Short term, your gas price went up 4% starting tomorrow and we are going to see how resilient our computing infrastructure is to an actual cyber offensive with destructive intent (rather than simple information theft or monetary theft/ransom). Medium term the odds of a war with substantial US casualties has increased substantially. Long term it's possible this will be seen as the tipping point for PRC as the dominant global power. This is a historic event and not in a good way.
A quick excerpt, if you don't have time for it all:
Suleimani took command of the Quds Force fifteen years ago, and in that time he has sought to reshape the Middle East in Iran’s favor, working as a power broker and as a military force: assassinating rivals, arming allies, and, for most of a decade, directing a network of militant groups that killed hundreds of Americans in Iraq. The U.S. Department of the Treasury has sanctioned Suleimani for his role in supporting the Assad regime, and for abetting terrorism. And yet he has remained mostly invisible to the outside world, even as he runs agents and directs operations. “Suleimani is the single most powerful operative in the Middle East today,” John Maguire, a former C.I.A. officer in Iraq, told me, “and no one’s ever heard of him.”
[0] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/09/30/the-shadow-com...
In between, the Obama administration managed to sign a deal that effectively ended the nuclear program and markedly reduced Iran's aggressiveness in the region.
But sure, the everyone-is-bad shtick gets so many points for contrarianism it easily compensates for the lack of truth.
(Indictment-of-the-public-sphere-aside: It's quite funny (but potentially deadly) that this cynical worldview has long gained the upper hand. Everyone still pretend to have heard it for the tenth time that day because they also like to see themselves as the rebel with thier own brain.)
Unfortunately, Warren, oder Sanders, or AOC, or whoever will be the next democratic President won't have the option of a negotiated settlement anymore: 200 years of the US' word having meaning beyond the duration of the administration giving it are gone. Lost the world's trust, and thereby access to such transactions, all for what? Because that plan that was essentially what Trump says he wants now just happened to be associated with the wrong guy.
No US President has ever lost a run for re-election during wartime. I think we all knew a new war was coming this year.
This is real war, the likes of which we haven't seen since Vietnam or the Korean peninsula. Professionals have dreaded this for a long time, and that was with extraordinarily more competent executive function.
So many things I was taught in civics class turned out to be complete fiction.
(I guess it already has it)
Not for the last few decades, no.
