It's going to be incredibly difficult to stop Iran being able to kneecap both the global economy and in particular the gulf states, who are going to be motivated to put maximum pressure on the US to sue for peace. Incredible hubris and a lobotomised diplomatic and intelligence infrastructure in the name of ideological purity, quite the combination.
Wars are hard to predict and the economy is hard to predict. There's easy money in the making for those who are sure the oil price is going to continue way up.
The blog you reference has inaccuracies. Drones are generally not shot by THAAD is a glaring one. It's very much not 2-3 million dollars to $50k. Helicopter gunships shoot down drones with bullets these days is very common and there are other economic means of bringing them down.
Most of the heavy lifting in suppressing these attacks is done by other drones patrolling the skies and attacking anything that tries to fire. Those also don't use extremely expensive munitions.
"Iran produces approximately 500 of these drones per day and holds a stockpile estimated at around 80,000 units.". Both these are false today. I'd also question if they were true when Iran was attacked. These figures don't pass the smell test and either way any stockpile is an instant target.
Everyone seems to be an expert today.
It's obviously not great that the Hormuz straits are more or less closed. We've seen in Yemen that a ragtag force can be massively attacked and still manage to fire at ships on a much larger body of water. That said we didn't really see if they can sustain it for months under heavy attack which is a possible premise here.
There are some pipelines bypassing the straits but their capacity is much smaller. It's also about 20% of the world supply so definitely other suppliers can make up for some of the loss at a cost.
I'm not an expert. But the current oil price reflects what the experts think best. And that price is still below what it was for about half of 2022. And fluctuating. What will matter is the price over months.
> The blog you reference has inaccuracies. Drones are generally not shot by THAAD is a glaring one
It's obvious that the author doesn't mean THAAD but Patriot, which are indeed used against drones. You can tell that by the missle cost the author mentions, which is 1/10th of the THAAD missle. As the argument is a cost effectiveness argument the logic holds, just replace THAAD with Patriot.
Even though Ukraine offered their cost effective solution, they have a war to fight so any serious capacity increase will probably take months if not years and these things are not static and are quickly shaped on the battlefield so the Gulf states and Israel and USA will need to develop talent that is on the battlefield, like Russia and Ukraine did.
> Helicopter gunships shoot down drones with bullets these days is very common and there are other economic means of bringing them down.
> Everyone seems to be an expert today.
Pot meet kettle?
Speaking as a former helicopter gunship weapons and tactics instructor (WTI), this is a VERY broad generalization. Sure, a gunship can shoot down a drone with 20mm or 30mm but you have to get pretty close. And first you have to find it.
Other factors
1. target altitude
2. air superiority (MANPADS is a real threat over land)
3. marksmanship
It might be more effective to throw AIM-9s on helos and target drones that way...but depending on the generation of missile those run ~$300k each and the inventory is limited.
In Israel helicopters are routinely taking down these drones. There are many videos of them chasing them down. There was an incident where some houses were hit by that cannon fire as well. They are finding them (presumably with radar).
You're probably more of an expert than me so educate me on how this works. But it is working.
But yes, some drones are also being taken down with air to air missiles.
[EDIT: at least the videos from Israel] Those drones are typically shot down over your territory so air superiority and MANPADS are less of an issue.
My main point was it's not the $2M THAAD missile taking down a $50k drone.
Wow, proximity fused 30mm. Never heard of that, but I've been out for a while and technology has really accelerated in the last 3-4 years.
Thanks for sharing.
And yes, find and fix with a strategic radar platform. It's tough to set up DCA (defensive counter-air) lanes with helicopters; they're slow and most need to refuel on the ground (an argument could be made for using H-60's. Some variants can refuel in the air).
Depending on the threat picture, it could be feasible to set helos up to defend naval assets or use them like Israel has been to defend land-based high-value assets.
Israel is a pretty small country as I'm sure you know. The northern border is about 60km wide. As I understand it the big problem with drones coming from the north is that they are programmed to fly through valleys and the topography is mountainous which makes them hard to detect. Drones from Iran or Yemen have large stretches of open flat desert and have to cross very large distances. Another purely speculative thought is that the F-35s act as an airborne radar to help with detection.
Israelis get advanced warning for (most) drone attacks and have to go into shelters/safe rooms just like with missiles. There is a specific/different kind of warning.
AFAIK in the big attack last year these Shaed drones were shot down by jets with air-to-air missiles.
I served in the IAF on that northern border (not a pilot or anything like that but a somewhat relevant role) so at least I'm familiar with the topography and distances.
The other thing coming into play in Israel these days is the laser system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Beam I think it already shot down at least one drone.
Also- Thanks for your service and for the "insider" perspective.
Absolutely agree there's both some dubious suppositions and hand-waving there. The real question is I suspect how much pressure the GCC can withstand and how much pressure they can apply to Trump directly given business ties etc. If they lose a serious chunk of desalination capacity for example the situation becomes dire extremely quickly. For Dubai simply not having a decent supply of fresh food would alone be an economic catastrophe, every day this drags on is doing reputational damage that'll take years to fully recover from long after the hotel facades are patched up.
It's intended as my informed opinion as a response to the parent less informed opinion with questionable sources.
I'm not the one writing a blog and pretending to be an expert. I have some knowledge and I can write what I want.
I know THAAD is against ballistic missiles and not against drones. I know Israeli helicopters have been bringing down drones. So I write that. It's true and I don't need to "source it". This isn't Wikipedia.
Whatever points this author was trying to make were completely obliterated by the LLM it was run through or used to generate it.
A shame because it seems to have interesting points, but was too wordy and LLMified to keep attention. Stop telling me what it's not every other sentence, and just say what you mean. I wish folks would just use their own words.
1/ When authors use AI for editing, it reduces their credibility.
2/ As much as I don't like the current administration (and Israel leadership), there is absolutely no way the assumptions this article makes about them are false.
There is no way the US/Israel didn't calculate that:
- the straight would be closed
- a new leader may represent similar idiologies of the past leader.
Everything that has happened so far (in regards to Iran attacking neighbors) has been extremely predictable. There is just no way these weren't calculated in.
>there is just no way these weren't calculated in.
the American government is publishing war footage intercut with Call of Duty scenes. The American secretary of defense is a former television personality with more tattoos than people in a trailer park. He said rules of engagement are stupid because they stop you from "winning" while the US bombed a girl's school.
They literally fired the people who calculate things and wage war based on memes, vibes and chatgpt recommendations
> There is no way the US/Israel didn't calculate that: ... the straight would be closed
It has always had this potential, as it has happened before: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Earnest_Will (1987). But based on this history I would assume that many in the admin did not find the threat as credible as it was then. We dont seem to have a good grasp on how things have gone in the black sea. We clearly did not anticipate the level of drone attacks that have been put out by Iran.
Nothing says "we did not have a plan" when easing Russian sanctions while you ask Ukraine for help with defenses.
> a new leader may represent similar idiologies of the past leader.
I could see making a bet that with the current water crisis there the this would tip them into an "Arab spring" moment. For any one aware of the history there, it was a poor one at best.
If the US decided that stopping oil production in Iran was important (restricting global oil supply), what other options does the US have ease the impact on oil prices other than Russian sanction easement?
Yeah, it looks bad, but there just isn't really any other ways for the US to magically pump more oil out of the ground instantaneously to compensate for the war.
That's exactly what we are doing, releasing the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
The fact that it's both a record release and still not sufficient suggests they underestimated how bad it would be. But the US did prepare for this eventuality. And now we're throwing away our ability to be prepared for any upcoming crisis.
Maybe the US military commanders, generals and Pentagon knew this but the civilian leadership at the top chose to completely ignore it and can't really articulate a plan or what the plan ever was.
This conflict was a long time coming: Trump claimed Biden or Obama will start a war in Iran and that is why they are weak presidents. Trump sees himself as a peacemaker (flying in to negotiate deals with TH and KH, negotiating Ukraine war, etc).
I think there is more going on to cause Trump drastically change his self-image.
I don't think this is a Trump administration driven decision.
All reports are saying the US generals were against this. And a UD senator (Graham I think) just admitted he lobbied trump for the war, comparing him to Roosevelt, and coached Netanyahou on how to lobby trump. Just look at the article:
> There is no way the US/Israel didn't calculate that:
I don't really believe the buffoons in US leadership calculate much. It's all vibes.
I firmly believe it will become a case study in how many ways a comically incompetent government can damage a country.
As for Israel... I think their calculation is simple. They don't really care about how much damage they cause to the world economy, as long as they get to kill Muslims in general and Iranians in particular. They want death.
Israel will aggressively destroy anyone who attacks or intends to attack them.
They have peaceful relations with Muslim nations, Jordan and Egypt especially.
I acknowledge Israel's current two decade strategy with the Palestinians is not kind, but they aren't cartoon villains that just want to kill Muslims.
If its all vibes, then how does trump hungry for a world peace prize vibe with the war? Or the many clips of Trump trashing Obama and Biden for potentially starting a war in Iran?
Trump calling something bad but doing the exact same thing he talked against? No, I can't believe it. What a surprise. This definitely never happened before. At least before December 2025.
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is reported to have recommended against further air strikes on Iran[1].
----------
"Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General Dan Caine, has warned that strikes against Iran could be risky, potentially drawing the US into a prolonged conflict, US media report.
Caine has reportedly cautioned that a military action could have repercussions across the region, potentially including retaliatory strikes by Iranian proxies or a larger conflict that would require more US forces.
In a lengthy post on Truth Social, Trump described the reports as "fake news".
I agree that many people inside and outside the US gov didn't want this war for various reasons, but of the people that wanted this war, they must have calculated these very obvious risks.
The article touches on this topic, but my guess is Iran isn't part of the USD/petrol trading. If the US can convince the new leadership in Iran to start trading in USD, then that would be very good for the USA (and bad for CN, RU, and IN).
If the POTUS starts a war against the advice of the The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, he should have a plan beyond "wag the dog" to distract from the Epstein files. I'm not convinced Trump actually has a plan unfortunately.
I think you give too much credit to the US and zionists. They probably convinced Trump that it would be another Venezuela, and because of their hubris they decided to go for it anyway. Remember how at the beginning it was supposed to only last for 2-3 days? Then 1 week, then 2 weeks, then 4 weeks, then until September. They clearly didn't see this far.
I'm very surprised anyone would think Iran would be a Venezuela.
Venezuela's leadership was barely legitimate (with voter fraud / dictactorship 3 years ago) whereas the supreme leader in Iran has had power for 36 years.
> There is no way the US/Israel didn't calculate that - the straight would be closed, a new leader may represent similar idiologies of the past leader.
A few things to remember here. First, Israel and US have divergent strategic goals. (Well, that presumes the US has strategic goals, which appears to be false given the struggle the administration has had over the past week to explain why the fuck we're at war with Iran.) Israel's apparent goal is the complete destruction of the Iranian state, and Netanyahu certainly seems to believe that Israel will suffer no consequences as a result.
The second is that Trump has never faced any consequences for his actions. If anything goes wrong, he just lies and says that it's all right, changes the topic and since no one talks about anymore, hey, it's been fixed. It also seems as if he believes that nobody else truly has agency, so the idea that the enemy gets a vote in war may truly be foreign to him.
Note also the quality of people that Trump has surrounded himself with in this term. The head of the military is someone who washed out of the military officer corps (and also essentially failed in every managerial career he's had since them). They openly denigrate the importance of things like logistics in military, in favor of big, manly things like the awesome power of their missile salvos. I believe Hegseth legitimately doesn't give a crap about the boring things like naval escort missions because that's not manly, and instead cares more about how much big kaboom has been delivered to Iran, and so far the evidence of how the operation has gone to doubt completely vindicates that belief.
Fourth, even almost two weeks into the strait being closed, the US military has done nothing to reopen it. The strait is not closed because of the existence of mines, or because Iran is targeting ships; it is closed because shippers are absolutely terrified to send their ships through it. Reopening it thus requires giving those people confidence to send their ships through it, and that confidence of course requires clear, public statements. That is not happening. Instead, we get Trump giving off a different explanation of how to reopen it everytime he's asked, followed up by the US Navy denying whatever Trump said (e.g., the US Navy is unwilling to provide any naval escort). There is insufficient materiel in the theater right now to reopen the strait, and nothing is being shipped to the strait that can reopen it. From all apparent evidence, the current plan for reopening the strait is praying that it reopens tomorrow, although I have doubts that there is enough self-awareness or religiosity to actually do any praying here.
The risk of Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz is so obvious, the catastrophe of such an action is so well-known, that you would have to be a colossal idiot to go into a situation where Iran might plausibly close the strait without a plan to reopen it swiftly. And yet all available evidence leans in that direction. So now many, many people are forced to countenance the sobering idea that the US government is led by an idiot who will destroy the economy without realizing that's what he's doing. It's time for us to wake up to the fact that there are no adults in the US government anymore and do something about that.
Japan, an island nation with virtually no natural resources of its own, depends on it for a staggering 75% of its oil. Japan’s Prime Minister has warned plainly that if the Strait closes, the entire Japanese economy will collapse within eight to nine months. Not slow down. Not a contract. Collapse.
I am failing to an article about this, but that is absolutely incredible if true.
That's a lot of words for describing "attempting MAD doctrine with conventional weapons". Hell, we even got to see a "first strike decapitation countered by autonomous cells with pre-written second strike directives" scenario play out.
Normally what happens in these scenarios is that both sides declare victory and go home to lick their wounds.
The US and Israel can claim that they've caused the IRGC sufficient damage to set them back a decade or more.
Iran will declare that they've fought off a superpower with minimal real losses. They can also claim that -- despite intense foreign interference -- they got to choose and keep their preferred leader, alive. For now.
Normally yes, but without regime change the Iranian leadership will have even more resolve than ever to continue weapons programs (nuclear or not) and prepare retaliation for the inevitable next round of bombing…
I'm not claiming either side is actually winning, I'm merely predicting that they'll both claim to have won.
On the topic of the weapons program: The Israeli approach is to regularly "mow the lawn" to keep their regional opponents perpetually behind. Iran's nuclear weapons and ICBM programmes have almost certainly been damaged, perhaps enough to delay them for half a decade or more. Then it'll be time to mow the lawn again, or hope that by then a more moderate leadership can sign an agreement with a new US president that's a bit more trustworthy than the current one.
Israel and the US completely control their airspace and Iran's entire navy got demolished. I think the US prefers not to got too far as they prefer to keep the negotiation talks open. According to reports they asked Israel not to target energy for example.
> Israel and the US completely control their airspace
Maybe the soldiers sending shaheds and missiles hitting other countries every day haven't gotten the memo? Did somebody forget to put a cover sheet on it?
This is written a bit like the US dollar depends solely on the price of oil, which isn't true.
It also seems like if we're to game theory this, we'd need to plot out the full escalation capacity of the USA, which the author is failing to do here. I don't like the idea of doing that because the thought is sickening, but it's necessary to consider the entire decision tree to make a remotely rational model.
In retrospect I guess game theory is used kind of rhetorically here. If you consider what's written through that lens, it's very poorly developed and doesn't make sense. Maybe this is a thing, though? Am I misunderstanding what the author means by game theory here?
I do think the asymmetry of war costs are a serious problem for the USA, and the less they're willing to escalate or otherwise mitigate this, the more serious that problem becomes. If I were to make a statement like the author did about the war, I'd frame it more like "this is going to be insanely fucking risky and expensive for the USA", but certainly not that they'll lose.
edit: Listening to the Professor Jiang analysis and I understand why game theory was referenced now. He seems much more thorough and analytical so far.
edit again: he claims Dubai will probably go bankrupt in one scenario. This seems exceedingly unlikely, but he doesn't explain why it could be true
You might expect events like this to fundamentally change the global order or bring some sanity to U.S. policymaking. But nothing is going to change. It will be chaotic few years, but soon enough, everything will be conveniently forgotten. Iranian/Syrian/Afganian threat will reappear, the war-mongers and Israel-lobby will once more push for pre-emptive strikes, assassinations of leaders or generals. Rinse and repeat.
At its core, the problem is a militarized, propaganda-driven state masquareding itself as a necessary guarantor of global order, while its sole objective is nothing more than letting no other nation threaten its supremacy. And much of the world continuing to accept that narrative either because of lack of alternatives or out of necessity.
The core of the problem is that the US stepped back under Obama from being the guarantor of global order. The world needs policing and deterrence is the sad reality otherwise everything goes to hell.
Why did Russia attack Ukraine? Why is China threatening to attack Taiwan? Without the US (and the west more generally) Russia would retake half of Europe and China would have taken Taiwan. If you think there would be world peace you are so very much mistaken (speaking of propaganda). If you goal is to speak Russian and Chinese and live in those sorts of regimes then that's very much aligned with the US and the West just stepping back and not using force ever.
> The core of the problem is that the US stepped back under Obama from being the guarantor of global order.
That is not the core of the problem. We can go a bit further:
- Obama was a reaction to overstepping under Bush. As a 'guarantor of global order' the US created a lot of disorder with Iraq and Afganistan. That is actually more in line with what historically the US understands under 'the global order': the US does what it wants to do and calls it the global order.
- also the relative standing of the US since the end of the 90s is falling, because of the rise of other countries. That was widely expected and forecasted. What was also expected is that empires on their way out don't act rationally, because there is ample historical precendent to that. And so here we are.
You're not wrong but neither am I. Both of these factors are relevant as is the break up of the USSR. And maybe even climate change. And globalization?
I'm not sure I would use the term "empire" to refer to the USA. It was for some time the world's only "super power" and it is still by far the strongest and most able to project power conventional military.
Whether or not it's "on its way out" - history will tell. Maybe? If it is I would claim this is more about internal forces than geopolitical ones (or internal forces influenced by geopolitics). Maybe that's also typical.
I would still say that when there is no policing the world goes to hell and there's not going to magically be "peace" by the USA not intervening. And yes, Iraq and Afghanistan were not great examples of how interventions can be followed by political gains. But- those interventions may have acted as deterrence anyways. Iraq took Kuwait by force. With no intervention why wouldn't they take all the Gulf states? It's easy to critique what happened but we also don't know what alternatives existed.
Keeping the world a peaceful place seems to require at least the threat of violence. Definitely given the composition of the world today. A threat that's never acted upon loses credibility. Too many Putins in this world who would invade and murder others at the blink of an eye if they feel that can gain them something.
> I'm not sure I would use the term "empire" to refer to the USA.
the UN was created in New York mostly by the US, the dollar is the world's reserve and international trade currency, the main distinguishing point of other countries foreign politics is their relationship with the US, there are US army bases all over the world, english is the lingua franca (yes, partly carried over from the British empire, but still) etc.
> I would still say that when there is no policing the world goes to hell
and with the current policing it's going to hell too.
> there's not going to magically be "peace" by the USA not intervening
yes of course
> Iraq took Kuwait by force.
That was in 1991 and it was indeed the right reaction at the time but as the realists say it is quite doubtful we would see the same reaction in an oilless region.
> But- those interventions may have acted as deterrence anyways.
No. By the US ignoring the rules they helped to establish (2nd Iraq war) they helped to codify 'might makes right' as the only real rule and as a consequence both Israel and Russia knew they won't be stopped by the international rule based order. So we got Russia bombing and annexing parts of Georgia in 2008 (no reaction), annexing parts of Ukraine in 2014 (no reaction) and starting an all-out war in 2022 (finally some reaction but too little too late and now the US is more a friend of Russia anyway), and Israel genociding and expanding their lebensraum without any consequences whatsoever.
Israel is very much a different story. Hamas initiated the last war like Russia initiated their war on Ukraine.
Israel, as a country, ignoring the fringe right, has had no desire to either have war or expand its borders. Israel simply wants to live in peace. Something the Palestinians and the Arab countries have been unwilling to accept.
You're also conveniently forgetting that pretty much the entire western world joined in post 9/11, that there was a large coalition against Iraq, and against ISIS in Syria. All those countries that were fine with using force against something that ranges from low threat to little threat to their citizenry are quick to lynch Israel when it does the same.
Attacks on Israel are also ignoring those supposed rule based world (from 1948 and onwards) and are universally recognized as war crimes (e.g. Hamas and Hezbollah firing rockets into Israeli population centers).
Maybe in your circles (obviously) there's a different story. But it's false. It's at the very least a simplistic narrative that ignores facts that don't fit in it. That's not to say Israel has necessarily always been 100% right but to equate it with Russia being 100% the aggressor is completely wrong.
> Israel, as a country, ignoring the fringe right, has had no desire to either have war or expand its borders.
Oh please, this is a straight lie. I'm pretty sure you are familiar with Area C, for example.
> Hamas initiated the last war like Russia initiated their war on Ukraine.
It was Israeli Army that bombed unknown tens of thousands of civilian
to death and destroyed the vital infrastructure for millions. It's for a reason we call it a genocide (while of course you called it war, because Palestinians lives don't matter). But anyway that's a nice example of how the rules don't apply to you if you don't like them and about the very selective enforcement by the international community, especially the US.
A great example of this was Obama asking Congress permission to bomb Syria after Assad used chemical weapons. A permission they delayed voting on until Russia ended up resolving the issue.
Quite the difference to how Trump's foreign adventures occur.
That's not a reasonable option, it's a bear-trap. Once troops are on the ground it will be another decades-long slog, and one that ends like Afghanistan at best. At worst, this looks like America's version of Ukraine.
I can argue both sides but under the assumption (which I think is true) that 80%-90% of Iranians want to remove the regime there's some possibility of success. That said there's also the possibility of screwing things up completely and getting the entire population to fight you as an invader.
One thing for sure, it's not going to look like Russia invading Ukraine. The Iranians don't have the resolve or the support or the capabilities that Ukraine had and has. It will look more like Iraq in terms of the ability of the military to put up any resistance.
The problem with "boots on the ground" isn't that it can't succeed. The problem is it has zero support from the American public. People feel about this a lot more strongly than the other topics dividing the public.
Iranian polls show that 20-25%
Iranians living in Iran support the IRGC, but due to how the questions were formulated, you can't know who would support a regime change.
Polls after the 12 day bombing campaign in 2025 showed that 60% disapproved the bombing. That means you probably have at least a 40% base of support for active overthroing, growing, to change the regime, which is larger than the current supporters. Maybe you could have done something with it. Wait until the previous Komenei died of his cancer instead of martyring him, and wait for the new nomination and the protests that would follow to strike (decapitation of the morality police, species to open the prisons, etc).
The way it was done just feels like the US wanted chaos and death, not meaningful change.
Trump, the neo-cons, and much of the Republican party might as well hang up their hats if they put boots on the ground (beyond special forces which is often ignored for some reason).
The US will be bogged down for years at a minimum if we entered Iran on the ground, or we would lose quickly and tuck tail.
This isn't a fight to be won in a conventional war, the administration put every chip they had on a gamble that regime change was possible with air superiority alone. I don't know of any historical example of that working, but I guess we'll see what happens.
Everyone says there's no historical examples but there is no exact parallel either. I wouldn't argue based on historical precedence here.
The challenge is that regime is large and armed and they can hide and weather the storm. They'll hide in hospitals, and mosques, and schools and amongst civilians.
Getting them and disrupting their organization to a point where a popular revolt can take over seems ... lessay hard.
What needs to happen is that some parts of the military, who are a bit less fanatic, switches sides. The probability of that is very hard to gauge. There are stories of some defecting but hard to know if it's true or not.
> What needs to happen is that some parts of the military, who are a bit less fanatic, switches sides.
Then they need to drive the rest out of the country, and then keep them out forever, regardless of whatever chaos, instability, and misery arise within the country.
Not really. Most people will just switch sides. There aren't that many people for whom fighting to the death with other Iranians is a goal. If the 10% can control the 90% today then the 90% will have no problem controlling the 10%.
I know you said to ignore historical precedent but I don't think what you're describing has happened anywhere, ever.
You can't build a stable, prosperous country with remnants of a former regime periodically showing up at people's doors holding guns and telling them that they're now part of a resistance movement.
Do you know many people that live in Iran today? You're making bold claims about their loyalty and aspirations, though if that's first or second hand I'd be very interested to hear more.
Historical precedent is important with regards to predictability. We have no idea if simply bombing them to hell will be enough for regime change, while we do know that there is some lower bound of military involvement on the ground that would have likely success with that goal.
Personally I don't see how an air campaign alone can lead to any regime change we'd actually want to see. We are all being told the Iranian public is a cohesive unit with a strong majority wanting to go back to 1978, I don't buy it.
The only likely outcomes I see, if the regime is changed at all, is a military coup with even worse people coming in, a very bloody civil war, or a faction in the country we never hear about taking over quickly by promising the world to the public. For the last one, I'd expect that to be a group more akin to the Nazis than some group that actually means well for Iranians.
The UK population was _very_ weary of Churchill and his decision to involve the UK in WW2. You had the UK nazi party that was lobbying the industrialists, and the moscow-aligned communist party that was putting pressure on the laborers. Churchill would have lasted at most half a year after Dunkerque, and and much more pro-nazi PM could have been named. But the German airstrike campaign radicalised the UK population. Because the fucking Nazis couldn't bear to have decisions like 'who to bomb' taken by non-nazi, they replaced all the capable men with idiots yesmen.
So 90% of British wanted were being brutally oppressed on the eve of WW2 and called on the Nazis to bomb the UK so they can overthrow the government? Not only that but weeks before the Nazi attacks the UK government mowed down protestors with machine guns on the streets?
Got it.
I'm not seeing any parallels.
There can be some "rally to the flag" effect but the Iranian population by large is not going to suddenly like their government.
But to turn the story around a little. Do you see Americans rallying around Trump if the Iranians attack some high profile US targets?
No. 80% of the British wanted to avoid war with Germany, for different reasons, and 15% even voted for someone whose main campaign idea was an alliance with them. The bombing campaign radicalised the vast majority of British voters, even those in less affected areas.
(Btw, the only recent documented instance of machine gun mowing down people is Saudi police mowing down Somali workers).
60% of the Iranian population polled were against the bombing during the 12 day war, bombing that, unlike this one, didn't break too much civilian infrastructure (targeting desalination plants is something I thought even Russia wouldn't do, but well, I shouldn't hold US army and Tsahal to the same standards). And that's with most observers saying that only 20-25% of the population support the regime in 'normal' time.
You had thousands dead, 50k people in prison waiting for the death penalty, a leader on his deathbed, and rather than waiting for the internal tensions between army branches to break the regime, the US chose to martyr the almost dead, suffering leader, consolidating his successor power, and eliminating and opposition in the more laical army. Nice fucking job. Now the army and the clerical police are aligned.
Even when you organize and plan correctly a regime change, a few unlucky breaks and you create a Lybia. Going there gung-ho was truly a spectacular choice, and managed to put Komenei son in place without any power struggles that could have been instrumentalized.
The ground deployment to the mountains on Iran's side of the strait will have to be absolutely insane to actually eliminate the threat (if it's even possible to) of Iran launching drones or suicide boats at tankers.
I think it’s wild to me just how much my mainstream news doesn’t feel like it’s covering some of what’s really going on. I have to go to YouTube to see that Iran is successfully fighting back in many ways including hitting oil tankers and depots.
Not that I’m claiming the CBC and such are doing something sinister here. Just that I no-longer get the full story vibe I recall getting back in previous U.S. wars.
The CBC hasn't done any good reporting in the last decade that I can tell. They just copy-paste from news agencies based on their ideological principles or something.
You can definitely get some color on YouTube. Iran is fighting back but that's not what's going to decide the war (e.g. the damage to Israel or to the Gulf states). They are taking a lot more damage then they're dishing out and the scale of their counters goes down every day. The straits are a very different story since it doesn't take much to threaten the ships to the extent nobody wants to take a chance. One drone, or mine, or a missile, and the straits are closed. Even if the US and Israel are able to pretty much completely suppress Iranian attacks on Israel and the Gulf states the straits might remain closed.
Figuring out what takes its place is a hard problem that no one seems to have cracked. I don't know if its replacement will be very profitable, but we all lose out when media isn't working. Having a shared reality is fundamental for a healthy society.
I was just talking with a friend about this on Sunday, just before the big oil price runup—it was very curious to me that I had had to hunt around a bit for coverage of what was going on with the strait.
Closure was something I had known was a risk with any conflict with Iran after learning about the Tanker War in some politics class in college, and following the various threats over the past 15 years or so. It seemed like something that should have had tons of coverage as soon as I heard the US had attacked Iran, and I wanted to know what was actually going on with it...yet all of the mainstream press seemed to skirt around it until oil prices finally spiked on Sunday, even though traffic through the strait had fallen off a cliff a week beforehand.
They're all afraid of America's dictator whose only interest is his own personal image. This is how corruption kills nations, overbearing unchecked power meeting a lack of bravery or conviction in those who matter.
It is similar to way how Russia / Ukraine war is fought. Both sides will show you when civilian area is hit and both sides will try to conceal actual hits on sensitive military targets.
So in the news you will see that Iranians are bombing hotels, but what you won't see is that Iranians were able to knock out for example THAAD and now USA needs to move one in Korea into the Middle East.
Except here the entire Iranian strategy (what's left of it) _relies_ on targeting civilian 3rd parties. Without threatening Gulf oil, they've got nothing.
They randomly shoot in all directions but they also managed to hit some things (e.g. the US installation in Kuwait and a US radar) that are probably actual legit targets. But yes, hotels, apartment buildings, (civilian) airports, container ships etc. are high on the list of things hit.
This is worrying about trivialities. We need to be rapidly phasing out fossils usage to mitigate the climate catastrophe. Which of course requires a much much smaller supply of oil.
There should be ~ $250/barrel cost added to the market price to account for externalities (barrel of oil releases 0.43 tons of co2 and avg social cost of carbon from https://arxiv.org/html/2402.09125v3 is $500+/ton)
I've found it mind boggling for at least a decade (since solar panels started being a relatively normal consumer addition to the home) that a transition to electric and away from fossil fuels hasn't been an, essentially, national security priority for all countries other than those that produce oil.
The dependence, of literally almost everything, on the continuous flow of oil from few parts of the world has been an obvious point of strangulation for longer than I've been alive.
I mean, I understand that it's so entrenched that politics is owned by it, but, hell, it's been, what a week and a bit, and already Australian media is trying to talk down panic about petrol shortages.
Look at who advocated to define natural gas as green in EU. The political block that has done the majority of advocating against fossil fuel industries were also the same block that advocate to maintain existing fossil fuel in the power grid. Those same parties are also the one advocating the need to maintain and expand thermal power stations in order to enable more renewable energy, and a increase in energy transmission between nations in order to address the intermittence problem of renewables.
The other block in contrast are advocating in favor of fossil fuel industries, but are mixed (some in favor, some against) in regard to thermal power stations, and primarily promotes nuclear for the grid. They are also those that usually bring up national security and energy independence, with reduce dependencies on energy trading to maintain the grid. That block voted against the decision to define natural gas as green.
So the political state in EU is that one block promotes fossil fuel in the grid, and the other promotes it in the industries and transportation. We need to be rapidly phasing out fossils usage to mitigate the climate catastrophe, but no side is really willing to give up on what those fossil fuels enable, and that is despite the now many years of wars that have major impact on economy and security.
It's also amazing that, if the rich, non-oil producing countries of the world actually went and transitioned away from oil, these ""problematic"" countries would lose all their power. All the middle eastern militaries are founded by oil an gas exports, the autocratic regimes are kept in power via military might, and the only reason why they matter in the international stage is that they export oil and gas.
And of course mitigating the climate catastrophe should be much more entrenched, there's vastly more voters whose lives will be impacted by it than by fortunes of the oil business.
The irony of drill, baby drill, and removing the environmental restrictions, encouraging the sale of petrol cars... And then causing the prices to be jacked up.
2026 I swear..., I'm expected a post on top of HN any day about
"i've written all code by hand this month, here is what i learnt".
I feel this is good. It will push economies towards more alternatives(nuclear/solar/wind etc), increase electrification of transport/cooking. Amazon saw India induction stove sales jump 30x after LPG supply hit issues. There is no real reason to be importing expensive gas for cooking, when the induction stove are just much more efficient and cheaper. This is one way to change existing habits that people find uncomfortable letting go off.
That only works when there's time to adapt. This is like the insane tariff rollercoaster. There was no time to plan or adapt. It was a black swan event and wrecked everything for no appreciable benefit.
The stat has been raised frequently of late that 20% of the world's oil floes through the Straight.
My understanding is that its 20% of total oil, but that around half of all oil production is used domestically where it is produced and never enters global markets.
Unless I missed something when fact checking that, Iran is capable cutting off 40% of all purchasable oil.
To begin with, it assumes that oil currently used domestically isn't on the market, but what do you expect oil producers to do if foreign buyers make a higher bid for the "domestic" oil? Or to put it another way, there's a reason the market price goes up by essentially the same amount in the oil-producing countries as everywhere else.
Then it assumes that oil that currently goes through the Strait has to. Oil can also leave the middle east by going west, e.g. to Europe. You might think that doesn't help India or China, but it's still a global commodity with a global price. India and China could then buy oil from Russia, Kazakhstan or whatever other country that Europe had been buying from and now isn't because they're getting more oil from the middle east.
Does this still raise the price? Yes it does, because there is a reason they were doing it the other way previously -- doing something else will have higher transportation costs. But does it mean 20% of global oil supplies will be cut off? Not really, it mostly means you'll have to increase the average distance it gets transported and pay a few percent more to cover the higher transportation costs.
Much of that domestic consumption is used in the process of extraction and refining, so actually isn't on the market as such. My understanding is that GP is correct to say that the 20% figure rather understates the potential impact of a prolonged shutdown of the Strait.
Pipeline capacity to the west is pretty limited. The connection via Syria is affected by the war aftermath, the Iraq/Turkey route is already at capacity, and the Saudi connection to the Red Sea is vulnerable to resumption of Houthi attacks. There's some connectivity via Oman, but that's largely natural gas rather than oil.
The type of oil produced also varies by region. Russia mostly ships heavy and sour crude oil while much of the middle east produces light, sweet crude.
I don't know enough about European refineries specifically, but even if you could entirely redirect oil out of the middle east (it wouldn't be that simple), regional refiners may not be setup to process that different type of crude at a similar capacity.
Yeah, most refineries in western europe were set up for Brent crude from the North Sea, which is actually somewhat lighter and sweeter than Arab Light or Dubai crude.
Russia does produce some lighter oil, but the usual Ural / Volga-sourced stuff couldn't be substituted without additional hydrotreatment.
> Much of that domestic consumption is used in the process of extraction and refining, so actually isn't on the market as such. My understanding is that GP is correct to say that the 20% figure rather understates the potential impact of a prolonged shutdown of the Strait.
The original claim was that all of the "domestic" oil was off the market.
It's also not clear why oil used for oil production requires special treatment. To the extent that it's used for transportation it's susceptible to substitution with electric vehicles like anything else. To the extent that it's used for heat in refineries it could likewise be substituted with non-petroleum heat sources when oil is at a premium. More than that, many of those costs also apply to unrefined oil currently going through the Strait, so that proportion is on both sides of the ledger anyway.
And to the extent that it can't be substituted, it's just a fairly arbitrary subclass of the broader category of consumers with inelastic demand, which implies that oil-producing countries might have a higher percentage of inelastic demand (even then assuming that oil production has more inelastic demand for oil than other things), but by significantly less than the proportion used in oil production, because it's just being averaged in to the broader category of all short-term inelastic global oil consumption.
> Pipeline capacity to the west is pretty limited. The connection via Syria is affected by the war aftermath, the Iraq/Turkey route is already at capacity, and the Saudi connection to the Red Sea is vulnerable to resumption of Houthi attacks. There's some connectivity via Oman, but that's largely natural gas rather than oil.
Pipelines are the most efficient way to transport it, not the only way. You import some tanker trucks and drivers and you can transport as much as you want, but it'll cost more. We're not even talking about thousands of miles, bypassing the Strait of Hormuz via a land path in the UAE is about an hour.
And the Houthis are a problem if you're trying to get to Asia, not Europe. The Saudi pipeline goes to the Red Sea well north of Yemen and from there has a sea path to Europe via the Suez canal.
On top of that, the Iranian military is already in a full conflict with the US. Whereas if the US parks an aircraft carrier with satellite support in the narrow part of the Red Sea ready to rain down fire on any Houthis that attack an oil tanker, but is otherwise going to leave them alone, how many do they have who are inclined to choose certain death to attack a ship most likely destined for Asia out of "solidarity"?
What experience do you have working directly in the oil industry? You're making very specific and bold claims related to the fungibility of oil, oil infrastructure, transpiration, etc and they simply don't line up with my experience.
You won't replace oil pipelines or sea-based transportation by importing tanker trucks, its completely inpheasible on any reasonable timescale.
Similarly, you will never replace petroleum-based transportation at scale in any near term future with electric or other non-petroleum sources. The power to weight ratio of oil, ease of transport of liquid oil, and scale of petroleum a powered vehicles is simply unmatched. Go ahead and do the math on what it takes to replace a diesel oil tanker at sea to cross from Iran to China or the US to Europe, and don't forget to consider all the materials required to make battery storage equipment for such a trip. It doesn't work today and we aren't near a solution today that can replace oil with a viable, sustainable alternative.
> You're making very specific and bold claims related to the fungibility of oil, oil infrastructure, transpiration, etc and they simply don't line up with my experience.
I'm not arguing that they're always and instantaneously fungible, my point is that the aren't any less fungible than they are when the thing you're transporting isn't oil, so it doesn't make much sense to make a special carve out for the cases where the load is also the fuel.
> You won't replace oil pipelines or sea-based transportation by importing tanker trucks, its completely inpheasible on any reasonable timescale.
An oil tanker ship holds around 55 million gallons. An oil tanker truck holds around 10,000. Truckloads per ship is therefore around 5500. If the round trip is around two hours, and assuming that pumping is a relatively small proportion of the time (you have high capacity pumps at both ends or bring a few percent more trucks so drivers can switch trucks instead of waiting or both), you'd need around 500 trucks and, assuming 8 hour shifts, 1500 drivers per oil tanker ship per day. In normal times something like 60 oil tanker ships go through the Straight per day, so if you had to do all of them it would be on the order of 30,000 trucks and 90,000 drivers.
That's not a small number, but at the scale of global trade, it doesn't seem like an impossible number. And you wouldn't actually be doing all of them this way, you would be diverting as many as you can to other paths and only doing this where it's the least bad alternative. 10 ships a day would be ~5000 trucks. Is it infeasible to find 5000 tanker trucks in the world?
> Similarly, you will never replace petroleum-based transportation at scale in any near term future with electric or other non-petroleum sources.
You're not trying to replace all of it instantaneously, you're trying to substitute at the margins. Does it make sense to try to use electric trucks if you were doing the above, trying to run the trucks continuously in a place that presumably doesn't have adequate charging infrastructure? Almost certainly not.
Does it make sense to convert fleets of millions of delivery trucks to electric or plug-in hybrids, when they're doing continuous stop and go that benefits from regenerative braking? Absolutely it does. Does it make sense to add a battery car to already-hybrid diesel electric freight trains so they can do regenerative braking on down grades, and add a pantograph and some overhead lines to the up grades so they can run electric there instead of burning diesel? Also yes.
> The power to weight ratio of oil, ease of transport of liquid oil, and scale of petroleum a powered vehicles is simply unmatched. Go ahead and do the math on what it takes to replace a diesel oil tanker at sea to cross from Iran to China or the US to Europe, and don't forget to consider all the materials required to make battery storage equipment for such a trip.
This seems like a pretty attractive option for large ships if you're worried about power to weight ratio:
I'd recommend this podcast episode[1] if you're interested. Nate Hagan's was originally in finance and has spent the last couple decades researching and discussing wide boundary risks. This episode goes deeper into some of the ripple effects of this oil being blocked in the Straight, it isn't as simple as running it through a pipeline and shipping it differently as though you're detouring around a car accident.
No, in the sense that he people who set oil prices and government policy alike can trade in those prediction markets. I'm all for the markets, very democratic and libertarian (not that I'm one), but policy makers, executives and other people from whom a conflict of interest by a prediction market translates into disaster for real people should be restricted from participating in these markets.
In this case however you can pretty much do the same thing with other financial instruments like future contract on oil. Either way, I agree decision makers shouldn't be allowed to trade (and I think are forbidden in most countries).
You can do the same with proper financial instruments, but there are insider trading laws that prevent those people with insider knowledge from profiting, but these markets have no such restrictions.
Price moves have hysteresis. The risk element in moving Oil hasn't gone, and the companies are looking to recover lost income in the month(s) and so whilst there is supply, there aren't necessarily boats in convenient places, or complete freedoms to walk off contracts.
It's going to be incredibly difficult to stop Iran being able to kneecap both the global economy and in particular the gulf states, who are going to be motivated to put maximum pressure on the US to sue for peace. Incredible hubris and a lobotomised diplomatic and intelligence infrastructure in the name of ideological purity, quite the combination.
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