[Serious] Does Trump deserve some credit if Iran...

[Jehanne]

Russia is a eurasian superpower..or..at least......was....

IDK how well it counterbalanced the west, looks like not so much at present....but hey..more broadly, I don't think that the wellbeing of anyone, in the us or in eurasia, depends on there being some ready us enemy in eurasia, or defeatable us enemy in eurasia.  That is an ideological belief about zero sum games and the necessity of opposing "the west" to human wellbeing.

actually, not the west, but the united states specifically.    it just so happen that at the moment the dominance of the US is such that much of the rest of the west sees there is more to be gained through exploiting recent historic kinship by abetting american hegemony and hopefully ride american coat tails for a while.   but this is not an issue of east vs west.    it is an issue of 80% if the world being dominated by a single offshore power whose most fundamental interest lies in keeping that 80 % unable to coalesce and offer effective resistance to itself while retaining for itself the power to do onto others a lot more than others can do onto itself.

Who is the United States dominanting?

Consider it from a Darwinian perspective. Whereas births are limited in the West by the reproductive freedom of women (clearly threatened, but not yet eliminated in the US), other areas of the World surviving infants are limited by the environment, such as healthcare, food, clean water, etc. Getting and sustaining the United States military into and within a theater of operation is $1 billion per day.

As with the conflict in Afghanistan, we can kill our opposition en masse, but only at great financial cost to ourselves, which means that if our opposition can continue the fight by producing enough children while not exceeding their environmental carrying capacity, they could fight us indefinitely. In this sense, a draw is as good as a win.