Because they would prefer to avoid a direct war. They'd prefer a Syria/Libya type situation of engineered moderate rebels and selective strikes to maximize chaos and breakdown. They already have Azerbaijan totally in the zionist/NATO pockets hosting their planes and harassing Russia just across the border which they can use to aid with arming these. They hope to inspire ethnic tensions to create an actual fall of Iran that's durable and removes it as any kind of a power player for decades.

They nuke them first. The US has been itching to use them for decades and will finally have the perfect excuse. You can't really build a nuke while under active attack by a nuclear power (two nuclear powers, one a vassal of the other) who need to destroy you for their plans of maintaining global hegemony. At that point they have nothing to lose from hitting you with a nuke to stop you using yours. You need several nukes BEFORE they launch the war and a way to deliver them to ward them off.

Once the war has started a threat likely won't scare them off and really your only choice is revenge, is firing it at them and killing a bunch of their people because they're already going to be nuking you so you get to die happy you took a million of them with you or whatever.

One thing I'll note is that the US and the zionist entity are likely to target and attempt to take out Iranian missile production and launch sites as well as mobile launchers as the next phase. The zionists are of course annoyed by all the missiles landing in the entity and more than that it is stretching resources thin for the empire firing off all those missiles.

Cynic in me says the US is letting Iran hit the zionists with their advanced missiles in order to study them in order to perfect anti-missile systems for their own future use. They simply need that data and are happy to see some settlers die for it. But once they have that data and once Iran starts hitting them in earnest assuming they have a stockpile and real capability to actively produce enough to meet their needs (a big if, I am a little doubtful but we'll see) they'll move to take out those capabilities meaning it will be harder even if Iran gets a nuke to successfully launch and deliver it. Nuking the entity would drive zionists up a wall with rage but after they nuke Iran back and destroy it totally the settlers will return to the zionist entity and I'm afraid it likely will survive.

This is the problem with not having control of your airspace at all. You can do as Yemen does and produce a small amount and harass them with them but not enough to win a war or inflict enough pain to collapse the entity or drive the US to sue for peace. A destabilized middle east/west Asia suits the US alright as we produce plenty of oil and have Canada as well, it'll fuck Europe and China HARD and drive up costs for your average person but given how much consumption is already driven by the top 10% they may think it really doesn't matter to siphon more wealth to the top and impoverish the proles even harder.

Knew it. Seemed staged.

Yeah and it's well known and western media broadcast it. It's such a weak faint, so transparent that if the Iranians were taken in at all by it at this point just.. no words. Not saying they were just saying it would be.

Yes but sadly only in a deranged anti-Russian conspiratorial "evil Russian commies led by Putin-Stalin-Hitler are destroying our democracy, we gotta nuke em" type way not a loss of faith in liberalism or introspection about what America is type way.

I'm sorry to go to Star Wars posting but there is something to be said about the understanding that the rebellion failed to win the peace because they just reproduced and tried to bring back the same failed republic which predictably failed again. These liberals are just trying to reproduce and bring back some imagined working, utopian version of liberalism and US-American political structure they imagine existed in the 20th century until around Obama and the big reactionary tantrum and/or Trump winning. They will inevitably not roll anything back meaningfully because Democrats aren't interested in using power first of all and also because they have no revolutionary program they could use to do that so they'll win elections again then be confused and angry and ever more conspiratorial about foreign enemies such as Russia/China as to why they can't get things to go back to the good old days.

It's a reflected image of American reactionary thought, really a different strain of reactionary "return" type yearning and propaganda which will be used to justify rigid adherence to militarism, imperialism, etc because those are still strong "institutions" in the American sense and they have been taught and still venerate them and believe in venerating them those institutions will save them from the scary Trump types and their imagined Putin/China foreign antagonists.

This conveniently leads them right into red scare type thinking and fearful belief in anything the military-intelligence propaganda mill pushes about other nations. It's an antibody being created against increased exposure to how good things are in China and how bad things are in the US. A way to get them broadly onboard with censorship of any positive coverage of "bad nations"[tm] on the internet and the creation of an American firewall and internet censorship board to keep Americans in the dark or as they would phrase it "protect them from sinister Russian/Chinese disinformation campaigns" which they believe can sway elections and turn ordinary otherwise good folks into dangerous types who want to turn America into a dictatorship.

Well 3 things:

1. Americans are media illiterate,
2. Americans revel in being the bad guys as long as they can look/feel cool. Reminds me of that British navy ship that played the imperial march on loudspeakers transiting a port or canal or something,
3. They sell the rebellion toys and such as well so they could always try to push more of those. (Truth be told the empire's stuff for most part looks cooler (not counting pre-Empire galactic Republic stuff some of which looks pretty neat but none of which has any current relevance given the whole new empire thing past the original trilogy Disney is pushing)). But see 1-2 for why they could make an ISB play-set with Doctor Gorst and Star Wars nerds would rush to buy it.

It gives them the ability to bypass the blockade until the US bombs it either from the air pretty openly or using one of their various "moderate rebel" groups with access to suspiciously advanced weaponry and explosives and maybe submarines for some reason.

It's good China is doing this but it's on shaky ground as long as the US has the ability to coup, seed terrorists, etc as they plead in areas with governments that are at least a lot weaker than Russia in abilities of self-defense and security against an adversary like NATO.

They already have a vague interest in color revolution-ing or seeding "moderate rebel" maidan or ISIS types in these nations due to their historical affinity with the USSR and present-day proximity to and importance to Russia but cutting off the belt and road is going to be very high priority. Taking out just Turkmenistan here for instance completely blunts this and Uzbekistan while possibly to bypass by a long routing around via Kazakhstan is also pretty important.

Make no mistake if the US escalates to the point of a naval blockade of China from the first/second/third island chains they're not going to flinch at using a proxy to blow up a rail bridge or do damage in ways that takes weeks to repair. For regular trade it's a good thing and a poke in the eye to the US but if stuff hits the fan their most reliable routes overland are going to be via Russia which is already dealing with CIA proxies via Ukraine and has the experience and capabilities to counter them pretty effectively compared to most places. Ideally they put into place more alternate rail lines as well so it takes more leg-work to attempt to take them all out.

Astonishingly odd move to be honest to not have originally built up the characters with the Andor series before doing the events that happened there. Harder to care for characters you just meet in an already big universe.

Yeah bullshit. At most I imagine he does something that applies only to US medicare. That is the US government in prices it pays has to get the lowest cost. People with insurance, e.g. those who aren't over 65? They still get fucked. In fact those with medicare might get fucked too if the drug companies simply decline to sell in the US and you end up with a medicare system that doesn't have a lot of vital drugs that in a few years Republicans can declare as completely failed and killing people and push for privatizing.

Those are the silliest things to stockpile. 1) You can get a bidet, 2) even without it we produce TP here. 3) We also produce tons of food here, we're a huge exporter, unless these officials are huge fans of Chinese brand chili crunch or ramen or something they don't need to worry about that. If anything things like soy should in theory have a price collapse for a short while as farmers go bankrupt before the price shoots up and stays up for years after due to a shortage. But you can't stockpile the things that matter long-enough term to matter, they'll spoil.

What you should stockpile is electronics, is household goods made in China that you go through. You should not defer purchases but make them now, now, now for that new TV or hard drive for yar har or video card for , etc.

Offshoring and de-industrialization was the only way the US was able to push off the spectre of the declining rate of profit and the corresponding class consciousness that comes with it.

Maybe they don't care? US proles are really, really, really propagandized against class consciousness and socialism. End of history and all that. I mean inevitably it comes back when conditions get bad enough and /enough/ time passes but maybe they think something else will happen before then to prevent it? Nuclear war where they all hide in their bunkers? Automated police kill-bots to keep the proles in line? Things like AI and robotics alleviating the need for all those workers (here's where they obviously don't understand proper Marxist economics of course and it eventually breaks down to them eating each other but by then they might have exterminated a lot of us so it'll be small comfort). I mean they're attacking public education and doing all kinds of other things you'd need to do to create a downwardly mobile population suitable for harsh factory work in horrible conditions. Add in some terror of gutting public healthcare, spreading around a few ever-present diseases like covid that slowly cripple those who get repeatedly infected and only those who keep their heads down and work have the healthcare to be able to survive in those conditions while many others are being picked off and you no longer have just food and hunger but living as a weapon.

I am not optimistic about Americans becoming class conscious quickly enough to matter in the next 20-30 years and more specifically class conscious and aware of and versed in Marxist theory as it's not enough to be class conscious, there are plenty of liberal-ish types who are but think the end all is peaceful protest and organizing and are easily put down. I just see some sort of extreme reaction taking hold as much more likely.

They might feel (and not without some reason) that by the time there's any real risk of the proles becoming class conscious AFTER reshoring that they'll have AI plus robotics down and they'll have automated kill bots, an enforcer class (cops), plus be able to increasingly replace the lost labor, plus just kill off or cripple tons of the unruly proles by poisoning their water and air, letting pandemics ravage the population at large, and of course climate change heat effects and perhaps increasing food costs to just starve a certain amount to death every year (if kept small enough I'm sorry to say most Americans would walk atop all those bodies and skeletons and stay in line as long as their number isn't up, as long as the mass slotted for starvation is small enough every year to be put down by militarized police and for the rest of the population to keep their heads down and not join them this seems viable).

Again this all eventually falls apart but it's little comfort as many of us here will be dead as a result long before it reaches that point.

I say, never say never. Really they might only be trying to prod back strategic industries. Trump likes to go on about antibiotics production which is telling because in a prolonged war against the rest of the world or at least against China the US would run out of medical treatments for their soldiers who'd begin dying to preventable things because they'd be cut off. The US wants to be able to self-sufficiently wage protracted global war on the rest of the world, war for conquest, war for dominance, war for plunder. They can afford to lose iPhone production, they can afford to lose all kinds of consumer goods but they must have food (already not a problem, not likely to be given Canada is a major supplier of fertilizers and we have lots of natural gas for that purpose), they must have medicine for their soldiers, and they must have arms building capabilities. Trump talks about ship-building, he wants back massive ship-building capability in the US which is why the tarrifs on non-US made ships because right now in a prolonged war China could just keep churning out new ships and the US would be without a navy very quickly, he wants to decrease global purchases of Chinese ships to shut down Chinese shipyards and move them to places where the US has control to give the US the ability to use them to make war-ships quickly in a prolonged war and to deny China that same ability.

Oh it does. Diagnosis: Terminally Chinese, not under control of western intelligence for planting backdoors.