Iran has two clear win conditions in this war: cause enough pain that the US withdraws (unlikely given the current admin), or wait until US midterms and hope the Dems secure a victory and use the war powers resolution to end the war.
The more FUD they can generate around transport in the strait of Hermuz the better for them.
Maybe they have this capability and maybe they don’t, but they are clearly able to hit these tankers with something. Ukraine has been using these drones so it’s entirely possible Iran has this tech too.
This admin does TACO all the time. A likely scenario is Iran causes economic problems, Trump chickens out and withdraws while simultaneously declaring absolute victory. Any lingering problems he blames on Rubio and hegseth.
It's not impossible. Iran has connections with China, who is great at designing and manufacturing UUVs.
That said, a UUV fleet would have downsides for Iran. It's expensive, dependent on imports and an overmatch for swarm-style attacks. Attack boats are a closer fit for the "cheap/attritable" tactics we see used with Shaheds.
I think you're overestimating the complexity of small unmanned subs. Drug traffickers are building _manned_ subs now in South American jungles.
You just need a body (plastic tube), batteries, motors, and a computer. Maybe with a "range extender" gas engine. Everything can be COTS, and Iran certainly can manufacture occasional custom components.
After all, it can manufacture centrifuges for uranium enrichment.
Maybe! Most of those unmanned narcosubs are cut-down speedboats hulls, to my knowledge. The truly watertight/submerged ones are few and far between; it's a lot of investment for marginal decrease in observability.
My money is still on low-observable attack craft, or a high-low mix that deprioritizes submersibles. Iran has an impressive panopoly but also has casus belli to lie out their nose. If Iran does have fully submersable UUVs, I'd expect them to be saved for a direct confrontation with the US Navy, not tankers.
I could definitely be wrong though, I don't have any insider info to work with here.
I think it is indeed more likely that they used a low-profile boat, but I won't discount a full submersible. Or maybe a combination: a low-profile boat that uses a regular outboard gas engine to get close to the target, and then dives and attacks like a torpedo.
> If Iran does have fully submersable UUVs, I'd expect them to be saved for a direct confrontation with the US Navy, not tankers.
I don't think they can do serious damage to large US Navy vessels.
>why would they boast about it and invite attacks upon that weapon and its deployment systems?
To complicate adversary targeting priorities. If you have to shift your pre-planned bombing sorties away from, say, local Basij HQ buildings, it takes pressure off of the Iranian government. Assigning aircraft to find/fix/target/track/engage "underwater drone launch points" is probably like searching for a needle in a haystack given the size of Iran's coastline.
It was my understanding the the tankers could not be insured or it was prohibitively high cost without the margin cost covered and therefore could not pass through.
These particular ships technically were not attempting to pass through the strait, they were anchored in Iraqi territorial waters. The backlog will extend even further now that it can be considered risky to be anywhere near the strait.
Iran is so near to everything in Middle East: Saudi Arabia/UAE, Hormuz, Israel. And all these are direct enemies of Iran or friends with the USA. It's unavoidable to be targeted. Whoever approaches these will be affected. Just for reference, Iranian missiled can reach southern Italy.
This is all about Hormuz, isn't it? Even though the attack itself was in Basra, Iraq, the intention seems to be to terrify any companies thinking of sailing through the Persian Gulf.
I wonder how many more caches of drones Iran has lying around. Days? Weeks? Years?
There's also the question of how to resupply any anti-drone systems in the area - maybe we'll see convoys carrying interceptors crossing the Arabian desert.
Why did we have to go through all this pain. Was that really necessary? And given we mostly talk about technology here, let me put this through that lens:
With all the technology advancement and improvement with access to information in the last 30 years, why does it feel that all of this culminates to more disinformation, more pain, and less understanding?
It's because technology doesn't change the fundamentals of global geopolitics. Which is that nearly all of history can be explained as a struggle to control basic resources such as arable land, oil, minerals, etc. Everything you're seeing today is because those resources are becoming either increasingly scarce, or increasingly valuable.
Technology can change things but people that profit today from something will oppose a change.
Case in point: switching from oil to renewables - which can lower dependency to external actors a lot as solar panels and windmills have life span of years, so even if the producers suddenly refuses to sell more, one has some time to find an alternative - was done slower than it could have because of "discussions".
Since 20 years I almost feel the discussion "climate change or not" is fueled by people that want dependency on oil, such that we don't talk about the issue of a couple of big producer points of failure (USA, Russia, Gulf countries). Not sure if oil companies are smart enough to finance green groups (to which I agree generally but is besides the point), such that the public discourse stays in a conflict area (climate) rather than a simple one (independence), but if they are that would be meta-evil.
Neither of which is actually true for oil. We're still finding oil reserves faster than we deplete them, major users such as China are rapidly decarbonizing, and the price was relatively low before the war.
But the people in power thought it was true, which is all that matters.
No actually. There's no real "resource" justification here.
This is directly caused by technology. Morons have helped the worst possible people build surveillance and coordination and propaganda networks and are all confused pikachu about that going exactly the way you should have expected it to go.
Technology was also bypassing the "resource" problem at warp speed. Solar panels are the energy future, and thanks to China being actually good at strategic planning, solar can be deployed and utilized far faster than any other energy innovation. With the sheer abundance possible through bulk solar, water scarcity is an engineering issue, about manufacturing enough plumbing and membranes to desalinate whatever you need.
We are fighting an 80s oil war because people voted for an 80s TV personality to run our country after he was known to rape kids, brag about Mein Kampf (even though everyone knows he doesn't read for fun), and attempt to invalidate the 2020 election.
Israel saw a clear opening to wildly advance their imperialist ambitions and because Donald Trump is so damn stupid we have jumped in to this absurdist situation because Donald Trump wanted to be seen shooting first, because he thinks that looks "Strong".
Technology is at the mercy of our social and financial systems, it rarely leads social advancement. As with other tools, it can be used in many ways
In surveying my friends in Silicon Valley, it seems that most VCs/techies know that:
1. This administration is likely leading us into long term wars and social instability
2. American Dynamism and Defense Tech (or more politely bundled into "DeepTech") are war profiteering, benefiting from greater instability
Speaking / acting out against the American military complex and Big Tech/VC's role in this carries 3 big risks:
1. Not being invited to parties ("too much negative energy, we want to be surrounded by positivity" or "don't talk politics")
2. Censorship and reduced following across most major social media platforms
3. Being economically left out as the world bifurcates into a K-shape economy
As a result, most of my community (generally peace-loving, music-loving humans) seem to be either taking a position of "the world has always been at war and will always be at war, I'm just a realist" or "I'm just going to focus on my locust of control and my personal wellbeing" or "if it's gonna happen anyways, I might as well make money off of it". There is a strong contingent of the resistance as well (still fighting for climate, social justice, peace) but much higher rates of depression and social isolation in this group
So it does not seem to be a problem that can be solved by more information and more technology (though k-12 and higher education assuredly is worth investing in), but perhaps by less nihilism and a stronger social/moral fabric
A big reason I am considering starting a company again is that we need more flags of institutions that carry large weight/reputation and stand for a set of values that is different than the current (and historical) status quo. I expect most of my community would be thrilled to align with those flags if those flags where held up tall and broke through the noise
Which is to say, if you're considering setting up one of those flags, please please do. The world doesn't have to be this way.
Because it is much easier to do more damage (disinformation, propaganda etc) with today's technology than ever before. Radio could do more damage than newspapers, TV could do more damage than radio, internet can do way more damage than TV...
Someone with a 500$ laptop, internet connection and a handful of social media accounts can do a level of damage and cause pain that would be impossible 3-4 decades ago.
Technology might advance, but people are still people. Greed, stupidity, ego, jingoism...these don't change no matter how much tech advances
This is a tale as old as humanity itself. Power-hungry people will always push lies to foster their version of events. This always causes pain and destruction.
I am not delusional about those power-hungry people, but I somehow thought that with better access to information, society would have been able to better regulate them.
Maybe in hindsight, "flooding the zone" will be considered a much bigger threat than it is today. Most of what's going on in the last 12 months have happened in plain sight and would have never worked 30 years ago. Today, it just flies, attention span be damned.
Irak war seemed to me reasonably "in plain sight". And there were other blunders as well. What I find amazing though is that more people passionately believe very strange reasons.
30 years ago people were like "meh, sure we don't get something, I bet there are hidden interest that I don't know about". Nowadays they are like "oh, yeah we attack country X because they have aliens that attack us telepathically, I know that for sure and if you don't agree you are an alien too!".
>Why did we have to go through all this pain. Was that really necessary?
Because the United States government is so grossly dysfunctional that a blatant real world re-enactment of Wag the Dog[1] has gone off without a hitch. "Without a hitch" in the "distract from the President's rape of a child" sense of the original film, of course.
One of the self-owns of all time. Triggering a global supply chain crisis right before midterms is bottom of the barrel strategy. But then again, who expects competency from any recent American administration, most especially this one?
These people live on manufacturing crisis after crisis in order to exploit the manic status that they generate. Why worry about how the midterms, if you can create a situation where elections cannot be held at all...?
Yes, it sounds crazy right now, but a lot of things sounded similarly crazy 10 years ago, and here we are.
Of course Trump will try something outrageous that would result in prison time for any other person. But I think that the states are also still independent, mostly ruled by law rather than man, and there's limited troop power to interfere.
Trump is not all powerful, unless everybody gives up their power. Not everybody is as weak as the SV elite, and the failures of Big Law and others that bent the knee were very instructive to everybody else. Bowing down to the king makes you his servant, but it does not protect you in any way.
This time he has his own brown shirts, even fast tracking to to service without any training. DoJ had been getting their hands on voter rolls from swing states. Bondi and other trump top advisors and relocated to living on military bases. Idk where it's going but it's really not looking good.
Yes, and Georgia refused. American elections are a lot more complicated than you seem to believe. There’s plenty to worry about in specific locations, but the federal government has no direct control over any of the voting processes or policies.
More than half the SCOTUS is corrupt and bought off, and the Republican Party in congress is just rubber-stamping what Trump wants. I don't have a lot of faith in the word "unconstitutional" anymore.
Well he and his people are far too stupid and incompetent to have come close to succeeding. While it's not great that there was no punishment, we should at least be thankful that they act on emotion and can only loosely follow playbooks for corruption from the past rather than write new ones for modern times.
What's the basis for this war in Iran? Did that stop this administration? This is akin to pointing out that it's actually illegal to drive 30 mph over the speed limit.
> no mechanism in the constitution for canceling elections
Sure, but there's mechanism in real life that allows cancelling elections like sending your newly funded ICE goons to polling places. Ideally everyone follows the constitution but in reality (even looking at past administrations) there's nothing stopping the executive from taking an action and saying "oops guess we'll let the courts figure it out!"
I agree. Stability of a system is not so much about whether there is some mechanism or force that wants to push it away from equilibrium (because there probably is some such perturber outside of a perfectly controlled environment), but stability is more about whether there exists a stabilizing mechanism to bring the system back toward equilibrium after it starts to deviate.
Yes, of course they are different. We're not embroiled in an active Civil War with tens of thousands dead and a third of the country having seceded. Most things are different from that.
They may be, but if there are no elections, there is no United States. Constitutionally, its government is predicated on having elected representatives.
I could see Trump trying this, but I also can see dozens of other people or groups, some richer, more powerful, more competent, and more ruthless than Trump, just waiting in the wings for the guardrails to come off to make a play to rule the territory of the former United States. If he tries and succeeds at this it's open-season. It's not a Trump dictatorship, it's a civil war, akin to the Chinese Civil War after the emperor fell or the Syrian civil war after the Arab Spring.
Yeah... because Lincoln wasn't a wanna-be tyrant like Trump. The leaders in charge of the elections are diametrically different people. Lincoln fought to keep the Union together; Trump tried to cause a coup to stay in charge in Jan 2020. My god.
The name of Lincoln and Trump cannot and shouldn't be used within the same sentence. Lincoln's story is inspiring and you can see him worried about his country and he grew up learning law books being poor and rose up to power.
Lincoln says, "With malice toward none, with charity for all"
Trump is the exact opposite of Lincoln being "With malice towards all, with charity for none"
The irony of the situation is that they are from the same party.
He believed that the greatest danger to America came from within, warning that if the nation faltered, it would be due to self-destruction rather than external forces
Lincoln's famous speech: , "At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide."
Lincoln was ahead of his time and might as well have predicted something like Trump.
In the current laws you mean, dictatorships usually start by throwing current laws out of the window. Not that I believe Trump would do that, but it is not unheard of in other parts of the world
There is no crisis that would create a situation where elections "cannot be held".
That is to say, if the current admin attempts to suspend elections, the legality of that and the magnitude of the reaction will be the same, crisis or no.
Every non-Confederate state held elections. Two recaptured Confederate states (TN and LA) held elections. The only states which did not are the ones that had seceded, and thus were not US states at the time.
That's not precedent for the federal government declining to hold elections in any way.
How are they downplaying it? Trump can try all he wants, but there is no mechanism in the constitution that allows him to do that. He wasn't successful in 2020 and he won't be successful this time.
The GOP won't even kill the fillibuster in the senate because they know change is coming.
They keep making the same mistake: underestimating that your adversary gets a vote, whether it's Iran, trade partners, colleges, Colbert, the Kennedy Center's audience, or Minneapolis.
He has lived through multiple wars where elections were held. I do not think highly of the man, but he would have to be pretty bad off to come to that belief.
I would wager that someone as selfish as narcissistic as he is would have been oblivious and unconcerned with the day to day affairs of the plebeians unless it effected his income.
Depends, I just want to point out that the US is a net exporter of Oil. They also secured oil imports from Venezuela while at the same time in 2 strokes seriously hurt Chinese oil imports.
If the goal was to hurt China / BRICS and kneecap Iran it seems on point.
It's always hard to predict how the USA will vote when "war" is happening.
> If the goal was to hurt China / BRICS and kneecap Iran it seems on point.
While also hurting Europe, South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, and many more. Very on point...
It will hurt everyone, Americans included, oil is a global market, fertilisers are a global market, those are basic inputs for probably every single thing produced in the world.
So now all of us around the globe have to pay the price for American Imperialism, compounded by the complete shattering of the USA's soft power as an ally, this will only create more animosity against the USA from all sides. Very on point.
But the USA oil industry can make a buck until everything buckles, or perhaps the USA admin will introduce price controls like in the 1970s, that worked very well too.
> It will hurt everyone, Americans included, oil is a global market, fertilisers are a global market, those are basic inputs for probably every single thing produced in the world.
Only because those countries choose for that to be the case. For example, Saudi Arabia and Russia don't do that. Local prices and export prices are different.
But the US, Canada, the Netherlands, and long list of other countries could make this crisis have zero effect on local prices. They choose to take every excuse to raise prices (in fact the Netherlands goes further: if sales tax on gas raises because prices raise, the amount of tax paid is kept constant if prices drop. So they artificially raise local gas prices. So if gas prices are low, tax on gas has at one point reached 72%), but it is fundamentally a government choice.
>But the US, Canada, the Netherlands, and long list of other countries could make this crisis have zero effect on local prices.
The US Government cannot force US companies to sell at a lower domestic price if they can get a higher price exporting. I know that God-Emperor Trump pretends that he can command the oil sector to make less money, but he can't.
>For example, Saudi Arabia and Russia don't do that
2 countries famous for being beacons of free-market capitalism.
And it will go higher now. And given the President's hatered for high interest rates and the next fed chairman being a garden-variety lick-spittle, things are not looking up.
They aren't pumping that much oil since Chavez, the expertise for extracting oil was lost during nationalisation. It needs a lot of work to restart extraction, it will take years.
Just because the US won’t literally run out of oil doesn’t mean the economy (or populace) will be unaffected by a supply crunch. As everyone in the country can already see when they go to fill up their tank.
You are mistaken to assume there was a goal. Trump has admitted he did this because he was told that Iran were about to attack the U.S. not because of any strategic goal.
The 'issue' here is that China has good relations with Iran and in talks to guarantee safe passage for their ships, like they had previously with respect to attacks off Yemen by the Iran-backed Houthis.
Whatever your political affiliation and thoughts on the war, I hope we can all agree that it would an awful thing to base our foreign policy on the US election cycle.
Not so awful as it may seem. It would be even more awful if election cycle had no influence over decision to wage one more war. "Democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time".
The Biden administration was actually extremely competent, handled global inflation after the pandemic and Russia's war fairly well relative to peer nations, and set US manufacturing on course to provide us with all the batteries, solar panels, and EVs to prevent oil crunches like this from causing future inflation.
I expect more competency from US Presidential administrations, and also expect more competency and indpendence from the various parts of the executive branch, which should execute their missions without micro-management from the President, and I further expect far more competence from Congress and the US Supreme Court in setting law and enforcing law. It's bad enough that we have an incompetent Presidential administration, but that damage should be limited by the independence of the other parts of the government. The blast radius should be far smaller, we shouldn't have a King.
Bothsides-ism is such a plague. While I don't agree with everything you said, I feel like the pandemic response doesn't get enough credit. Everyone hated how the Biden admin responded in the moment, but looking back the US really came out ahead compared to almost everyone else
Biden held back arms support for Ukraine on dubious "we don't wanna test Russia's red line" grounds, gave unlimited support a wannabe despot's (Netanyahu's) wars of aggression even as he tried to backstab democracy in the US, arguably also enabling him to start the current situation in Iran, failed to prosecute an attempt to overturn the US election, and stayed in the presidential race for too long when his body and mind was in visible decline.
We wouldn't be having a discussion about the US having a king if Biden's administration was actually competent at doing its job.
I disagree heartily with Biden and the deeper US intelligence communities assessments, like you do.
Nonetheless, I wouldn't call Biden incompetent on any of that.
Biden did not lose, Kamala Harris lost. Biden was not incompetent, but he was successfully portrayed as incompetent by applying a very different standard to Biden than to Trump 45.
> I disagree heartily with Biden and the deeper US intelligence communities assessments, like you do.
Maybe if they were actually competent they wouldn't have made the mistake then?
> Biden did not lose, Kamala Harris lost.
Harris had no choice but to carry the Biden administration's poor approval on her back. Furthermore if Biden knew he would be unelectable in 2024 earlier he could have dropped out earlier and allow Harris (or other Democrats) more time to campaign. But he chose to stay until a disastrous televised debate forced him out, out of… what, exactly?
> but he was successfully portrayed as incompetent by applying a very different standard to Biden than to Trump 45.
Biden defenders always bring up how we shouldn't criticize him because Trump is worse. Ok. But you realize that's an absurdly low bar to clear, no? We are not upset that Biden is worse than Trump, we are upset that Biden is worse than what we expect from a someone with a letter D next to his name.
The current situation we're facing can be traced back to, in some parts, Trump pulling out of JCPOA and Biden's tepid resistance to Israel's war in Palestine, leading to this situation.
Huh? That's a pretty far out there statement that needs substantial support to be taken seriousl.
By all accounts Israeli leadership also tried to rope Biden and Obama into attacking Iran, but they were stronger presidents that paid more attention to US interests rather than being easily tricked.
Agreed. And I'd say pulling out of the TPP is an equivalently big mistake, and will honestly have far worse consequences for the US but in far different ways. Letting China be the leader of the Pacific by pulling out, in combination with the terrible hostility to all countries there now, especially to South Korea, massively weakens the US economically and military. We just handed everything over, no fight, no fuss, no benefit to the US. Ugh.
What’s baffling to me is how they’re going to attempt to spin the colossal fuck up this is from a “Best Military in the World” perspective, particularly after their unapproved relabeling of the DoD to the DoW.
It doesn't matter how good the military is if the political leadership is incompetent and the strategic objectives are incoherent. You'd think that after Vietnam, Iraq 2, and Afghanistan this lesson would have been learned, but apparently not.
The nation is one terrorist attack away from rallying behind the president. And sadly the chances of that happening have gone up significantly in recent days.
Lockheed Martin already paid for Trump's ballroom (not a joke) and so needed the guy to start a War as their investment must be repaid a hundred fold. Who cares about American voters ?
I would bet Trump just shot himself in the foot with this war, after midterms he will be a "lame duck" pres the remainder of his administration, relying on executive orders, which his opponents will merely take to liberal judges to have them stricken down. The final straw near the end of his term may be selling pardons to any takers.
I have no idea how American will extricate itself. We are nowhere near a Nixonian "Peace with Honor" exit. The Trumpian manuver of declaring victory and walking away seems increasingly infeasible. I think the best case senario is a Pyrrhic victory. The worst case is probably more like Russia's exit from the Soviet-Afghan war.
I don't understand why is everyone at war, I don't understand anything, I really just feel depressed. Don't feel like anyone cares what you think whether you live in US, EU, or somewhere else. It's all bomb this guy, bomb that guy these days.
I don't really have anything constructive to add, but hope folks in US realize just how insane all this is. Like can we just not have wars, like pretty please anything but more bombs and killing...
Like what happened to the walls folks in US were building a while ago, can we fund another, I will donate a 100$ if we wrap up all this shit this week. Heck if Russia and other countries pack it up I will add another 100$ to it...
Does that work, does anything work? ._.
Let's do something productive, honestly AI slop is more productive than this. I still can't wrap my head around this nonsense.
I am 25 I don't wanna know a world at war, just a few hundred more years of peace please, then you folks can feel free to go to war with Zurgs or something with your AGI drones...
A done attack is utterly predictable though? Ukraine and Russia have been doing drone attacks on each other by air, sea and on land for years now. To great effect. It should be expected, not surprising at all.
While some naysayers might claim the US has entered the FO stage after the commencement of FA, I have full faith in the ability of great minds like Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth to navigate the sea of uncertainty and achieve strategic victory!
He may still wriggle out of it but it is increasingly looking like Trump has stepped into something that he won't be able to reverse his way out of easily, a one way decision.
It seems like a huge self own but he benefits from an extremely loyal fan base and a militaristic culture that loves rallying around the flag.
Does he even care if his actions hurt the country or global stability at all, so long as his supporters remain unwavering? It seems like he doesn't, so here we are.
There is no plausible stimulus that he might actually care to respond to.
The stepping was done years ago when Epstein got kompromat on him. That's why he ordered this war for no apparent reason. His life is over if he doesn't, his life lasts a few more years if the blackmail is withheld, at the cost of innocent lives.
I'm actually somewhat surprised Iran is openly telling us they are using underwater drones for this. That piece of technological advance has gone mostly under the radar (!) so far.
FYI, "The Ukraine" is politically charged wording held over from Soviet times, and implies that it is part of Russia. The independent country is known simply as "Ukraine".
There are plenty of languages with gendered country names. Ukraine is die Ukraine (feminine gender) in German and the article is necessary since changing the article changes the meaning of what you're expressing. Whenever I see/hear "the Ukraine" I assume English is their second language.
Yes but as one of the other commenters pointed out, its a charged term when it comes to Ukraine so its worth mentioning to people that use it accidentally.
What defense is there against something like this? AFAIK only a few US aircraft carriers are equipped with anti torpedo torpedoes, and one of those sitting in the straight would be pretty vulnerable.
The calculation is that of course there are defences, but if you have a big stockpile of $20K drones, and your opponent has a limited number of $2mil drone interceptors, then you can keep throwing drones and keeping your opponent busy there, and you're coming out ahead even before one finally gets through.
This is very much a 'you break it, you buy it' situation. The US should be running destroyer screens for convoys a la WW2 today, yet AFAIK the US fleet is sitting hundreds of miles out of the Persian Gulf, within bombing range, outside of easy strike range.
The navigable part of the Strait of Hormuz is only 15-ish miles wide, maybe less. There is no way the US can convoy screen anything without significant loss in sailors and ships.
The WW2 convoy situation was far easier to escort (but still quite dangerous obviously) because:
1. The Atlantic is a much bigger place, even considering common routes and chokepoints.
2. U-Boats had to surface frequently, making them extremely vulnerable to Allied air cover.
3. U-Boats had to be within visual range to strike convoys, versus the drone and missile world we live in now.
- We likely don't have the assets to move the amount traffic that needs to get through
- We probably can't protect them perfectly (we don't have maritime supremacy) so ships will still take damage and that will stop the convoys pretty quickly
I suspect the escort ships would be fine though. They can defend themselves.
So if we did start them, they wouldn't continue for long until the economic pain was pretty massive and the cost of loosing ships was worth it.
It would be cheaper just to build an oil pipeline around it than to cover insurance and risk through that Strait. It would do well to just forget the Strait exists, our conflict has taken it out of commission for the indefinite future.
Cheaper but less resilient to attacks. Pipelines are fixed infra, and are imminently targetible by even the smallest drones. One successful attack and your entire pipeline is down.
Probably a 'why not both' question though. If the US could quick deploy enough pipelines to support the entire d-day offensive back during ww2 I don't see why we couldn't do so today
Let's replace a choke point by an even smaller single static point of failure transporting highly flammable content, are you an adviser for the white house? If not you should apply
> The US should be running destroyer screens for convoys a la WW2 today,
That's harder than bombing schools, goat herders or kidnapping the leader of the most corrupt country in the world, are you sure they can still pull it off, I'm starting to think even they know they cannot anymore.
After seeing the latest white house CoD style propaganda videos and Pete "Kafir" Hegseth speeches it's clear the people in charge completely lost it
> In After the Empire, written in 2001, Todd claimed that the reason for America’s “theatrical micromilitarism” was to prove that it was still an indispensable power in a post-USSR world. In his latest work, however, he revises this thesis, arguing that it would imply attributing rational intentions to Washington.13 The American liberal oligarchy is not driven by any clear project.
Roughly 3 years. That being said, there’s thousands of carriers globally and they have maybe a 25 year lifespan, so a couple of ships becoming inoperable is largely negligible.
They don't even need that many mines or bombs to start with, presence of wreckage on the shipping lanes that aren't more that 75m deep would already put all shipping at risk.
Also, the amount of oil spilling into such a small area can't be good for the environment, can't be good for local marine life (if there is any), etc....
I’ll laugh whenever someone comes along and says "This is definitely an act of war" despite everything we’ve all seen that has been done to Iran lately.
A lot of the world tried to shift to renewables during the ~10-year-long 1970s embargo. They went straight back to sweet old oil afterwards. This isn't gonna last nearly as long. Don't get me wrong, I hope and pray that renewables get a boost out of this, but I don't think it's gonna happen.
I suppose that the specifics of what I said were mistaken, but the general sentiment remains the same. It doesn't seem like this conflict will last as long as the embargo, and when one of the largest investors into new technologies has firmly refused to acknowledge the necessities of renewables, progress and adoption will certainly slow down.
In the 1970s electric cars were not generally available and solar panels were 100 times more expensive than they are now. Today the world has the manufacturing capacity to install nearly a terawatt-peak of solar panels per year, at low cost, and millions of electric cars are shipping every quarter:
It won't change rapidly in the US, because the current administration opposes renewables at every turn and keeps low cost BEVs out of the US, but most of the world's energy/oil needs are outside the US. This situation will accelerate a global process that was already gaining speed.
The USA and Israel should've went after the Iranian regime a long time ago. What we're seing now is the price of procrastination and weak past presidents.
Imagine if multiple Western countries allied early to correct this regime (and not just with sanctions).
They may hate their govt. But they hate Israel even more. And getting ruthlessly bombed by Israel and US, yeah that will not do what Trump and Netanyahu think it will.
Telegram is full of gigantic rallies all hours of the day and night supporting the Iranian government. Even street interviews with young women (no hijab!) claiming they were formerly protesters but aren't going to tolerate foreigners bombing their country.
Do you have some solid sources on the ground to the contrary?
As the sister comment alludes, how many of those 15 families are in Iran?
My professor from my graduate program and his family are all Iranian. It's no surprise that they anti-regime: his wife's uncles were generals in the Shah's army, and were "disappeared" during the Revolution. They've been living in Japan for ~40 years. Hardly indicative of the opinion of the "man on the street" in Tehran, Isfahan, or Mashhad.
Presumably you are not in Iran. Where people are getting bombed and feel the consequences of “finally [getting] rid of the Iranian regime”.
Some circles might have only pro-Trump Americans. Others might only have anti-Trump Americans. And yet your experience is all-knowing? With 15 families? Outside of Iran (presumably).
> IRAN has claimed responsibility for an attack on two oil tankers anchored in Iraqi territorial waters, as conflicts in the region continue to escalate and strikes on commercial shipping spread beyond the Strait of Hormuz.
It's not that it's impossible to go through it, but you have to do something specific in order to do so beyond just trying to go through, or you're going to walk straight into getting a bloodey nose.
But yeah, these ships weren't anywhere near the strait.
Is this how it really works? With demand outstripping supply, prices rise across the globe. Prices at gas stations go up as well. The only ones earning a „LOT“ of money are Big Oil shareholders?
That is hilarious cope. The US benefits far far relatively more when the global economy is running smoothly than when able to sell oil higher, like some shithole petrostate. Appropriate I suppose.
Plus gas is largely immune to sales tax and we don't really tax corporations so this will largely lead to no revenue for the US and instead just record profits for Exxon.
An Iraqi security source said they think it was an Iranian boat rigged with explosives.
If Iran does have underwater explosive drones, why would they boast about it and invite attacks upon that weapon and its deployment systems?
Iran has two clear win conditions in this war: cause enough pain that the US withdraws (unlikely given the current admin), or wait until US midterms and hope the Dems secure a victory and use the war powers resolution to end the war.
The more FUD they can generate around transport in the strait of Hermuz the better for them.
Maybe they have this capability and maybe they don’t, but they are clearly able to hit these tankers with something. Ukraine has been using these drones so it’s entirely possible Iran has this tech too.
> Ukraine has been using these drones so it’s entirely possible Iran has this tech too.
Ukraine has been defending against these drones for past 4 years!
EDIT: nevermind, we are talking about sea babies, not shaheds - different kind of drones.
This admin does TACO all the time. A likely scenario is Iran causes economic problems, Trump chickens out and withdraws while simultaneously declaring absolute victory. Any lingering problems he blames on Rubio and hegseth.
TACO isn't enough, Iran must also withdraw, this isn't a given if they feel they have nothing to lose
It might have been a low-observable watercraft like the Sea Baby: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Baby
A true UUV attack is probably outside Iran's wheelhouse, but cutting-down an attack speedboat to the waterline seems very realistic.
Why would it be outside of Iran capabilities? They are the ones who provided Russia with Shahed drones.
> They are the ones who provided Russia with Shahed drones.
Shaheeds are aerodynamic clones of the Israeli Harpy SEAD drone, which in turn were based on the German Dornier DAR of the 1980s.
Compared to the loitering anti-radar DAR, the Shaheed is electronically extremely simple and not much more advanced than the WW2 V-1.
The fact that Russia started producing Shaheeds reflects more on the poor state of Russian industry than any sophistication of Iranian technology.
It's not impossible. Iran has connections with China, who is great at designing and manufacturing UUVs.
That said, a UUV fleet would have downsides for Iran. It's expensive, dependent on imports and an overmatch for swarm-style attacks. Attack boats are a closer fit for the "cheap/attritable" tactics we see used with Shaheds.
I think you're overestimating the complexity of small unmanned subs. Drug traffickers are building _manned_ subs now in South American jungles.
You just need a body (plastic tube), batteries, motors, and a computer. Maybe with a "range extender" gas engine. Everything can be COTS, and Iran certainly can manufacture occasional custom components.
After all, it can manufacture centrifuges for uranium enrichment.
Maybe! Most of those unmanned narcosubs are cut-down speedboats hulls, to my knowledge. The truly watertight/submerged ones are few and far between; it's a lot of investment for marginal decrease in observability.
My money is still on low-observable attack craft, or a high-low mix that deprioritizes submersibles. Iran has an impressive panopoly but also has casus belli to lie out their nose. If Iran does have fully submersable UUVs, I'd expect them to be saved for a direct confrontation with the US Navy, not tankers.
I could definitely be wrong though, I don't have any insider info to work with here.
> Most of those unmanned narcosubs are cut-down speedboats hulls, to my knowledge.
Some are now fully submersible: https://insightcrime.org/news/under-radar-what-hundreds-ofna...
I think it is indeed more likely that they used a low-profile boat, but I won't discount a full submersible. Or maybe a combination: a low-profile boat that uses a regular outboard gas engine to get close to the target, and then dives and attacks like a torpedo.
> If Iran does have fully submersable UUVs, I'd expect them to be saved for a direct confrontation with the US Navy, not tankers.
I don't think they can do serious damage to large US Navy vessels.
>why would they boast about it and invite attacks upon that weapon and its deployment systems?
To complicate adversary targeting priorities. If you have to shift your pre-planned bombing sorties away from, say, local Basij HQ buildings, it takes pressure off of the Iranian government. Assigning aircraft to find/fix/target/track/engage "underwater drone launch points" is probably like searching for a needle in a haystack given the size of Iran's coastline.
"If Iran has missiles why would they boast about it and invite attacks upon that weapon and its deployment systems?"
See how that doesn't make any sense?
This boondoggle is going to make Iraq 2003 look well planned.
A week ago we saw Iranian and Greek vessels plying the Strait [1]. I guess Tehran is now establishing its monopoly.
[1] https://gcaptain.com/iranian-shadow-fleet-and-greek-affiliat...
It was my understanding the the tankers could not be insured or it was prohibitively high cost without the margin cost covered and therefore could not pass through.
https://www.spglobal.com/energy/en/news-research/latest-news...
Either way for sure this will cause further backlog. And for what.
These particular ships technically were not attempting to pass through the strait, they were anchored in Iraqi territorial waters. The backlog will extend even further now that it can be considered risky to be anywhere near the strait.
some of them were not in the straights just near.
Iran is so near to everything in Middle East: Saudi Arabia/UAE, Hormuz, Israel. And all these are direct enemies of Iran or friends with the USA. It's unavoidable to be targeted. Whoever approaches these will be affected. Just for reference, Iranian missiled can reach southern Italy.
This is all about Hormuz, isn't it? Even though the attack itself was in Basra, Iraq, the intention seems to be to terrify any companies thinking of sailing through the Persian Gulf.
I wonder how many more caches of drones Iran has lying around. Days? Weeks? Years?
There's also the question of how to resupply any anti-drone systems in the area - maybe we'll see convoys carrying interceptors crossing the Arabian desert.
Not so much 'terrify' as a hint to the insurance adjusters who set prices and therefore control the flow.
'Nope'
They'll signal something else later and things will open up.
Why did we have to go through all this pain. Was that really necessary? And given we mostly talk about technology here, let me put this through that lens:
With all the technology advancement and improvement with access to information in the last 30 years, why does it feel that all of this culminates to more disinformation, more pain, and less understanding?
It's because technology doesn't change the fundamentals of global geopolitics. Which is that nearly all of history can be explained as a struggle to control basic resources such as arable land, oil, minerals, etc. Everything you're seeing today is because those resources are becoming either increasingly scarce, or increasingly valuable.
Technology can change things but people that profit today from something will oppose a change.
Case in point: switching from oil to renewables - which can lower dependency to external actors a lot as solar panels and windmills have life span of years, so even if the producers suddenly refuses to sell more, one has some time to find an alternative - was done slower than it could have because of "discussions".
Since 20 years I almost feel the discussion "climate change or not" is fueled by people that want dependency on oil, such that we don't talk about the issue of a couple of big producer points of failure (USA, Russia, Gulf countries). Not sure if oil companies are smart enough to finance green groups (to which I agree generally but is besides the point), such that the public discourse stays in a conflict area (climate) rather than a simple one (independence), but if they are that would be meta-evil.
Are they?
We have so much stuff that we just throw things away if a tiny piece of it gets tarnished / broken.
The US's population density is pretty low and we have a ton of land not in cities that's very sparsely populated.
Like it largely seems that geopolitics of now is about creating scarcity.
> Like it largely seems that geopolitics of now is about creating scarcity.
How else do you create scarcity except by controlling all the resources?
Convincing people something is scare or artificially creating scarcity.
> increasingly scarce, or increasingly valuable.
Neither of which is actually true for oil. We're still finding oil reserves faster than we deplete them, major users such as China are rapidly decarbonizing, and the price was relatively low before the war.
But the people in power thought it was true, which is all that matters.
No actually. There's no real "resource" justification here.
This is directly caused by technology. Morons have helped the worst possible people build surveillance and coordination and propaganda networks and are all confused pikachu about that going exactly the way you should have expected it to go.
Technology was also bypassing the "resource" problem at warp speed. Solar panels are the energy future, and thanks to China being actually good at strategic planning, solar can be deployed and utilized far faster than any other energy innovation. With the sheer abundance possible through bulk solar, water scarcity is an engineering issue, about manufacturing enough plumbing and membranes to desalinate whatever you need.
We are fighting an 80s oil war because people voted for an 80s TV personality to run our country after he was known to rape kids, brag about Mein Kampf (even though everyone knows he doesn't read for fun), and attempt to invalidate the 2020 election.
Israel saw a clear opening to wildly advance their imperialist ambitions and because Donald Trump is so damn stupid we have jumped in to this absurdist situation because Donald Trump wanted to be seen shooting first, because he thinks that looks "Strong".
Technology is at the mercy of our social and financial systems, it rarely leads social advancement. As with other tools, it can be used in many ways
In surveying my friends in Silicon Valley, it seems that most VCs/techies know that: 1. This administration is likely leading us into long term wars and social instability 2. American Dynamism and Defense Tech (or more politely bundled into "DeepTech") are war profiteering, benefiting from greater instability
Speaking / acting out against the American military complex and Big Tech/VC's role in this carries 3 big risks: 1. Not being invited to parties ("too much negative energy, we want to be surrounded by positivity" or "don't talk politics") 2. Censorship and reduced following across most major social media platforms 3. Being economically left out as the world bifurcates into a K-shape economy
As a result, most of my community (generally peace-loving, music-loving humans) seem to be either taking a position of "the world has always been at war and will always be at war, I'm just a realist" or "I'm just going to focus on my locust of control and my personal wellbeing" or "if it's gonna happen anyways, I might as well make money off of it". There is a strong contingent of the resistance as well (still fighting for climate, social justice, peace) but much higher rates of depression and social isolation in this group
So it does not seem to be a problem that can be solved by more information and more technology (though k-12 and higher education assuredly is worth investing in), but perhaps by less nihilism and a stronger social/moral fabric
A big reason I am considering starting a company again is that we need more flags of institutions that carry large weight/reputation and stand for a set of values that is different than the current (and historical) status quo. I expect most of my community would be thrilled to align with those flags if those flags where held up tall and broke through the noise
Which is to say, if you're considering setting up one of those flags, please please do. The world doesn't have to be this way.
Because it is much easier to do more damage (disinformation, propaganda etc) with today's technology than ever before. Radio could do more damage than newspapers, TV could do more damage than radio, internet can do way more damage than TV...
Someone with a 500$ laptop, internet connection and a handful of social media accounts can do a level of damage and cause pain that would be impossible 3-4 decades ago.
Technology might advance, but people are still people. Greed, stupidity, ego, jingoism...these don't change no matter how much tech advances
People are people. Adding tech doesn't change the people very much.
This is a tale as old as humanity itself. Power-hungry people will always push lies to foster their version of events. This always causes pain and destruction.
I am not delusional about those power-hungry people, but I somehow thought that with better access to information, society would have been able to better regulate them.
Maybe in hindsight, "flooding the zone" will be considered a much bigger threat than it is today. Most of what's going on in the last 12 months have happened in plain sight and would have never worked 30 years ago. Today, it just flies, attention span be damned.
Irak war seemed to me reasonably "in plain sight". And there were other blunders as well. What I find amazing though is that more people passionately believe very strange reasons.
30 years ago people were like "meh, sure we don't get something, I bet there are hidden interest that I don't know about". Nowadays they are like "oh, yeah we attack country X because they have aliens that attack us telepathically, I know that for sure and if you don't agree you are an alien too!".
>Why did we have to go through all this pain. Was that really necessary?
Because the United States government is so grossly dysfunctional that a blatant real world re-enactment of Wag the Dog[1] has gone off without a hitch. "Without a hitch" in the "distract from the President's rape of a child" sense of the original film, of course.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wag_the_Dog
One of the self-owns of all time. Triggering a global supply chain crisis right before midterms is bottom of the barrel strategy. But then again, who expects competency from any recent American administration, most especially this one?
These people live on manufacturing crisis after crisis in order to exploit the manic status that they generate. Why worry about how the midterms, if you can create a situation where elections cannot be held at all...?
Yes, it sounds crazy right now, but a lot of things sounded similarly crazy 10 years ago, and here we are.
There is no crisis in the US that results in canceled elections
We're talking about the same guy that sent a second slate of electors for the 2020 election.
The same guy that told the government of Georgia to add 10,000 votes to his total so he'd win.
The same guy that received 0 punishment for either action.
Why wouldn't he try something for the mid-terms?
Of course Trump will try something outrageous that would result in prison time for any other person. But I think that the states are also still independent, mostly ruled by law rather than man, and there's limited troop power to interfere.
Trump is not all powerful, unless everybody gives up their power. Not everybody is as weak as the SV elite, and the failures of Big Law and others that bent the knee were very instructive to everybody else. Bowing down to the king makes you his servant, but it does not protect you in any way.
This time he has his own brown shirts, even fast tracking to to service without any training. DoJ had been getting their hands on voter rolls from swing states. Bondi and other trump top advisors and relocated to living on military bases. Idk where it's going but it's really not looking good.
Let's hope next year we laugh about this with the question with "And why did he have any expectation it was going to work?".
No man, thats not going to fly. No one ever got anything done by just hoping. Get started now.
Started doing what? Distributing Maoist literature and rifles, or donating to Act Blue, or something in the middle?
Yes, and Georgia refused. American elections are a lot more complicated than you seem to believe. There’s plenty to worry about in specific locations, but the federal government has no direct control over any of the voting processes or policies.
The Federal government has some direct control and lots of indirect control. Relevant right now is the horrible Save America act.
It doesn't. This is a power specifically granted to states. The Save America act is unconstitutional.
More than half the SCOTUS is corrupt and bought off, and the Republican Party in congress is just rubber-stamping what Trump wants. I don't have a lot of faith in the word "unconstitutional" anymore.
> The same guy that received 0 punishment for either action.
and
> but the federal government has no direct control over any of the voting processes
Coming soon, to polling booths near you, "random" ICE activity.
Well he and his people are far too stupid and incompetent to have come close to succeeding. While it's not great that there was no punishment, we should at least be thankful that they act on emotion and can only loosely follow playbooks for corruption from the past rather than write new ones for modern times.
They still kill a lot of people and, through their actions/inaction, let many others be killed.
Yeah so stupid he managed to become president
Yes. He wasn't elected for his intellect, because Americans don't trust intellect. He was elected for his attitude and personality.
I am surprised to see that this kind of complacency remains.
The corruption competence of this body of actors is as impressive as it is horrific.
What's the basis for this war in Iran? Did that stop this administration? This is akin to pointing out that it's actually illegal to drive 30 mph over the speed limit.
I’m keeping a link to this comment to see how well it ages
It's currently historically accurate. It's aged 250 years so far.
Civil war? Elections. WWII? Elections. Covid? Elections.
In your world view is it possible for empires to fall?
If so, why do you think this is not relevant to this particular empire at this particular time?
Obviously. All empires either have fallen or will fall.
That doesn't mean all extant empires are currently actively falling, and soon, will have fallen.
The US is less divided now than it was during the Civil War, which it survived. Why would it be more likely to fall now than then?
Wake up. Things are different this time in case you haven’t noticed
Things are absolutely different, but there is no mechanism in the constitution for canceling elections.
> no mechanism in the constitution for canceling elections
Sure, but there's mechanism in real life that allows cancelling elections like sending your newly funded ICE goons to polling places. Ideally everyone follows the constitution but in reality (even looking at past administrations) there's nothing stopping the executive from taking an action and saying "oops guess we'll let the courts figure it out!"
I agree. Stability of a system is not so much about whether there is some mechanism or force that wants to push it away from equilibrium (because there probably is some such perturber outside of a perfectly controlled environment), but stability is more about whether there exists a stabilizing mechanism to bring the system back toward equilibrium after it starts to deviate.
Yes, of course they are different. We're not embroiled in an active Civil War with tens of thousands dead and a third of the country having seceded. Most things are different from that.
They may be, but if there are no elections, there is no United States. Constitutionally, its government is predicated on having elected representatives.
I could see Trump trying this, but I also can see dozens of other people or groups, some richer, more powerful, more competent, and more ruthless than Trump, just waiting in the wings for the guardrails to come off to make a play to rule the territory of the former United States. If he tries and succeeds at this it's open-season. It's not a Trump dictatorship, it's a civil war, akin to the Chinese Civil War after the emperor fell or the Syrian civil war after the Arab Spring.
Agreed. The United States had an election in 1864, while the states were literally at war with each other.
Yeah... because Lincoln wasn't a wanna-be tyrant like Trump. The leaders in charge of the elections are diametrically different people. Lincoln fought to keep the Union together; Trump tried to cause a coup to stay in charge in Jan 2020. My god.
The name of Lincoln and Trump cannot and shouldn't be used within the same sentence. Lincoln's story is inspiring and you can see him worried about his country and he grew up learning law books being poor and rose up to power.
Lincoln says, "With malice toward none, with charity for all"
Trump is the exact opposite of Lincoln being "With malice towards all, with charity for none"
The irony of the situation is that they are from the same party.
He believed that the greatest danger to America came from within, warning that if the nation faltered, it would be due to self-destruction rather than external forces
Lincoln's famous speech: , "At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide."
Lincoln was ahead of his time and might as well have predicted something like Trump.
Yet.
In the current laws you mean, dictatorships usually start by throwing current laws out of the window. Not that I believe Trump would do that, but it is not unheard of in other parts of the world
If they have one, First they start by replacing the Supreme Court with their own minions.
Start to worry of the Republicans start talking about expanding the Supreme Court to add their own to it
That play already showed its limits with the tariff decision. They can’t stuff the Supreme Court with followers.
> They can’t stuff the Supreme Court with followers.
Can't? They already did.
The US held elections during the Civil War.
There is no crisis that would create a situation where elections "cannot be held".
That is to say, if the current admin attempts to suspend elections, the legality of that and the magnitude of the reaction will be the same, crisis or no.
Some of the states held presidential elections, not all, but the winners write history so it worked out fine in that case.
Every non-Confederate state held elections. Two recaptured Confederate states (TN and LA) held elections. The only states which did not are the ones that had seceded, and thus were not US states at the time.
That's not precedent for the federal government declining to hold elections in any way.
Account created Jan 6 2020. Now downplaying the current admin attempts.... hmmm.....
Please explain how saying "there is no crisis which could justify suspending elections" downplays anything the current admin is doing.
How are they downplaying it? Trump can try all he wants, but there is no mechanism in the constitution that allows him to do that. He wasn't successful in 2020 and he won't be successful this time.
The GOP won't even kill the fillibuster in the senate because they know change is coming.
I really think this gives them too much credit.
They keep making the same mistake: underestimating that your adversary gets a vote, whether it's Iran, trade partners, colleges, Colbert, the Kennedy Center's audience, or Minneapolis.
> Why worry about how the midterms, if you can create a situation where elections cannot be held at all...?
But they claimed "flawless victory".
Both things cannot be true at the same time.
I heard a theory that since someone told Trump that Ukraine wouldn't hold elections until after the war, he thought America had the same law.
He has lived through multiple wars where elections were held. I do not think highly of the man, but he would have to be pretty bad off to come to that belief.
If you listen to him talk and the things he actually says, it's hard to escape the conclusion that he's losing his grip on reality as he ages.
The mainstream media is incredibly generous to him, they parse out the non-crazy from his word salad and report on that.
I would wager that someone as selfish as narcissistic as he is would have been oblivious and unconcerned with the day to day affairs of the plebeians unless it effected his income.
Which "war"? While there are the current "debates" about whether this is a war, the US hasn't declared war on anybody since WW2.
> but he would have to be pretty bad off to come to that belief.
Well, did you hear that the dead are walking around with no arms and no legs because they were blown off? Trump said that, a few days ago.
The only way you could do something like would be to "appoint" someone as the presidential candidate in a two party system without holding a primary
Depends, I just want to point out that the US is a net exporter of Oil. They also secured oil imports from Venezuela while at the same time in 2 strokes seriously hurt Chinese oil imports.
If the goal was to hurt China / BRICS and kneecap Iran it seems on point.
It's always hard to predict how the USA will vote when "war" is happening.
> If the goal was to hurt China / BRICS and kneecap Iran it seems on point.
While also hurting Europe, South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, and many more. Very on point...
It will hurt everyone, Americans included, oil is a global market, fertilisers are a global market, those are basic inputs for probably every single thing produced in the world.
So now all of us around the globe have to pay the price for American Imperialism, compounded by the complete shattering of the USA's soft power as an ally, this will only create more animosity against the USA from all sides. Very on point.
But the USA oil industry can make a buck until everything buckles, or perhaps the USA admin will introduce price controls like in the 1970s, that worked very well too.
> It will hurt everyone, Americans included, oil is a global market, fertilisers are a global market, those are basic inputs for probably every single thing produced in the world.
Only because those countries choose for that to be the case. For example, Saudi Arabia and Russia don't do that. Local prices and export prices are different.
But the US, Canada, the Netherlands, and long list of other countries could make this crisis have zero effect on local prices. They choose to take every excuse to raise prices (in fact the Netherlands goes further: if sales tax on gas raises because prices raise, the amount of tax paid is kept constant if prices drop. So they artificially raise local gas prices. So if gas prices are low, tax on gas has at one point reached 72%), but it is fundamentally a government choice.
>But the US, Canada, the Netherlands, and long list of other countries could make this crisis have zero effect on local prices.
The US Government cannot force US companies to sell at a lower domestic price if they can get a higher price exporting. I know that God-Emperor Trump pretends that he can command the oil sector to make less money, but he can't.
>For example, Saudi Arabia and Russia don't do that
2 countries famous for being beacons of free-market capitalism.
> The US Government cannot force US companies to sell at a lower domestic price if they can get a higher price exporting.
That's not a mechanism that anyone is proposing. The US government can, however, apply an export tariff that's used to subsidize local prices.
> in 2 strokes seriously hurt Chinese oil imports.
USA, Europe, and many other countries depend on China for manufacturing. I doubt that this is going to solve inflation.
But it will fill the pockets of a few people in oil rich countries that can still export.
Inflation is currently at 2.4%. How much lower do you want it to go?
Still above the fed's 2% target.
And it will go higher now. And given the President's hatered for high interest rates and the next fed chairman being a garden-variety lick-spittle, things are not looking up.
> They also secured oil imports from Venezuela while at the same time in 2 strokes seriously hurt Chinese oil imports.
This 'Venezuelan oil' is a pipe dream for the moment. It will take a significant amount of years to get anywhere near completed.
really? where are their oil exports going now?
They aren't pumping that much oil since Chavez, the expertise for extracting oil was lost during nationalisation. It needs a lot of work to restart extraction, it will take years.
Oil markets are global, you cannot hike prices for China while enjoying cheap oil yourself.
Unless china is importing sanctioned oil from.... Iran, Russa, and Venezuela at discounted rates.
I think this has been the crux of many allegations against China. They don't operate fairly in global markets.
Just for my own understanding, you're not insinuating the US is currently playing fair with regards to starting the war that caused all this?
Just for my own understanding, you're not insinuating China isn't violating international sanctions to purchase oil at a discount?
Venezuela has reserves. Relative to the gulf it doesn't produce any meaningful amount of oil from those reserves.
Just because the US won’t literally run out of oil doesn’t mean the economy (or populace) will be unaffected by a supply crunch. As everyone in the country can already see when they go to fill up their tank.
“If the goal was the hurt China…”
You are mistaken to assume there was a goal. Trump has admitted he did this because he was told that Iran were about to attack the U.S. not because of any strategic goal.
https://youtube.com/shorts/YlkcOjSQVJk
Oh no, it's coming right for us!
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GaazFYTrQ_A&pp=ygUYaXQncyBjb21...
The 'issue' here is that China has good relations with Iran and in talks to guarantee safe passage for their ships, like they had previously with respect to attacks off Yemen by the Iran-backed Houthis.
They don’t need Venezuela look up Guyana next door its the new oil country in the region
What makes you think that if this was the case that the US wouldn’t also take action there to secure those oil exports?
ExxonMobil is the one who found oil in Guyana, the US is already there
China is still moving tankers through the strait, Iran has no quarrel with them.
Whatever your political affiliation and thoughts on the war, I hope we can all agree that it would an awful thing to base our foreign policy on the US election cycle.
Not so awful as it may seem. It would be even more awful if election cycle had no influence over decision to wage one more war. "Democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time".
The Biden administration was actually extremely competent, handled global inflation after the pandemic and Russia's war fairly well relative to peer nations, and set US manufacturing on course to provide us with all the batteries, solar panels, and EVs to prevent oil crunches like this from causing future inflation.
I expect more competency from US Presidential administrations, and also expect more competency and indpendence from the various parts of the executive branch, which should execute their missions without micro-management from the President, and I further expect far more competence from Congress and the US Supreme Court in setting law and enforcing law. It's bad enough that we have an incompetent Presidential administration, but that damage should be limited by the independence of the other parts of the government. The blast radius should be far smaller, we shouldn't have a King.
Bothsides-ism is such a plague. While I don't agree with everything you said, I feel like the pandemic response doesn't get enough credit. Everyone hated how the Biden admin responded in the moment, but looking back the US really came out ahead compared to almost everyone else
Biden held back arms support for Ukraine on dubious "we don't wanna test Russia's red line" grounds, gave unlimited support a wannabe despot's (Netanyahu's) wars of aggression even as he tried to backstab democracy in the US, arguably also enabling him to start the current situation in Iran, failed to prosecute an attempt to overturn the US election, and stayed in the presidential race for too long when his body and mind was in visible decline.
We wouldn't be having a discussion about the US having a king if Biden's administration was actually competent at doing its job.
I disagree heartily with Biden and the deeper US intelligence communities assessments, like you do.
Nonetheless, I wouldn't call Biden incompetent on any of that.
Biden did not lose, Kamala Harris lost. Biden was not incompetent, but he was successfully portrayed as incompetent by applying a very different standard to Biden than to Trump 45.
> I disagree heartily with Biden and the deeper US intelligence communities assessments, like you do.
Maybe if they were actually competent they wouldn't have made the mistake then?
> Biden did not lose, Kamala Harris lost.
Harris had no choice but to carry the Biden administration's poor approval on her back. Furthermore if Biden knew he would be unelectable in 2024 earlier he could have dropped out earlier and allow Harris (or other Democrats) more time to campaign. But he chose to stay until a disastrous televised debate forced him out, out of… what, exactly?
> but he was successfully portrayed as incompetent by applying a very different standard to Biden than to Trump 45.
Biden defenders always bring up how we shouldn't criticize him because Trump is worse. Ok. But you realize that's an absurdly low bar to clear, no? We are not upset that Biden is worse than Trump, we are upset that Biden is worse than what we expect from a someone with a letter D next to his name.
well, Biden was extremely generous towards Iran at least, which most likely resulted in the current situation we are facing
The current situation we're facing can be traced back to, in some parts, Trump pulling out of JCPOA and Biden's tepid resistance to Israel's war in Palestine, leading to this situation.
Please explain what was different between Iranian and U.S relations before and after Biden’s presidency, and how that has impacted today’s situation.
Huh? That's a pretty far out there statement that needs substantial support to be taken seriousl.
By all accounts Israeli leadership also tried to rope Biden and Obama into attacking Iran, but they were stronger presidents that paid more attention to US interests rather than being easily tricked.
US pulling out of the JCPOA was the biggest travesty of the 21st century. No nation state will ever feel safe without a nuke now.
But Israel wanted to destroy Iran as competition. And they got it.
Agreed. And I'd say pulling out of the TPP is an equivalently big mistake, and will honestly have far worse consequences for the US but in far different ways. Letting China be the leader of the Pacific by pulling out, in combination with the terrible hostility to all countries there now, especially to South Korea, massively weakens the US economically and military. We just handed everything over, no fight, no fuss, no benefit to the US. Ugh.
Tactical win, strategic defeat, a classic for the US military, especially in the middle east, you'd imagine they learn after so many blunders
What’s baffling to me is how they’re going to attempt to spin the colossal fuck up this is from a “Best Military in the World” perspective, particularly after their unapproved relabeling of the DoD to the DoW.
Including starting with murdering 100+ kids based on stale intelligence, according to the NY times.
It doesn't matter how good the military is if the political leadership is incompetent and the strategic objectives are incoherent. You'd think that after Vietnam, Iraq 2, and Afghanistan this lesson would have been learned, but apparently not.
The nation is one terrorist attack away from rallying behind the president. And sadly the chances of that happening have gone up significantly in recent days.
Lockheed Martin already paid for Trump's ballroom (not a joke) and so needed the guy to start a War as their investment must be repaid a hundred fold. Who cares about American voters ?
I would bet Trump just shot himself in the foot with this war, after midterms he will be a "lame duck" pres the remainder of his administration, relying on executive orders, which his opponents will merely take to liberal judges to have them stricken down. The final straw near the end of his term may be selling pardons to any takers.
The previous one, while not great, was reasonably competent.
I have no idea how American will extricate itself. We are nowhere near a Nixonian "Peace with Honor" exit. The Trumpian manuver of declaring victory and walking away seems increasingly infeasible. I think the best case senario is a Pyrrhic victory. The worst case is probably more like Russia's exit from the Soviet-Afghan war.
Curious timing given the latest from the Epstein files.
But where are the Epstein Trump documents?
Someone really hopes you forgot about them...
I don't understand why is everyone at war, I don't understand anything, I really just feel depressed. Don't feel like anyone cares what you think whether you live in US, EU, or somewhere else. It's all bomb this guy, bomb that guy these days.
I don't really have anything constructive to add, but hope folks in US realize just how insane all this is. Like can we just not have wars, like pretty please anything but more bombs and killing...
Like what happened to the walls folks in US were building a while ago, can we fund another, I will donate a 100$ if we wrap up all this shit this week. Heck if Russia and other countries pack it up I will add another 100$ to it...
Does that work, does anything work? ._.
Let's do something productive, honestly AI slop is more productive than this. I still can't wrap my head around this nonsense.
I am 25 I don't wanna know a world at war, just a few hundred more years of peace please, then you folks can feel free to go to war with Zurgs or something with your AGI drones...
I still don't know whether a drone attack is less worse than a suicide attack.
I guess that's another war to end all wars to add to the list
Why? Aren't drones just as bad as guided missiles?
A done attack is utterly predictable though? Ukraine and Russia have been doing drone attacks on each other by air, sea and on land for years now. To great effect. It should be expected, not surprising at all.
This is amazing news! I've just gotten my seafarers medical and my C-1/D visa for a job in shipping. Perfect timing!
While some naysayers might claim the US has entered the FO stage after the commencement of FA, I have full faith in the ability of great minds like Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth to navigate the sea of uncertainty and achieve strategic victory!
You forgot to put a /s at the end.
https://archive.ph/ms992
He may still wriggle out of it but it is increasingly looking like Trump has stepped into something that he won't be able to reverse his way out of easily, a one way decision.
It seems like a huge self own but he benefits from an extremely loyal fan base and a militaristic culture that loves rallying around the flag.
Does he even care if his actions hurt the country or global stability at all, so long as his supporters remain unwavering? It seems like he doesn't, so here we are.
There is no plausible stimulus that he might actually care to respond to.
The stepping was done years ago when Epstein got kompromat on him. That's why he ordered this war for no apparent reason. His life is over if he doesn't, his life lasts a few more years if the blackmail is withheld, at the cost of innocent lives.
Noone could’ve seen this coming, how were they supposed to know that the strait of hormuz is so important!
I'm actually somewhat surprised Iran is openly telling us they are using underwater drones for this. That piece of technological advance has gone mostly under the radar (!) so far.
> That piece of technological advance has gone mostly under the radar (!) so far
The Ukraine would like to have a word.
FYI, "The Ukraine" is politically charged wording held over from Soviet times, and implies that it is part of Russia. The independent country is known simply as "Ukraine".
There are plenty of languages with gendered country names. Ukraine is die Ukraine (feminine gender) in German and the article is necessary since changing the article changes the meaning of what you're expressing. Whenever I see/hear "the Ukraine" I assume English is their second language.
Yes, my bad, I am not an english native, thanks for the reminder.
How do you explain "back in the USSR"?
You don't know how lucky you are, boy...
For the same reason as "The UK" or "The USA" - all of them are acronyms starting "The Union of ..." or "The United ...".
Similarly you say "The commonwealth of Massachusetts" but not "The Massachusetts".
This does not apply to Ukraine, unless you want to say "The Republic of Ukraine".
... or "Born in the USA"
The drones that are mainly used there are the flying kind.
"Mainly" but they've been assaulting Russian boats and ships with USVs and submersibles.
For example - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Baby#Sub_Sea_Baby
Ukraine completely locked up the Russian fleet inside its bases with the underwater drones.
Underwater drones, not drones in general.
Ukraine has been sinking Russian warships in their harbor using underwater drones for at least a year now.
It’s Ukraine, no “the”.
In many languages the article is necessary. I assume English is their second language.
Yes but as one of the other commenters pointed out, its a charged term when it comes to Ukraine so its worth mentioning to people that use it accidentally.
What defense is there against something like this? AFAIK only a few US aircraft carriers are equipped with anti torpedo torpedoes, and one of those sitting in the straight would be pretty vulnerable.
Of course that could be the entire idea.
The calculation is that of course there are defences, but if you have a big stockpile of $20K drones, and your opponent has a limited number of $2mil drone interceptors, then you can keep throwing drones and keeping your opponent busy there, and you're coming out ahead even before one finally gets through.
See: https://bsky.app/profile/mekka.mekka-tech.com/post/3mgrvx5gr...
This is very much a 'you break it, you buy it' situation. The US should be running destroyer screens for convoys a la WW2 today, yet AFAIK the US fleet is sitting hundreds of miles out of the Persian Gulf, within bombing range, outside of easy strike range.
The navigable part of the Strait of Hormuz is only 15-ish miles wide, maybe less. There is no way the US can convoy screen anything without significant loss in sailors and ships.
The WW2 convoy situation was far easier to escort (but still quite dangerous obviously) because:
1. The Atlantic is a much bigger place, even considering common routes and chokepoints.
2. U-Boats had to surface frequently, making them extremely vulnerable to Allied air cover.
3. U-Boats had to be within visual range to strike convoys, versus the drone and missile world we live in now.
Yes. I think the biggest issues though are:
- We likely don't have the assets to move the amount traffic that needs to get through
- We probably can't protect them perfectly (we don't have maritime supremacy) so ships will still take damage and that will stop the convoys pretty quickly
I suspect the escort ships would be fine though. They can defend themselves.
So if we did start them, they wouldn't continue for long until the economic pain was pretty massive and the cost of loosing ships was worth it.
> I suspect the escort ships would be fine though. They can defend themselves.
From underwater drones? Does that technology exist?
The US shouldnt be starting wars with countries, and bombing civilians, at all.
Captain Obvious? Is that you??
It would be cheaper just to build an oil pipeline around it than to cover insurance and risk through that Strait. It would do well to just forget the Strait exists, our conflict has taken it out of commission for the indefinite future.
Cheaper but less resilient to attacks. Pipelines are fixed infra, and are imminently targetible by even the smallest drones. One successful attack and your entire pipeline is down.
Probably a 'why not both' question though. If the US could quick deploy enough pipelines to support the entire d-day offensive back during ww2 I don't see why we couldn't do so today
Good idea, but pipeline would need to be 100m underground
Let's replace a choke point by an even smaller single static point of failure transporting highly flammable content, are you an adviser for the white house? If not you should apply
You might be surprised to find out the Abu Dhabi pipeline, which does this exact thing, is still running.
> The US should be running destroyer screens for convoys a la WW2 today,
That's harder than bombing schools, goat herders or kidnapping the leader of the most corrupt country in the world, are you sure they can still pull it off, I'm starting to think even they know they cannot anymore.
After seeing the latest white house CoD style propaganda videos and Pete "Kafir" Hegseth speeches it's clear the people in charge completely lost it
> In After the Empire, written in 2001, Todd claimed that the reason for America’s “theatrical micromilitarism” was to prove that it was still an indispensable power in a post-USSR world. In his latest work, however, he revises this thesis, arguing that it would imply attributing rational intentions to Washington.13 The American liberal oligarchy is not driven by any clear project.
https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2024/11/how-the-west-was-...
Lol how did I know someone was gonna link Emmanuel Todd? Too bad more of his work isn't translated to english.
They forgot to add "check all angles (including the OBVIOUS ones!)" in the AI prompt.
I see what you did there
These tankers aren't easily replaceable are they? As in it takes significant time to build them.
Even if Trump's claims that the war will end shortly were true. Oil prices are guaranteed not coming down if many more of these ships are sunk.
Roughly 3 years. That being said, there’s thousands of carriers globally and they have maybe a 25 year lifespan, so a couple of ships becoming inoperable is largely negligible.
https://public.axsmarine.com/blog/build-time-for-new-vessels...
There are a surplus of tankers, that's not the problem.
The problem is they are halted, which causes price spikes.
$120/barrel Oil will screw up the whole world.
Oh yeah, The Oil crisis in the 1970's effects were felt until the mid 80's this is just starting and it isn't going to go away anytime soon.
They don't even need that many mines or bombs to start with, presence of wreckage on the shipping lanes that aren't more that 75m deep would already put all shipping at risk.
Restarting the oil wheels that are closed now will take years already.
Why is starting so much slower than stopping?
AFAIK, if you stop it slowly, it's quicker to restart.
But stopping it suddenly breaks rock structures and makes it harder for oil to flow. So the entire thing has to be repaired.
Also, the amount of oil spilling into such a small area can't be good for the environment, can't be good for local marine life (if there is any), etc....
From twitter: the cost of cleaning up the oil spill is much larger than the damage repair on the ship which drives up insurance rates
This should go into dictionary as definition for "fuck around and find out"
I get a blank page with that link
I’ll laugh whenever someone comes along and says "This is definitely an act of war" despite everything we’ve all seen that has been done to Iran lately.
Trump has given a surprise gift to renewable energy worldwide, one that the sector should not fail to use.
A lot of the world tried to shift to renewables during the ~10-year-long 1970s embargo. They went straight back to sweet old oil afterwards. This isn't gonna last nearly as long. Don't get me wrong, I hope and pray that renewables get a boost out of this, but I don't think it's gonna happen.
Really not sure you can compare solar and wind energy from the 1970s to the highly efficient modern solar and wind solutions of today.
Really.
I suppose that the specifics of what I said were mistaken, but the general sentiment remains the same. It doesn't seem like this conflict will last as long as the embargo, and when one of the largest investors into new technologies has firmly refused to acknowledge the necessities of renewables, progress and adoption will certainly slow down.
"... when one of the largest investor into new technologies ..."
No. Sorry but China has not firmly refused to acknowledge the necessity of renewables. Quite the contrary, actually.
In the 1970s electric cars were not generally available and solar panels were 100 times more expensive than they are now. Today the world has the manufacturing capacity to install nearly a terawatt-peak of solar panels per year, at low cost, and millions of electric cars are shipping every quarter:
https://open-ev-charts.org/#global:electric-sales:quarter
It won't change rapidly in the US, because the current administration opposes renewables at every turn and keeps low cost BEVs out of the US, but most of the world's energy/oil needs are outside the US. This situation will accelerate a global process that was already gaining speed.
The USA and Israel should've went after the Iranian regime a long time ago. What we're seing now is the price of procrastination and weak past presidents.
Imagine if multiple Western countries allied early to correct this regime (and not just with sanctions).
Only more reason to finally get rid of the current Iranian regime and any and all of their military capabilities.
Unless you are sending ground troops that's not happening.
I think you underestimate how much Iranians hate their current regime..
They hate it a lot less today than they did 2 weeks ago.
Interesting you should say that, as not a single one of the Iranian emigrants that I know would agree with you.
Extrapolating the politics of people who stayed based on the politics of people who chose to leave is not going to get you very far.
They may hate their govt. But they hate Israel even more. And getting ruthlessly bombed by Israel and US, yeah that will not do what Trump and Netanyahu think it will.
Telegram is full of gigantic rallies all hours of the day and night supporting the Iranian government. Even street interviews with young women (no hijab!) claiming they were formerly protesters but aren't going to tolerate foreigners bombing their country.
Do you have some solid sources on the ground to the contrary?
All the Iranians I personally know. About 15 families.
As the sister comment alludes, how many of those 15 families are in Iran?
My professor from my graduate program and his family are all Iranian. It's no surprise that they anti-regime: his wife's uncles were generals in the Shah's army, and were "disappeared" during the Revolution. They've been living in Japan for ~40 years. Hardly indicative of the opinion of the "man on the street" in Tehran, Isfahan, or Mashhad.
Presumably you are not in Iran. Where people are getting bombed and feel the consequences of “finally [getting] rid of the Iranian regime”.
Some circles might have only pro-Trump Americans. Others might only have anti-Trump Americans. And yet your experience is all-knowing? With 15 families? Outside of Iran (presumably).
Does this mean that Greece will join the US/Israeli side in this increasingly global conflict?
Other countries have been bombed by Iran in this war and none have actively joined the war.
Or we stop attacking sovereign countries simply because our allies (why are Israel our allies?) want to start wars.
Why did they attempt to pass the closed Strait of Hormuz?
In the article:
> IRAN has claimed responsibility for an attack on two oil tankers anchored in Iraqi territorial waters, as conflicts in the region continue to escalate and strikes on commercial shipping spread beyond the Strait of Hormuz.
They were docked. And who gets to say a waterway is open or closed?
The insurance companies primarily... secondary the people with bombs that can sink ships attempting to use the waterways.
He who can destroy the spice controls the spice
They were anchored. Slightly different than being docked, even if the overall point remains. The other thing is they were in Iraqi waters
What does "closed" mean in this context?
It means if you sail through it, Iran will launch drones and missiles at your ship.
I'd say the analogy is a closed door.
It's not that it's impossible to go through it, but you have to do something specific in order to do so beyond just trying to go through, or you're going to walk straight into getting a bloodey nose.
But yeah, these ships weren't anywhere near the strait.
The strait is considered closed when a country not afraid to use its military says ships can't cross.
The Iranian military has stated their intention to attack any ship passing through the strait without their permission.
trespass*
The US will make a LOT of money from selling their oil at premium.
https://x.com/sentdefender/status/2032091651422720197
*Edit: Now I understand that some companies may make more money, but the economy overall may suffer.
*Seems like I hit a nerve with stereotypical people groups.
More specifically a few oil companies and their shareholders. Everyone else suffers. Ie privatizing profits and socializing costs.
Is this how it really works? With demand outstripping supply, prices rise across the globe. Prices at gas stations go up as well. The only ones earning a „LOT“ of money are Big Oil shareholders?
Either it's purely for monetary gain and it's dumb.
Or it's for "Da NuKeS ThEy AbOuT To GeT" it's even dumb because they killed the only dude who was against Iran getting nukes. [0]
Or he got tricked by bibi &co into yet another middle east war I don't have words to describe how dumb it is.
[0] Iranian intelligence minister Esmaeil Khatib said that the country may nevertheless change their stance if "pushed in that direction" like a "cornered cat". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_Khamenei%27s_fatwa_against...
That is hilarious cope. The US benefits far far relatively more when the global economy is running smoothly than when able to sell oil higher, like some shithole petrostate. Appropriate I suppose.
You're replying to someone who gets their political analysis from Twitter. Hilarious is the best case.
I understand you clearly hate Trump, but I'll take his statements over yours any day.
Well and Russia. Trump essentially crippled the impact of 4 years of sanctions against Russia with these new oil prices he created.
Unsure if this is sarcasm or not.
Plus gas is largely immune to sales tax and we don't really tax corporations so this will largely lead to no revenue for the US and instead just record profits for Exxon.
It's delusion.