I Hate It When These Obnoxious Fucks Are Right.

[Anomalocaris]

And what exactly did we get in return for that expenditure?  The inability to discourage Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons and hamstringing our ability to influence the behavior and policy of foreign powers going forward from this date.  If you think that's a sound return on our "investment," then you're a fucking moron.

We don't need to be influencing the behavior and policy of foriegn powers. That's been a failed policy of the US for decades.

Part of the hole we dug for ourselves came from not paying enough attention to the interests of foreign powers, but instead let petty domestic political posturing dictate our foreign policy.

We’ve always been foolish that way, and we’ve just massively redoubled our efforts towards becoming even more foolish in this way, and we are doing this precisely at the time when foreign powers have crossed over our trajectory in relative power, and have gained more power to fuck us up domestically, both politically and economically, than anytime since perhaps the 1880s.