USA is only theoretically independent, most of the USA imports its oil, and most of the native oil is close to the Mexican gulf and is immediately exported through there. We don't know if the economics would work well fast enough to use that oil locally, even if you assume an export control is politically feasible.

Iran already attacked gulf oil in retaliation... This is existential.

It is existential for Israel too, which is why the two Jews Trump sent to negotiate sabotaged the negotiations.

Iran wasn't important for American dominance at all, because even now China is going to be just fine, they did so much work to prepare for this. They won't magically lose their industry edge, he'll even Iran won't lose it's arms industry that fast.

however... Now that the US is in it, losing and capitulating to Iran (withdrawing from the gulf as Iran demands) would definitely be a Suez moment.

The USA will survive without being an empire though... Maybe even do better.

All in all, I don't think this was justifiable by any American interest, and much easier to explain by zionists (Americans even more than Iraelis) simply are very happy to sacrifice the American Empire sooner than lose it's support for Israel as the generational shift continues, and if the worst case happened; US withdraw from the Middle East... Well then that is better than if it stayed and became hostile as more Americans become antizionists.

Mind you they gave on fighting the Houthis

What a time to be alive!

The American empire ends with cringe

Just use Rust everywhere... If LLMs are so good, what is the purpose of JavaScript at this point?

I agree that local politics should be prioritised... But this is not correct all the time, sometimes policies outside your local environment sets you up for failure no matter what you do locally.

This is by the way why Americans are angry; the empire forces the people of the periphery to move to the center and compete with Americans, and the elites of the periphery are forced to middle into American politics and bribe politicians quite literally not to get bombed.

Nostr doesn't magically make Politics irrelevant... he'll you can just go meat your neighbours... If anything the politics becomes the main thing you do most of your waking hours, and if you have better more scalable communications, more politics happen over these channels not less.

Finally, local politics is not the only political concern, because you are not in an island, you still need to manage politics with the immediate neighbouring communities, as well as politics on your trading routes..etc.

Basically just more of the same that human communities always had to deal with.

If you ignore this, you just put your fate in someone else's hand out of cowardice, laziness, or cynicism that you convince yourself is rather because you are too smart for it.