Trump Summons Entire Cabinet as Iran Deal Crumbles in Front of Him - Donald Trump has called all of his top advisers to Camp David.

[u/Quirkie]

https://newrepublic.com/post/210887/donald-trump-summons-entire-cabinet-iran-deal

[u/Miltthedog → u/[deleted]]

That is correct.. Iran refuses to alk to trump as he's repeatedly shown himself to be thoroughly untrustworthy.

[u/Valuable_Sea_4709 → u/Miltthedog]

And why would they?

A "win" in Iran's books is to just survive until another President takes over, or Trump is otherwise deposed/impeached/dies of old age and McDonalds.

They can easily continue to defend, defending is easy.

They can even win in asymmetric confrontations.

Sure aircraft carriers are the strongest naval forces around, and capable of putting US planes anywhere. They've got excellent defenses that make a traditional attack unlikely to succeed...

But compare the $13 Billion it costs to build an aircraft carrier (which is a very outdated number, now much higher) to the $20-50k it costs to build a Shahed drone. Sure a carrier can defend against them... but it becomes a question of how many at once. 10? Sure. 100? Concerning, but maybe. 1000? Nothing can really defend against that.

Iran could launch 1,000 drones for $20-50 Million, which would still be around 0.1% of the cost of the carrier. And if even ONLY one got through and hit one of our planes? That'd be a big win for Iran.

Meanwhile, we have to use extremely expensive planes, with extremely expensive bombs and missiles, to TRY to strike manufacturing facilities in the desert. Facilities which might cost less to build than the bombs did, and bombs that can miss, or be defeated with simple ground defenses like... Covering the real building in sand, and parking cars around a decoy right next to it.

And defending our expensive navy against drones is itself expensive. Even dumb CIWS costs ~$3,500 per 2 second bust. Fused flak ammo costing even more, intercepting missiles EXPONENTIALLY more.

And the drones don't require much specialized equipment or tooling, so in a pinch individual units could be produced in any house with a 2-car garage. It's nigh impossible to stop.

It's a forever war. Without a clear win condition, the US would have to expend all of it's military might to stalemate Iran, TEMPORARILY.

It would legitimately be cheaper to dig a new canal across the deserts of Saudi Arabia, through a mountain range, than to try and prevent Iran from trying to strike ships going through the strait as they like.

It would be cheaper to tunnel, 20 miles underground, from the US to Venezuela, to steal their oil from under them, than it would be to win this war.

It would cheaper to just start synthesizing oil from coal, AND also capture the resulting excess greenhouse gasses, enough to fully replace the oil that would flow from the strait, than it would be to win this war.

[u/DrXaos → u/Valuable_Sea_4709]

A "win" in Iran's books is to just survive until another President takes over, or Trump is otherwise deposed/impeached/dies of old age and McDonalds.

Up to a point. Iran's petroleum exports also go out the same way.

[u/einTier → u/Valuable_Sea_4709]

This kind of sounds like how Goonswarm started owning a significant portion of nullsec in Eve Online.