Tehran believes fresh attacks will come over next two days. Feeling emboldened, leaders there are ready with new targets for retaliation.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/47584733

Trita Parsi May 18, 2026

We should first recognize that restarting the war amounts to an admission that Trump’s previous escalatory gambit — the blockade of the blockade — has failed. That, in turn, was itself an admission that the war had failed. Which was an admission that the threats of war in January had failed. As I have argued before on my Substack, this relentless search for an escalatory silver bullet capable of bringing Iran to its knees is not unique to Trump; it has become a defining pathology of American Iran policy for decades.

Although negotiators have made meaningful progress on several fronts, talks have thus far failed to produce an agreement, largely because of irreconcilable differences over Tehran’s highly enriched uranium stockpile. And as Washington has come to realize that the blockade is backfiring, a new and dangerous dynamic has emerged: both sides now believe another round of fighting will strengthen their hand in the negotiations that follow.

  • OpenStars@piefed.socialEnglish
    24·
    2 hours ago

    They still won’t come here even if you do.

    They are centrists, we have tankies here, it simply is what it is.

    Some people don’t enjoy reading the incessant calls for murder e.g. Luigi-ing or guillotining. We can be anything that we set our mind to, I’m just trying to illuminate how we are - wishful thinking about what might have been does not help us in any way.

    We turn them away, we routinely say that we don’t even want them here, we (collectively) don’t want them here. So they both do not want to come nor are welcomed if they did. This matter has been settled and decided and seems extremely unlikely to change.

      • OpenStars@piefed.socialEnglish
        1·
        56 minutes ago

        We all did, and agreed it is better here:-).

        Here is the last discussion about it afaik. Here is a quote from the comments in that discussion:

        While the Fediverse may be “strong” overall, the individual pieces are too fragile to handle a significant Rexit onslaught. If even a small fraction of all Reddit users came to the Fediverse en-masse, this place as we know it would be gone.

        Here is another quote:

        I don’t want people from Reddit here. The fact that half of Twatter moved to Bluesky instead of Mastodon is a blessing. ActivityPub is by design a data harvesting goldmine, the fact that it flies under the radar is the only saving grace.

        These were both highly upvoted, with tens of upvotes and almost no downvotes. I could go on… and in fact, here’s one more:

        Ready for a bunch of teens coming in and trashing the place? No.

        (this one had many downvotes, but it had >3-fold more upvotes than down so…) Another one is:

        No, not ready for another USA spam shit. Other than that, the rest is fine.

        On the bright side, the upcoming Lemmy 1.0 software should help a bit, as moderation reports will finally federate out to mods on other instances besides exclusively the one that the community itself is on.

        But there are more downsides too - such as the fact that since that discussion the anarchist flotilla has been pushing strongly to defederate from lemmy.world, and any instance that runs PieFed software too, for being “zionists” - thereby further fracturing the Threadiverse into tankie-tolerant vs. tankie-intolerant spaces, and increasing the complexity of someone having to pick an instance. This includes lemmy.dbzer0.com that is the #7 most popular instance.

        Leftist in-fighting and the complexity of signing up are the top 2 reasons why people do not join. Lack of content is the third, which is further aggravated by defederations and in-fighting.

        I am so very glad that you felt welcomed here. I am so glad that you persevered through all of this. But… I can understand why people choose not to. At the end of the day we cannot control how others feel.