I don't believe Assad will fall and he'll probably get his territory back eventually - as in every single conflict nowadays, if it takes a day to lose a town to the imperialists then it'll take a year to re-take it. HTS will likely reach a point where their offensive becomes untenable to continue even with US and Israeli backing, with Russia bombing supply routes and headquarters; they don't strike me as a group as literally or figuratively embedded as Hamas is in Gaza or Hezbollah is in Lebanon.

What I do hope is that this is the final kick up the ass of the Iranians and even Russians to actually fucking do something meaningful. If there's a single critique I have of the Resistance Axis, it's that they are very slow, especially when they should be fast. The US and Israelis are somehow working at quintuple speed compared to everybody else. They zip from failure to success to failure, but at least they're zipping. Iran's first strike on Israel should have been in the same year of October 7th, and their second strike should have been in like, February. It shouldn't have taken a full year of genocide - 365 goddamn days - for them to realize that they'd maybe have to start seriously hitting Israel directly. Hezbollah was on that shit on October 8th, and Ansarallah, under some of the worst conditions on the planet, virtually the Haiti of the Middle East, was setting up their blockade within a couple months. Maybe if Putin stopped doing will-I-won't-I shit with threats to use nuclear weapons or conventional ones against NATO forces in Ukraine or whatever, and instead did something actually productive and drop a few Oreshniks on HTS sites a month ago (as I presume the Russians of all superpowers with pretty competent intelligence agencies had some idea of what was soon to occur in Syria), then maybe the US would have truly realized that Putin wasn't fucking around anymore.

We all know that it won't propel the Iranians to do anything which is the most frustrating part, possibly. I'm not accusing them of doing nothing, I'm actually probably Iran's strongest defender in the news megathread, they are a critical part of the Resistance and Palestine might well have fallen without them and their influence being more covert shouldn't mean that they're underappreciated. But, like, the United States, thousands of miles away, has taken more substantial hits for their allies in the past year than Iran has for their's, in the same goddamn region. I think we all have issues with Putin's conduct of the Ukraine War, but at least he had the balls to directly start a war despite all the consequences instead of continuing to meekly supply arms and the odd piece of intel to the Donbass while the Ukrainians kept murdering them.

I don't think Iran should necessarily start a direct war with Israel or the US, the nukes make that an unbelievably risky move, but the Iranian government is gonna reach a point similar to the Russian government where they realize that it's either take a stand now and possibly win, or stand by and watch as their allies are picked apart and they are left alone against a region full of either US allies or countries that have been bombed and ripped apart internally by "rebel forces". Not necessarily this year or the next, but at some point. The Russians watched NATO militarily march to their borders over the course of a few decades and finally had enough. When will Iran have that same breaking point? Will Assad have to fall? Will Iraq and Yemen? Will Hezbollah? Will every Palestinian have to die or be exiled? If Hamas does eventually fall or become too damaged to stop their activity in Gaza, will Iran be like "Hm, yes, well... we've received the latest dispatch from the Israelis and they seem intent to sign a deal with us to establish a committee on the possibility of eventually discussing the possibility of starting a bipartisan super-committee on the prospects of eventually signing a deal to..." How many Minsks will Tehran need to go through before they realize that the US is actually and truly agreement-incapable?

And jesus fucking christ, we'll have to go through the same process AGAIN with China and Taiwan. Can't wait for Xi or whoever's in charge by then to agree to pause the Taiwan offensive in exchange for XYZ and then have the US betray the deal by sending in arms to Taiwan and then do that another three times before the Chinese government realizes that no, there CANNOT be any agreement with the United States. Every single group or country - with the exception of like, Ansarallah and Hamas, if only out of necessity - seems to be totally unable of observing the process other countries go through and have to be forced to painstakingly learn that the US will NEVER play fair.

America might well survive another hundred years SOLELY because every anti-imperialist force will go through a three-decade process where they sign like five Minsk Agreements with their own Israels/Taiwans/Ukraines and it takes an entire generation to internalize that the only language that America understands is overwhelming and terrifying brutality and violence. Meanwhile, every decade, another 50 million people are dead in either wars or climate disasters. The incoming decades might well be characterized by governments moving glacially while crises arrive and compound year-after-year, until they either undergo revolution or break into a dozen warring mini-states.