Comment by alephnerd

A US-Iran conflict has been inevitable for decades.

A nuclear Iran would lead to a nuclear KSA, Turkiye, UAE, Egypt, Qatar, etc and would make the Middle East more unstable.

We don't need to put boots on the ground though. The reason why we had boots in Afghanistan and Iraq which led to it's unpopularity was due to our moral commitment to nation-building in the 1990s-2000s (especially after Yugoslavia). Americans no longer feel that moral compulsion.

If Iran shatters like Libya, the problem is solved and KSA, UAE, Qatar, Turkiye, Azerbaijan, Pakistan, Russia, China, and India can fight over the carcass just like how ASEAN, China, Russia, and India are doing in now collapsed Myanmar (which had similar ambitions in the 2000s); how the Gulf, Med states, and Russia are meddling in Libya; and how the Gulf, Turkiye, Russia, China, and India are meddling in the Horn of Africa (Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia).

This is why North Korea prioritized nuclear weapons - in order to gain strategic autonomy from the US and China [0], especially because China has constantly offered to forcibly denuclearize North Korea as a token to SK and Japan for a China-SK-Japan FTA [1]

Edit: can't reply

> How many more years will it remain inevitable, do you think?

As long as Iranian leadership remain committed to building a nuclear program.

Thus Iran either completely hands off it's nuclear program to the US or the EU, or it shatters.

The former is not happening because the key veto players in Iran (the clerics, the Bonyads, the IRGC, the Army, and regime-aligned oligarchs) are profiting from sanctions and substituting US/EU relations with Russia and China, and have an incentive to have a nuclear weapon in order to solidify their perpetual control in the same manner that North Korea did.

That only leaves the latter. The same thing happened to Libya and Myanmar.

The only reason the Obama administration went with the JCPOA was because the EU, Russia, and China lobbied the Obama admin that they could prevent Iran from nuclearizing. China+Russia are now indifferent to Iranian nuclear ambitions due to ONG (China) and technology (Russia) dependencies, and the EU does not have the power projection capacity nor the economic linkages to stop Iran.

[0] - https://www.cfr.org/backgrounders/six-party-talks-north-kore...

[1] - https://english.kyodonews.net/articles/-/47844?device=smartp...