The Iranian government is terrible, but that doesn’t mean that the U.S. relationship with the gulf states isn’t worse off than in February. The United States made our alignment with Israel hard to ignore and was significantly unable to protect allied countries while drawing fire onto them. It’s entirely possible for both sides to lose a war and I’d bet we’re going to see enough of a shift away from us, likely to China, to solidly count this as a loss.
It hard to say which way this goes. It's a possibility. But China can offer even less protection than the US can.
We have seen that the US ability to project power is great. We've also seen (and I don't think anyone didn't know that) that power has its limits. Especially when it comes to fighting fanatics with nothing to lose.
The US is still the only world power that has the ability to e.g. prevent Iran from just walking in and taking the gulf countries. It's true that protection isn't hermetic.
But hermetic protection is REALLY important when your entire economy is based off of oil and water desalination plants. Iran still retains the ability to damage that infrastructure. The Gulf countries have some hard decisions to make, but I wouldn’t be surprised if several of them sprint closer to Iran. Already we are hearing of a joint Omani-Irani agreement on Hormuz administration…
But it's not new that there's no hermetic protection.
There is no real possible alignment between the regime in Tehran and the Sunni Emirates or Saudi Arabia or Kuwait. There is no way they are sprinting closer to Iran.
Oman is more complicated but they are also not going to align with Iran.
It's hard to evaluate but I don't see huge shifts from the gulf states. The US is still their best bet (not to mention that they are heavily invested in that). They have major investments that aren't oil, i.e. unlike Iran they can live very comfortably even if the energy sector is shut down. They prefer to make money from oil and gas but they also prefer a weaker Iran.
It's looking like more of the same and counting down to the next round.
> it's not new that there's no hermetic protection.
I think what new is the realization of Iran’s willingness to escalate.
> There is no real possible alignment between the regime in Tehran and the Sunni Emirates or Saudi Arabia or Kuwait. There is no way they are sprinting closer to Iran.
Can you please expand on that? I don’t understand why they couldn’t be aligned.
Basically they believe the rulers of the gulf countries should be overthrown and that those countries should be run by Islamic rules. So basically MBZ who rules the UAE (as an example) wants to keep ruling the country and strike some balance between economic prosperity and maintaining his rule while Iran would want to see him removed and his government replaced by a theocratic regime. Naturally the UAE also wants not to be bombarded by Iran but the personal survival of the UAE rulers is a bit more important to them than that goal.
> But China can offer even less protection than the US can.
I think a lot of those states are wondering how much protection they’d need if we weren’t based there and drawing fire. China can offer economic stability and sales of modern military equipment for self-defense, and I think the entire world is working through the implications of the United States allowing an unsound octogenarian to destabilize the dollar or declare a major war on a whim. There’s a lot to dislike about China but the gulf states aren’t exactly sticklers for democracy and stability is good for business.
> We have seen that the US ability to project power is great. We've also seen (and I don't think anyone didn't know that) that power has its limits. Especially when it comes to fighting fanatics with nothing to lose.
My unprovable pet theory is that the US would've had less black eyes if we didn't have incompetent people like Kegseth in charge, and especially if he hadn't been allowed to dismiss top brass across the military just because they were too woke/not "warrior" enough.
Hegseth didn’t help matters at all but the problem started at the top. In past administrations, the various people leading the military & State would’ve pushed back against Netanyahu/Graham’s sales pitch that it’d be an easy war, identified actual goals, and planned ahead to achieve them (e.g. assembling a coalition like their counterparts did against Iraq twice) but everyone with backbone or independence was purged under the Republican’s new unitary executive theory. Hegseth was selected because he would never say “sir, that’s a bad idea” as happened so many times during Trump’s first term.
Carlini talked about that a fair amount in the context of pairing the two: e.g. many protocols are challenging for fuzzers because they have something like a checksum or signature but LLMs are good at coming up with harnesses for things like that. I’m sure that we’re going to see someone building an integrated fuzzer soon which tries to do things like figure out how to get a particular branch to follow an unexercised path.
One of the things I’ve been wanting to see is basically an estimate of their minimum revenue to meet investor expectations, too. I’ve heard people talking about using even cheaper local models aggressively to save on tokens and it increasingly makes me wonder if they’re caught in a vice where prices need to go up but if they raise them they’ll just shed usage to the competition, especially since at least Google has a much longer runway.
This isn’t unexpected for anyone in the actual military: they’ve planned for this for decades. A couple of friends served in the previous war and they mentioned that this is what their training exercises were like: same enemy, same difficulty.
To the extent that this is true, it’s irrelevant: your body has many things which need to be within certain ranges for health. Salt, water, oxygen, etc. are all vital but too much or too little will make you dangerously ill.
You definitely got wiser—we all do—but I think there’s also a big shift in both what they think they can say safely in public and the sycophantic reinforcement they get on social media. Rich guys have always had that problem to some extent but it used to be less public—nothing like Musk just tossing out some inane insight while high and getting hundreds of thousands of fans applauding. Human brains don’t handle that well, and you can tell these guys haven’t had to defend an idea rigorously in years.
Another factor seems to be the way corporate valuations have become increasingly untethered from actual value. It’s not like there isn’t historical precedent for people getting rich by luck but thinking they’re geniuses, but the tech world has become really weird about that in ways which amplify the previous no-filter point: it’s one thing to be, say, a Netscape millionaire but parlaying that into billionaire status really gets into the point where they never have to hear unwanted criticism and are guaranteed to be treated as sources of wisdom regardless of the applicability of their experience.
I thought that about GCP until I used it more seriously and kept running into issues where they didn’t have some feature AWS had had for ages, and our Google engineers kept saying the answer was to run your own service in Kubernetes rather than use a platform service which did not give me confidence that they understood what the business proposition was.
I strongly believe in paying journalists but I started blocking ads after nytimes.com served me a Windows malware download from a Doubleclick domain. It couldn’t have harmed my Mac but it was clear that the adtech industry had no interest in cleaning shop if it cost them a dime in revenue.
People buy IBM for the support and exotic features around high-availability and expansion. I think they’d be able to do an ARM migration if needed since they have deep experience with emulation (there is mainframe code from the 1970s running on POWER today on nested emulators) and they have a lot of precedent for their support engineers working closely with customers.
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