Salvē!
This episode of Londinium Chronicles was broadcast live yesterday on YouTube, X, and here on Substack.
Join us this Sunday at 6PM EST for another live broadcast.
A new battlefront.
There is some debate about the word “war.” So we will not settle that debate. The vice president, Mr. Vance, has said (paraphrasing), “We're not at war with Iran. We're at war with the Iranian nuclear weapons program.”
That is unusually careful. We'll go along with the idea that “at war” is the important part of that sentence.
The US has launched a preemptive strike on what we're told are the suspect nuclear weapons sites in Iran: Isfahan, Parchin, I believe, and Fordow—Fordow being the mountain that requires the attention of B-2 stealth bombers and big bombs, the MOPs, we're told there were 12 of them dropped.
We do not have any reason to believe that they were successful or not successful. I'm certain that I've read very carefully that bomb assessment is extremely difficult from the air, and that it takes a great deal of time. You gather metrics, you decide what the site is doing after you've bombed it. You can kill the people, but to destroy a site with accuracy and high probability is very challenging, even for the supermen at the Pentagon.
So we'll set that aside and I'll frame this question to you another way:
Russia attacked Ukraine because it said that it was drifting into the EU and NATO, and Russia found NATO a threat to its sovereignty. Ukraine wanted to be a member of the EU, and it's a candidate now. And they tell it all the time. Ukraine wanted to be a member of NATO—it’s a candidate now. And they tell it now and again. That's the way we think we should go.
We come over to Iran. Iran is a revisionist state, yes, but it's also a member of BRICS—invited by Russia and China, Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa. And Iran is a member. So is Venezuela. It's also a member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. It was established by China some years ago.
Therefore, we're looking at Iran integrated into a separate but co-equal transnational series of organizations that are chiefly about trade, but also about self-defense.
We've attacked a member of that alliance as Russia attacked a member of our alliance.
This is what I would call a distinction without a difference. Help me, Germanicus, how do we solve this?
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