candidates I like with the best domestic tax plans Walker and Paul have the least foreign policy experience.
Russia is acting to take military action to stop Iranian development of a Bomb off the table. Putin doesn’t fear an Iranian bomb as much as he desires to increase the Iranian threat to US influence in the Middle East, so he is strengthening the Iranian hand at this stage of the nuclear negotiations .
To your point, HC will not address this issue unless it becomes a major worry for the part of the voting public she is courting, not likely to happen given the current state of the MSM and the myopic American public in general unless events in the Middle East get explosive enough to catch American attention.
Exactly what else has to happen?
I don’t have a link, but I seem to remember that Iranians were getting S-300 systems training in Belarus awhile back, even when the sanctions were in place (kind of like how Russian crews have been training on France’s Mistral assault ship, although they didn’t actually have one in their possession, and won’t for the foreseeable future). Their crews should be able to operate the systems pretty quickly without Russian training wheels.
This also tells me that Israel, which doesn’t have stealth aircraft like we do (they don’t, do they?) just saw its window to act militarily against Iran’s nuclear sites close considerably if they go without the US, and the US ain’t going anywhere in the next two years, at least.
What seems odd to me is Russia agreeing to buy up to 500,000 barrels of oil a day from Iran. Didn’t Russia used to be an oil exporting nation? It’s like Japan importing cars or South Africa importing diamonds.
This deal looks like not only a sign of Iranian strength but also of Russian weakness.
A huge segment of Americans take our wealth, security, and freedoms for granted, Others don’t. It is the true dividing line in American politics.
Notably, it is a division that runs vertically- from the poorest to the wealthiest and best educated.
I didn’t know that, although I remember rumors of a Belarus connection, now that you mention it. And a Google search turns up more rumors of it.
Lots of debate about whether the F-35 would work. I don’t know.
Let me see if I understand what messages the U.S. is sending to non-nuclear nations in its efforts against nuclear proliferation. Ukraine gives up its nuclear weapons in exchange for some kind of security assurances from the U.S., and the U.S. does nothing while Russia essentially invades with phony “rebels.” Libya gives up its nuclear program, and the U.S. helps to overthrow its leader, a dictator like every other nation in the region except Israel, who is then dragged through the streets, abused and murdered. Iran steps up its nuclear program, continues official ritual chants of”death to Israel” and “death to America,” exports terrorism abroad and the U.S. makes a deal allowing it to obtain a sophisticated Russian air defense system, trade deals with Russia (and China), a public admission from the President that there is essentially no way that the U.S. is going to use force against it, the lifting of sanctions and a virtual guarantee of its ability to go nuclear in ten years. Yes, I am more worried than when we were practicing “duck and cover” in grade school.
What kind of event would make the majority of Americans say, “This is serious?”
Do they even know? If you look at the websites of the three broadcast news divisions this morning the story doesn’t even show on ABC and CBS. NBC has it buried toward the bottom of the page. Only CNN had it “above the fold,” that is, above scrolling territory.
However, everyone knows Rita Wilson had a double mastectomy.
Claire,
I think Israel has technologies already available that will work around S-300. Again the problem is that the mission is very large and Israel would need support and resupply. There is only one obstacle and that is the current resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
Imagining that co-existence with a nuclear Jihadist State is possible is a gamble that Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey..etc. don’t want to take. Only the great minds of Thomas L. Friedman, John Kerry, and Barack Obama can manufacture that level of self delusion.
As Ben-Gurion said, “Israelis don’t believe in miracles, we rely on them.”
Regards,
Jim
A mushroom cloud over Diego Garcia? Or the loss of a carrier group?
Actual explosions.
I don’t think any kind of event short of an Iranian nuke landing on the White House will trigger any response in the next two years. If HRC is our next President that timeframe is extended. Remember that the MSM is going to downplay any embarrassing Foreign Policy stories during HRC’s candidacy and the end of BHO’s reign as Emperor. Even serious events will not get air time except on Fox News. Benghazi proves that. What is taking place in the Ukraine is a current example of how the MSM will ignore stories that don’t help the Democrats.
The vast majority of Americans won’t care until it directly affects them, which I suspect will be after Iran actually has a nuclear capability.
Russia’s willing to take the economic hit–and it will be a hit–for the strategic gain.
George Eliot explained it:
The sense of security more frequently springs from habit than from conviction, and for this reason it often subsists after such a change in the conditions as might have been expected to suggest alarm. The lapse of time during which a given event has not happened is, in this logic of habit, constantly alleged as a reason why the event should never happen, even when the lapse of time is precisely the added condition which makes the event imminent.
Who can Iran attack with these air defence systems?
Not quite the point, unless you’re entirely persuaded the Iran doesn’t want a nuclear weapon.
Because of the sanctions, it is almost impossible to transfer money between Iran and almost any other place in the world. One the other hand, oil is a fungible commodity, once it is moved from one tanker to another, nobody knows and cares where it came from, and if you are willing to sell it at below market prices, there are plenty of buyers out there.
Well, I’m certainly not concerned at all because Mary Harf of the State Department has put me at ease:
That’ll tell those naughty Russians. Do not mess with Mary Harf or she’ll scold you again. On a completely unrelated note, I’ve had my eye on some new bomb shelter designs for the backyard.
In the US, I assume. If explosions were sufficient to focus peoples’ minds, there’s really been no shortage.
It’s consistent with the Islamic Republic wanting to proof itself against regime change by external force – or at least make it too expensive to do without significant cost. (They really don’t want to end up like Iraq or Libya – which, whatever one thinks of them, is understandable.)
The threat of a nuclear bomb would have achieved this, but if they’re giving that up, they’re going to want something else to replace it. This does seem like the better option of the two.
The nuclear deal – if it ever happens – is only about an Iranian military nuclear program. It isn’t about completely containing Iran, or leaving the Islamic regime vulnerable. That wasn’t, to be realistic, ever on the table.
So they could, notionally, use these to support an invasion of Iraq?
Sure. If you were a German commander invading France and the Low Countries in 1940, you wanted to have your flak guns along, and if you’re an Iranian commander invading Iraq, you will want to have your S-300s.
It seems quite likely that fighter and attack pilots from America, Israel, and other countries will at some point be killed by these S-300s. The number of people who find that disturbing is less than it should be.
E.J. Hill has got it. If you’re paying attention, you know. For most people who aren’t, they rely on the media to alert them to stuff they should know. And as you’ve observed many times, Claire, the media doesn’t really do much international news. Moreover, because most of the media tend to reflexively support President Obama and want to make him look good, they don’t point to worrisome consequences of policy, but tend to pre-write apologias for it. Similar dynamic to the smaller rightward media under President Bush, except it’s got worse consequences because the rightward media’s audience is a small minority of engagé political junkies of a particular leaning. The larger media remains the means by which the larger and largely disengaged public learns of things.
So barring something blowing up, as Theodoric and Quinn suggest, I think foreign affairs coverage, such that it is, will be in reassuring, quiescent tones until there’s a Republican president, at which point it will become hysterical and clamorous. At least that’s the lesson of the first decade or two of the millennium. Grant that U.S. under the GOP made colossal errors (at least arguendo, ok?); none of them directly increased the chances of a nuclear war. Whereas that’s the direction we seem to be sliding in.
Granting (arguendo) the premise that Iran’s emergence as a regional power somehow stabilizes the area by its legitimacy as a local and non-Western actor (which would be much less debatable were it a secular republic than a revolutionary régime with terrorist catspaws around the globe, genocidal rhetoric on Israel, and an unusual sideline in chiliasm), Iran’s developing nuclear weapons not only makes it a ripe target for a preemptive strike by Israel (which regards an Iranian nuke as an existential threat because of the rhetoric above), but also, given regional dynamics, is likely to drive at least two of its neighbors (Turkey, Saudi Arabia) to develop a similar nuclear force as a deterrent capacity. In which case, the newfound stability starts to disappear in a proliferating regional balance of terror, and potentially a nuclear holocaust or two.
But, have America’s errors of judgment in the region, especially the poorly-run occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, turned the public so off the region that any serious action in the region by us is off the table? Maybe. And in a media climate supportive of President Obama who seems to want to empower the Islamic Republic in his vision of the region…there’s not going to be a lot of to-do about it. Until something very bad happens. (Deus avertat.)
Claire, I think two significant components of the demographic are:
1) People who care about their personal lives and the popular culture–actors, TV hosts, etc–but are pretty disconnected from politics and national/international affairs. It will take either a considerable disaster *or* a propaganda campaign by the media that they follow to get their attention.
2) People who are extremely political–on the Left–and are so partisan that their fear of Republicans/Christians/”rednecks” greatly outweighs any concern they have about Iranian S-300 missiles, or even Iranian long-range missiles placed in Latin America. These people are highly subject to “confirmation bias,” and disasters will be re-framed to position them in their minds as due to the above internal enemies.
Re the second category, see my post the phobia(s) that may destroy America
Look at America circa 1938 and you have your answer. People here are far more concerned about domestic squabbles than anything happening elsewhere, and the news media here reflects that. Besides, the media make more money covering domestic stuff (and it costs less too). It would take lots of media descending on the Middle East to even begin to create the necessary emotional connections Americans would need to care. People need emotional reasons to care what happens beyond our shores, and right now they don’t have them.
Show Americans why they need to care what happens over there and you might get some to pay attention.
It’s top of the fold everywhere else.
So Americans, I guess, are the last in the world to know.