I have said many times before — Trump may not “want war” but his policies are making war more likely. He can start one, but his posturing as “Mr. Tough Guy” will make it very hard to stop one once any “incident” starts escalating.
There are powerful forces that want war. I’m not talking about the idiots here on USM. The Israelis have long wanted the U.S. to attack Iran. Crucially, American Oil interests that once stood to lose a fortune if the Persian Gulf was shut down now would mostly also welcome the resulting rise in the price of oil. Even Russia would benefit. Here I disagree with
charwin95, who I think earlier said that Russia would stand by Iran no matter what. I otherwise sympathize with his concerns.
The provocative U.S. military presence in this part of the world no longer makes any sense, if it ever did. The intelligent policy is to strategically draw down our forces, withdraw from Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan. Limit our naval forces in the Gulf to a bare minimum. American working people have NO SIDE in any conflict between Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shia Iran. Israel can defend itself. Our wars and interventions have left only wreckage and hatred, refugees and extremism behind, which we try to “clean up” with more interventions and by encouraging more civil war. The real U.S. policy is the same as the Israeli policy — Balkanize the whole region. The U.S., however, also wants ultimately to gain full control of all the oil in the Middle East so as to increase its leverage over China and ALL other countries now competing successfully with our de-industrialized and indebted economy. We cannot and should not try to maintain our world empire indefinitely through military force. This is the present real U.S. bipartisan policy, though it has been frustrated by Iranian resistance, and by Sunni terrorist “blowback.”