By now, you've probably noticed the chaos surrounding Iran's strategic maneuvers. This episode dives into the heart of these developments, exploring how AI-generated disinformation is reshaping perceptions and strategies in the Middle East.
Join us as we unravel the layers of misinformation, revealing the strategic underpinnings that often go unnoticed. Discover the hidden truths behind the headlines and the real impact on global stability.
Hope you enjoy!
Watch on listen on Spotify. Transcript is below if you want to read.
Iran’s geopolitical strategy and regional influence
Wjat are Iran’s Capabilities and Regional Ambitions
The sectarian divisions and Middle East dynamics under the crisis
The impact of US and Chinese policies on Middle East stability
China’s De-Risking Strategy and Global Influence
Why Information Warfare and AI Disinformation is the new normal
How Iran plans to weaken the US economy
How AI and information warfare in modern conflicts are the new norm
Substack:
00:10 Introduction: A Fluid and Divisive Conflict
01:08 The Strategic Picture: US Interests and the “Black Hole”
03:47 Iran’s Strategy: Economic War and Outlasting America
08:55 The Economic War and the Will to Fight
13:41 The Threat and Potential Escalation
17:57 No Off-Ramp and the Existential Stakes
23:16 Air Power’s Limits and the Sunni‑Shia Dimension
28:44 Gulf States’ Reactions and Internal Dynamics
34:23 The Petrodollar and Misconceptions
39:44 China’s Role: De‑risking, Not Ideology
45:35 Information Warfare: AI Slop and Narrative Friction
58:31 Wars Escape Their Planners
01:02:28 Conclusion
People’s Art of War:
Hi and welcome to States Craft. It’s been a while and I’m again here with Lance Legion. We’re going to be talking today about a very important topic that we all know, Iran. And how are you doing today, Lance?
lance’s legion:
I’m doing well. Thank you so much for having me back.
People’s Art of War:
It’s great to have you back. It’s been a while since I talked to you or anybody on the podcast. I guess things have just been really heating up since the last time.
lance’s legion:
It’s not even just heating up, but it feels like the whole world is in disarray and so much is shifting. It’s just such a fluid and dynamic situation.
And I don’t know if you’ve noticed this yourself, but it feels like everyone is so split right down the middle—whether it’s personal GCs or whatever communities and stuff. And it’s very interesting how that’s shaking out.
People’s Art of War:
It is, and what we’re seeing is this whole situation where we’ve gone from small wars to one whole old regional war at this point that it’s very, very hard to back out of.
lance’s legion:
Yeah. First to zoom out: if we take into account America’s interest in the Middle East, of course it’s the case that we’re trying to interdict energy markets away from the PRC. I guess that’s the cope argument going on.
That may be true, but then again, they can still source their oil and energy needs from Russia. And if anything, this just deepens the relationship between Russia and China, which is the antithesis of what we actually want. So it’s very questionable as to the calculus of why that’s happening.
Secondarily, I’m very skeptical about the inability to get outside of this black hole that is conflict escalation. Whether it’s intentional or not, the ramifications of that choice—whether we get sucked in or we choose to go in—would be dire for the United States. And I think the big winners would be, ironically, obviously not Iran, but everyone else.
People’s Art of War:
Right. And that’s the interesting part because when we look at all of this, people are saying, well, the United States is going to be defeated by this and Trump’s going to talk. There was really no planning on this. There should have been some ground assets in the theater—like at least a Marine Expeditionary Unit or an army unit—before this popped off, and something more than an air campaign. And I really think they actually thought Iran was just going to surrender.
But what we’re not looking at is the other side: where Iran is concerned, people say Iran’s going to win and dictate all the stuff to the Gulf States. I can see where Iran’s going to win, but at the end it depends on the position where Iran and the United States are at the end of this.
Largely, and I’ve said this before, just as the United States cannot induce regime change by an air war, Iran alone cannot induce conditions where they start to overrule the Gulf states just by an air war alone. Now, to be fair to some people I’ve talked to out there, yes, I do believe that they can enforce some pretty harsh conditions by blockading the Strait of Hormuz with munitions, with anti-ship munitions, with drones.
But as far as getting a settlement where the multipolar bros say, oh, it’s going to be like Iran’s going to be the hedge of the month for the region—I don’t think Turkey or Saudi Arabia is actually going to allow that.
lance’s legion:
Yeah, to be frank with you, the way I perceive the positive outcome for Iran… everyone talks about classical geopolitical realpolitik calculus between nation states as if the valuation of certain assets or advantages are one in the same, equally weighted. I think we fundamentally don’t have a theory of mind for the Iranian regime or we don’t understand their interests.
I don’t believe that they will actually necessarily expand their hegemonic claims in the medium term. But what I can say is that I think they have fundamentally flipped how the Middle East’s chessboard is placed.
Prior to this, most people don’t understand this, but even though the populace of the general Arab states are anti-Israel in orientation, their elites are closely connected and we’re having a very strange and new rapprochement with Israeli elites. So it’s a very strange situation because it was almost like this conflict galvanized all these Arab nations to take Iran’s side, even though there’s a lot of conflict between the Saudis and the Iranians, the Turks and the Iranians, and so on.
With the greater view of it, I think the idea for the Iranians is actually to impel the Americans into invading with the idea of either causing such economic damage to the United States, just as jihad had done an immense amount of damage to the republic, much in the same way.
I think their idea would be to make America suffer a pyrrhic victory, wreck it economically and make it a non-factor going forward in the next hundred years. This doesn’t imply that Iran will be standing up straight, being okay. Of course, they’re ready with the calculus understanding that they’re probably going to suffer a lot. But I think the idea is to finish the job ultimately of what GWOT started, which is basically the financial disruption in the United States and therefore their power abroad.
People’s Art of War:
Right. And that adds to another thing I was going to think. At this point, when I’m looking at this situation, it’s to show the world that we can not just paralyze the global economy, but we can also inflict those consequences on the global economy, which is an essential part of deterrence.
One of the most essential parts of deterrence is not just being able to say, well, I can deter you, but also being able to ratchet up the levels of that deterrence to the point that people will say, yeah, they’ve got power, and also the sustainment of that deterrence.
And the big thing I’ve been saying about Iran is we need to see how long Iran can sustain this deterrence on the global economy, which is a very, very big part because I don’t think they want other people to come into this situation again. Sustaining economic deterrence by blocking the Strait of Hormuz is probably one of the more impressive facts that we need to look at. How long can they sustain this? I think they can sustain this for a while, and it’s not just a few months either.
lance’s legion:
Yeah, I think they can do it indefinitely. Remember our campaign against the Houthis, which still exists and still interdicts all kinds of maritime travel through those straits—the Horn of Africa, basically. I think it would be near impossible to completely stop Iranian asymmetrical strikes on merchant fleets into the Persian Gulf.
And of course, disruption is not necessarily about enforcing a total blockade. What it is about is causing variance in economic prices and indexes. And if the indices are constantly volatile, the volatility abroad actually causes massive disruption domestically, especially in the United States.
Ultimately, they don’t even need to sink every single merchant ship. What they need to do is cause consumer confidence to plummet. That in and of itself causes problems. Petrol obviously becomes incredibly expensive and all the secondary and tertiary effects of that.
So long story short, I think the Iranians, not simply by utilizing FPVs and anti-ship missiles and all that kind of stuff in a kinetic sense, but they also have asymmetrical capabilities—embedded IRGC agents or spontaneous Shiite or Hezbollah-type affiliated civilians to spontaneously sabotage deep in enemy territory. So this in and of itself causes that economic disruption.
A lot of people really underestimate the fragility of the globalist system. And that’s what has everyone freaking out in the West Belt.
People’s Art of War:
And the other thing I was thinking about here is, yes, there’s economic damage to take. We need to see how well the Americans or the Europeans or these other countries take the economic damage. And I think that’s what Iran is banking on.
Now, one thing that keeps coming up in my head consistently is that other nations in the system may not like what the United States is doing. So they’re likely to put pressure first—Southeast Asia, Vietnam. These sorts of countries are probably going to put pressure first more than the United States per se.
China has its own oil reserves, the United States has its own oil reserves. Now the price is going up, but it’s at this point not painful enough.
One thing I keep thinking about is economic warfare is important to put pressure, but how much does economic warfare actually stop people from supporting a war? At what point? Because you have to break the opponent’s will to fight.
In some ways we saw this in World War I, we saw this in the Iran-Iraq War, we see this in Russia and Ukraine. The economy takes a hit, but until the average person on the ground is actually suffering, we’ve seen it throughout history where people will just simply justify and say, well, I take that, but there’s no violence being done to me.
lance’s legion:
Yeah, it’s interesting because it’s subtle, right? The calculus for the average citizen in the West, what they care about is fundamentally domestic issues and the economy, which are the most pressing concerns in the United States specifically, but I know Europe as well.
There is a significant downturn in employment. As much as a lot of propaganda says to the contrary, the economy is not well. People are underemployed, they’re kind of shut out, and the housing market is terrible.
So I think the calculus is: why are we spending all this money? Why are we suffering the effects of stagflation and the furtherance of a conflict that has questionable real outcomes, positive economic outcomes?
Because at the same time, the IRGC, as far as I know at this time when we’re recording, hasn’t actually activated any sleeper cells to attack civilian targets in the West—only targeted, I think, military targets so far.
So I think their calculus is to cause economic discomfort, which causes domestic turmoil and exacerbates what’s already happening organically, and refraining from galvanizing political support from civilians.
For instance, 9/11 was a huge mistake in a certain way because obviously everyone’s like, well, we were attacked. That’s a very easy thing to sell to Joe Schmo, and Joe Schmo supports the war. So I think they’re walking a very fine line, and that’s why they’re focusing on the economic element.
People’s Art of War:
Right, and it’s kind of feeling like it’s not registering. So if you had like 9/11 in the United States once again, that would register. I mean we saw when 9/11 happened a huge outpouring of support, people coming together. The shock was like a shock to the heart. The entire impetus for intervention and that wasn’t really registering in the back of United States citizens’ heads. Well, there’s stakes here. We could actually get hurt.
And that’s why I’m always wondering here, two things. One, what’s the actual threat to the United States from Iran as this war goes on? Two, do you think is the reason Iran’s proxies are not doing certain things? Like for example, Houthis haven’t fired any missiles and this is a great time to do it. We haven’t seen them do it. Hezbollah is doing a campaign in Southern Lebanon and the Israelis are fighting them, that makes sense.
And then three, with all this situation, like you saw with the sleeper cells, how deadly do you think this threat is? How far do you think this could expand? Like Europe or even into other parts of the Middle East? What’s the escalation ladder?
lance’s legion:
Okay, let me handle it from bottom to top.
To answer your question, the IRGC, most people don’t know how concentrated they are actually in the far abroad. So for instance, if you go to South America and Argentina, you go to Buenos Aires, there’s Iranian agents there, in the Philippines and Suriname and so on. And of course in the United States and the West.
The MO for Shiite kind of clandestine—not terror per se, but state actor—doesn’t resort to the same Wahhabist, Sunni type of terrorist modus operandi. So I think they’re going to exclusively focus on industrial sabotage.
I don’t know if people are aware of this, but sometimes there are very few plants in the United States that store eggs, for instance. And early in the Ukraine-Russia war, a specific egg processing plant that was like the one main one for the entire Southern United States magically caught fire. A lot of people, of course, can make the case that it was totally an accident. And that’s obviously the point of clandestine action—to have probable deniability. So you’re going to see a lot of that.
I think if things escalate, you’ll start to see more severe and incisive actions take place. What I mean is probably attempted assassinations of various major politicians in the West. Maybe it could be the case and you hear some bombings of military bases or whatever, like 9/11. I don’t think that’s what’s going to happen to us.
So for the second question, it’s going to be relatively tame, a relatively traditional Westphalian type of exchange.
And then going to the first question, which is about the actual acute kinetic threats the Iranians are likely to incur upon us. Well, here’s the thing. The Iranians have modestly only accessed a few of their hypersonic missiles to target Israel and I think Qatar and some bases of the United States in the Middle East. But they have a large stockpile.
And that’s why there’s this kind of freaking out about that capability because that kind of technology, which they have proven to be advanced—very adept users of this kind of battery system. Obviously they have a lot of institutional knowledge garnered by at least a decade of ballistic missile unit actions.
So ultimately what you’re going to see is this continuous air campaign. It’s likely going to last a few months and then we’re going to figure out, well, we can’t extract the diplomatic outcome that we had intended. Therefore what we’re going to do is probably have some limited interventions on the mainland, on the coast, to interdict the blockade efforts.
And then later, likely the conflict will expand. Of course, there’s going to be a lot of asymmetrical actions taking place, both by the official government, but also at the same time by spontaneous civilians just protecting their country.
And this is very funny—I talked to some Iranian ex-pats talking about even though they oppose the regime as it stands, if someone were to invade, they would stand by that regime. So I think it would be a mistake.
You’d see a lot of unconventional strikes. I think the United States would handily defeat the conventional force, but that’s not actually where the threat would reside. It would be the unconventional asymmetrical insurgency that would pose the gravest threat to a protracted American presence.
People’s Art of War:
And it’s very interesting because when we look at this, there’s clearly no off-ramp, no clear ones. With the entire crisis, Trump made it existential for Iran. You mentioned with going on with the ACP, which is fueling this asymmetric stuff. Trump has made it existential for Iran where you’re assassinating leaders.
At the point you start assassinating leaders, that makes it politically existential. And at that point, they’re not going to surrender because if they surrender, that means they’re going to lose their grip on power.
And then at the same time, you’re attacking their economy and then attacking their people. And at that point, it starts to be, well, is it even an attack on the regime or is it just an attack on the Iranian people?
And going back to what you’re saying, that doesn’t give very much of an offer. And when you see Iran attacking the Gulf States, some of them are not involved, some of them have been negotiators for Iran in the past—you’re creating a situation where there is literally no offering.
It’s very hard for the Gulf States and the United States at this point, given the actions that they’ve done to each other and the tit-for-tat retaliation, to not just take significant concessions to come back, but also significant economic concessions to even get people back on the table.
That’s the one thing we’re starting to see. Where is the offering? Because both Trump, the Gulf States, and at this point even Iran have created no off-ramp. And the great powers in the world order at this time—China, the European Union, Russia—there’s no negotiation. There’s no one saying, well, we need a mediator.
lance’s legion:
It’s always very interesting because America has a long experience of conducting air campaigns with the expectation of dissolving popular support for an adversary’s regime or incumbent governance, the elites. And every time we do that, it is resolutely the case that they always support their regime as opposed to where, if there was no air campaign, they would likely be on the fence or indifferent.
And again, same thing with economic sanctions. If you notice, actually it causes the local populace to start to understand that it’s not the fault of the regime that they’re poor. The regime is able to convincingly point at an outside aggressor and therefore it actually increases cohesion within.
Now, Iran is a very interesting polity itself because the Ayatollah is not simply the leader politically, but he is also something akin to the Pope. He’s a spiritual leader with international ties. So there’s a dynamic: what if someone damned the Pope? What do you expect is going to happen from that? It’s just going to piss off people.
And to say nothing, of course, that the American administration is also making, I think, maybe a miscalculation. If it’s the case that they want the regime to change and install the Shah—I heard that under-25s want the Shah to come back, but everyone older than that is very opposed to it.
At the same time, I think the stratagem is not necessarily to depose the regime, but rather shatter Iran itself. For instance, today there was a Kurdish YPG or PKK spokesperson that made the claim that they’re mobilizing the Kurds in the region that’s obviously within their homeland that they’re trying to claim within Iran.
The motivation behind that is to levy the ethnic minorities within Iran because it’s not all Farsi. There are various different ethnic composites within this state apparatus and they’re trying to pit each against each other, maybe arm them and galvanize them, give them some kind of incentive.
But resolutely, I think most of the Iranian populace actually just hates America because of the fact it’s been a multi-decade economic blockade, which they have grown up knowing that it’s America’s fault that they’re so impoverished. And it’s convincingly so.
And so now America is threatening your religious leader, killing them. Of course, I understand that only 40% of the populace is practicing Shiite Muslim, but it also affects secular people because for as much as someone may be secular, they can also understand the cultural affinity of this kind of figure in Iran.
So I think this whole thing is such a miscalculation. From what I understand, America’s hand was forced by whatever it be, some intervention from before. I think the miscalculation is more also because of the fact that they were forced into a position that was unwinnable as opposed to anything else.
People’s Art of War:
That’s a large part of this. It’s still boiling down to the Iranian people may not like the government, just like people did not like Winston Churchill much before the Blitz. But when you start bombing people and without a ground campaign or without a way to politically show people physically that they are defeated, you just harden the will of the populace, as you said.
The air-land battle doctrine of the United States gets into this idea, especially since the ’90s, the 2000s, GWOT, where you think that overwhelming air power will get them to surrender. To the point that it’s become a meme.
Before, it was, well, we’re going to use overwhelming air power in the ’90s to be able to force them to come to the table and negotiate on our terms. So air power itself was used as leverage, as one tool in our toolkit.
And then you had GWOT, of course, where people were also on the ground and air power was used to make it easier so that we could put troops on the ground.
What we’re really seeing right now is this vibe thinking where people say, well, if you just do things, then it’s going to happen. Which is basically what the Iran war boils down to. It’s one thing to plan an invasion, but it’s a totally other thing to say you want to meme it into existence using air power, which was not the case in 2003 in Iraq or 2001 in Afghanistan, or even the air campaigns we saw over Serbia in the nineties.
So, but that also brings me to another topic. I think this is one that isn’t getting discussed on Twitter: the Muslim angle.
One thing I have noticed in the Arab spaces, the Gulf States, the Twitter spaces, is there is a very strong emphasis on how this is between two different sides of Islam—the Shia and the Sunni—and that’s just not populating on the Western side. The Western commentary is all about commerce. It’s very interesting to watch it.
Some geopolitical analysts a long time ago—20 years ago, 15 years ago—were saying that the rivalry between Iran and the Saudis is of course regional rivalry, of course with petrodollar and oil, but it’s also a rivalry of two sects of religion. One who controls two mosques and then the Shia—like you said, basically the Ayatollahs who were the Shia popes. I might be over-exaggerating that, but it’s the rivalry between two sects. And that’s definitely a factor that I don’t feel Western people are thinking about.
lance’s legion:
Yeah, I noticed the same thing. Mind you, Iran’s official regime is Shiite, specifically of a very specific sect. Even within Shiite Islam, many groups and clerics of rival schools denounce the Ayatollah as kind of heretical. So even within Shiite Islam, there is this kind of division.
And on top of that, there is the division between Sunnis and Shiites. I understand that there’s this element of sectarianism and it’s why historically over the last 20 years, many of the Arab states have approximated themselves in a kind of loose, tense alliance with Israel with the interest of leveraging Israel’s capabilities against Iran.
What’s interesting is that the Saudi prince kind of did a 180 here. The last 10 years have been trending towards a kind of pro-Israel relationship, now they’re starting to have more solidarity with Iran, which is incredible considering the fact that Saudi Arabia is a staunchly Sunni country.
I know that the Wahhabists have been effectively cleared out of the elites, but it’s important to remember that the majority of their body politic are fundamentally fundamentalist Sunni Muslims.
Within MENA, these sectarian differences and divergences cause a lot of inter-seeing conflicts. Iraq was a great example, especially in the south with the Shiites taking power.
The point is, it seems like in the West, expatriate Islamic communities somehow are more united, and in the theater they’re kind of tentatively aligned, even though they’re still at each other’s throats at the end of the day.
People’s Art of War:
That’s a really good point to emphasize. I think a lot of people do see the Shia and the Sunni as two blocks when the reality is there’s divisions in this. Even the Iraqi Shia do not 100% get along with Iranian Shia either. They weren’t exactly 100% on board when they were taking orders during the Iraq war. They were very like, well, yeah, we appreciate the help, but we have our own priorities here.
One thing when we look at this too: if any of you guys look online, right now the Saudis are doing quite a bit of saber rattling. The rhetoric has shifted from, well, no, we’re just here on the sidelines to, no, Saudi Arabia will defend its own. And it’s not just Saudi. The UAE is starting to do this too as well. And that’s a very huge shift.
lance’s legion:
Yeah, for as much as people may conflate Saudi Arabia with Al Qaeda and tenuously connected to ISIS, what’s interesting is that the state itself—the Saudi princes—usually are very benign, not usually very belligerent. A lot of their actions are clandestine and muted. But it seems like they’re taking a very firm stance, although of course we have to take it with a grain of salt.
The Saudi military is very incompetent, notoriously so, compared to even other Arab regimes. I think the most competent Arab republic military was either Syria or Iraq before Saddam Hussein fell. So the Saudi Arabians, for as much as the Royal Saudi Army is well kitted out with all the Western weapons platforms and training and so on, I don’t really believe a lot in their power.
But if they’re doing the saber rattling, it’s an indicator that there’s kind of a theater realignment. I think what’s happening now is there’s kind of a solidarity against America and Israel for messing things up. So that’s my take on the situation personally.
People’s Art of War:
I mean, it kind of goes through the middle, I feel like. They’re clearly not happy that the United States and Israel wage this war without letting them know, without considering the impact on Saudi or the Gulf States.
But at the same time, I feel like there’s this: we got an enemy that’s destroying our economy. They are hitting our refineries, hitting our other settings. And that makes it existential. We have petrodollars, we have petrostates here.
For all of Saudi’s attempts under Mohammed bin Salman to try and diversify the economy or even engage in economic boosters like NEOM—I don’t understand how that’s an economic booster, it is according to the Saudis, but it hasn’t gotten them off the petrodollar.
Dubai and the UAE have kind of done that, but let’s be honest here, Dubai and the UAE is a clearing house for black market stuff, but also a logistics hub.
What we’re seeing is that the Iranians are hitting them where it hurts. And at the same time, the Saudis and the Emiratis, the Qataris, they’re in this situation where culturally and they’re kind of tribal, they cannot just back down. They have to show their people, the factions that are underneath them, that yes, we were strong.
And it shows because Saudi had a backdoor communication to Iran early in this war where they said, hey, can we just strike some random target? I don’t need to put anyone there.
lance’s legion:
If I’m going down, you’re coming down with me.
It’s interesting because I think the Iranians intuitively understand how the dynamics of specifically Saudi Arabia work, but of course the other Gulf states as well. As you alluded to before, the organization of their politics and their culture heavily emphasize retribution as a form of justice.
And so, especially an energy-centric economy, it’s a critical vulnerability that the Iranians are exploiting—it’s destabilizing the entire economy. You’re not going to just offer the other cheek because if you do so as a sovereign, no one’s going to respect you. And if you’re going to offer the other cheek, why am I not the head guy? I’m a strong guy. So it causes a lot of civil disturbance within.
So the calculus is, as you said, it’s destabilizing and it causes belligerency.
I’m sure that as things stand, many of the natural gas and oil fields are ablaze. It’s going to cause a lot of disruption in the petroleum industry. Of course, the petrodollar still exists. Hasn’t gone away, guys.
And just before we stepped on here, I just saw that America lifted the blockade for Russian petrol and, ironically enough, to Iranian petrol. So I wonder what the calculus is there. How it is that we’re going to actually make that happen, but it’s very interesting.
People’s Art of War:
Right, and it does show a sort of back down in a way. If you had thought this through, you wouldn’t be releasing the oil from somewhere like Russia, which you had embargoed before. You wouldn’t be releasing the oil from a country that you’re fighting right now.
I feel like when you’re reading into this, there’s all these people on Twitter timeline celebrating the end of the petrodollar. But at the same time, you look at how many things inside your room right now are made from petroleum derived products. It’s easily 30, 40, 50%.
And as long as those exist and as long as you have something that is not derived from those products, the petrodollar is not going away. With all the EV talk and all this other stuff, people are not realizing that even components inside EVs still have some petroleum derived products. So the petrodollar is not going away.
lance’s legion:
I doubt it’s going to go anywhere for at least 150 years, I would say, despite the fact that technology is advancing because ultimately the engineering technology regarding everything from chips to mundane plastic items is all derived from petrol. So it’s always going to be a reliable index.
And for as much as there’s a finite amount of oil, I just don’t see it not being a constant. So I really would hesitate or caution people to be overly optimistic of the shift away from the petrodollar because the way I see it is it’s actually going to entrench, especially as the supply of oil becomes more acute or threatened internationally, therefore causing its price to surge and therefore its salience as a currency and exchange value.
People’s Art of War:
And I mean, there’s also that talk you hear too about people saying, well, they are going to make us pay it in Chinese RMB. And I say, yeah, well, that’s a little bit funny in my head, because if you look at what it takes to do payments in another non-reserve currency, you have to set up credit lines, you have to be able to have liquidity available on the site. And that takes a significant amount of financial engineering that isn’t done in a day.
And it just feels like people have the right idea, but there’s just a lot of what I call multipolar world-kanging, where people are assuming that this stuff is going to happen overnight. Now, I’m not saying it won’t happen, but it’s going to take a lot more than doing this.
lance’s legion:
To be fair though, the multipolar world-kanging is infinitely orders of magnitude better than whatever is happening in the West. Because it’s just like a geriatric Alzheimer’s patient playing chess with someone not so intelligent. Someone who is fundamentally crippled in the mind is always going to lose. So it’s a very interesting dynamic.
I think multipolarity is more a reflection of a reality as opposed to a doctrine per se. It’s still being fleshed out. It’s a work in progress as a philosophy.
But I think it’s a massive strategic miscalculation on the part of the United States. And it’s actually going to be the cause for a hegemonic realignment.
I think that America made a huge mistake by conducting this air campaign because, as you know, they have completely emptied their stocks in Eurocom of basically Cold War deep storage weapons platforms, smart munitions, et cetera, into Ukraine, which has lasted a long time. That all got chewed up and used out.
And then of course, when this air war began, they diverted all their assets. I think it’s roughly almost 60% of the Air Force’s assets are currently being deployed in that theater itself. And they’re taking very important assets away from the Pacific theater to this Iranian weird chiasco.
If it’s the case that America truly believes the PRC is the main rival, it’s a huge miscalculation because the PRC already has peer or actually superior capabilities in a number of critical aspects, whether it’s technological, industrial capacity, etc.
And to say nothing of the huge massive population advantage it has in comparison to the West and is fundamentally united. It has a unity of action. It has a will as opposed to the West, which is completely divided at home and abroad.
The industrial base of the West is completely hollowed out by the globalists. And China was very smart about basically keeping on-shoring its hard capital investments and as well as its financial investments in the domestic theater.
Do you have any thoughts about that?
People’s Art of War:
If we really look at how China has been playing this, I think that a lot of what we’re seeing is a lot of pushback from people in the Middle East, Africa, the usual places about why isn’t China doing it? It’s just this kind of feeling of like they need to be doing what the Soviet Union did.
But to go back to what you’re saying, China deliberately has done this for centuries. It’s nothing new. We used to call it “managing the barbarians.” Basically anything that isn’t within our sphere—like East Asia—we generally tend to ignore.
It’s not this internal cultivation that people think; it’s more like, well, does that directly affect us? And if it’s farther away, we’re going to manage it with diplomacy rather than direct wars.
If you look at Chinese history, when they go for wars overseas, it is almost always the region right next to it—whether it’s the Korean war, invasions of the near abroad. And it’s usually in response to the idea of managing foreign powers overseas by playing them against each other and then putting the weight on the scales so that it helps our interests.
When you’re talking about the commerce angle, that’s exactly how China’s done it. China generally tries to find different ways to de-risk, finds different ways to minimize the impact of changes that are happening overseas. So what we see is investments in Indonesian oil, investments in Russian oil, investments in Azerbaijan oil, investments in Iraqi oil.
So the idea is a de-risking strategy: okay, well, if there’s a conflict here, at least it won’t hurt us as bad.
lance’s legion:
Do you mind if I just make a note? This is actually a good geopolitical lesson in teaching realpolitik. This is exactly what you want to do. You want to diversify, especially if you’re an energy poor country and you have a deficit of domestic energy production or whatever it may be. Diversification of markets are essential to maintaining cheap and abundant external imports.
With this oil thing, I’ve heard a lot of core analysis excusing this war as a means to undermine China’s energy dependency with Iran, because right now China sources 15% of its petrol from Iran. But they forget this fact that China has many markets to select from. They’re just simply going to shift.
And to say nothing, they’ve been selling a lot of their export variety, edge technologies, as anti-aircraft missile battery systems and C5ISR capabilities to the Iranians as a form of testing, shield testing for their domestic military. As we spoke about earlier in another episode, it’s actually very wise.
And many people think that they have to pursue an aggressive foreign policy much in the same way the Soviets pursued aggressive foreign policy abroad in the far abroad to Africa, Latin America, et cetera. They don’t need to do that because they’re fundamentally geopolitically spaced in a place that’s advantageous for them.
And also on top of everything, we’ve pushed Russia into their corner, which obviously it’s still an adversarial relationship. But as things stand, they still have a way out into the markets that make it effectively able to outmaneuver a blockade or some kind of restriction of market access.
People’s Art of War:
Right. And that has a lot to do with how China sees it. Generally what we saw with the Soviet Union and the United States during the Cold War, it’s very ideological, evangelical. They want to spread their ideology beyond their shores to increase their influence. That’s soft power projection.
China generally in history is not as aggressive or ideological—I would say they’re not evangelical. China is not evangelical about its policy. It’s more of, well, you come to us and you learn from us, not, well, you come to us and we convert you. There’s a huge difference.
If you look at Japan, Korea, Vietnam, they’re all in the same sphere. And the reason they started to be able to take on Chinese aspects without losing their own cultural identity was because when China was the center of East Asian political life, the geopolitical center of East Asia, it was advantageous to be Chinese, to act Chinese, to be able to get benefits.
And that’s a large part of what goes into this, but I think we got off the Iran war part a little bit. I want to talk about China a little more some other time, but let’s get back to the Iran war.
So what’s your take though on the massive amount of AI slop that’s going out there? It’s insane how much the third world and the kangaroo speaker is afraid of that to the point that like Nikita Beer and Elon Houcher retrained the entire algo.
lance’s legion:
Because this is, you know, an information worker, this is called spoofing. Of course, it’s the case that there are individuals who make this that do it with the intention in some weird way to support their war effort and their sympathies.
But the utility of it is actually that the algorithm boosts it and it obscures true news and the true dynamics of the battlespace to emerge by simply blotting it out with slop.
I’m sure you felt this way. You just go to the timeline and you just can’t even watch it. You watch three of these videos at a time, which is AI slop bullshit, and you’re like, I’m just turned off. I don’t even want to know.
And so this plays to the advantage of Iran, whoever’s sympathetic to the polity, because ultimately what it’s doing is minimizing internal damage reports being taken out. So the United States doesn’t have the information initiative in this instance, as we’ve before.
Of course, the bombing of the school that killed like those hundred schoolgirls was a huge blow to the information war as well.
And then conversely, the few things that we do hear is Israel being struck. Obviously in the background, even though it’s not very much covered, we know that America is doing a lot of strikes in Iran and they’re relatively effective in degrading Iran’s military capabilities, especially in air and sea. But the average people don’t see that.
So therefore, because of the spoofing, because of the slop, we have the perception that Iran is actually holding out better than it is and therefore galvanizing support against the war because it’s leading to inconclusive results from our perspective.
People’s Art of War:
Right. And that’s what we call narrative friction. There’s a difference between the reality and then what’s being served up on there.
And it doesn’t help that the AI agents or the staff that we didn’t see during the Ukraine war are available en masse. The Ukraine war, I think, was the last real war where OSINT could say, I gathered all this information. This is my conclusions.
With the current war, it’s become, no, this is what is popular. We’re monetized, can make slop, slop videos, slop posts and push this tribal narrative on one side.
And I really think part of the danger here is that we’re getting what you called arsonist incentive. Arsonist incentive just means that, hey, well, I get money if I burn down the house. I’m going to not just burn down one house, I’ll put it down the neighborhood. And that’s what we’re getting here.
There’s a huge difference between the Ukraine war in 2022 and the Iran war now, and how much the AI slop has increased.
lance’s legion:
Yeah, technology has certainly changed it. It’s like a combat modifier.
From what I remember in the early Russian intervention—not even 2022, but early, early, like 2014—the Kremlin sought a policy of just absolute truth or silence. When the Russians came into Crimea, they denied their involvement until it was annexed.
The Russian invasion into Ukraine, of course, there were slight exaggerations on the part of the Russians. But I think they understood that pursuing a truthful policy was better than trying to create false narratives that didn’t line up with reality.
Now with AI, there’s a lot of videos that Boomers mistake as reality. And you have to remember that the median IQ and cognitive ability of reasoning and perception of the average person globally is actually pretty low. And AI is getting so good that in passing, you can believe it’s true.
So I think in the wars to come, there’s going to be a lot of this information narrative friction being purposely deployed or artificially boosted.
And monetization—another neoliberal mistake—is monetizing everything, and it causes perverse incentives. The perverse incentive is self-defeating. It’s just as you said, the arsonist incentive. So it’s a conundrum and I wonder how that’s going to develop, but it’s certainly a trend that will only increase in frequency and robustness as time goes on.
People’s Art of War:
Right, and we’ve seen this situation where they’re no longer trying to convince you. Propaganda before tried to hide the details and create some sort of strategic ambiguity about what was going on. Now, they’re not even attempting that. They just said, well, we can mass produce all this slop. So we’ll just dump it on you.
And at a certain point, once they dump it all on you, your brain turns off. So the cost of verification in this case exceeds the ability to understand and correlate what you’re seeing.
When the cost expands explosively, the average person isn’t going to even look at it. And the average analyst is not going to look at that. They’re just going to push the narrative because all that matters is speed. All that matters is to be there first. And it doesn’t matter if you’ve been verified, you can just keep going and going.
What we’re seeing here is an acceleration of propaganda at levels that we have never seen before in human history. To the point that it does not take very much to set off a war.
Even in World War I, even before the Spanish American War, the press was sending all sorts of slop, making up conspiracy, making up victories and defeats. That’s normal in the fog of war. But that was humans doing it with a printing press. There was enough time for the diplomats to go in between and try to resolve the situation.
In this case, this might even outstrip the diplomats’ ability to resolve the situation because some people have different incentives, whether it’s just starting a war or an industry that says, well, if I can get money off this, why not make it happen? And that’s the neoliberal aspect you’re talking about. The idea of money has outstripped the consequences.
lance’s legion:
And on top of everything else, the irony is it’s not the state arbitrarily propagating propaganda, but it’s organically sourced. That’s the funny thing. And that’s why it’s so challenging to counteract because it’s coming from everywhere all at once.
And so the only people privy to the reality on the ground are those in decision-making circles. And there’s so much contradicting information coming out, whether it’s through the news. For instance, how do we really know that America lifted the blockade? How do we know that it’s still sailing 30 minutes later?
And to say nothing of the fact that a lot of people have become turned off—myself, I just don’t look at the conflict day to day as I used to during the early Russian invasion of Ukraine, because none of the information actually holds up.
To say nothing of how it’s a fluid and dynamic event, human event. War is that way.
And so for me, I would give advice to your listeners: you should wait two weeks or three weeks and then check in. You’ll be able to see what is true, what isn’t true, by reading between the lines—whether it’s official press or the official organs of state giving announcements, X, Y, or Z—look at the markets.
But do not pay attention to OSINT accounts in the same way that you could semi-reliably look at OSINT accounts in the Russo-Ukraine war. So that’s the dynamic. And I think it’s only going to increase, and I think OSINT is a thing of the past, frankly. I just don’t think it’s a real thing anymore, to be honest with you.
People’s Art of War:
Funny. That’s real funny you mentioned it because in one of the articles I said before, they’ve largely figured out how to counteract those annoying Twitter posters—as that Air Force Colonel was saying—instead of trying to figure out likes and tell the truth or try and hide it harder, they just increase the volume of data.
And we’ve seen it where China has started to fly drones with signals to be able to confuse the flight radar, the OSINT guys, or people just start delaying satellite photos. So OSINT at this point starts to become a prey to volume and then a prey to rumor to the point that people become apathetic because of the volume.
And you’re not going to sustain that. It’s just getting to this point where when people hit that limit, unlike we saw in 2022 with the Ukraine war, they’re no longer trying to verify the sources or verify what’s happening. The easier thing is just to check out.
I mean, look at Twitter timeline. I’m seeing guys—I’m not going to say the name—but it’s all two, three liner stuff about reacting to what journalists are saying. Yes, we saw that before during COVID and during the Ukraine war, but the responses were funny, but they were also trying to disagree with facts.
What we are seeing now is not facts. We are just seeing people who are pushing their academic policies, who are pushing their tribal theories, but also people who are pushing, I would say, simple narratives, football narratives, where their team is winning and it’s acting like a football match with boosters in everyone.
Like Lance was saying, I’m going to say this again: wait and take time to actually understand what’s going on. Because half the stuff you see in the feed is not going to matter a week or two from now. I’m not even joking.
Do we talk about operations in Syrsk or do we talk about Mariupol all in Ukraine? No, because we’ve moved on. They were significant at the time, they were strategically important. But at the same time, you got to arrange these data inside the biggest strategic picture. And the strategic picture, as Lance is saying, is something you form by yielding.
lance’s legion:
Yes, exactly. And to say nothing, just to kind of cap it off and reiterate your point, it’s become white noise. And so the only things which are relevant anymore to pronounce about, especially these kind of drifters, all they have to do is basically they’re making their own ethical or emotional appeal. Yeah, I was trying to be kind, but it really is fan fiction from every angle.
People’s Art of War:
It’s fan fiction.
lance’s legion:
And it’s from right to left. And I think it’s a huge disservice because ultimately you only undermine your own position, of whatever kind you may be, whatever persuasion. And so the best thing to do is to retain that kind of organic credibility if you’ve run one of these accounts by refusing to do that. But of course, you’re your own person, so do whatever you want.
But this is why I don’t even make comments about it. And to say nothing, of course, there’s a lot of incentive not to report on real news because whether it’s a state actor or not, doxing and harassment and all this kind of stuff.
Ultimately, I think it’s also feeding into the fact that so much information is just simply not credible and it’s not salient.
Americans make fun of Russia because it’s five years into the three day war or whatever the three day special military operation. I think that Iran might turn into precisely a similar situation where it was at first a limited intervention with very specific and concrete objectives, which again are far outside the reach of whatever mechanism that NATO originally chose. But I think it’s only going to be a black hole. And that’s what I fear the most personally.
People’s Art of War:
Right, and wars historically have a way of escaping the trajectories of the planners who created them. I mean, look at World War I, look at World War II. You have ideas, but managing the friction I feel like is the biggest test of the strategist and whether or not they can manage that friction while we can do a judo move and turn that to their advantage is the true sign of the skill with strategy.
lance’s legion:
No, and if you don’t mind me just kind of pivoting a little bit here, the way I see it, if we zoom out just to contextualize the Iranian conflict, I think what’s happening right now and the rapprochement between the United States and Russia is because we’re trying to balance the EU away from the PRC.
I know this sounds crazy, but obviously there are a number of governments within the EU which are becoming increasingly hostile to the United States. And so they’re making inroads with the Chinese as a kind of counterhegemon in a way to play one side off the other, which is very wise.
And I think what’s going to end up happening is a strategic realignment where the United States will find a way to split Russia away from economic ties with China and find a way to isolate the EU.
Though this still does not—it’s not even simply explained—but it doesn’t justify intervention just from a realpolitik perspective into Iran because the outcome of it would be at most, I don’t know, pyrrhic victory. I mean, what is the move there? What do you think is the read on the conflict? What’s the cause?
People’s Art of War:
For Iran and for this, it took Iran kinda by surprise because I feel like there is this feeling rather than the United States or just online of the rational actor. Like we place this highly, highly, high evidence on the rational actor.
People as we’ve seen in our own lives, as we’ve seen in history, constantly doing things that are totally against rational interest and it seems rational to them at the time. So understanding the premises that they have that’s rational is important.
But from what I see all this going on, whether it’s the Ukraine or the United States here, as long as there is no next steps, as long as there’s no clear offer to all of this and especially when a leader goes into a conflict and treats it like it’s a social media post or as an influencer kind of thing—it’s more impulsive because of the influence of social media.
lance’s legion:
I completely agree. I guess I don’t make any pronouncements as to how things will turn out because it’s so fluid. Just as you implied, state actors are just as irrational with irrational priors as any one individual. One thing might mean something completely inordinately more than someone else.
And so we don’t understand the reasoning matrix of the Iranian regime, especially because it’s become decapitated, which is so funny. It’s like, how are you supposed to engage in terms with a nation whose leadership you’ve decimated? And so what you’ve caused is power to become diffuse, and therefore there’s no decisive outcome possible due to that very fact.
So it’s very hard to presage what’s going to happen. All I can say is I think conflicts and their intensity and profligacy will be an ever-increasing trend in the future, especially at least in the medium term. I’d say the next 20 years, it’s going to be a continuous roll of various different flashpoints and kinetic exchanges throughout the world, especially in the third world.
People’s Art of War:
Great, and we’re going to see people try and settle the score as the United States weakens and as China or some other great power doesn’t step in and give their own version of world order. And that’s an interesting topic we should talk about another time, but that’s all the time we have today. Anyways, thank you so much for being on the show.
lance’s legion:
Thanks for having me on. Thank you so much.
People’s Art of War:
And thanks for listening. If you want to find us, you can find Lance at Lance Legion on Twitter, also Lance Legion on Substack. You can also find me, People’s Art of War, on Substack, Twitter, and also on Spotify as Statescraft. Thank you for listening and we will see you again in the next episode.
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