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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I was under the impression that everyone (ie US, UN, EU) basically agreed they complied with the JCPOA right up until the US pulled out of it? Is that not accurate?
I am not expert in Iran, but can you list agreements they didn't keep?
I know IAEA was allowed for inspections as agreed, but IAEA started leaking information to Israel and Iran stopped sharing more info with them.
Surprisingly, Israel, the country who didn't allow IAEA at all, while owning nuclear arsenal is attacking another country for "not-complying" with IAEA
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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".
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.
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
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??
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
It'd be more helpful if you could explain for the class why you disagree with their comment, rather than disparage it with nothing of your own to offer.
It costs a lot more to block one than to build one, and Trump's already blaming Biden because the US is running low on the top tier interceptors. Congressional testimony suggests the current stockpile will last weeks. After that, they'll fall back on ones that are less accurate, and that will let some attacks through.
The destroyer doesn't help much in that scenario, in the same way it's not going to stop mosquitoes from biting the oil tanker's crew.
You could use it to transport a large number of interceptor drones behind an armored hull, I guess.
But, in scenarios where you need to worry about strikes taking out stored interceptor drones on the tankers, then the tankers are already swiss cheese.
> 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.
>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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
- 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.)
With a regime that for decades has the explicit goal of destroying Israel and murdering every one of them, it's not a good scenario but most likely the best.
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?
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.
Fine article, pearl-clutching tone (the world economies will not collapse if 20% of oil and gas maritime trade is blocked, but many specific industries in specific countries would be very significantly annoyed/impacted in the middle term).
But an absolutely absurd title. There is no citation in the article to anyone, much less “they all said”, who said a Hormuz closure would be brief. And I’d expect “brief” to be defined in somewhere in the article, and it isn’t. Expect better from Lloyd’s. Are they this sloppy in their underwriting? This topic doesn’t need click-bait, it’s important enough.
This blockade scenario had been identified and studied for several decades by major industrial powers, and contingency plans and stockpiling has been part and parcel of industrial planning by those powers. It’s orders of magnitude less globally impactful than any scenarios involving nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles in that “comic opera/snuff film” the world calls the Middle East.
Taiwan, Japan, and Korea import the vast majority of their fuel from that region. If any of those three countries run out of fuel, the impacts would be larger than if any single Western European country lost energy. The world as a whole depends on tech manufactured in this countries, and we're already in a pinch with AI slop companies buying up global supplies of components for the whole year. If LCD/OLED screen factories are shut down for even a few weeks, that will have massive rippling effects across the world. And if TSMC needs to turn off its factories, it will be absolutely disastrous.
Some countries are more prepared than others. Vietnam, who now handles a lot of mfg moved from China, has reserves measured in days. Yes, some countries have a couple months. I don't know the stats for nat gas though, and that could be better or worse.
Petrochemicals are a big part of the world economy. Energy is needed to get workers to work, factories to run, and ships to move.
This could slow goods production on par with covid. Forward looking financial markets which, by and large, failed to predict this will likely overreact as well. If the private credit bubble bursts coincident with market panic we could see a major financial crisis (maybe not GFC, but big).
It's a big price just to cover up the Epstein Files...
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.
In fairness to the Trump administration, they did have several acceptable candidates in mind for a transitional government.
They just accidentally killed them all.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/03/world/middleeast/iranian-...
> In fairness to the Trump administration
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
In fairness i don't really believe them, i don't think anyone in the Iranian line of succession would've worked with the US.
Actually it was the other party in the war that killed them all
China’s move toward solar and wind seems more prescient than ever.
Solar and wind is more of a nat gas and coal substitution. They are still heavily dependent on oil for transportation.
Not for long. 75% of their rail network is electrified and 50% of the semi tractors sold in 2025 were electric.
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.
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.
Most of their trains are electric, and 50% of semi tractors sold in 2025 were electric. Lots of their logistics run without diesel.
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.
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.
Iran has nobody in charge to lead any sort of negotiations or to order stand down. Now it really is guerrilla war. The type that never ends.
Iran should negotiate with whom?
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.
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.
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.
There is no evidence that they acted in bad faith as well, most of us don't have access to the briefings of those negotiations
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-...
I mean if you try to be just, they also did not keep their part of the deal in any of the agreements they had in the past.
So negotiations were not useful at that state anyway.
Negotiations require honest interest from both parties to honor the deal.
I was under the impression that everyone (ie US, UN, EU) basically agreed they complied with the JCPOA right up until the US pulled out of it? Is that not accurate?
I am not expert in Iran, but can you list agreements they didn't keep?
I know IAEA was allowed for inspections as agreed, but IAEA started leaking information to Israel and Iran stopped sharing more info with them.
Surprisingly, Israel, the country who didn't allow IAEA at all, while owning nuclear arsenal is attacking another country for "not-complying" with IAEA
That simply isn't true.
Guerrilla war requires people at the grass roots to care. Is that true in Iran? Venezuela seems to have quieted down already.
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.
Iran's theocracy is pretty ideologically motivated, they're not just in it for the money.
I don't think the oil exports from Canada ever stopped. If anything, they have grown.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> has the demonstrated ability to strike well beyond its borders.
Yep, now if IR survives, I see no reason for them not to double down on even longer range missiles. Like, why not?
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.
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".
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:
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.
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
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.
See this comical propaganda clip:
https://youtu.be/GKJHaODzP-0?is=QRf8HkFJ0O4Amx3v
They also have Shaheds.
How is a fleet of speedboats not a navy?
"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??
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.
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?
> Must it be the US military?
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.
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.
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.
So now we know the true purpose for Board of Peace membership dues
If Iran makes a nuisance of itself for long enough, I expect a coalition naval task force will go and open the strait back up.
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 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.
https://theaviationist.com/2026/03/06/typhoon-spotted-rocket...`
And now you have a US navy destroyer in torpedo range of the shore.
Only someone without military experience could hit "send" on a post like this
It'd be more helpful if you could explain for the class why you disagree with their comment, rather than disparage it with nothing of your own to offer.
Okay.
Would you like to say which parts are the wrong parts?
Drones.
It costs a lot more to block one than to build one, and Trump's already blaming Biden because the US is running low on the top tier interceptors. Congressional testimony suggests the current stockpile will last weeks. After that, they'll fall back on ones that are less accurate, and that will let some attacks through.
The destroyer doesn't help much in that scenario, in the same way it's not going to stop mosquitoes from biting the oil tanker's crew.
You could use it to transport a large number of interceptor drones behind an armored hull, I guess.
But, in scenarios where you need to worry about strikes taking out stored interceptor drones on the tankers, then the tankers are already swiss cheese.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> 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.
>Trump could make up with Canada
I'm sorry, did this suddenly become a comedy?
>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.
https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/america-produces-enough-oil-...
This link is just one of many that all suggest that the US is just not set up to refine light crude.
That link doesn't clear up anything for me
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.
That's not at all the case. We have refineries that can handle everything from sweet to sour to Canadian tar sands
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
https://understandingwar.org/research/middle-east/iran-updat...
They've started bombing the oil in infrastructure
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?
> Trump could make up with Canada so those oil imports restart.
Like hell he could.
- every Canadian
Hey Canadians, can you permanently dismantle some pipelines?
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.
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?
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.
What genre of cope is this?
[dead]
My predictions for the end of this war:
- 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'm not claiming that this is a good scenario
With a regime that for decades has the explicit goal of destroying Israel and murdering every one of them, it's not a good scenario but most likely the best.
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?
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.
Fine article, pearl-clutching tone (the world economies will not collapse if 20% of oil and gas maritime trade is blocked, but many specific industries in specific countries would be very significantly annoyed/impacted in the middle term).
But an absolutely absurd title. There is no citation in the article to anyone, much less “they all said”, who said a Hormuz closure would be brief. And I’d expect “brief” to be defined in somewhere in the article, and it isn’t. Expect better from Lloyd’s. Are they this sloppy in their underwriting? This topic doesn’t need click-bait, it’s important enough.
This blockade scenario had been identified and studied for several decades by major industrial powers, and contingency plans and stockpiling has been part and parcel of industrial planning by those powers. It’s orders of magnitude less globally impactful than any scenarios involving nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles in that “comic opera/snuff film” the world calls the Middle East.
Taiwan, Japan, and Korea import the vast majority of their fuel from that region. If any of those three countries run out of fuel, the impacts would be larger than if any single Western European country lost energy. The world as a whole depends on tech manufactured in this countries, and we're already in a pinch with AI slop companies buying up global supplies of components for the whole year. If LCD/OLED screen factories are shut down for even a few weeks, that will have massive rippling effects across the world. And if TSMC needs to turn off its factories, it will be absolutely disastrous.
Some countries are more prepared than others. Vietnam, who now handles a lot of mfg moved from China, has reserves measured in days. Yes, some countries have a couple months. I don't know the stats for nat gas though, and that could be better or worse.
Petrochemicals are a big part of the world economy. Energy is needed to get workers to work, factories to run, and ships to move.
This could slow goods production on par with covid. Forward looking financial markets which, by and large, failed to predict this will likely overreact as well. If the private credit bubble bursts coincident with market panic we could see a major financial crisis (maybe not GFC, but big).
It's a big price just to cover up the Epstein Files...
Delusional levels of cope
[flagged]