These aren't really "from" the US companies. They're commodity parts that US & other Western companies design that are manufactured in Asia and sold around the world. The parts are used way too widely to be tracked in any meaningful way.
Seems like the article disagrees with you, do you have a more reliable source for what you're saying?
> Of the 52 components Ukrainians removed from the Iranian Shahed-136 drone, 40 appear to have been manufactured by 13 different American companies, according to the assessment.
> The remaining 12 components were manufactured by companies in Canada, Switzerland, Japan, Taiwan, and China, according to the assessment.
> According to the Ukrainian assessment, among the US-made components found in the drone were nearly two dozen parts built by Texas Instruments, including microcontrollers, voltage regulators, and digital signal controllers; a GPS module by Hemisphere GNSS; a microprocessor by NXP USA Inc.; and circuit board components by Analog Devices and Onsemi. Also discovered were components built by International Rectifier – now owned by the German company Infineon – and the Swiss company U-Blox.
So less than 12 of the components were manufactured in Asia, while 40 have been manufactured by US companies.
The article also finishes by linking together components with US companies who seem (at a glance / without digging deeper) to manufacture said components within US borders.
Half the parts listed here you would probably find in a dishwasher or car radio as well, they're called jellybean parts.
It might not even mean they bought these parts from a legitimate source. They might have been reclaimed or salvaged from legitimate electronics, or they might even be counterfeit chips (which often come from Asia) that were labelled to look like the genuine part.
Yep, and buying even 10.000 voltage regulators is a very common thing, so much, that they even have a reduced price for >10k orders already listed on many sites. Even if you tried to regulate it, someone could just go on farnell/digikey/..., order 10k pieces put them in a pocket and carry them over the border.
Still, I guess you could catch some of these smugglers ? They will be fined/jailed/both, which could influence others doing the same & at least would drive up the price of components.
But who and why? A company in china can legally buy them, ignore american regulations, since well.. they're not from america, and export them at a higher price to russia. Russians can even open a company in russia that deals with importing foreign components and then exporting them to russia. Most of the world doesn't care about american regulation and why should they?
Few generic switch mode power supply low current ones ? Eh, sure, there are few chips that are very popular but they're generally old and not super efficient.
Anything else ? Sure you can replace existing one but that requires redesigning the device so if you used part A but now can get only part B sure, you might get your 3.3V 5A out of it but you might need different sized capacitors/inductors, and you will certainly need a different board layout.
Even something simple as transistor used in power regulator (if it is big enough to have separate controller and transistors) might have same/higher amps but different other characteristics so you have to tweak the design a bit to get to the performance.
Simple microcontroller ? Even if any similar one on market fits the requirements, unless you get part from same family (just having more memory) you ain't fitting same code on it even if it is same architecture, the register map and their function can be different even within same family of chips, let alone different lines so you're up for the recompile at the very least, rewrite of parts at worst. And again board needs to be changed
Contrast the present situation with the cold war. The society union may have sometimes gotten western parts which theyd use for various purposes - most famously tractor factory equipment and Mainframes. The same was true for us acquisition of titanium. However the idea that either military would rely on the other blocks parts would have been insane. Trade was not normalized, and tracking the majority of shipments between the blocks was a tractable problem. These jelly bean parts have huge supply chains that just happen to be extremely efficient.
I wonder how close we are to a world where global conflict becomes impractical simply due to a lack of parts.
That is one of the founding principles of the peace through (free) trade argument. But many countries seem to be working on reversing globalisation (on-shoring critical capabilities). So this Russian invasion is the closest we might have come for a long time to the impracticability of global conflict.
It isn't voltage regulators. It's actual chips, much like the kind found in smart phones, designed and sold by American companies that Russians need so their drones know where they are.
Since Russia has its very own clone of the American-operated GPS, I’m having a hard time believing they don’t have a massive stockpile of the parts required to use it.
The company mentioned in the article (U-Blox) makes said GPS modules, however there are many chinese clones of these. Some rebranded, some passed off as legit ones. They'll mostly meet the spec and sometimes lack a rarely used feature that the original does have.
The same happens with microcontrollers. Take the STM32F103 from ST Micro, before the chip shortages this was a chip you could find in in heaps of random low cost electronics that required a bit of smarts. Same thing happens there, there are some chinese clones that are cheaper and almost perfect copies. The "legit" sellers will sell these as GD32F103 or CH32F103 for instance, but if you try to buy a genuine part from a less trusty source there's a decent chance you're paying the higher prices for the same chip, just someone laser marked it as a genuine one instead to make some profit.
I thought that's why the Russians were looting as many white goods from Ukraine as they could, to get hold of the electronics parts that were now harder to source after sanctions.
They loot plenty of non-electronic goods, too. Most of their military comes from the most impoverished parts of the society, as anyone else has the means to avoid conscription or coercion into signing a military contract.
Not OP, but TI manufactures in both the US and Asia and they also outsource some of their manufacturing. I assume the other companies are the same. I recognize about half of those manufacturers, and I'm not even into hardware.
"Microcontrollers, voltage regulators, and digital signal controllers" are very much commodity parts that companies buy in huge bulk and are available pretty much everywhere. I'm not surprised to see them in a drone (Iranian or otherwise) because I'd expect to see them in ANY sort of complex electronics device - drone, car, washing machine, computer, child's interactive toy, you name it. Ditto for most of the other stuff.
I'm pretty sure American companies are forbidden from selling things to Iran, regardless of where geographically those things are manufactured.
Obviously just finding these parts doesn't mean necessarily they were sold directly by TI to Iran, for example, but it does raise questions that are not answered by "they were physically manufactured in China."
> I'm pretty sure American companies are forbidden from selling things to Iran...
Sure, but they're most certainly permitted to sell to several billion other people on the planet, most of whom aren't under American jurisdiction. Some of those will be willing to shove the chips in a shipping container and send that on a boat to Iran for a reasonable fee.
It'd be pretty insane for TI to be selling to Iran directly, and finding TI chips in Iran isn't evidence of it.
Purchasers and users of US made parts are obligated to sign a contract that prohibits them from trading with North Korea and Iran (and Cuba?). That includes selling your iPhone.
> Purchasers and users of US made parts are obligated to sign a contract that prohibits them from trading with North Korea
This is some kind of fantasy? I can go to a million websites or into a store with cash and I can buy microchips for $0.08 without signing any contract. What's next, you are going to keep track of nuts and bolts?
It might be fantasy or it might be the mighty reach of the US government. The US has a trade org that controls EVERYTHING about materials made with US licensed or US developed technology. I think it is the US International Trade Commission.
I live in europe, and I bought many US chips (eg TI ones)... your regulation means nothing here, and i didn't sign any contract. You can literally go to a physical store and buy them off the shelf.
NK is different.. you cannot even travel there normally without going through an agency.
But iran.. I don't know what their customs rules are but if you pay import fees, probably unlimited amounts.
How much you can buy? A lot.. eg. 10k voltage regulators is such a common order size, that they have a predefined lowered price even in online stores (without having to contact sales):
Sorry, my dumb-ass brain somehow pictured you walking in a supermarket, buying a bunch of TI calculators to rip off the interesting parts and ship them. Totally misread the conversation.
Cool. How enforcable is that contract in China on a non-American citizen operating a company that only exists for a few weeks on paper to facilitate the transaction?
How hard would it be for Iran to open a shell company in third-party country like, say, Iraq to mask the transaction?
Several years back, a company in China got in trouble for selling US controlled technology to Iran. The company ended up getting sanctioned. It was not until they changed the board, CEO, and other offices and paid a bunch of fees, that the company was able to operate freely again. The sanctions got so bad, that the company could not repair their toilets anymore. I believe it was Xiaomi.
TI chips in Iran doesn't support the proposition that TI is directly violating sanctions by deliberately selling to Iran in violation of sanctions. There is no evidence of that.
Evidence eliminates alternative possibilities. The presence of any of these components eliminates the possibility that there are no TI components in Iran. And to reiterate: this is obviously nowhere near the standard required to take any action whatsoever, thus the "very very weak" designation.
I have some large trees that produce a meaningful quantity of moles of oxygen and I've gotten wind that some of those particles are taking a circuitous route into the combustion engines of these drones.
Hate to admit it, but that's some damning evidence. Very, very weak fortunately.
That’s an incredible stretch of the term “evidence” when these are commodity parts involved in tens of thousands of not hundreds of thousands of parts of the supply chain. If the US found cutting edge components from US companies that were actually specialized and more rare you might have a point, but these are parts you can find in literally any electronic good. They are defined as electronics by using these electronic components.
>> Companies do apparently insane things for money all the time!
The costs of violating OFAC far exceed ANY gain TI would see from selling to Iran. You're wrong. Stop posting and go read about the semiconductor supply chain.
I suppose this is why we never see examples of criminality where the possible penalties outweigh the possible gains?
And in any case, I agree with you. I am extremely doubtful that this is what's happening, I just think "the penalties are substantial" and "they were likely manufactured in China" are not evidence it's not happening. TI components in Iran are evidence (weak, weak, completely non-actionable!) evidence that it is happening.
The more plausible story is that some distributor somewhere sold a couple shipping containers worth of these commodity parts from a place that doesn’t really give a damn what the US says (except for making sure to fake some paperwork or whatever), like China. Or some random county in Eastern Europe. Or Africa.
They sell 100’s of millions of these parts to pretty much everyone, and they’re dirt cheap.
That TI ‘made them’ (not really, outsourced usually) then ‘sold them’ (not really, almost certainly. TI doesn’t do direct deals like that for pretty much anyone!) is a narrative that is pretty implausible considering how the supply chains actually work for these components.
Yeah - that can't be a good marketing and for positive brand recognition.
Major brands already make a huge fuss what content their adds are displayed next to.
So repeatedly having chips with your logo being pulled from the wreckage of a drone that just demolished an apartment building can't be good for PR either.
> Texas Instruments entered China in 1986 and set up R&D centers and product line teams in Shanghai, Shenzhen and Beijing. The company also established a manufacturing base in Chengdu and two product distribution centers in the country.
Chips are cheap, lightweight, and often made outside the US. They're pretty trivial to divert.
The nominal ‘manufacturers’ of the chips (TI) are forbidden from doing business with Iran.
They’re so far from what happens on the ground though, who actually ends up with one of the chips in their hand has pretty much nothing to do with them.
This is a straw man argument. It is irrelevant where the parts are made. American companies sold them. Their logos are on the them. If Russians can get these parts anywhere, then let them get them elsewhere. American companies don't need to be accessories to killing Ukrainians.
First, we don't know that. It's not uncommon for Chinese manufacturers to make extra parts and sell them themselves. It's also not impossible that Iran or Russia obtained these from taking apart other devices, theft, or other means.
Even if these chips generated revenue for TI, TI almost certainly didn't sell them to Iranian or Russian companies or representatives. They'll have been sold to an intermediary in a legal fashion, as far as TI was aware (or at the very least, with plausible deniability) at the time.
> First, we don't know that. It's not uncommon for Chinese manufacturers to make extra parts and sell them themselves.
You're saying these parts could be designer imposters, like a Gucci purse. Chinese manufactures might copy the part. They wouldn't copy the logos because there is no reason to copy the logos.
> It's also not impossible that Iran or Russia obtained these from taking apart other devices, theft, or other means.
I need you to prepare yourself to be wrong, because this is just as unlikely. Russia doesn't think they're bad, so they're not going to try to make America look bad by associating with them. From Russia's point of view, that would be trying to make America look good, which they would never do.
> Even if these chips generated revenue for TI, TI almost certainly didn't sell them to Iranian or Russian companies or representatives. They'll have been sold to an intermediary in a legal fashion, as far as TI was aware (or at the very least, with plausible deniability) at the time.
If you sold ovens to an intermediary in 1941, and they sold them to a contractor who installed your ovens at Auschwitz, you'd really feel good about the money you made? Trust me, you wouldn't. It would make you sick, as it should if you are a member of our species.
> Russia doesn't think they're bad, so they're not going to try to make America look bad by associating with them.
That wouldn't be the motivation. Russia is desperate for chips. They'll use any they can get their hands on.
> If you sold ovens to an intermediary in 1941, and they sold them to a contractor who installed your ovens at Auschwitz, you'd really feel good about the money you made?
If I had zero reason to believe they'd make their way to Germany when I sold them to someone in town, I'd be sad, but I certainly wouldn't feel culpable.
In the case of Ukraine, pretty hefty sums of my taxes paid are being used to support them. I feel pretty OK with the balance of things there. Some thousands of dollars of microchips to Iran (unwillingly) versus tens of billions in weaponry and supplies to Ukraine (happily) maths out just fine.
Okay, how ? Manufacturer sells the parts to distributors. They can't just opt to not sell their parts to essentially entirety of china (via distributors located there).
And even if they somehow exclude those, who stops someone in any other country from just setting up shell company and reexporting the chips ?
I don’t see what the big deal is. You could order a whole reel of voltage regulators off digikey and they’d fit in a backpack. There’s no way to stop the movement of low level ICs around the world no matter who/where they were produced. It would be like trying prevent Iran from getting a hold of American nails.
I did not realize this. I thought a computer chip, meaning a CPU, was distinct from the IC on which it was implemented. Thanks for clearing that up for me.
Also, there are many voltage regulator ICs (and hence chips), and a great many other ICs (and hence chips) used in pretty much every piece of electronic equipment now a days.
I was only replying to "So less than 12 of the components were manufactured in Asia, while 40 have been manufactured by US companies." My point is that the nationality of a company has no bearing on where they manufacture their parts.
But while yes these companies should bear responsibility if they are selling their parts to sanctioned countries, this is unlikely. There is just no way to track the real-time user of every commodity product - even if there were would you really want to live in that world?
> There is just no way to track the real-time user of every commodity product
This is somewhat of a tu quoque argument much like the many others here claiming these products are commonly supplied by many companies worldwide, and it will have absolutely no bearing on the reputations of the companies involved, nor can it remove their involvement in the violent deaths of innocent lives.
Chinese manufacturers frequently make counterfeit parts and stamp fake US company logos on them. Even if the parts were authentic, they certainly weren't sold directly to Iran. Middlemen in other countries not under sanctions buy them, and then re-export them. There is literally no way for US companies to prevent this, they don't have that kind of reach or power.
It is astounding how posters here are bending over backwards to deny all responsibility. Russia is using American parts to kill Ukrainians. It doesn't matter where the parts were manufactured or how they got the parts. Why doesn't anyone here understand this?
If someone picks up a brick and smashes someone’s head in, does it particularly matter who made the brick?
Statistically, the most widely made bricks would be ‘at fault’. But how does that matter, exactly?
You can try to ban bricks from your country, which hey, maybe it could happen. But if they were having a brick shortage, couldn’t they just buy the same bricks from a neighboring country, since these items are so cheap
and common, it’s not like it’s possible to serialize and track each one.
If the brick has the company's logo on it, I'm sure it will be great for sales and general impressions. What is commonly believed, even if entirely wrong, can have detrimental effects. It certainly isn't a good thing what was discovered about Russian drones, and it certainly does matter. Remington didn't kill those children, and you can get guns anywhere, so you tell me why Remington settled for $73M. This is a very easy thing to understand. It is amazing how stubbornly dumb intelligent individuals can sometimes be.
Bwahah. Folks do hit pieces all the time on companies to do some thing - extract some money (like with Remington), or try to force some change (like the Ukrainians trying to ‘name and shame’ companies to cause a larger chilling effect for suppliers and start folks like TI cracking down on their supply chain).
TI not manufacturing those chips won’t stop Iran using identical chips though. It’s one of many ‘try all the things’ tactics from a belligerent at war. And I can’t blame them for trying. I’m sure it will cause some minor issues here and there for Iran and Russia, and every little bit helps.
It’s still transparent bullshit and manipulation of the public.
The part I have to laugh at is arguments like this that take the manipulation at face value, and go after folks pointing out it’s bullshit on a technical site.
It would be like going on a Gun forum and going after folks pointing out the Remington smear campaigns (or any number of other manufacturers) was transparent bullshit to try to get cash or force them out of business by those ideologically opposed to them.
Like what do you expect but a bunch of folks going ‘that’s bullshit’?
They chose to settle after sufficient pressure and wild accusations were brought to bear publicly no?
If the lawsuit was kept confidential and not turned into a high profile socio-political football being used to target them, then I think you might have a point, as the case could be about matters of law and fact.
But it wasn’t, was it?
One would call that ‘forced’ in most contexts. If it wasn’t in the context of an active lawsuit, perhaps even extortion. But lawyers get a pass for this, of course.
One would hope we’d blame the one doing the genocide?
Unless of course Apple sent a container of free iPhone’s after they’d laid out their genocidal plan. So far zero indication that’s happened though, right?
Or is that too much to ask now a days?
This entire thread is the height of ridiculous absurdity.
I live in Finland, and Russians have been found looting electronics from the recycling centers over here, supposedly because they need the components back in the motherland. So theoretically they are also using western components but it is not like anyone actually sold these components to the russians.
This is an obviously fake story. Similar to the consumer drone panic that's been going on in the Nordics.
A few months ago all the Nordic medias seemed convinced that this guy with his "4 terabytes of encrypted data" must have been a Russian spy, of course that turned out to not be true. (Russia has satellites, the idea that they'd need people to go scout out Nordic infrastructure with consumer drones was and is preposterous)
Except Russia has had spies do precisely that in the past in Estonia? They even did a prisoner exchange for a guy who got caught.
> An unredacted five-page document tells a fuller story than anything Zinchenko offered in our four hours together. Vasily was one of three different handlers over the space of his eight years as a GRU agent. (Zinchenko would tell me only that Vasily introduced him to another man with whom he’d sometimes communicate.) He’d meet with each one face-to-face at liaisons in St. Petersburg, only a five-hour car or bus ride from Tallinn. Each handler tasked him with surveilling Estonia’s “objects of national defense” and its “vital services,” defined under Estonian law as critical infrastructure, power and electricity, telecommunications and banking services.
> Zinchenko spied on Paldiski, a garrison town where Estonia’s elite Scouts Battalion, a veteran unit of both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, was stationed. He also spied on Vasalemma, where NATO’s Ämari Air Base is located.
This is typical busy work given to agents to make them feel important, to test their loyalty and ability to accomplish tasks provided. For the most part, it's not actually supposed to result in useful intelligence.
Also there's a huge difference between tracking military equipment movements and power infrastructure. Power infrastructure doesn't move and can't really be hidden.
The US is so tight-lipped about its spy satellites, even the resolution of their images are classified, and it forces US commercial satellite operators to degrade image resolution as well. Maybe I'm wrong, but if it were trivial to do, then someone should launch a satellite imaging startup outside of US jurisdiction.
> even the resolution of their images are classified
Yeah, but physics isn't. Good resolution requires large mirrors. Large mirrors require large satellites. These aren't cubesats we're talking about; optical American spy satellites have 2.4 meter wide mirrors and are more than 10 meters long. The only non-US/Chinese/Russian rocket that can launch such a satellite in principle is the Ariane 5, but AFAIK they don't fly that to polar orbits.
In any case, not many people have the equipment laying around to make such large mirrors, or the expertise, or a stockpile of such mirrors. Russia likely has all three, or certainly once did.
>Apparently valuable enough to do a prisoner exchange for.
You don't do prisoner exchanges because of the valuable contributions of that agent, you do prisoner exchanges to ensure future contributions by other agents.
>I also doubt the quality of the optics in Russian satellites.
They're just fine. What kind of quality do you think they need to hit a power plant with a missile? Most of their missiles aren't that precise anyway.
There's only an extremely limited set of circumstances where drone footage of power infrastructure could be useful.
Yet you provide no data to convince anyone otherwise. Outside of scrap, also electronics stores over here have signs now which denote the amount of electronics you can carry over the border into the Russia (not exceeding the value of 300€) which suggests there is a reason to do so.
Related to your article, if something sounds ridiculous it's the explanation given in your article of the unemployed man travelling from Russia to take drone pictures of a cottage for a friend. Very reminiscient of the two "tourists" "just visiting" Salisbury.
> Outside of scrap, also electronics stores over here have signs now which denote the amount of electronics you can carry over the border into the Russia (not exceeding the value of 300€) which suggests there is a reason to do so.
The purpose is not to disrupt Russian military supply chains, but to make Muscovites pay higher prices for their grey market iPhones.
>Related to your article, if something sounds ridiculous it's the explanation given in your article of the unemployed man travelling from Russia to take drone pictures of a cottage for a friend. Very reminiscient of the two "tourists" "just visiting" Salisbury.
The Norwegian government agreed that his story checked out. Also, I'd suppose that wealthy unemployed men make up a decent chunk of tourism in general.
The purpose of sanctions is not only to limit access to luxury, but also to restrict things that are loosely considered dual use "things", such as components that can be repurposed to be part of military purposes - see https://ek.fi/ajankohtaista/uutiset/venaja-pakotteet-qa-vast... section 8) since you seem to be fluent in Finnish
Your previous comment is exclusively observing the effect of sanctions on luxury goods.
You generally can't buy the mentioned dual-use goods in your local electronics store. Look up the "EU dual use control list", it mostly covers exotic stuff like electronics adapted to operate in extreme (temperature, radiation) environments.
I totally believe Russians importing broken/used electronic stuff, but I completely believe it’s because throwaway culture hasn’t caught on as much there.
Could be due to culture, skill or poverty/economics. Or all three.
At least on aliexpress, reviews for random spare parts/components are often from Russians.
I can speak directly to onsemi as I’m a former employee. While ONN is a US company, they manufacture a significant number of parts in Malaysia. ONN does have onshore fabs, but they’re expensive and are only used for their specialized, high cost components.
When I was there, the US fabs were selling parts used in iPhones, Zunes, and XBoxen.
"No weapon or weapon systems
One of the central pillars of the u-blox Code of Conduct is our position on the non-integration of our products into weapons and weapon systems. This policy is in place since 2002."
And probably done through a chain of shell companies and other laundering and smuggling methods. We can't keep them all out of Russia/Iran. It's just about minimizing.... ... and writing your code with best practices so it can be ported to whatever hardware trickles over the border ;)
Most of them were probably manufactured in Asia just for american companies.
Also nothing here really looks like something irreplaceable. A bunch of compute[1], the standard supporting chips (power, sensor interfaces etc.), I think only thing that might be problematic to replace are some high end analog stuff. The microcontroller on the photo
Point being they could probably get by just with chinese chips, just picked the "vanilla option" because it's easier to read datasheet in english than in chinese.
About only thing that would be hard to get off top of my head would be fast thermal cameras, as US for the long time limits anything consumer/export to low framerate and I'm not sure whether china does any of their own that are available.
> Also discovered were components built by International Rectifier – now owned by the German company Infineon – and the Swiss company U-Blox.
I'm guessing first one is some diodes/power transistors and such (easily replaceable) and U-blox I think just provides ready-to-go modules so less of a "part" more of a "module" made of stuff also from asia.
Point being blocking exports wouldn't exactly do much unless China also closed borders; it would be far too easy for 3rd party company to just... buy what is needed and get it in via china with other chips.
Hemisphere and ublox aren't even making chips in first place, they are making modules out of other people's chips
Now of course company having factory in china (or just buying capacity there) doesn't mean that particular chip was made in china but article doesn't really give much details about the chips aside from shitty picture of one (that is just generic MCU with some DSP IIRC)
Even if they are made in USA, a company can buy them and resell them at will, because US regulation doesn't apply outside of US... so someone from china can order 10k chips and do whatever they want with them.
Don't be so naive. It means everything, because when American company logos are found on parts in drone wreckage surrounded by dead and mutilated Ukrainians, it makes those companies accessories to this illegal Russian war, and by extension and association, the United States, and me and you!
If you steal a knife from my house, and stab someone with it, am I an accessory to the crime because it's my knife? No.
Texas Instruments isn't at fault if someone buys their chips legally, but turns around and resells them to the Russians. That'd be an insane standard to set, both ethically and legally.
If an American company is deliberately selling components to Russia, by all means, nail them to the wall for violating sanctions. That's not what has happened here, though.
> If you steal a knife from my house, and stab someone with it, am I an accessory to the crime because it's my knife? No.
You are employing the fallacy of poor analogy. These parts weren't stolen. And if you sold a weapon to a murderer, or even if you failed to reasonably secure your weapon and it was stolen, then by common morality and even case law, you bear some responsibility.[1]
> And if you sold a weapon to a murderer, or even if you failed to reasonably secure your weapon and it was stolen
There's no indication either of these things happened, either.
As the article says:
"There is no evidence suggesting that any of those companies are running afoul of US sanctions laws and knowingly exporting their technology to be used in the drones. Even with many companies promising increased monitoring, controlling where these highly ubiquitous parts end up in the global market is often very difficult for manufacturers, experts told CNN."
The part pictured is a TMS320F28335PGFA. You can get 'em in trays of 240 for $10/chip on Alibaba and any number of other places that a) aren't TI and b) don't care about US law.
You're still missing the point like you can't hit the side of a barn. It has nothing whatsoever to do with American companies doing anything wrong or punishing them. America is punished. Trying to escape responsibility is utterly impossible. It already happened. American parts in wreckage of Russian drone strikes is undeniable. It's bad. Endlessly trying to make excuses is childish, narcissistic and callous.
> It has nothing whatsoever to do with American companies doing anything wrong or punishing them.
OK, but you said this:
> it makes those companies accessories to this illegal Russian war
Is being an accessory to the Russian aggression not wrong?
> American parts in wreckage of Russian drone strikes is undeniable.
I mean, sure, but the Russians are using Ukranian-made arms and aircraft, too; that doesn't make the Ukranians complicit in the Russian aggression. Ukraine used to be a major arms supplier to the entire Soviet and post-Soviet sphere of influence.
Your standard for "responsibility" is bizarre. The balance of US involvement in Ukraine is extremely heavily on the side of good, and it'd stay that way even if TI had knowingly had anything to do with these drones.
I don't think that "manufactured by 13 different American companies" necessarily means manufactured in America. Apple "manufactures" IPhones, but not in America
> Of the 52 components Ukrainians removed from the Iranian Shahed-136 drone, 40 appear to have been manufactured by 13 different American companies, according to the assessment.
> The remaining 12 components were manufactured by companies in Canada, Switzerland, Japan, Taiwan, and China, according to the assessment.
Not a single component produced in Russia? Somehow strange that a country that can send people to space and back is not capable of producing a single component for a military drone.
> According to the Ukrainian assessment
Ah, ok. So the source is trustworthy and objective, not a war party telling whatever they have to tell to support their cause.
Russia was strong in MechE and material science but surprisingly weak on electronic. I think Warsaw Pact's electronic workhorse was East Germany, especially Dresden.
It was probably even. East Germany focused on Zilog clones (Z80 and Z8000 family - called U880 and U8000), while the Soviet Union focused on Intel x86 clones (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K1810VM86).
The most advanced microchip produced in East Germany was the '1-MBit chip' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U61000), but AFAIK this suffered from terrible yields and didn't really go into mass production.
Here in Brno they also made world class electron microscopes & some of the leading electron microscopy companies still come from Brno or at least operate there (Delong Instruments, FEI, Thermo Fisher, etc.).
That might explain why their film-based spy sats[0] used to return the camera as well as the film, unlike their US counterparts[1][2] that just returned the film capsule.
> their Orlan drones have been found with consumer cameras for their optics
As well as more advanced Thales thermal imaging systems that were installed in combat vehicles (tanks, IFV). AFAIK they were produced in Russia under a license from Thales (a French company) till at least 2016. Thales was likely evading sanctions
> Somehow strange that a country that can send people to space and back is not capable of producing a single component for a military drone.
Soyuz (as in both rocket and capsule) has had multiple failures over the last decade. The most recent was the coolant leak a few weeks ago that made the capsule unusable for a safe return to Earth. Under Rogozin their space industry degraded very quickly (probably one of the reasons why Rogozin was fired last year).
It's been known for some time that Russia gets components for its hi-tech weapons via a network of proxy companies in EU.
> So the source is trustworthy and objective, not a war party telling whatever they have to tell to support their cause.
US and Israel officials are clearly taking these reports seriously
They're "from" the US companies, but not directly. There's already issues with counterfeiting (you order TI parts and get something else); this is the reverse, where the parts are bought by some kind of "straw buyer" in a neutral country and then resold to Iran.
It's tricky. It would require a huge amount of surveillance to prevent it from happening, or an even more aggressive physical blockade of Iran. And of course there's always the possibility of China->Russia->Iran shipment by air.
Was on national news broadcast last night. American company logos are on these parts. It's the chips they need, and I hope now they will be starved of them.
Can't seem to find it with a brief google search. But a story like this came out ~6 months ago and the components were all off the shelf microprocessors, sensors, and similar electronics.
The article specifically says 'manufactured' by American companies; I'm not sure how the geographic location of the factory is relevant.
>Of the 52 components Ukrainians removed from the Iranian Shahed-136 drone, 40 appear to have been manufactured by 13 different American companies, according to the assessment.
The context missed by the article is that Iranian drones are crude, low-tech, and cheap by most military standards, hence, made with only the cheapest and most widely available parts.
The article below estimates the Shahed-136 at $20,000. The Mohajer-6 probably isn't that much more.
You might be surprised, from the pictures of the insides the Shahed drones have a software-defined radio (SDR) in them with a decently beefy FPGA and presumably some other similarly expensive chips on the analog side.
Certainly for the FPGA side you can make the case that these things are actually very, very rare in true consumer products (anything that sells in numbers they are the first thing to go off the BOM, at all costs). But they power an overwhelming number of military gadgets that don't have the unit numbers to be sensitive to their cost.
So yeah, today FPGA are an utter commodity item that are impossible to trace. But if you want sanctions like these to work, they probably shouldn't be.
I guess its using an FPGA as a foreign foundry won't fab something a custom one-way UAV signal processing chip for a sanctioned country & they don't have the technology to fab it themselves ?
And a discrete component version might not be realistically doable or too heavy/expensive.
They are currently mostly using machine guns mounted on LAT to shoot down Shaheds + tuned the detection system to figure out their location(crowdsourcing through app). That's why Iranian drones kinda stopped being a problem at all recently. And other valuable weaponry is spent more wisely rn.
That video literally shows nearly a dozen objects being blown up. Yes, one makes it through and causes damage. No air defense is 100% unfortunately.
It also shows how shitty Russia is, continuing to bomb Kyiv when it's far from any military objective. And shows why we need to expedite Ukraine's victory.
Most of the cost of operating a $20k drone probably isn't the drone itself. Think transportation, maintenance, crew training, caring, and feeding, development, etc.
I think to understand the problem you need to see a list of components that are being used but also to understand that substitution is relatively easy in today's world of cross platform embedded systems. I have ordered many of these boards from places like DigiKey and Mouser. Here is on example:
The US has been shipping refuse to China for quite some time for recycling. I have been to Shenzhen and there are millions of recycled electronic parts owned, manufactured, or distributed by American companies, including "semiconductors and GPS modules".
What is the likelihood that these parts are mostly recycled?
I doubt that Iran needs to use recycled parts. Most of the components specifically mentioned in the article are things that are common in most electronic devices.
They are generally unrestricted and there is no tracking done of who buys them or what they are going to use them for. The only limit on buying them is when the buyer and seller happen to be in different countries that have some sort of general trade restriction between them such as sanctions.
These are the countries that Iran has over $1B/year in imports from: China, UAE, India, Turkey, Germany, Switzerland, South Korea, Russia, Italy, UK, Netherlands, and France.
As far as I know there are no restrictions on US companies selling these components to buyers or distributors in at least 2/3 of those countries. Iran can probably just order from distributors in many of them, or have someone in one of those countries buy the components and ship them to Iran.
Keeping these components out of Iran is about as difficult as keeping something like nails from a US company or USB cables from a US company out of Iran.
Indeed, US sanctions can only increase the costs and lower access to advanced high end tech of domestic Iran defence industry.
This still has serious consequences, especially long term and extends well beyond the miltary... Even if the miscellaneous run of the mill electronics aren't controllable.
A lot of commenters are mentioning that Iran is simply using very common parts. I think that's missing the wider context that Iran was only recently eclipsed by Russia as the most sanctioned country on Earth. Going a step deeper, it's not that the parts are common in our globalized world, it's how Iran managed to get them, who supplied them, why Iran is choosing to use sell these limited and expensive parts (relative to global norm), and how that can be mitigated. I tried to find a list of specific parts that would fall under the sanctions, but, ho-boy, that is a deep dive into procurement and sourcing.
A lot of people are assuming that because the US and Europe -- e.g. the collective "West" -- is sanctioning Iran, then the whole world is, and so there is shock and confusion about how Iran can buy very common parts on the global market, when in reality it just calls up Alibaba and gets whatever it wants like everyone else. If China, India, Russia, Brazil, the OPEC nations, Latin America, etc are not sanctioning you, then you are not going to have any trouble obtaining widely available parts. And even things like replacement engines for jet aircraft -- Iran has a domestic airlines and they are able to obtain parts for that, too.
I think the reason why this obvious truism keeps surprising people is that deep down, they are really convinced that the West is the whole world, and so western sanctions are assumed to always be global sanctions, and then people ask questions like "How can Iran have a domestic airline industry if no one is selling them parts? How can Iran possibly make drones? Satellites? Missiles? Gas Turbines?" Etc.
It's a big multipolar world, and very little stuff is actually made in the West. Most stuff is made in Asia and sold globally, and the vast majority of the world and the world's markets are doing business with Iran.
The title of the article is "A single Iranian attack drone found to contain parts from more than a dozen US companies." The concern therein expressed is the perception that US companies are helping Iranians provide weapons to slaughter civilians. I think people understand that Iranians can buy their toys from other countries.
The point is that if the US is a sole producer of a good for which the rest of the world cannot produce a replacement, then it can ban sales of the good to Iran and also threaten to withhold the good from any nation unless they agree to impose custom controls that prevent export of the good to Iran from their own country.
But when the US outsources production to Chinese factories - or when other nations can produce replacement goods on their own - the US can no longer do that, because by definition China can now produce the good as well, and if the US company were to threaten to stop selling the good to, say, Brazil, unless Brazil also promised to not export to Iran, then the Chinese factory would directly sell their version to Brazil instead, and the net result is that the US loses the Brazilian market, but Iran still buys the good. In the new world, there are many suppliers of replacement goods, and so we are not in a position to impose bans on re-export of US made goods to third parties. We can only do that for those goods for which are truly the global sole supplier -- e.g. F-35s and the like. But not for microcontrollers.
In other words, the de-industrialization of the West and spread of manufacturing to asia has, as a consequence, severely limited our ability to unilaterally sanction sales of even the goods we produce to Iran - at least for goods that can be resold. We can no longer credibly threaten to sanction any country that resells our stuff to Iran, and thus force them to comply with our sanctions. As a result, even US made products which can be resold are going to end up in Iran if Iran wants to buy them. And this extends even to things like jet engines, so it's certainly going to apply to memory chips, microcontrollers, RAM, and the inconsequential parts "discovered" to be in the cheap Iranian drones.
In the new multipolar world, if you want Iran to not be able to buy US goods that can be resold, then you have to actually get the whole world to agree to the sanctions, you can no longer impose the sanctions unilaterally. It is only because people do not recognize this new reality that they are surprised that US made components appear in Iranian drones.
And broad sanctions amount to economic blockades which leads to massive civilian suffering. You can't let that farmer repair his tractor because the parts could be used in a drone.
War is hell. Sanctions/blockades are evil and ineffective outside of destroying entire countries.
Diplomacy only works if the counter party is willing to play by the rules. Russia is not such a party. And that has nothing to do with neocons, it has everything to do with the fact that they see diplomacy simply as yet another weapon instead of a way to reach common ground.
The historical details emerging around the Minsk agreements (e.g. Merkel's comments) indicate you are completely wrong here. Not to mention Trump's unilateral pullout of the JCPOA!
I'm going to have to express my ignorance here: are sanctions not 'transitive'? I was under the impression that if a 3rd party violated the sanctions, then they would no longer have parts sent to them.
How would that work? Businesses are liable if they trade with an entity that isn't on the OFAC list but turns out to be a shell company of a restricted entity? Each company needs to not only do KYB and ensure compliance with OFAC lists, but also somehow figure out UBOs for every customer too?
Sounds like a lot of work to me, probably not viable for any but the biggest companies, and even they would struggle.
"War with the Newts (Válka s Mloky in the original Czech), also translated as Salamander Wars, is a 1936 satirical science fiction novel by Czech author Karel Čapek. It concerns the discovery in the Pacific of a sea-dwelling race, an intelligent breed of newts, who are initially enslaved and exploited. They acquire human knowledge and rebel, leading to a global war for supremacy."
The Newts use explosives to demolish land, creating more of the shallow sea they prefer to live in & they also use poisonous gases and other weapons against the humans. And all the time, there are at least some humans who sell them explosives, chemicals or arms to make a quick buck.
The only thing that saves the remainders of humanity in the end is that the Newts eventually start fighting each other and wipe themselves out...
> There is no evidence suggesting that any of those companies are running afoul of US sanctions laws and knowingly exporting their technology to be used in the drones
Sounds like just standard parts rather than sensitive equipment.
Rules are made to cause trouble for the average law-abiding citizen, but have almost no effect on actual criminals. e.g when you buy an AR magazine online (just a piece of cheap plastic and a single spring all there is) it says very clearly these are not to be exported outside the US.
If you're a lawful citizen and by mistake take one to the airport and get caught with it, would be a lot of trouble, but criminals will just ignore than warning, buy a few hundreds and smuggle them through land or sea no problem.
If these components were allowed to be purchased by civilians without a specialized license, then the companies can't really be blamed for it. There's no way to prevent things like that from being smuggled abroad.
People do get caught for smuggling export-controlled goods. Some Russians were caught a few years ago for trying to export a few night-vision goggles (around 20 or so?). You could probably smuggle out a couple dozen from the consumer market, but hard to do so in higher quantities (enough to outfit a military) without attracting attention.
Russia has had issues with not having enough optics, so there's speculation that the Russian NODs for sale to American LARPers for years as milsurp might not have actually been surplus...
So, literally nothing. That's small guys getting slapped for breaking rules. Wake me when France imprisons some Thales executives for selling thermal scopes to Russia (post-invasion!)
By the way, the French government is the largest Thales shareholder.
US sanctions apply to any entity doing business with the US. If a company chooses to violate them, they lose the US market and can get penalized in other ways too by getting their US assets seized.
Well, first, sanctions aren't the same as export restrictions. America can account for NODs sold in America, they can ask vendors who they've sold them to, they get signed statements from anyone who buys one that they can't be exported, but that's not something America can do in France.
How many do you think were caught vs how many were successful? The masterminds back in Moscow don't care if one shipment gets caught when 10 more made it through.
> if even an operation to smuggle few dozen gets busted.
Right, one such operation failed, but there's many more which succeeded, not to mention all the Western stuff they confiscated from the Ukrainians (verified through videos they posted).
And you're right, it's not realistic for them to outfit thousands of soldiers with that gear, but certainly enough for small groups of special forces, but their real problem isn't bypassing sanctions, but their own corruption which made them not have such gear long before the war started in the first place.
I would be very surprised if any of the Western optics the Russians have that have been captured are American. Or at least the advanced optics available for sale in America but under export controls. Like I said, this isn't hard stuff to keep track of.
> Rules are made to cause trouble for the average law-abiding citizen, but have almost no effect on actual criminals.
I'll bite, how do you think the justice system should work?
Laws and their corresponding punishments are deterrents. And judges have flexibility in applying them to handle issues of accidental vs. intentional rule violation.
> how do you think the justice system should work?
I don't know, and I am not saying we should turn the country into North Korea or China with full government control, that's far worse.
> And judges have flexibility in applying them
They can only apply them to those caught, and that's the problem here. Only a very small percentage of those violating the sanctions are actually caught at all in the first place.
I would disagree that there's a problem here. As mentioned much better in other replies, there's a global supply chain and these are commodity parts. This is on the order of jaywalking or going 2mph the speed limit on the highway.
So the drones' engines don't appear to have anything to do with any US manufacturer, and even if they did, Iran could buy them from China. Good luck with sanctioning those.
This isn’t surprising at all. General commercial or industrial parts aren’t highly controlled around the world. Even if the US has export restrictions, many other places don’t. There are plenty of middlemen more than happy to sell these parts at a premium to make a buck.
Civilian parts, meanwhile ru tanks and helicopters are equipped in post 2014 French Thales military grate systems (ir/thermal). ru Orlan drones fly French Lynred 640x480@120Hz microbolometers. Where is the investigation into that? Where are arrest of Thales/Lynred executives? They sold military parts breaking post Crimean embargo.
I'm pretty sure they can analyze those parts to find where they originated from, their date of manufacturing, then draw a line from the fab to the buyer. Digital parts can have internal serial numbers readable with reserved instructions, as for analog ones I wouldn't be surprised if there weren't very subtle differences in their manufacturing (material composition, tolerances?) that could be used to identify at least roughly where they originated from and a list of potential buyers.
Turns out it's really easy to pass a law and really hard to actually enforce it especially when you don't want to and the result of enforcement would be really unpopular...
Took a quick look. I didn't see a list of components or a link to that list.
My guess is these are comercial grade components (as opposed to industrial or military grade). This might mean they are susceptible to forms of attacks higher grade components will survive. In other words, they are not "hardened" (a term that has a range of meanings). Another way to put it might be that they are relatively easy to disrupt and shoot down through means other than kinetic countermeasures.
> Another way to put it might be that they are relatively easy to disrupt and shoot down through means other than kinetic countermeasures.
Ukraine has been achieving very high shoot-down rates on Shahed-136 drones. The Russians have to launch them in big swarms to have a hope of getting any of them through.
The drones use a piston engine designed for model airoplanes, driving a pusher propellor. Apparently its top speed is about 135mph. It looks like a jet, with its delta wings; but I'd guess you could shoot one down with a rifle.
GPS modules and microcontrollers are about as fancy as it gets. They listed (gasp) power supply regulators, and chips from Analog Devices that I presume to be OpAmps or similar.
It is actually far scarier that they are able to bypass any sanctions and buy everything they need to make weapons. And it seems US government can’t do much about it.
As long as these are commonly available components, made in the millions, it's absolutely impossible to stop Russia and Iran from sourcing the thousands they need.
Indeed, the microcontroller pictured in the article seems to be a fairly unremarkable DSP from TI: https://www.ti.com/product/TMS320F28335. I can buy them from over a dozen online stores in the uk for around £20 a piece.
Those components are mostly dual-use and not that exciting.
And they probably don't get as many of them as they like, and they have to design around their lack of access. All of that already imposes costs on them, which is felt in the drones being more expensive and less capable than otherwise possible.
> the microchips and other small devices ending up in so many of the Iranian and Russian drones are not only inexpensive and widely available, they are also easily hidden.
I think the fact they can bypass sanctions to get these sorts of parts is expected- after all, they are the ones securing their borders. The OP is right, it would be more worrisome from a military perspective if they further had the capabilities to produce all this themselves.
Trying to prevent common cheap components that almost anyone in the world can order online from falling into the hands of adversaries is a lost cause. It would require shutting down over half the economy and instituting a draconian and virtually totalitarian control regime. The Biden administration seems to be playing from a 1960's era playbook that makes zero sense in the 21st century.
If the supplier for iran is centralized then having a catalogue of these specific components and monitoring for purchases of them could tip who the supplier is. If the source of the components are separated into different entities and components are only brought together in Iran, then yea I think it would be super hard to find them.
These parts are commodities. It’s like saying the drone had sheet metal, rivets, screws, wires, and solder. Even if somehow they had all been purchased in one Amazon shopping cart, it would create zero hardship to “force” them to be purchased separately from different vendors.
Why would you think the supplier is centralized when any of X billion people could have bought the component or a product containing it and sold it to someone who sold it to someone who sold it to Iran ?
This is a shallow take IMO; the idea of sanctions are to add enough friction to hurt, not to be able to completely throttle an adversary.
Spending time trying to fund and manage black market networks, raiding recycling centers, buying and dismantling washing machines for chips etc. is all time that the Russians aren't putting towards streamlining cruise missile production.
The level of hardship imposed is going to be minimal once the black market structures are in place. These kinds of sanctions may have had an effect in the first few months of the war but that effect has probably vanished to practically nothing by now.
At the same time sanctions and export restrictions impose costs on the US and its allies. Those costs aren't worth it if the restrictions aren't themselves effective, which they almost certainly won't be for common off the shelf components.
That criminals break laws and crimes require investigation and prosecution which are activities that have associated expenses is not new.
You have to remember that both investigation and prosecution involve a large amount of discretion, so the cost of the sanctions regime is dynamic and variable. Enforcement can put a small effort against low-value components and put a large effort into violations of high-value components. If the small effort put against low-value components deters some activity, then the goals of the sanctions regime are furthered.
I thought the quality of an optical system came down to it's resolution and its freedom from aberration. If I'm not mistaken, it's not hard to achieve "perfect" optical resolution (1/2 a wavelength of light?). Mitigating aberration is done with stacks of lenses with different refractive indices, which requires a specialist glassmaker. But Russia has specialist glassmakers. I don't think it's possible to achieve complete freedom from aberration, but I don't know.
This isn't a reminder that sanctions are useless. It's evidence of a crime that needs to be investigated and charges filed against the companies involved.
Spoken like a true politician! Not only are the sanctions illegal by many international laws (and frankly, even domestic law considering how freedom of speech has been interpreted by the Supreme Court, to say the least), they fail to prevent the activity that supposedly justifies them. Meanwhile, the general population cannot get medicine and basic goods needed to have a decent life. A true crime against humanity. Especially absurd in the case of Iran, which entered a formal deal with the US in exchange for sanctions relief, only to have a subsequent administration scrap it because it didn't like it, all the while Iran holding up its end of the bargain.
> The assessment, which was shared with US government officials late last year, illustrates the extent of the problem facing the Biden administration, which has vowed to shut down Iran’s production of drones that Russia is launching by the hundreds into Ukraine.
In a US with sane foreign policy this would be fairly easy. The US, with backing from Europe, would tell Iran "stop supplying Russia with drones or we are going to put major sanctions on you".
Iran would look back to the sanctions there were placed on them over their nuclear weapons program, which were pretty severe, and remember how when they agreed to stop the weapons program and agreed to international inspections for verification the sanctions were lifted.
They would not want to go back to that, and would know that the US will be reasonable if Iran complies and quickly lift sanctions, decide helping Russia isn't worth going back to those US/EU sanctions, and stop supplying drones.
But we have a US where after the US lifted the nuclear sanctions it changed its mind and reimposed them. So now (A) the US no longer has imposing sanctions on Iran as a tool to persuade them on new issues, and (B) Iran (and everyone else) has no reason to believe the US when it says sanctions over any particular thing will actually be lifted if the sanctioned country makes the changes the US wants.
Not by the Europeans it’s not. When Trump reimposed sanctions over Iran’s nuclear program most of the Europeans pulled out because it looked like everyone but Trump was working in good faith.
Yeah. Trump and the right really fucked America’s ability to negotiate with hostile nations. Not sure how we ever get out of this mess unless we structurally reform our constitution to require more oversight for doing stuff like that.
They are working on the technology to build nukes and intercontinental missiles. They stir up trouble in the middle-east all the time, bringing your allies and US interests at danger. They threaten to blockade the street of Hormuz which a lot of your goods travel through. They supply weapons to players that want to hurt US citizens elsewhere, sometimes even on US soil. They provide assistance to North Korea and Russia.
There are probably more reasons why you should care...
> They are working on the technology to build nukes and intercontinental missiles...
Yes, they are almost there, hurry up. At most a year out!!! (Sad I'm too old and hearing this same theme really since something like 20-30 years...). Gaah. And from there this post gets only worse, admitting some true bits one can easily exchange some nouns and have this for any other.. ok enough :)
Your reply is like textbook liberal American foreign policy. Another idea is Iran is developing those weapons to ensure their sovereignty against ruthless western influences. The version of democracy that the U.S. exports to other countries is easily manipulated by the American special interests. It is not done to promote human rights.
> Iran is developing those weapons to ensure their sovereignty
Iran is about as meddlesome in other sovereign states’ affairs as America is. They work to export their influence as much as we do. We do it more and better because we’re bigger. But it’s the same impulse.
So sure, they’re developing nukes to protect their regime. I’m not sure how that’s a hot take, it’s why we have war. The problem is with what and to whom that regime likes doing.
Well I dont agree it’s the same impulse. Iranian sovereignty is directly influenced by the actions of its immediate neighbors. U.S. doesn’t have the same concerns, as they aren’t even on the same continent. Neither regime has the moral high ground, but the Iranian regime has a more pressing obligation to its people to ensure their survival. The U.S. is the expeditionary force acting in foreign lands. Their actions are not equivalent.
> the Iranian regime has a more pressing obligation to its people to ensure their survival
I'm not sure survival of the existing regime is high on the list of priorities of the average Iranian person at the moment...
And the subject of the thread is talking about Iran developing long range weapons and sending them and their drone technicians to Russia, which does not border Iran, in order to facilitate its war of aggression against Ukraine, which neither borders Iran nor possesses any credible threat towards it. The idea that when the US extends its military reach around the world it's an expeditionary force in foreign lands but when Iran does it has only the salvation of its people in mind is textbook anti-liberal double standards...
Syria isn’t Iran’s immediate neighbour. Neither are North Africa or Yemen, but there are natural strategic complements to Tehran having influence in each. Same as America. Again, same impulse, different scales. Iran is no Iceland.
The US is no nation governed by Angels, but orders of magnitudes "better" in most regards. Allies of the US fare much better than those of Iran or Russia. Its citizens have orders of magnitude more rights and access to self-fulfillment, among other things. The insistence on Israel not to get wiped out by an Iranian nuke is hardly a questionable goal.
Only the most black-and-white perspective can justify this false equivalency.
I don’t know, if we were to go off of “total number of innocent civilians murdered globally” for establishing moral high ground, Iran has done less harm than the United States.
Totally bogus metric, actually. You again have to ignore the size and historical comparisons. Or that Iran's current regime has tortured, disappeared, executed or murdered tens of thousands of its own citizens. You have to ignore the circumstances and motivations for some of the wars the US forces killed civilians in. You have to ignore that US forces do a lot to avoid killing civilians, while Iran just doesn't give a damn and actually targets those.
If you think Iran is such a good place, you should move there. As you can't see the moral difference between an imperfect democracy and an authocratic regime, you are certainly not capable of defending a democracy.
American citizens don't regularly march down the street chanting "Death to Iran", though. I mean, that could be just for show. But I sure don't want them to ever have the means to carry it out, so we could see what they would do...
> They claim they want to destroy Israel and call the US the big satan. They aren't famous for rational decision making.
Both of those are very rational ways of ginning up domestic support in a way that commits to absolutely nothing meaningful on the geopolitical stage. There's very little reason to believe Iran's power brokers are privately suicidal.
The US says all sorts of things it doesn't really mean, too.
There's very little evidence the Iranians are acting irrationally.
Their pursuit of a nuclear program is pragmatic (as evidenced by the kid gloves we treat North Korea with, versus how we treated Libya). Their negotiations and the resulting agreement for its suspension was pragmatic. Their response to Trump blowing that agreement up was pragmatic. Their funding of anti-Israeli groups is pragmatic. Their playing up of external threats for internal political purposes is pragmatic.
What genuinely irrational things has Iran done in, say, the last two decades?
> You can't compare the US and Iran on their records concerning threats.
The US made a bunch of "red lines" in Syria, without following through, but I was more referencing stuff like tough talk on human rights contrasting with business involvements in China.
A nuclear weapons program may be in the interest of Iran (though I doubt it). It's not in anyone else's interest.
Much of what Iran is doing is somewhat irrational... meddling in conflicts around the reason in particular is often much to its own detriment, but serves some "irrational" purpose. Same as with posturing over the Hormuz strait, well knowing they can't do shit against the US navy.
Yes, if you ignore all the things contrary to your world view and only look at what fits it, and squint really hard, you can say the stuff you say.
The Navy was present during every incident listed on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strait_of_Hormuz#Events, including seizures of oil tankers and cargo ships. Minefields are also a handy option. Iran can and has disrupted traffic through the strait; it's an effective threat even if they can't keep the US Navy out.
Yes the Iranian Navy can pester a commercial ship here and there. They can't blockade the entire Hormuz street and even if they ramped up those seizures too much, they'd draw an international response they wouldn't like. Iran can't want a shoot out with the US in any form...
It's order of magnitudes easier to stop Iran from getting the bomb rather than "disarming" them completely.
And there are good reasons for countries having at least some kind of army. You need a police force to stop a few gangsters from teaming up and raiding weaker civilians. You need an army to prevent/deter the police forces of your neighbor countries to team up and overwhelm your police force to take your stuff.
“ Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
"installed by" in a fairly indirect way though, right? (by first installing the Shah who then caused a revolution, leading to the current regime coming to power very much against US wishes and interests).
The US / UK coup in the 50s overthrew a democratically-elected leader to install a puppet regime. The subsequent revolution was to a large extent a backlash against imperialism. "Installed by" may not be accurate, but that the current regime is in power is largely a consequence of Western actions.
I think Western policy towards Iran has been an absolute disaster in just about any measurement you can think of: global security, regional stability, the Iranian people.
The Russians want to take land and kill Ukrainians en masse. Ukrainians insist on not giving up their homes and marching, hands bound, to the execution basements. When you say "push for a peace agreement" to finally achieve this vaunted Peace In Our Time, where do you propose to find middle ground? Which Ukrainian towns and cities are you okay to allow to be ethnically cleansed so that Dastardly Military Industrial Complex is left with fewer defence contracts?
Reminder that this was entirely initiated by Russia, which is the country that needs to make a meaningful peace proposal such as returning to the status quo ante bellum.
I do not condone Russia's invasion but this is a simplistic take. One could also make a case like this: In 2014 a revolution overthrew Ukraine's legally elected government. The victorious revolutionaries then attempted to force the supporters of the overthrown government to remain part of the same country with them rather than letting them secede. The supporters of the overthrown government turned to Russia for aid.
There are many contentious issues related to this situation, many inconclusive arguments over who started the violence during the revolution, over the extent to which the overthrown government was a Russian puppet, over the extent to which the revolutionaries were NATO puppets, over whether or not the revolution was justified despite it having deposed a fairly elected government because the government was corrupt, and so on, over Russian hypocrisy in supporting Donbass separatists even though Russia would not permit one of its own territories to secede, etc. I would not say that it is an open and shut matter.
The way I see it, at the very least there is not some cartoonishly good side in this war that is covered only in honor.
Keep dreaming. They will not make a meaningful peace proposition until they're defeated and fully evacuated from the 1991 borders of Ukraine. This is exactly why weapons deliveries to Ukraine are essential to achieve that.
If an adult persuaded a child to stick their finger in a mousetrap, the resulting injury wouldn’t be entirely owed to said mousetrap.
Like it or not, Putin did exactly what he said he would do should Ukraine (or any other border adjacent country), attempt to join NATO. What changed is that our sitting President encouraged Ukraine’s to go for it, where past presidents discouraged poking the bear.
Your argument is supporting the equivalent of telling a physically abused person: "if you call the cops, I will beat you more. Why are you making me hurt you?"
Yes, terrorists can do exactly what they said to their victims, unless their demands are met. This doesn't make them "children persuaded to hurt themselves".
Daily reminder that not only Americans have agency in this world. Even Putin had agency to not start the war. And Ukrainians have agency to pursue whatever means available to free themselves from Russian influence.
> Then when it ends [(a)] there will be another war somewhere else that America at the very least will supply arms to [(b) mainstream media who supported the war will ceremoniously backtrack from their previous positions.]
I think this is being downvoted for being off topic from the main article though, as far as I can tell. Strong point nonetheless.
