French President Emmanuel Macron has said France deployed in the recent hours Rafale fighter jets, anti-air systems and air radars for the purpose of intercepting missiles and drones.
He also confirmed that Paris is sending its aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle – the flagship of the French Navy – towards the Mediterranean.
I said it elsewhere and got downvoted for it, but yeah, pretty much. Putting aside how utterly fucked the situation is and how abjectly fucking stupid the orange and Bibi’s regimes are, this is an object lesson in why target discrimination is extremely important: you can turn a nominally neutral party into an actively hostile combatant with the push of a button. Iran has been getting high on their own dogma for so long that it’s evidently divorced them from reality. Leaning into an orgy of violence towards everyone around you that you can hit - instead of focusing it on the people specifically fucking with you - is a one-way ticket to getting regime-changed.
All that said: the US and Israel kicking this idiocy off was deeply fucking stupid for dozens of reasons. The Iranian regime was quite bad for a lot of reasons, but this is just about the worst way they could have addressed that geopolitical sticking point.
Not aimed at you specifically, but Iran isn’t attacking these countries because of their political or religous dogma.
They’re attacking them because they are all valuable oil vassal states of the USA. None of them are nominally neutral because they all have several US staging bases, supplies, and armaments that are only there to protect US interests.
It would be pointless for Iran to expend its entire ammo stock to take out one carrier strike group when the US can just deploy 4 more. They would fall into a similar trap as Ukraine and enter a scenario where they will ultimately lose.
Nothing is more damaging to the US in this war than money, and the fastest way to cost them money is to effectively delete the oil trade in the region, which means they’ll hit a ton of undefended infrastructure.