Several versions of the Memorandum of Understanding between the U.S. and Iran are circling through the media. They ain’t the final ones.

Yesterday I quoted from a draft version published by the Iranian Mehr News Agency. It was known that this version was not the final one.

Since then Bloomberg, via Time, has published another version. CNN has a slightly different one.

None of these are the finally version the parties had agreed upon.

Late Sunday the final version had been expanded from the draft as Trump had to make additional concessions. These had become necessary to prevent Iran from massively retaliating against Israel for its early Sunday attack on Beirut.

The new concessions included, Iranian sources said, a full retreat of Israel from sovereign Lebanon stipulated in paragraph 1 of the MoU. They also conceded to Iran to control the Strait of Hormuz. The currently published versions in western media do not include such a clauses.

Iran explicitly denies the accuracy of the currently published versions:

Source Refutes Bloomberg’s Alleged Text of MoU as Inaccurate – Tasnim

TEHRAN (Tasnim) – An informed source told Tasnim that the text published by Bloomberg regarding the memorandum of understanding between Iran and the US is not accurate.
…
“As previously announced, the memorandum consists of 14 clauses, and the subjects covered by those 14 clauses have been discussed repeatedly in the media. However, the details presented by Bloomberg regarding each clause are, in many significant respects, incomplete,” the source said.

“For instance, the first clause and the clause concerning the Strait of Hormuz, as presented by Bloomberg, are clearly inaccurate and omit several important key terms,” the source explained.

The source further noted that, based on the agreement between the parties, the text of the MoU will be published after it is signed on Friday, June 19.

There is speculation why false versions are put into circulation:

Cont. reading: War On Iran: Trump Under Fire For Not Yet Published MoU

During a press conference at the G7 meeting in France U.S. President Donald Trump criticized Israel’s way of waging war against Hizbullah.

Video via FOXnews.

Partial transcript:

I tell you what – Israel is fighting Hizbullah too long and too many people are being killed. And you don’t have to knock down an apartment house every time you are looking for somebody. Because there are a lot of people in those apartment houses and not all are Hizbullah. That I can tell you.

Trump does not say it explicitly but he is accusing Israel of committing war crimes. Fine so far.

But then he suggests to solve the Hizbullah problem by using Abu Mohammad al-Julani aka Ahmed al-Sharaa, the al-Qaeda ruler of Syria, to (re-)ignite a sectarian Sunni-Shia war:

And I suggested to Israel to let Syria take care of Hizbullah – ’cause to be honest with you I think they would do a better job of doing it. [….] Syria, you know, he’s pulled that country together amazingly quickly. He’s very capable. And he’s been very good for me. He’s protected – everything I’ve asked for he’s done. And if Israel can’t do the job without killing everyone he will do the job, Syria will do the job.

Just an hour ago another Israeli attack in southern Lebanon killed another four random people. The U.S.-Iran Memorandum of Understanding agreed upon two days ago stipulates an immediate end to Israel’s war in Lebanon and a full retreat of all Israeli forces from Lebanon.

Israel’s prime minister Bibi Netanyahoo is obviously trying to sabotage Trump’s Iran deal. He has already lost the war against Iran which he himself had instigated. Now his political survival depends on continuing his war against Hizbullah. A war which his own generals are telling him they can not win.

Trump will have to squeeze Netanyahoo hard – by withholding intelligence, money or weapons – to end his conflict in Lebanon. The public offer by Trump to Netanyahoo to use the Al-Qaeda kingpin of Syria to ‘finish the job’ in Lebanon may be a his last chance to escape from the problem.

But there are complications.

Cont. reading: Lebanon – U.S. Offers To Ignite Sectarian War

The United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran have agreed upon a Memorandum of Understanding which is supposed to end the current hostilities between the country.

A MoU is non binding. No text has been published and public remarks on either side hint that there are different interpretation of what the various clauses of the MoU are supposed to mean.

The agreement, if it survives that long, is supposed be signed in Switzerland on Friday.

Until about the last minute Iran was not willing to sign on to it. There was, and is, political opposition in Iran against an agreement with the U.S.  Iran, it is argued, is in an advantageous position. It could and should demand more than it is supposed to get under the MoU.  Without knowing the details of the social-economic situation in Iran it is hard to judge if that is true.

Last Friday, Mehr News Agency published a 14 point draft of the MoU. This Iranian draft version included:

1. Permanent and immediate end to war on all fronts, including Lebanon.
2. US commitment to non-interference in Iran’s internal affairs and respect for the sovereignty of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
3. Complete lifting of the naval blockade within 30 days.
4. US commitment to withdraw its forces from around Iran.
5. Reopening of the Strait of Hormuz within 30 days, under Iranian arrangements.
6. Suspension of sanctions on oil and petrochemical product sales and derivatives, and full Iranian access to its financial resources.
7. …

Points 2., 3., 6., are straight out of the 1981 Algier Accords which had ended the Iranian hostage crisis. Under that agreement the U.S. had committed to not intervene politically or militarily in Iranian internal affairs and to remove the freeze on Iranian assets and sanctions on Iran. The U.S. started to break those commitments as soon as the Accord had been signed.

While Iran, on Sunday afternoon local time, was still arguing about signing the MoU, Israel, in an attempt to sabotage the agreement, launched an attack on Beirut in Lebanon. Iran immediately pulled back from the MoU. It announced retaliation strikes against Israel proper.

President Trump, who was very eager to get the MoU signed, had to make additional concessions to get the agreement back on track:

Cont. reading: War On Iran: The MoU – A Small Pause In A Decades Long Conflict

News & views related to the war on Iran …

News & views related to the war in Ukraine …

Last week’s posts on Moon of Alabama:

• Jun 8 – War On Iran: – Iran Will Respond To Ceasefire Breaches Wherever Those Are
• Jun 10 – War On Iran: – U.S. Provocation Towards Further Escalation
• Jun 12 – War On Iran: – Groundhog Day
  Related:
  – The tanks in Cushing, Oklahoma, are hitting bottom. The oil market is about to hit a tipping point – CNN
  – Israel carries out air strikes on Lebanon, state media says, as Iran claims deal with US near – BBC
  – Exclusive: Iran sealed uranium cache and placed mines amid fears of US operation to seize material – CNN
  – Qatar pursued secret talks with Iran to shield gas complex from strikes, security officials say (archived) – Washington Post

Fereshteh Sadeghi فرشته صادقی @fresh_sadegh – 21:21 UTC · Jun 13, 2026

#Iran 🧵
1- “We don’t accept it”
That’s the mantra of political factions and ordinary citizens who oppose the status quo and the Pakistani-mediated memorandum of understating btw Iran and the US.
Those groups have held protest gatherings against the MoU with chants against negotiators.
…

• Jun 9 – No Need To Waste Europe – by English Outsider
  Related:
  – How Western Europe’s elites lost the plot over Russia – Brian McDonald
  – Deconstructing the Myth That Russia is Running Out of Armour – Fronts
  – “This is nonsense.” Kuleba does not believe that Ukraine has turned the tide at the front (in Russian) – Strana
  – Water was drained from fire extinguishers, food was obtained in battle: 109 days of volunteering in positions that were “forgotten” (in Russian) – Bukvy

• Jun 13 – SpaceX’ Stock Price Will Come Down To Earth
  Related:
  – How LLMs Actually Work – 0xkato
  – Court finds Google liable for false AI answers in landmark case – Yahoo/DPA
  – The AI Price War Is Here, Piling Pressure on OpenAI and Anthropic (archived) – WSJ
  – AI costs spike as subscriptions hit pricing wall — firms turn towards Chinese LLMs, open-source models to extend… – Tom’s Hardware
  – Elon Musk, Human Ponzi Scheme – Paul Krugman

—
Other issues:
Cont. reading: The MoA Week In Review – OT 2026-124

Yesterday Elon Musk’s SpaceX, a conglomerate of a profitable defense space contractor, a social media company and a disastrously loss making intelligence simulation (AI) unit had its initial public offering at the stock market.

The banks involved in the launch did their usual thing and within a day the stock price increased some 19% from its offering baseline.

Unfortunately the total value of the company is only less than half of what its stock price says.

The original SpaceX has become a somewhat solid business. The civil Starlink internet access business, and its secret  military variant which is also provided by SpaceX, are profitable enough to finance additional future space endeavors.

Adding the former Twitter to it was to bail out those who had lost half of their investment when they joined Musk in buying the tweeting blue bird business for a way to expensive $44 billion.

Adding xAI was done to obfuscate the enormous losses Musk’s AI company will make in the foreseeable future. The marketing hook for adding xAI to SpaceX is the idea of providing AI computing power in space.

I doubt that this will ever happen at scale. Sure, there is sufficient energy available if you put up large size solar collectors. But one will also need to cool and heat those computers in space which is, without an atmosphere, not a trivial problem. There is also a lot of radiation in space which tends to destroy electronic circuits unless one provides those with heavy shielding. What are the transport costs for putting 100,000 GPUs and the necessary support systems into space?

It may well be that  xAI that will one day break the whole SpaceX business. Despite the hype around them all U.S. AI providers, Open AI, Anthropic, xAI, Google and Meta, have yet to find profitable use cases for their products.

AI models require an immense amount of computing power for training as well as for interference, i.e. for answering a users questions. So far all AI products currently on the markets have been heavily subsidized. Given that these models are unpredictable in their results and accuracy there is doubt that many user will be willing to pay for what their usage really costs. Sure, there is room for some high end niche products but these companies have yet to identify a sufficiently price-able mass market.

Promotions of AI excellence don’t necessarily help their cases:

KPMG report contained AI hallucinations on benefits of . . . AI (archived) – FT

A KPMG report on how AI is being used by businesses across the world exaggerated adoption of the technology with bogus case studies that appear to have been based on AI hallucinations.

The October report, “Redefining excellence in the age of agentic AI”, made numerous false claims about the use of AI by organisations including the Swiss bank UBS, the UK’s National Health Service and the public transit groups Swiss Federal Railways and Transport for London.

The inaccuracies were identified as AI hallucinations by the research group GPTZero and verified by the FT.

While I find it amusing to follow the hilarious development of the Large Language Model AI sector I am sorry for the enormous waste of money which it entails. It could have been used for much better purpose.

The bombing is on. The bombing is off.

A deal is ready. A deal is far from being made.

Here is the deal’s text. None of this is mentioned in any deal’s text.

Oil is flowing through Hormuz. No oil is passing thru.

An agreed upon text of the peace deal has been reached. Some 75% has been agreed upon.

The bombing is off. The bombing is on.

News & views related to the war on Iran …

News & views related to the war in Ukraine …

News & views not related to the wars in Ukraine and Iran …

The war on Iran continues to escalate.

Yesterday a U.S. Apache helicopter went down in the Strait of Hormuz near the coast of Oman. The pilots were saved. The U.S. at first did not claim any external influence for the incident. Only hours after it happened it claimed that an Iranian Shahid drone had hit the helicopter.

That claim is not plausible at all.

Shahid are point to point kamikaze drones. They get their target coordinates before they are launched. They are not radio controlled. They do not have the capability to maneuver against a moving target. They explode when they hit something.

Whatever happened to the downed helicopter it wasn’t a hit by a Shahid drone that took it down.

After the U.S. had suddenly claimed that Iran had caused the incident it announced to strike on Iran. Some 10 targets were bombed including radar, communication equipment and, in the port of Sirik, a desalination station.

Iran responded by firing some 20 missiles and drones against U.S. installations in Kuwait, Jordan and Bahrain.

Neither side has claimed casualties so far.

Today the U.S. hit an Indian vessel near the coast of Oman. One sailor was killed. India condemned the attack.

About an hour ago U.S. President Donald Trump announced more strikes against Iran.

In unconfirmed news Israel just mobilized some 280,000 reservists. Together with already mobilized forces that sums up to be near its full potential.

The situation is going to escalate. Tomorrow the region may well again be in a full fledged war.

by English Outsider 

lifted from a comment

Such a lot of nonsense being talked at the moment.  Sorry, Gentlemen, (the Ladies, fortunately, are immune) but there’s any amount of it I’ve been reading here too.

I’d guess that a good half here are Ritter acolytes.  Lay waste Europe.  Bomb them to hell.  Don’t let’s pussyfoot around any more.

On Martyanov’s site I saw the video of Ritter delivering that message in Russia.   At the St Petersburg conference.   Has Ritter  lost his mind?  I wrote in to reply to Larch on the subject.  Many of “b’s” commenters will know Larch because he’s a fund of information on the ins and outs of the Ukrainian war since 2014.  Great bloke.

Larch – Ritter’s way off in that video clip. Karaganov plus. They’ll be listening to him at SPIEF and thinking, is that sort of rabid nonsense all Ritter has to offer us? It’s Curtis LeMay thinking, make the rubble bounce, no use at all when working out how to defuse a confrontation the Russians aren’t looking to extend.

Ritter’s Intel and arms control background, plus his ability to marshal a whole lot of information he has at his fingertips and that most of us don’t, make him a valuable analyst – when he’s not going off the deep end which he does far too often. And for all his undoubted analytical ability he doesn’t seem to grasp the underlying reality.

That is, that the Americans, for all Trump’s increasingly lame PR, are still key players in the conflict in Ukraine. Those drone and missile attacks into Russia would not be possible but for American ISR and planning assistance to go with it. Same for the sabotage and assassination missions being run into Russia. Much of the supply of arms is also still down to the US. Indirectly, again in spite of Trump’s PR, financial support too. The logistics are still being run from Wiesbaden and we’re fools if we think that the Americans, whose expertise in logistics is far superior to the European’s, aren’t key in that too.

So the full scale attack Ritter is calling for would be an attack on American assets too. What’s Ritter up to, going to a big conference in St Petersburg and calling for that?

All Ritter’s doing is showing the Russians that the Americans, whether it’s hawks like Blumenthal and Lindsey Graham or dissidents like Ritter, are in an advanced state of hysteria all round and need to be handled very carefully if they’re not to harm themselves and others. But I think the Russians know that already.

I should add that there are plenty of good people in Europe who have the gravest reservations about EU foreign policy. Believe it or not, that goes for Britain too. Responsible voices in England are calling for our UK foreign policy to be changed. Ian Proud, Commodore Jermy, the late Lord Skidelsky, the invaluable Mercouris, Dr Rob Campbell, many others.

Far as I can see they’re not making much headway but they’re all in their various ways working at getting a more accurate and rational view of the Ukrainian conflict through to the public here and abroad. Ritter can do that when he’s not losing it but when he does lose it as he does in that video, he discredits all those attempts and his own too.

And I’m going to guess that many of the commenters on “b’s” site bellowing “nuke everything” are just shooting a line.  They’re just thoroughly fed up with the mess their various countries have got themselves into and are expressing that dissatisfaction through hyperbole.

—
b here:

I agree with the above. Ritter is talking nonsense (with Larry Johnson and Pepe Escobar not far behind).

The current ‘Ukraine is wining’ propaganda coming from all NATO channels seems to have influenced quite a few of these people. It is bullshit.

Professor Mearsheimer has studied at West Point and was an air-force officer for some ten years before becoming an academic expert in international relations. His assessments of military realities are sound and grounded in facts.

In his latest talk with Judge Napolitano just hours ago, he agrees with my view that the situation in Ukraine has not changed:

Cont. reading: No Need To Waste Europe – by English Outsider

President Trump and his partner in crime Netanyahoo have tried to draw Iran into a ceasefire trap.

It was hoped for that a bit by bit escalation, like Israeli bombing in Lebanon, would be left without a response by Iran.

Iran however did not fall for that scheme. It had been agreed that the ceasefire in the war on Iran  includes Lebanon and other fronts between the imperialist and resistance parties. It is either a ceasefire for all or a ceasefire for none.

A week ago, when Netanyahoo threatened to bomb the Dahiyeh suburb of Beirut Iran stopped all further peace negotiations and threatened to response in kind.

Trump then allegedly shouted and cursed Netanyahoo for his Beirut bombing plans. But such alleged divergences of views between Washington and Tel Aviv have long be proven to be scams.

Yesterday, on Sunday afternoon local time, Israel dropped at least 10 bombs on Dahiyeh.

Iran’s response followed shortly thereafter. Five waves of missiles were launched against air bases and other targets in northern Israel.

Trump, in an interview (archived) with the Financial Times and FOXnews, asked Israel to stay down. He claimed to “call the shots” on the issue:

“He won’t have any choice,” Trump told the FT in a telephone interview. “I call the shots. I call all the shots. He [Netanyahu] doesn’t call the shots.”

A bit later Israel aircraft bombed targets in Iran with stand of missiles. Among the targets were oil installations at the Karun petrochemical complex. Other targets were radar stations.

Iran responded by launching missiles against two additional air bases in central Israel while missiles from Lebanon hit at Israeli oil installations in Haifa.

Ansarullah in Yemen joined in. It announced that all Israel related shipping will be blocked from the Red Sea and fired some of its own missiles against Israel proper.

Both sides of the conflict then concluded the fight. The skirmish is, for now, over.

Trump has several times claimed to restrict Netanyahoo, to hold him back or to order him to stand down. Israel has bombe anyway and, at least in its attacks on Iran, continued to rely on U.S. controlled air defenses and U.S. flight refueling tankers.

Trump’s claims about ordering Israel to do this or that are obviously fake.

The strong cooperation between the U.S. and Israel continues and it is indeed Netanyahoo who is calling the shots while Trump is either agreeing with him or decided to stay silent whenever Israel ignores his ‘order’:

Cont. reading: War On Iran: – Iran Will Respond To Ceasefire Breaches Wherever Those Are

News & views related to the war on Iran …

News & views related to the war in Ukraine …

Last week’s posts on Moon of Alabama:

• Jun 1 – War On Iran: After Israel Threatened Beirut Iran Announced To Further Reduce Global Oil Supplies
• Jun 2 – War On Iran: Economic Reality Will Force Trump To Defy The Lobby’s Pressure
• Jun 5 – War On Iran: – Iran Needs Escalation To Avoid The Ceasefire Trap
  Related:
  – Oil industry warns Trump administration of price spikes within weeks – Politico
  – Trump Dreads an Iran Deal Worse than Obama’s (archived – Atlantic
  Talks have stalled in part because the president keeps aiming for a grand finale.
  – Iran Severely Damaged US Air Ops Center in Qatar Soon After War Began – Air and Space Forces
  – Exclusive: Israel sent troops to Azerbaijan during Iran war as part of secret network across region, sources say – CNN
  – A new defence champion is rising from the Gulf (archived) (UAE) – Economist

• Jun 4 – Can Russia Refrain From Hitting Back? – by English Outsider
  Related:
  – The attritional war in Ukraine: a brief update – Warwick Powell
  – Is Ukraine-Russia War Entering the End Game? – A Model of Attritional Warfare Suggests Yes – Peter Turchin
  – Ukraine’s plot to force Putin to sue for peace – Telegraph
  – AI drones – Ukrainian mid-range drone war: effects, statistics, Russian counter-measures. – Events in Ukraine

• Jun 6 – Israel Asks For A Guaranteed Share Of U.S. Weapon Purchases
  Related:
  – Pentagon Sees Growing Espionage Threat From Israel (archived) – NY Times
  – How to Understand the Israeli Bid to Forego US Military Aid (“its a shell game”) – Jewish Current
  – Revealed: Israel’s curriculum for ‘influencing public consciousness’ – 972mag

—
Other issues:
Cont. reading: The MoA Week In Review – OT 2026-118

The colonial expansion of Israel is openly subsidized by the U.S. with currently $3.5 billion per year. Most of that money is bound to Israel’s purchase of U.S. made weapons. The stipend is controlled by Congress and must pass the yearly budget review.

The Israeli government is trying to change the stipend into a more lucrative racket.

It has suggested to replace the yearly subsidy by a ‘deeper military cooperation’ which is code for the guaranteed U.S. purchases of Israeli made weapons and continuous profits for Israel’s weapon manufacturers. To institute the new scheme Congress will pass a law that will integrate Israel’s military-industrial complex into U.S. procurement and production lines.

Following that there will be no more yearly reviews:

Buried in the House’s version of the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) released on Tuesday, is section 224, entitled “United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative.”
…
Section 224 lays the groundwork for bilateral research and development, co-production of weapons, joint ventures, licensing agreements, and seemingly every manner of U.S.-Israeli military-industrial complex cooperation.
…
It would fuse the U.S. and Israeli defense sectors in multiple areas vital to the battlefields of the future, like autonomous systems and cyber.

and:

If enacted, the provision could mark a major change in one of the world’s closest military relationships, shifting the two countries from a partnership centred largely on American military aid towards one in which their defence industries are more deeply intertwined.

Section 224 would require the US defence secretary to appoint an “executive agent”: a single official to coordinate military cooperation between the US and Israel.

That work would cover joint research and development, the shared production of weapons, and the linking of military systems and data.

In future the Pentagon will have to spend, by law, a part of its budget on purchases from Israel. Given the $1.5 trillion war budget proposed by Trump the profits from such an alliance for Israel will be a multiple of its current stipend.

Congress is currently in the process of passing the proposal.

The U.S. military is not happy about the prospect of having Israel involved its technology and data systems. A subtile hint of that can be seen in this current news item:

Pentagon raised threat of Israeli spying on U.S. to highest level, sources say – NBCnews
The counterintelligence threat level was raised by the Defense Intelligence Agency in recent weeks after growing concerns that Israeli espionage had become more aggressive than usual, sources say.

Cont. reading: Israel Asks For A Guaranteed Share Of U.S. Weapon Purchases

A typical U.S. tactic against a strategic target is to ‘boil the frog’ by slowly increasing the temperature of the water it is sitting it. The conflict in Ukraine is an good example for this. Hits against Russia, directed by the CIA, are escalated bit by bit while Russia is reluctant to more severe deterrence measures.

The current war on Iran is another example. The U.S. is insisting on a ceasefire while trying to erode Iran’s leverage with economic strangulation.

Iran’s major weapon, the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, will need another month or two to fully unfold its intended effect on the U.S. and global economy. Meanwhile the U.S. is trying to tire Iran with fake diplomacy, economic measures (its blockade) and pinpoint strikes.

But Iran is well aware of this tactic. It has decided to avoid this ceasefire trap by continuous escalation:

The United States and Israel are using this [ceasefire] period to reshape realities on the ground, weaken Iran’s leverage, and arrive at a negotiating table where Tehran’s position has already been quietly eroded. This perception is strengthening those within the Islamic Republic who argue that diplomatic restraint, under current conditions, carries its own strategic costs.
…
The delay in finalizing the memorandum of understanding is increasingly interpreted as purposive rather than procedural and as a U.S. attempt to use the passage of time as a strategic instrument. The concern is that each week of ceasefire, with American military and economic pressure continuing unabated and Iranian restraint producing no reciprocal concessions, represents a net erosion of the position Tehran believes it secured during the forty days of active fighting.

Iran has decided to respond to this ‘boiling-the-frog’ tactic by increasing the cost for even the slightest U.S. attack. It is no longer responding in kind. Each U.S. strike is answered by hitting back stronger and against more targets. As Rob Campbell provides of the skirmish of June 2:

Late at night, the Americans hit an Iranian oil tanker and the Iranians retaliated with an attack on an USraeli vessel. The Americans also targeted the control tower on Qeshm Island and the Iranians responded with attacks on US Kuwaiti bases at Ali Al- Salem and Arifjan and the Fifth Fleet base. Bahrain also came under attack and it airspace closed to all traffic. It is claimed that 136 Shahed drones were seen above Kuwait while heavy damage was inflicted on Kuwait’s only international airport which has been closed.
…
Satellite images indicate damage to a hanger which housed drones and aircraft at Ali al-Salem airbase in Kuwait

The Iranians also attacked the Kurdish Separatist group at their HG in Erbil (Iraqi Kurdistan).

Iran has warned the Americans that they will respond to future attacks with increased intensity. which they appear to be doing.

The increased intensity is designed to avoid the trap:

As economic pressure mounts, Israel continues its campaign against Hezbollah, and Washington works to reduce the strategic significance of Hormuz before any deal is concluded, more voices within the Islamic Republic are arriving at the conclusion that leverage must be actively defended before it can be usefully negotiated.

Iran wants an agreement with the U.S. but is also expecting and prepared for a new round of war. For political reason President Trump is, for now, trying to avoid both, an agreement with Iran and renewed fighting. He continues to ignore Iran’s escalation. But he will have to respond (archived) if it ends up killing U.S. soldiers:

Cont. reading: War On Iran: – Iran Needs Escalation To Avoid The Ceasefire Trap

by English Outsider 

lifted from a comment

“The fact that Russia has lasted this long is a miracle.  How much longer can it hold on is another story.”

Posted by: bored | May 31 2026 15:23 utc | 7

The main thing is that we’ve all got this far without going nuclear.  It was getting just a little edgy toward the end of the Biden Presidency.

Not that anyone would be fool enough to press the button deliberately.   But when tensions are running high, and in spite of what seem to be some comprehensive deconfliction arrangements, the chances of accident are just that little bit higher.  I’m guessing, though it can’t be an informed guess, that the chances of accidental Armageddon have receded since President Biden left office.

So the question now is not so much one of straight survival.  It’s whether the Russians can keep plodding along as they are,  which keeps costs fairly low for them, or whether they’re going to have allow the conflict to spill out into Europe.

That seems on the face of it to be a simple calculation.  What is the cost of the damage the West is currently doing?.  What is the cost of stopping them doing it?   Not just the cost of the missiles it’d take to prevent the Western powers shipping drones and missiles to Ukraine, but the diplomatic and political backlash long term if the Russians were to extend the war to the European theatre as a whole.  Remembering they’d have to strike American assets in Europe too because the Americans are still key players when it comes to supplying materiel and ISR assistance and helping plan the various attacks into Russia.

But it’s not that simple a calculation.  It’s not just a matter of balancing relative costs.  War has its own momentum.  Emotional response matters too.  I remember the Falklands war.  In terms of scale that’s a ridiculous comparison.  In terms of emotional response of the general public, not.

At that time the risk and cost of countering the Argentinian invasion looked to be greater than the loss incurred by just letting the Argentinians have the islands.  No question.  But the public mood was nothing to do with relative costs.  “We’re not having that!” was the public response in the UK.  The politicians of the time, though fully aware that the risk and cost of responding outweighed the benefits, would almost certainly have lost power had they not acted in accordance with that public mood.

So here.  Striking supply depots, logistics facilities and military HQ’s in Europe goes dead against the policy that the Russian administration has been pursuing for the last four years.  They want to put the Ukrainian conflict to bed without letting the conflict spill out into open war in Europe and they’ve been doing OK on that so far.  But then the public mood enters the equation.

If someone were sending missiles and mounting sabotage and assassination attacks into England we in the general public wouldn’t be doing cost benefit analyses.  We’d be jumping up and down and insisting our politicians did something about it.  Turn that obvious truth around.  We in the West are sending missiles and mounting sabotage and assassination attacks into Russia and we can be dead sure the Russian general public is jumping up and down about that right now.

So that’s the question they’ll be pondering in the Russian Security Council.   How much more rope can we give the West, they’ll be saying,  before the Russian public gets fed up with just passively taking the knocks.  You and I, “bored”,  have no way of guessing what they’ll decide on that.   And it’s not as if you and I were players ourselves.  We’ll just have to wait and see what their decision is.