Putin’s war ambitions profit most from the scare around Hormuz. His sanctions get removed to provide alternative supply, he can charge exorbitant prices, and he gets leverage. Since he is also providing targeting information for Iran to shoot at, it feels like this is an avatar joystick war for him to distract from his Ukraine disaster.
Putin mainly benefits from the increased price of oil - black-market oil prices are a discount relative to standard-market oil, so he'll have a much healthier budget, even if his sanctions stay "airtight".
China benefits here - they import Russian crude oil over land, so their costs won't increase as much as the international market (unless Russia uses the leverage to absorb all the benefit, which I doubt), but more crucially: the alternative to oil fuel is renewables, and China dominates renewables so a spike in demand for solar/batteries will be a godsend for them.
> China benefits here - they import Russian crude oil over land,
No, they don't. 54% of their oil comes from the middle east. Only 20% comes from Russia.
China does have a healthy oil reserve at the moment, so this may be marginally less bad for them. And yes, their electricity comes from renewables, but like in any other country, all of their logistics run on diesel.
By starting this war, the United States, unsatisfied with flipping the table on bilateral trade with other countries just flipped the table on multipolar international trade. What a time to be alive.
But at least for now, their fret trains have limited reach. They have a big country, with sparse population once you leave the coastal areas. I think this will help them push their railroad infrastructure though.
It's not a sparse population until you're significantly further inland than Chengdu. A billion people are living in an area that's roughly comparable to west-of-missippi USA. It's cities and high-density farmland, nothing else. If there's a few square meters of unoccupied space, somebody planted vegetables there.
It's not a big threat to the US. The US is a net oil exporter, has the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and, if absolutely necessary, Trump could make up with Canada so those oil imports restart.
Taiwan, Japan, and Korea, though - totally dependent on imports for oil.
Something that most pundits have missed: unlike all other US wars since Korea, the US can't end this war by pulling out. Iran, unlike all US combat opponents from Vietnam to Venezuela, has the demonstrated ability to strike well beyond its borders. This war isn't over until both sides say it's over.
Frankly this whole thing is worth it if it scares Taiwan and Japan into building new nuclear capacity. Taiwan has been suicidally turning off nuclear generation for a decade despite it being the last country on earth that wants to rely on naval imports of essential goods.
Could it be because nuclear is highly centralized? I would expect that something like solar/wind power would be better for decentralization (in a war).
Even if you don't blow up a nuclear plant, it seems like cutting the power from one would be relatively easy.
Russia has refrained from hitting Ukraine's nuclear plants directly, and Ukraine has more or less kept them connected to the grid (albeit with nonstop repair efforts).
Transformer substations are more vulnerable targets but it's hard to be decentralized enough to not have those.
> It's not a big threat to the US. The US is a net oil exporter,
The thing is that the US exported oil is sweet crude, and our own refineries are not made for that type of oil. So for the petroleum products used within the US need the heavy oil that is imported. So if the world goes tits up so that the US can only use the oil it produces, it would take time before the US could refine it.
That and it's way easier to go from retooling from sour to sweet than reverse, way easier to go from heavy to light than reverse, etc. Not suggesting it's just a flip a switch kind of change, but it's usually a net reduction in complexity in refining for both of those changes.
That goes against every thing I've ever read or heard. I'm no oil man, nor play one on TV, but I only know what information I've come across in reading or hearing in radio/tv. Maybe my googlefu is lacking, but a quick search still suggests this is the answer.
>So for the petroleum products used within the US need the heavy oil that is imported.
Is that really true? I've heard experts say that sweet crude is easy to refine. I've always thought that the reason US refiners bother with sour crude is that they're better at refining it than non-US refiners are, so they make a little more money that way.
I'm not going to lmgtfy with other links. If you have something contradictory to show, then by all means show. I'm never one to be unwilling to learn something new, but I will not just accept the comment of a random stranger on the interweb providing no supporting evidence for their position that opposes my current understanding.
As I understand it, light sweet crude is in fact easier to refine, but refineries still have to be set up for it to get optimal or economically viable results, which US refineries largely are not. US refineries certainly could switch, but the process of doing so would be expensive and time consuming.
Don't the Canadian pipelines just go to the gulf for exporting and not used in the US? In other words, what would turning them off do except hurt their bottom line?
The threat to the US is China feeling like they need to act. The loss of Persian gulf oil is an existential threat to the Chinese economy. This could end very, very bad.
Nah. So far we haven't hit Iran's oil export infrastructure. If China makes a serious move we blow it up. We can also close the straight ourselves and claim it's for protection.
I ain't reading all that, but if you're referring to the strike on the oil storage facility in Tehran, AFAICT that's not for export. It's local consumption. We haven't, to my knowledge, hit oil exports yet.
I don't think oil works like that. Infra takes a long time to reroute, especially in war time. Exports are nearly all of Iran's economy. They can't turn it off or they starve.
Why isn't China acting. Putin showed the world is not going to do anything when an aggressor invades. Trump is doing it now. Nobody stopped Israel. What is China waiting for?
They are helping Iran militarily and diplomatically. The last attack on Iran ended in 12 days. The Americans or Israelis haven't send any boots as a proper invasion requires. So they are just waiting and watching.
China is starting to act.[1][2] There's a summit with Xi and Trump coming up.
China is pushing for a cease fire with Iran. China has also stopped aggressive flights over Taiwan airspace for the last week, for whatever reason.
Diplomats on the China side are worried about the Trump administrations's amateurish approach to diplomacy.
"... Trump’s reluctance to delegate, disdain for process and focus on quick wins, banking instead on personal magnetism and his “gut” as summit organising principles. ...
“You have a handful of people who have never done this before, putting together what may be the most consequential trip in the president’s administration on a wing and a prayer. The Chinese are beyond worried. They’re apoplectic.” - South China Morning Post.
Conceivably, the 50 tankers per day could move in batches with the protection of a Destroyer. It's hard to imagine a credible surface or subsea threat with current fleet presence so it's basically a question of missile defense. Some constellation of vessels can indefinitely secure the zone if any powers that be with a suitable Navy desire it, and there are at least a few that have plausible capabilities.
It's less about "opening it up" and more about the tanker companies feeling there is enough safety. With the Red Sea instance, they didn't start running ships until the Houthis said they were done.
The feeling of safety in this scenario would be provided by the assurance that anyone who tries picking on a tanker would be stomped into the ground by a destroyer.
The missiles destroyers have are not the kind you want to use to shoot down shaheds. The economics don't work out in the long run. Same for AIM-9s. There are some new guided pod rockets that likely break even, but they are new.
How is a single destroyer going to protect 50 oil tankers at once? Oil tankers are almost comically unsuited to warfare and you don't need missiles to penetrate their non-existent defences, they can easily and cheaply be taken out by drones. Here's Ukraine doing just that for the Nth time last week:
As the friendly article says, the US military has no idea about how commercial shipping works and how hard it will be convince anybody to transit through an active war zone.
The simple solution seems to be to put the Trump fortune up as insurance collateral. If he's so confident that the war's such a good idea, he needs to put some skin in the game.
Not congruent to what I wrote:
Why would the batch size be 1?
Must it be the US military?
What anti-drone capabilities do Destroyers have or could be made to have?
If the tankers are primarily for the benefit of Asia and not the US do you risk bringing additional parties with a grievance into your conflict?
Kuwait, Qatar, UAE, Iraq, and Saudi are all US allies and they all rely on the Straits for exports. If they can't sell oil/LNG, they will be in much bigger trouble than their customers, who have other suppliers to choose from.
When the action you are talking about is, for anyone other than the US or Israel, signing up to become a co-belligerent with the US & Israel in their war with Iran? Yeah, the realistic options for who might do it are pretty limited.
Seems tinged in political fog. For instance, if China wants tankers to have safe passage they can present diplomatic arrangements with the other players (US&Israel and/or Iran) indicating they are there for escort only. Belligerence would not be up to them if they were forced to defend their merchant escort.
How good is an Iranian navy really? At this point, seriously asking, why is there anything left of an Iranian navy? If we're in a shooting conflict that's a war not a war, why would they not be going after anything that could be considered a blockade? I'm going with these guys didn't have a real plan, and that block the straight is something they actually didn't consider so nothing in place to counter. It's Keystone cops
Iran doesn't need a navy to sink cargo ships going through the Straight of Hormuz, they just need a handful of guys in the mountains with a stock of rockets or drones.
The don't have a navy per se, just speedboats fitted with missiles, whatever is left of it. Enough to drive the insurance costs sky high and interdict tanker traffic through the strait. Also their navy port is right next to the strait, I wonder why.
"A navy, naval force, military maritime fleet, war navy, or maritime force is the branch of a state's armed forces principally designated for naval and amphibious warfare;" --wikipedia
Also, comical is a great description. I was aware that Iran has a speedboat navy, but wtf that video?! How much is AI? The shot with the giant flame throwing rockets flying slower that the speedboats is hilarious. I guess perspective is everything??
I guess you could call a fleet of dinghies a navy as well by that measure. Anyway, they no longer have their navy, because according to Trump it was, uh, 'knocked out'.
What they do still have however, is enough Shaheds to interdict tanker traffic through the straight.
Ukraine's entire navy was sunk in the first 3 days of the war, and 4 years later Russian Black Sea fleet knows to stay in port as more than half of their ships have been sunk by Ukrainian missiles and drones.
You have to convince three sets of people to move any tanker through the Straight:
- the crew
- the company
- the insurer
The company has an obvious reason to take on some amount of risk to move a vessel through the Straight. However, both the crew and the insurer will be quite risk averse, so the Navy would need to demonstrate a very high success rate in intercepting both missiles and shaheds to convince those two other groups to say "yes".
Seems like a great way to have the destroyer's air defense overwhelmed/depleted by shaheds while IRGC drone boats and speedboats attack from the surface. Then you have 50 insurance claims against the US treasury.
> Trump could make up with Canada so those oil imports restart.
Sounds like Trump hubris. Probably just what he'd expect. And then he'd accuse Canada of "behaving terribly" if things didn't go his way, and he'd reach for his tariff paddle.
Fortunately, his handy paddle is no longer available (the one where he can make changes on whims, eg. when a commercial upsets him). He still has other options, they require process and need to be specific, setting aside the short term tariffs levied after his tantrum tariffs were rebuked by SCOTUS.
The IRGC is 125k-150k people. Many of them are pot committed to the current government, because the IRGC has done... unforgivable things that a new government would be likely to punish.
Venezuela is also run by the same security apparatus and government as it was before. We didn't attempt to turn over the entire government.
thats in a scenario with soldiers pushing into no mans land under permanent drone control. Israel demonstrates much lower stats when enemy hides underground. I would imagine having no boots on the ground will lower the numbers further.
Maduro was such a bad leader that his prime minister sold him to the US.
Which means now Venezuela is still a chavist regime, but not under US embargo anymore. This will improve their economy a great deal, and if the regime doesn't capture all the profits for itself, will also improve the QOL of all Venezuelians, hopefully.
Venezuela wasn’t a regime change war it was a US-backed palace coup that left the entire regime except for the guy at its head in place in exchange for a narrow set of policy favors to the US.
It has little in common with Iran, which is more like the 2003 Iraq war (but, so far, without committing ground troops, but there is no way to maintain that with Trump’s stated goal of “unconditional surrender”; that’s going to require a ground forces occupation at a minimum, and probably a ground forces invasion to acheive it) than it is like the recent intervention in Venezuela.
Even if they are not particular fond of the regime that is in the process of being destroyed, the Iranian people are likely to resist that, just as occurred in Iraq (with the most significant resistance there coming from forces that were opposed to Saddam’s regime and which had been actively suppressed by it while it was in power.)
If someone backstabbed me twice while we were in negotiations, I would not give them 3rd chance for negotiations, US and Israel really f....d their reputation after 2 attacks while in negotiations
That's exactly what the Iranian fireign minister said.
"The fact is that we don’t have any positive experience of negotiating with the United States. You know, especially with this administration. We negotiated twice last year and this year, and then in the middle of negotiations, they attacked us," Araghchi said.
They said that, but there is also no evidence of them negotiating in good faith. Showing up to the table and just dragging the process out for years isn’t negotiating, it’s an act.
This is how long negotiations took on the last agreement. 20 months. But I guess the current administration doesn't have that kind of patience and would rather blow them up instead.
It took years to negotiate the nuclear deal that Obama got, it was productive, it was good enough to keep nuclear proliferation in check.
Comes dumbo and rips that off, goes back to "deal making" without any diplomacy, bomb them twice during the negotiation process after ripping off the previous deal.
Seems like the whole new negotiations from Trump's admin was just putting up an act after all... Quite disgusting.
There is evidence they negotiated in good-faith because they deliberately involved a third-party as a mediator. Oman, who was involved in the mediation said a nuclear deal was nearly done (where the Iranians agreed to completely scrap the Obama nuclear deal for a new Trump nuclear treaty) when the US changed its mind and decided to attack them.
> unlike all other US wars since Korea, the US can't end this war by pulling out
From what I read in Kissinger’s Diplomacy, Vietnam was also a war they couldn’t just pull out of if they wanted to.
The public wanted deescalation, but the Americans under Nixon had to escalate the war to get enough of an advantage to pull out without it being a bloodbath.
Hence part of Nixon’s infamy: he defied public opinion and escalated an unpopular war, precisely to end it more cleanly.
That sounds kinda stupid. These days when someone says something ridiculous but pro-war it generally turns out they are just lying through their teeth and just not being honest about their motivations (eg, getting kickbacks or they're worried about tactical political issues). It seems more than likely that when Kissinger writes that we're reading someone being dishonest.
In addition, I'm struggling with the idea that Kissinger of all people cared enough about what happened to Vietnamese people for it to affect policy. He was the sort who would have no difficulty at all allowing bloodbaths to happen if he thought that was advantageous. His wiki page suggests, in fact, that he did do exactly that a few times.
Neither Nixon nor Kissinger wanted to be in Vietnam, but again, if they evacuated in 1969 it would have been a bloodbath of American soldiers I think is the point you missed.
The communists had a decisive advantage until the Americans escalated the war to a ceasefire then pulled out in the mid 1970s.
The US is a net exporter of petroleum (crude oil plus refined products) but from what Google tells me it is still a net importer of crude oil. It also tells me 75% of what goes through Hormuz is crude.
Also, domestic crude of mostly light, sweet crude whereas many US refineries are designed to deal with heavy, sour crude. Google is telling me 80% of the crude that goes through Hormuz is heavy, sour crude.
Does any of this raise the impact disruptions of Hormuz would have on the US?
>Also, domestic crude of mostly light, sweet crude whereas many US refineries are designed to deal with heavy, sour crude. Google is telling me 80% of the crude that goes through Hormuz is heavy, sour crude.
The US has some of the best chemists in the world; light sweet crude is easy to refine but heavy sour crude is hard, so US refineries refining light sweet would be a waste of their talents - better to export it out for newbies to refine and buy the harder-to-refine and therefore cheaper heavy sour crude. But if heavy sour becomes more expensive, then the US will switch to the easymode option in a heartbeat.
An increased cost of inputs will always hurt the entire industry, but it won't particularly hurt the US any more than anyone else, and will probably hurt them the least - especially when they have plenty of domestic shale oil that will be financially viable to extract if prices go up.
> It's not a big threat to the US. The US is a net oil exporter, has the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and, if absolutely necessary, Trump could make up with Canada so those oil imports restart.
The SPR is 58% full, so... not empty but also not all the way full.
Additionally, even though we're a net oil exporter, we're not insulated from the global oil market rates. Local producers aren't going to sell into America more cheaply than they can sell internationally, so if international rates spike, prices will go up domestically too.
If the Straight of Hormuz remains closed for an extended period of time, we'll definitely feel the pinch domestically.
Nah. Very little direct US trade moves past Iran. In a few weeks President Trump will declare the operation a success and end most kinetic strikes, regardless of the actual situation. Then someone else will have to deal with the aftermath.
> It's not a big threat to the US. The US is a net oil exporter
The US being a net oil exporter doesn't make the domestic market independent of the global market (especially over the short to intermediate term), for a large variety of reasons.
> has the Strategic Petroleum Reserve
Which whille partial refilled from the 2022 drawdowns is still at rather low levels by historical standards.
> and, if absolutely necessary, Trump could make up with Canada
He could try (though I don’t think even that is in his character), that doesn’t mean he would succceed.
- The USA eventually declares some arbitrary "victory" condition.
- Iran will be left even poorer, and much less able to defend itself conventionally, but will remain under the same regime. Very likely they give up cooperating with atomic energy inspectors and do what North Korea did to a acquire weapons.
- Israel's ability to dictate US foreign and military policy will be degraded long term. What many commentators do not see is how anti-Israel younger consevatives trend in the US now. It will be decades or
before a serious anti-Israel republican candidate will be fielded, but it is inevitable, and even your typical greatest-ally-wall-kissers will have to moderate themselves.
Will be very interesting to see what the mid terms bring. Some on the American right are already talking about voting democrat to protest - MAGA was specifically sold to them as an antidote to necon middle eatern entanglements.
Iran won't be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons. North Korea was under China's protection but no one is going to protect Iran. The USA, Israel, and maybe some of the Gulf states will continue occasionally "mowing the grass" whenever the threat level increases.
(I'm not claiming that this is a good scenario, just a likely one.)
I am not seeing a scenario were they can be stopped. They are already surviving under combined US/Israeli strikes. Short of being attacked with weapons of mass destruction...
... oh dear god this administration is dumb enough to try that, isn't it?
Iran can be stopped. Building nuclear weapons plus delivery systems isn't easy and requires a major industrial effort. They won't be allowed to sustain that effort, or rebuild the air defenses necessary to protect it.
There is no reason to believe that they haven't already developed and worked out the details of all that, in case they'd ever need it. Now the US and Israel have killed the only man who was preventing it from being done, the late supreme leader. I cannot imagine the next supreme leader (that is about to be announced) not immediately cancelling the prohibition on building nuclear weapons (to be made public only after they've been built, ofc), and giving the order to build ~10 nuclear warheads (the amount that they can build based on the amount of 60% enriched fissile material they currently possess). With two nuclear powers relentlessly attacking them, it would be suicidal of them to not order the immediate building of nuclear weapons ASAP.
You're really missing the point. Just because someone gives the order to develop nuclear weapons doesn't mean that their defense industrial base has the capacity to do it, or that it can be protected against future strikes. Furthermore, if Iran declared that it did possess working nuclear weapons that wouldn't be a deterrent: it would trigger an immediate and massive preemptive attack by the USA and Israel.
The point was addressed in the first sentence of my previous reply.
As for a preemptive attack, which I imagine you meant would be nuclear since they're already giving it all they've got with their non-nuclear attacks, it is already clear that Israel and USA don't have a way to stop Iran's faster missiles, and they would have no way to prevent Iran nuking Tel-Aviv and Haifa in return. At that point Israel would cease to exist as a state and as a society. They would never risk that. The entire decades-long war against the middle east by USA and Israel is fought for the benefit of Israel, not for its destruction.
No, you're still missing the point. I mean a massive US conventional attack. So far in the current conflict the US has used only a fraction of its capability, and only targeted military and government facilities. In a scenario where Iran claimed to have nuclear weapons then the US would hit much harder and aim to cause so much infrastructure damage and civilian casualties that Iran would be unable to build much of anything more complex than short-range rockets.
A massive conventional attack against a nuclear power is historically not a thing. That's the whole point of a nuclear deterrent. No one is attacking Russia or North Korea under pretenses of humanitarian interventions. A massive conventional attack that would tear Iran apart would be a sufficient reason to initiate nuclear armageddon between Israel and Iran, as it would be a doomsday event for Iran either way; might as well go down swinging. Again, that's the whole point of a nuclear deterrent. It's what Israel's Samson option is, even though none of their enemies ever possessed nuclear weapons.
The problem the US and Israel now have is that no amount of preemptively declaring victory and withdrawing will make it safe to pass through the Straight of Hormuz again.
EU rollback on reducing gas liability, especially the widely debated rule on « no gas car after 2030 », feels now laughable. Maybe the reason why « technocrats » are good rulers is because they use science and data to do it.
The problem with the EU is that now they depend on rare earth minerals / solar panels / etc. for their infrastructure, which means more dependency on China. However, as the war unfolds, I bet the EU will certainly want to cozy up more with China than whatever the hell that is the Middle East and the US (and hell no they don't want to depend on Russia either!)
Rare earth minerals are often all over the place, they are just very messy to get to and that gets in the way of EU pollution regulations. China is not a sole producer - they are just cheap enough to make mining elsewhere not worth the hassle. That will change fast if they bottleneck the supply.
And once enough panels start nearing the end of their lifetime, it's likely that we should be able to recover nearly all the rare earth minerals from them with proper recycling. They don't actually get used up the way, say, fossil fuels do.
Solar panels contain negligible amounts of rare earths, compared to the amount used in wind / gas / steam turbines. They're also still used in oil & natural gas refining (though less than in the past).
Fossil fuel generators are most reliant on them, wind less so, solar barely at all.
Oh, I completely agree—but they're so frequently used as a gotcha for why the rise of solar is just trading one "foreign master" for another. "Oh no, solar panels rely on rare earth minerals, so that means you have to kowtow to China!!!"
And it's true that there is some in them, so it's good to have at least a long-term answer for how we deal with them.
> Oh, I completely agree—but they're so frequently used as a gotcha for why the rise of solar is just trading one "foreign master" for another. "Oh no, solar panels rely on rare earth minerals, so that means you have to kowtow to China!!!"
> And it's true that there is some in them, so it's good to have at least a long-term answer for how we deal with them.
It's the old saying about a man and fish and giving vs. teaching.
Solar panels bought now, at least the quality glass-glass kind, doesn't really go bad in a way that makes them depreciate at-all-quickly.
If in locations that are not themselves at a premium, so lower yield only matters if maintenance overhead per yield becomes so bad it's cheaper to replace& upgrade, they can be expected to stay there for 30~50 years depending on how fast they'll mechanically fall apart after their warranty expires (which is expected to be the duration until which most stay alive). I'd guess something like an agricultural east/west fence install would stay more towards 50y and get individual modules replaced when they break, as they're easy to get to unlike roof/wall installs and the like where they're hard to get to and given they are very low complexity in mounting system ("fence panel") there's little engineering complexity in retrofitting a plain new future panel of the same physical size and sufficiently similar voltage/current.
Rare earth minerals are not consumed in the process of generating solar energy, whereas once you've burned your oil to generate energy, it's gone and you need to buy more. That makes a pretty damn major difference.
Renewables... and coal. If shit hits fan it's not just hammering EVs (including trucking/freight) but hammering coal to liquid/olefin to make diesel and plastics. This not talked about much, long term strategic hedge / resource autarky looks like electrify everything, and domestic coal+oil for industry/petchem. If Hormuz long term, PRC going to be ramping up coal for industrial feedstock including fuels, even if it's much more polluting or expensive, but expensive is relative, $80 barrel oil = coal + extra processing becomes economical.
I think the real threat is that if you tip the Iranian conflict over into asymmetrical warfare, then nobody can stop it - ever. It seems to be almost the intent with the US and Israel especially announcing explicit intent to keep removing anybody who attempts to form a system of government.
So you'll have a permanently aggrieved population with nothing to lose saturated with know-how and materials for building missiles and drones who will just keep taking pot shots at ships and possibly commercial airliners. They don't have to "close" the straight - just make it hazardous enough that it becomes permanently very risky to sail through there. They can go dormant for 3 months and then send 30 drones at a single ship.
I'm not sure who in the strategic planning decided that no system of government for 90 million people was a good idea, but it seems quite insane to me.
Probably, Iranians also had several accepted candidates in mind to lead the US, but they didn't attack because they had some opinions about foreign government
It was a convenient misunderstanding about a call to the Palm Beach Sheriff. The FBI has a recording of the call, but probably ambiently from the Sheriff’s side. It’s a small ray of innocence for a guy like Trump. And he forgot all about it until by luck it was in the Epstein files.
What I find interesting is that Trump officials says Trump was the target here, but the guy was arrested in July of 2024 - which is when Biden was still in office.
> I think the real threat is that if you tip the Iranian conflict over into asymmetrical warfare
We're there already. We've been there. There's nothing symmetrical about this war.
Israel is basically unscathed in this war despite Iran launching barrages of missiles and drones. They were already fighting Israel asymmetrically by supporting Hamas and Hezbollah. They knew they could never fight a fair war against the US and Israel.
Trump announced yesterday they will murder anyone who takes leadership. They don’t want it opened, they want China and India to suffer while establishing themselves as alternative energy supplier.
US itself has huge reserves, and recent move with Venecuela further expands it.
Middle East countries are too blind to see it, they’re being thrown under the bus to hurt Iran.
Yes, a decade or two down the lane, all of middle-east will regret that they didn't do anything to check the US backed Israeli aggression in their region. The lack of political foresight and political will is really astounding (and surprising). And this is after the US Ambassador to Israel openly said that Israel has the "Biblical right" to all of middle-east, and the US is fine with that!
Yes, doubling the price of oil, and setting random maybe-not-enforceable tariffs and embargoes, is a net positive because it has the unintended effect of reducing carbon dioxide emissions.
Seems like tankers passing through the straits will always be at risk so long as the IRGC (or any irregular faction) remains intact with access to drones.
Seems like the only options are reaching a deal with whatever the new regime is or occupying the coastal areas.
Seems to me that a conglomerate of oil companies could have funded a canal and reduce this risk a long time ago. Just around this choke point in global logistics.
The Qataris wouldn’t even have to have direct influence if they more are likely to be long term friendly. I hadn’t heard this before, it would actually make a lot of sense and wouldn’t even really be a conspiracy theory just a theory (unless we consider anything multiple people in government do together to be a conspiracy).
dzink | a month ago
Qwertious | a month ago
China benefits here - they import Russian crude oil over land, so their costs won't increase as much as the international market (unless Russia uses the leverage to absorb all the benefit, which I doubt), but more crucially: the alternative to oil fuel is renewables, and China dominates renewables so a spike in demand for solar/batteries will be a godsend for them.
vkou | a month ago
No, they don't. 54% of their oil comes from the middle east. Only 20% comes from Russia.
China does have a healthy oil reserve at the moment, so this may be marginally less bad for them. And yes, their electricity comes from renewables, but like in any other country, all of their logistics run on diesel.
By starting this war, the United States, unsatisfied with flipping the table on bilateral trade with other countries just flipped the table on multipolar international trade. What a time to be alive.
bryanlarsen | a month ago
orwin | a month ago
nixon_why69 | a month ago
bryanlarsen | a month ago
thisislife2 | a month ago
Animats | a month ago
Taiwan, Japan, and Korea, though - totally dependent on imports for oil.
Something that most pundits have missed: unlike all other US wars since Korea, the US can't end this war by pulling out. Iran, unlike all US combat opponents from Vietnam to Venezuela, has the demonstrated ability to strike well beyond its borders. This war isn't over until both sides say it's over.
reliabilityguy | a month ago
Yep, now if IR survives, I see no reason for them not to double down on even longer range missiles. Like, why not?
bpodgursky | a month ago
foota | a month ago
Even if you don't blow up a nuclear plant, it seems like cutting the power from one would be relatively easy.
bpodgursky | a month ago
Transformer substations are more vulnerable targets but it's hard to be decentralized enough to not have those.
dylan604 | a month ago
The thing is that the US exported oil is sweet crude, and our own refineries are not made for that type of oil. So for the petroleum products used within the US need the heavy oil that is imported. So if the world goes tits up so that the US can only use the oil it produces, it would take time before the US could refine it.
>Trump could make up with Canada
I'm sorry, did this suddenly become a comedy?
idiotsecant | a month ago
vel0city | a month ago
dylan604 | a month ago
hollerith | a month ago
Is that really true? I've heard experts say that sweet crude is easy to refine. I've always thought that the reason US refiners bother with sour crude is that they're better at refining it than non-US refiners are, so they make a little more money that way.
dylan604 | a month ago
This link is just one of many that all suggest that the US is just not set up to refine light crude.
hollerith | a month ago
dylan604 | a month ago
hollerith | a month ago
rainsford | a month ago
testing22321 | a month ago
Like hell he could.
- every Canadian
hedora | a month ago
Unlike our fearless orange leader, I live on earth, and global warming's becoming quite a big issue over here.
Also, the sooner we're forced off oil, the sooner these dumb wars stop.
dylan604 | a month ago
idiotsecant | a month ago
01100011 | a month ago
klooney | a month ago
They've started bombing the oil in infrastructure
01100011 | a month ago
disgruntledphd2 | a month ago
01100011 | a month ago
dylan604 | a month ago
idiotsecant | a month ago
thisislife2 | a month ago
Animats | a month ago
Diplomats on the China side are worried about the Trump administrations's amateurish approach to diplomacy. "... Trump’s reluctance to delegate, disdain for process and focus on quick wins, banking instead on personal magnetism and his “gut” as summit organising principles. ... “You have a handful of people who have never done this before, putting together what may be the most consequential trip in the president’s administration on a wing and a prayer. The Chinese are beyond worried. They’re apoplectic.” - South China Morning Post.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/07/china/china-us-iran-wang-yi-i...
[2] https://www.scmp.com/topics/2026-trump-xi-summit
[3] https://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/3344769/trump-xi-sum...
[4] https://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/3344769/trump-xi-sum...
kev009 | a month ago
bigfatkitten | a month ago
verdverm | a month ago
bigfatkitten | a month ago
verdverm | a month ago
https://theaviationist.com/2026/03/06/typhoon-spotted-rocket...`
decimalenough | a month ago
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cr5ll27z52do
As the friendly article says, the US military has no idea about how commercial shipping works and how hard it will be convince anybody to transit through an active war zone.
vkou | a month ago
dylan604 | a month ago
kev009 | a month ago
If the tankers are primarily for the benefit of Asia and not the US do you risk bringing additional parties with a grievance into your conflict?
decimalenough | a month ago
dragonwriter | a month ago
When the action you are talking about is, for anyone other than the US or Israel, signing up to become a co-belligerent with the US & Israel in their war with Iran? Yeah, the realistic options for who might do it are pretty limited.
kev009 | a month ago
dylan604 | a month ago
crooked-v | a month ago
petre | a month ago
See this comical propaganda clip:
https://youtu.be/GKJHaODzP-0?is=QRf8HkFJ0O4Amx3v
They also have Shaheds.
dylan604 | a month ago
"A navy, naval force, military maritime fleet, war navy, or maritime force is the branch of a state's armed forces principally designated for naval and amphibious warfare;" --wikipedia
Also, comical is a great description. I was aware that Iran has a speedboat navy, but wtf that video?! How much is AI? The shot with the giant flame throwing rockets flying slower that the speedboats is hilarious. I guess perspective is everything??
petre | a month ago
What they do still have however, is enough Shaheds to interdict tanker traffic through the straight.
the_why_of_y | a month ago
nixon_why69 | a month ago
ncallaway | a month ago
- the crew - the company - the insurer
The company has an obvious reason to take on some amount of risk to move a vessel through the Straight. However, both the crew and the insurer will be quite risk averse, so the Navy would need to demonstrate a very high success rate in intercepting both missiles and shaheds to convince those two other groups to say "yes".
cosmicgadget | a month ago
mkoubaa | a month ago
tejohnso | a month ago
Sounds like Trump hubris. Probably just what he'd expect. And then he'd accuse Canada of "behaving terribly" if things didn't go his way, and he'd reach for his tariff paddle.
verdverm | a month ago
whatever1 | a month ago
rayiner | a month ago
ncallaway | a month ago
Venezuela is also run by the same security apparatus and government as it was before. We didn't attempt to turn over the entire government.
rasz | a month ago
Takes Ukrainians 4 months to kill that amount. What you are saying winning is quite doable.
anabab | a month ago
Qwertious | a month ago
rayiner | a month ago
fmajid | a month ago
orwin | a month ago
Which means now Venezuela is still a chavist regime, but not under US embargo anymore. This will improve their economy a great deal, and if the regime doesn't capture all the profits for itself, will also improve the QOL of all Venezuelians, hopefully.
dragonwriter | a month ago
It has little in common with Iran, which is more like the 2003 Iraq war (but, so far, without committing ground troops, but there is no way to maintain that with Trump’s stated goal of “unconditional surrender”; that’s going to require a ground forces occupation at a minimum, and probably a ground forces invasion to acheive it) than it is like the recent intervention in Venezuela.
Even if they are not particular fond of the regime that is in the process of being destroyed, the Iranian people are likely to resist that, just as occurred in Iraq (with the most significant resistance there coming from forces that were opposed to Saddam’s regime and which had been actively suppressed by it while it was in power.)
throwaw12 | a month ago
If someone backstabbed me twice while we were in negotiations, I would not give them 3rd chance for negotiations, US and Israel really f....d their reputation after 2 attacks while in negotiations
petre | a month ago
"The fact is that we don’t have any positive experience of negotiating with the United States. You know, especially with this administration. We negotiated twice last year and this year, and then in the middle of negotiations, they attacked us," Araghchi said.
https://www.nbcnews.com/world/iran/iran-foreign-minister-int...
To add insult to injury, the US also sent two clowns, Witkoff and Kushner, to negotiate, so it was quite obvious the negotiations would fail.
kortilla | a month ago
throwaw12 | a month ago
But here is what we know:
* US acted in bad faith - because it planned attack in around December 2025
* Oman, mediator of negotiations told they were almost there with negotiations and Iran mostly agreed to conditions and boom, next day it got bombed: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/2/28/peace-within-reach-...
petre | a month ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Comprehensive_Plan_of_Ac...
We'll see if that works or wether another jihadist regime rises from their ashes.
piva00 | a month ago
Comes dumbo and rips that off, goes back to "deal making" without any diplomacy, bomb them twice during the negotiation process after ripping off the previous deal.
Seems like the whole new negotiations from Trump's admin was just putting up an act after all... Quite disgusting.
thisislife2 | a month ago
beached_whale | a month ago
mikrl | a month ago
From what I read in Kissinger’s Diplomacy, Vietnam was also a war they couldn’t just pull out of if they wanted to.
The public wanted deescalation, but the Americans under Nixon had to escalate the war to get enough of an advantage to pull out without it being a bloodbath.
Hence part of Nixon’s infamy: he defied public opinion and escalated an unpopular war, precisely to end it more cleanly.
roenxi | a month ago
In addition, I'm struggling with the idea that Kissinger of all people cared enough about what happened to Vietnamese people for it to affect policy. He was the sort who would have no difficulty at all allowing bloodbaths to happen if he thought that was advantageous. His wiki page suggests, in fact, that he did do exactly that a few times.
mikrl | a month ago
Neither Nixon nor Kissinger wanted to be in Vietnam, but again, if they evacuated in 1969 it would have been a bloodbath of American soldiers I think is the point you missed.
The communists had a decisive advantage until the Americans escalated the war to a ceasefire then pulled out in the mid 1970s.
tzs | a month ago
Also, domestic crude of mostly light, sweet crude whereas many US refineries are designed to deal with heavy, sour crude. Google is telling me 80% of the crude that goes through Hormuz is heavy, sour crude.
Does any of this raise the impact disruptions of Hormuz would have on the US?
Qwertious | a month ago
The US has some of the best chemists in the world; light sweet crude is easy to refine but heavy sour crude is hard, so US refineries refining light sweet would be a waste of their talents - better to export it out for newbies to refine and buy the harder-to-refine and therefore cheaper heavy sour crude. But if heavy sour becomes more expensive, then the US will switch to the easymode option in a heartbeat.
An increased cost of inputs will always hurt the entire industry, but it won't particularly hurt the US any more than anyone else, and will probably hurt them the least - especially when they have plenty of domestic shale oil that will be financially viable to extract if prices go up.
ncallaway | a month ago
The SPR is 58% full, so... not empty but also not all the way full.
Additionally, even though we're a net oil exporter, we're not insulated from the global oil market rates. Local producers aren't going to sell into America more cheaply than they can sell internationally, so if international rates spike, prices will go up domestically too.
If the Straight of Hormuz remains closed for an extended period of time, we'll definitely feel the pinch domestically.
nradov | a month ago
dragonwriter | a month ago
The US being a net oil exporter doesn't make the domestic market independent of the global market (especially over the short to intermediate term), for a large variety of reasons.
> has the Strategic Petroleum Reserve
Which whille partial refilled from the 2022 drawdowns is still at rather low levels by historical standards.
> and, if absolutely necessary, Trump could make up with Canada
He could try (though I don’t think even that is in his character), that doesn’t mean he would succceed.
LAC-Tech | a month ago
- The USA eventually declares some arbitrary "victory" condition.
- Iran will be left even poorer, and much less able to defend itself conventionally, but will remain under the same regime. Very likely they give up cooperating with atomic energy inspectors and do what North Korea did to a acquire weapons.
- Israel's ability to dictate US foreign and military policy will be degraded long term. What many commentators do not see is how anti-Israel younger consevatives trend in the US now. It will be decades or before a serious anti-Israel republican candidate will be fielded, but it is inevitable, and even your typical greatest-ally-wall-kissers will have to moderate themselves.
Will be very interesting to see what the mid terms bring. Some on the American right are already talking about voting democrat to protest - MAGA was specifically sold to them as an antidote to necon middle eatern entanglements.
nradov | a month ago
(I'm not claiming that this is a good scenario, just a likely one.)
LAC-Tech | a month ago
... oh dear god this administration is dumb enough to try that, isn't it?
nradov | a month ago
C6JEsQeQa5fCjE | a month ago
nradov | a month ago
C6JEsQeQa5fCjE | a month ago
As for a preemptive attack, which I imagine you meant would be nuclear since they're already giving it all they've got with their non-nuclear attacks, it is already clear that Israel and USA don't have a way to stop Iran's faster missiles, and they would have no way to prevent Iran nuking Tel-Aviv and Haifa in return. At that point Israel would cease to exist as a state and as a society. They would never risk that. The entire decades-long war against the middle east by USA and Israel is fought for the benefit of Israel, not for its destruction.
nradov | a month ago
C6JEsQeQa5fCjE | a month ago
crooked-v | a month ago
cosmicgadget | a month ago
standeven | a month ago
0wis | a month ago
cyber_kinetist | a month ago
dzink | a month ago
danaris | a month ago
roryirvine | a month ago
Fossil fuel generators are most reliant on them, wind less so, solar barely at all.
danaris | a month ago
And it's true that there is some in them, so it's good to have at least a long-term answer for how we deal with them.
namibj | a month ago
> And it's true that there is some in them, so it's good to have at least a long-term answer for how we deal with them.
It's the old saying about a man and fish and giving vs. teaching.
Solar panels bought now, at least the quality glass-glass kind, doesn't really go bad in a way that makes them depreciate at-all-quickly. If in locations that are not themselves at a premium, so lower yield only matters if maintenance overhead per yield becomes so bad it's cheaper to replace& upgrade, they can be expected to stay there for 30~50 years depending on how fast they'll mechanically fall apart after their warranty expires (which is expected to be the duration until which most stay alive). I'd guess something like an agricultural east/west fence install would stay more towards 50y and get individual modules replaced when they break, as they're easy to get to unlike roof/wall installs and the like where they're hard to get to and given they are very low complexity in mounting system ("fence panel") there's little engineering complexity in retrofitting a plain new future panel of the same physical size and sufficiently similar voltage/current.
Bombthecat | a month ago
Hikikomori | a month ago
Balinares | a month ago
kortilla | a month ago
bryanlarsen | a month ago
maxglute | a month ago
zmmmmm | a month ago
So you'll have a permanently aggrieved population with nothing to lose saturated with know-how and materials for building missiles and drones who will just keep taking pot shots at ships and possibly commercial airliners. They don't have to "close" the straight - just make it hazardous enough that it becomes permanently very risky to sail through there. They can go dormant for 3 months and then send 30 drones at a single ship.
I'm not sure who in the strategic planning decided that no system of government for 90 million people was a good idea, but it seems quite insane to me.
Jordan-117 | a month ago
They just accidentally killed them all.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/03/world/middleeast/iranian-...
mkoubaa | a month ago
pfannkuchen | a month ago
queenkjuul | a month ago
throwaw12 | a month ago
Probably, Iranians also had several accepted candidates in mind to lead the US, but they didn't attack because they had some opinions about foreign government
Gud | a month ago
text0404 | a month ago
Gud | a month ago
sigwinch | a month ago
myvoiceismypass | a month ago
ajam1507 | a month ago
We're there already. We've been there. There's nothing symmetrical about this war.
Israel is basically unscathed in this war despite Iran launching barrages of missiles and drones. They were already fighting Israel asymmetrically by supporting Hamas and Hezbollah. They knew they could never fight a fair war against the US and Israel.
DrProtic | a month ago
US itself has huge reserves, and recent move with Venecuela further expands it.
Middle East countries are too blind to see it, they’re being thrown under the bus to hurt Iran.
thisislife2 | a month ago
jaybrendansmith | a month ago
entwife | a month ago
widenitnow | a month ago
whattheheckheck | a month ago
cosmicgadget | a month ago
Seems like the only options are reaching a deal with whatever the new regime is or occupying the coastal areas.
alwayspossible | a month ago
thatmiddleway | a month ago
jazzyjackson | a month ago
Good thing the Qataris have no influence over the American president /s
pfannkuchen | a month ago
pibaker | a month ago
"Just" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.