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#15 | Posted by madbomber at 2026-08-14 12:45 PM
Between us girls, because of this failure to produce the results Israel was hoping for, I don't know how much use they will have for Trump - or the US - going forward.

The night of November 5 2024 was a special nightmare for both Zelensky and Netanyahu.

Trump botched Abraham Accords that Netanyahu was working for almost 10 years to make with SA. Instead, Trump took the idea and rushed to sign something before 2020 elections to get the credit and bask in glory of "peacemaking" ceremony, so he got UAE and Bahrain (who already had informal trade relations with Israel) joined at the time, and later removed Sudan from state sponsor of terrorism list to get more signees. Unlike would-be accord with Saudis, that obviously didn't change geopolitics of the region, but Trump got the resume enhancement he could brag about, and the "peacemaker" / "no forever wars" cred he took into his 2024 campaign.

Not to mention Trump's habit of saying stupid things which he takes back an hour or day later, but which cause havoc and demand immediate attention and need to be taken "literally and seriously" by any serious government... which is much harder on [former?] "friends and allies" who - if that's possible - want to keep "normal" ties with the US for "post-Trump" (and post-traumatic) era, than adversaries who can and do just blow him off.

Iran just warned Syria, Turkiye, Qatar, SA and Iraq to not interfere with Hezbollah in Lebanon, to avoid "a broad regional confrontation."

Syria and Russia are now reestablishing the ties, importing > 80% of wheat and about half of daily crude consumption from Russia, and discussing joint exercises on former Russian bases inside Syria, while there is a possibility of another coup, or at least good old-fashioned tribal genocidal blood-letting, the way it's happening against Alawite, Druze, Kurds, Yezidi, Christians...

The $3.3B FMF to Israel (100% of it flowing back to the US, in addition to facilitating joint R&D, intelligence and commerce) is going away soon anyway, but Israeli companies have good trading and cooperation relationship with the US companies, which is more important than any "agreement" that US government can tear up or "limit" or slow-walk as has been done in the past, and particularly recently.

Trump has a knack for making a mess anywhere he goes and anything he touches turns to crap... yet he keeps inserting himself into everything, because of his ego and as long as he thinks he and/or his crime family can financially benefit.
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#20 | Posted by REDIAL at 2026-08-14 03:48 PM
Which is what? $3B per year?
- - - - - And a couple of aircraft carrier groups on hand.

Missing the fact that they are there for protection of US and allied countries' bases, datacenters and other assets in the Middle East, which became evident when Iran attacked UAE, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Jordan ($2.2B annual FMF+ aid), Egypt ($1.3B annual FMF)... and that it were Saudi and UAE rulers urging Trump to turn heat on when they saw Trump claiming victory and dithering ("Surrender!" mistakenly assuming it would follow the earlier militarily operationally successful "Venezuela playbook"), and/or turn it off when they understood that thought that making [another] deal with Iran was a better option.

As Trump [quite accurately, for a change] said many times, "Bibi doesn't tell me what to do, I tell him what to do".

Israeli command understood long ago that the only way Iran could be defeated was through real "regime change" (not Trump's "Venezuela model" or killing Ayatollah and top clerics, in which case IRGC and Basij would assume direct government control and become more entrenched) and had plans to accomplish that in late 2024 when they ran into Biden's/Blinken's "take the win," and in June 2025, when they ran into Trump's ego (he was still pining for that Nobel Peace Prize at the time) and micromanagement (he made it known "loud and clear" that he was "generalissimo" of the ops) when, after bombing a few Iran nuclear sites - operation "Midnight Hammer" which he wanted to be a punctuation point, to take the credit for "obliterating" Iran's nuclear WMD program - he abruptly called a ceasefire, then stopped the second phase of regime change plan ("They don't know what the f**k they're doing!") and Israel had to abort the op and turn back IAF planes that were on the way for another raid wave and to provide support for the IDF and Mossad's fully prepped "ground game" of dismantling and removal of IRGC and Basij command and control (by various means, including providing safe passage for them and families to neutral countries) with the uprising follow-up...

A few months later, out of the blue, Trump made another idiotic call, now for an impromptu uprising promising "Help is on the way!"... when no help was forthcoming, and more than 40,000 Iranians were slaughtered by IRGC within a few weeks.

Trump finally realized this made him look bad, as was the news that most of the nuclear "dust" was removed from the bombed plants... so that's how Trump's decisions were made.