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Radio War Nerd EP #515 — World of Wars: Iran, Ukraine (Patreon)

Published:
2025-04-19 01:02:15
Imported:
2025-04
Tags:

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Content

Recorded: April 17, 2025

We discuss reports of Trump Admin's factional splits over whether to start bombing Iran now or later + no end to the Ukraine war...

*Music interlude by Brendon Anderegg. Check out music from his group Mountains here

*Clip of UGV (unmanned ground vehicle)*Map of Kostiantynivka frontTotal time: 1:28:04Direct link to this episode's mp3 here

*

Subscribe to Radio War Nerd at patreon.com/radiowarnerd

Sound production by Telescope Audio

Check out the Radio War Nerd Merch store here!

Order your print or ebook of John Dolan's new book Erdogan Pizza: Dispatches from a Violent & Grotesque World

Files

Comments

NYCM&AHole

Insert shipping up to Boston by Dropkick Murphy’s

Andrew

Welcome to Boston Mark!

William

Brb, going to Cheeto’s oblong office and calling an airstrike on my position

William

Dropping “commandos” in Iran has some “parachute bandarites into Ukraine in 1945” energy

konradingus

Enjoy your stay in Boston! Jonathan Richman played around here less than a month ago

Grant Francis

Boston is the best city if you were also born in Massachusetts

JoR

Is there a current war in the world that the hosts enjoy following? It's all pretty grim lol. Whats a war the war nerd would actually want to see? How about Ireland?

OH

Hello from Merida 👋

hayley summer evans

im biased as im from boston but i think we have the best regional accent in America ;}

Elsie Hupp

The long, narrow shape of the Hudson Valley is indeed very strange, in that NYC is closer to Philadelphia than it is to Albany.

Simon Esders

After countless articles and podcast episodes, the war nerd finally gives his conclusive thoughts on the whole thing: "War! Huh! Good god, what is it good for?"

a clash of purple

I mean... I guess it depends on where exactly they send them, and what they want them to do, but at a glance it seems like an excellent way to give Iran some high-value prisoners? I really don't understand why the U.S. leadership seems so certain that we can start a war with Iran and everything will be fine. The fact that Israel wants it so bad should really set off more alarm bells. From a completely amoral, realpolitik perspective, their strategic plan of "Fight Wars Against Everyone Simultaneously Forever While Politically Imploding" doesn't seem very sensible.

a clash of purple

JoR, we're talking about massive bloody armed conflicts here, not sportsball. Dolan and Ames aren't sociopathic teenage edgelords posting on the internet, they don't "enjoy" ongoing wars. They have enough taste to only look fondly on wars that are long-past, where everyone involved has been peacefully dead for a long time. Even when present-day conflicts result in some farcical shenanigans, they take it seriously. Remember when a bunch of Indian soldiers died on the border with China after a ridiculous pitched medieval battle with polearms and phalanxes, and Dolan had to ruin everything by musing how it must feel to die, being a uniformed soldier of a modern nation-state, tumbling off a mountain and slowly freezing to death in a ravine after a glorified shoving match against a bunch of rowdy Chinese border guards with makeshift pollaxes? Really sucked the fun out of that incident.

PostmasterFenian

Not even close white trash Baltimorean for the win

William

Re: jd Vance comments: since it is a difference without a difference to me, I just say he’s a fucking moron, because nothing is worse for a thin- skinned “intellectual” than having their attempts at sarcasm and “wit” misunderstood as their actual position

William

Re: Ukraine: I did see a funny post from a Ukraine simp crying about how Russia kept going around strongholds, like, “they’re too cowardly to stand and fight the UAF, they just keep going around them until the UAF is forced to pull back!”

William

They’re delusional? Like, their predecessors have thought they could create barriers of radioactive cobalt to stop armies

JoR

I agree about John, but what does Gary think about what you wrote ? I would think he would lament such a take.

Jack Sylvia

Great episode but a comment around the 31 min mark.. while third parties like the Populist Party got crushed, let’s not forgot that the most successful third party/breakaway party is the Republican Party. And they won the presidency within 2 elections of their formation and accomplished their purpose (abolition) within a decade.

sleepyjed

BOSTON MENTIONED 🔥🔥🔥

a clash of purple

Well, they've been very successful tightening the screws on the Iranian regime without ever precipitating a military escalation. If they keep up the pressure, Iran will weaken, and cracks will grow in their society. I doubt they'll collapse as suddenly or dramatically as Syria did, but I think they could be turned into an isolated basket case like North Korea, with absolutely no power outside their borders. That seems to be the preferred program of the relatively sane people in the American ruling class. I have to assume that it's really just Israeli pressure demanding an open war with Iran. I really don't know how that would turn out for Israel, but I suppose it'd good for Netanyahu. It would be a total, unmitigated disaster for the United States, though. The question of how our military would fare against Iran's is really beside the point. Iran can devastate the global economy and wipe several key American allies off the map without ever exchanging fire with American or Israeli forces. And attacking Iran would rally the Iranian people behind the regime, instantly undoing all the work we've done trying to destabilize and delegitimize them. And for what? We let our allies Saudi Arabia and Israel be crippled forever and blow up the world economy, just so Bibi can stay out of prison for a couple more years? I suppose the counterpoint is something Dolan suggested once a while ago, which is that what's bad for the rest of the world isn't necessarily bad for the United States. Especially if we're done with this farce of the international rules-based democratic order or whatever. Cutting off the Strait of Hormuz and turning the Middle East into an apocalyptic hell forever wouldn't hurt us. Not directly. Not as much as it would hurt everyone else. And as long as we're the global hegemon, sabotaging everyone else might be the whole point of it.

T

And they came into being and popularity because of the failure of the whigs to confront the political realities of the time

julio

Wondering what is the study showing Dems knew they'd lose over Gaza? Thanks!

Matt McCartney

I checked in on serpent head James Carville's YouTube channel a month ago and he is still pushing "pee tape" Russiagate nonsense. The DNC has no idea what to do with Trump 2: This Time it's Personal.

Benjamin Glover

I think this is one of the handful of times I've ever heard John drop the f-bomb.

Rod Miller

The left-conservative party in Germany you mentioned is Sahra Wagenknecht's outfit, which came within an agonizingly scrawny whisker of clearing the 5% hurdle in the recent election. The other Ukraine-skeptical party is the AfD, which you call "post-nazi". Well it certainly has some nazoid members, but it's hardly alone in this on the German political scene. It's basically an anti-immigration party. By the way, it was set up by ferociously austerian economic ideologues & its leader, Alice Weidel (veteran of Goldman Sachs), is "in a long-term relationship" with a Sri Lankan woman.

Terry Dunk

What does Weidel's Sri Lankan lover have to do with anything. Strom Thurmond had black children.

fw

Re: ames' comments on drones around an hr in- would really appreciate a broad view on current drone use (or i guess 'doctrine?' iunno) given that stuff like this is just the latest example of stuff being advertised to the west as Freedom Weapons while of course being used to do this simultaneously https://x.com/qudsnen/status/1913783253325988053 - i remember following the announcements (in the recent anti RSF gains) of both anti RSF military units celebrating drone hits against RSF in again, a very similar use case; less than a day later, followed by an announcement of sudanese civilians and journalists being drone assassinated by (amongst others) the RSF in same area. I get that there's a lot of informational fog if not outright misinfo around them, (witnessing a spat between various gruntfluencers at the moment about 'best drone takedowns' and 'drone defence' being some of the more ridiculous examples), but think RWN would cut through it all well. I know drones have already been commented on and covered on a case by case thing here recently, but the more I see the different coverages of the same broad phenomenon, the more intrigued / concerned I get about the black mirror spectacle makebelieve many people talk about when they say they are discussing 'drones' (and what an obfuscation-ally broad category!).

Rod Miller

1) It doesn't HAVE to be terribly relevant, just information. 2) It helps situate this "post-nazi" party in context, i.e. it was founded by market-fundamentalists & they ain't necessarily Quite as conservative as some people prefer to believe.

Xander Udo

In the Netherlands we've been told to 'prep' as well. Scaremongering is definitely ramping up. And regarding the western European politicians maintaining public support: on top of the scaremongering, our public is under the influence of broadly served up propaganda. And it's all pro US empire. Alternative opinions are suppressed and mocked across basically all major media. And that goes for most politicians too, I reckon.

Jason Thompson

Clearly some brainiac who is smart enough to send email threats to the President is smart enough to build a drone 🙄

Stefan

John: ”I’m sure there’s a lot of seething, suppressed, macho dreams in Swedish male demographics anyway” . After having lived in Sweden a while, I’d say this is spot on. And I doubt most would actually go fight.

drizzly_november

Mark on the rudderless Democrats: “Say what you will about the tenets of Russiagate, but it was at least an organizing principle!”

Adam Loeb

Listening to the part about Iran and hoping for a future episode laying out what a conflict would like/wargaming it out similar to the recent Canada episode.

JoR

Just so you know they did an episode on this years ago. Episode 142 "Iran war scenarios". A lifetime ago, but I'm sure most point would still stand

Mark Ames

we should get Samuel Bendett on again