American destroyers and aircraft carriers have been chased away from the Strait multiple times now.
Hilariously the USS George HW Bush had to go the long way around Africa rather than risk transiting the Bab El Mandeb after the Houthis defeated the US Navy last year.
In what way were they chased away? Iran tried to sink them and didn't hit any shots, and many on Iran's side died trying. Many IRGC soldiers dying and not even scratching the paint on US vessels doesn't show US to be weak.
> Hilariously the USS George HW Bush had to go the long way around Africa rather than risk transiting the Bab El Mandeb after the Houthis defeated the US Navy last year.
Valuing the lives of your crewmen and avoid terrorists is bad how? USA not wanting their soldiers to die is weak? Would you want more deaths on US side to show strength?
USA can win this war with barely any casualties, why would you not do that? And USA being able to do this with barely any losses shows tremendous strength to me, Iran was more powerful than Ukraine but USA could establish aerial superiority immediately with no losses, this is so much stronger than what Russia displayed.
But this stalemate benefits US corporations by raising the price for oil, so its not really hurting the attacker. In order to hurt a plutocracy like USA you need to hurt the American stock market but American stocks are doing great.
Trump is at -20% net approval and it's steadily getting worse even now. Seems like most Americans don't decide whether things are going great by looking at S&P 500.
neither he nor people that will decide 2026 election give a hoot about his net approval rating. they should not even poll this. the only thing worth polling is few states that could swing the election one way or another (and this is even smaller number than normal for upcoming midterms). what americans think on the whole has stopped mattering awhile ago…
It benefits a few corporations in the short term but not America in general. And if the oil prices rise and stay high, there will be demand destruction. US sits on top of the capital food chain and will be hurt.
They are not, they updated their tactics to account for that so they destroyed a lot of Iranian small boats with bombs trying to attack the vessels. If they were incapable of countering that we would have seen American casualties in these skirmishes but only Iranians died.
What do you mean by "win"? What strategic goals can the US achieve in this war? We're at a point where merely achieving status quo ante bellum--i.e., Iran doesn't charge for passage through the Strait of Hormuz--seems to require giving concessions elsewhere.
In many ways, this looks like the American version of Pearl Harbor--a stunning tactical victory that is simultaneously a crushing strategic loss.
> We're at a point where merely achieving status quo ante bellum--i.e., Iran doesn't charge for passage through the Strait of Hormuz--seems to require giving concessions elsewhere.
No, there is no reality where the world will let Iran take tolls here, no matter what happens that part wont happen. The world depends too much on straits being open and toll free, if you let that slide once it will be done by others and that will break down the entire world order.
What you're skipping over here is how that happens. If Iran wants to charge tolls on the strait, someone has to do something to keep Iran from doing that. And when you start gaming out the possible identities of that someone, the possible things of that something... well, the most likely route of this is via negotiating some concessions to Iran (i.e., at minimum sanctions relief and maybe even concrete progress to a nuclear bomb). That assumes that Trump even considers freedom of navigation as something worth concessions in the first place, which I don't take as a given.
So now you pivoted from the US to the world. Yeah Trump tried that, first to engage 'the Europe', then eastern Asia (Japan, South Korea), now China. He has to own his failure, nobody will solve it for him. Meanwhile the SPR is draining, reserves all over the world are dwindling, thw world is hungry for oil - they will pay the tolls happily.
The primary US strategic war goal was to slow down Iran's nuclear weapons program. That was not a smart reason to launch an attack, but the attack was at least somewhat successful in achieving the goal. Much of Iran's critical equipment is now destroyed or buried, so from the US perspective that's at least a minor, temporary strategic gain. I'm not claiming that any of this was a good idea or that it will work out well in the long run but let's be clear about the real goals.
The US administration has given several contradictory claims as to what the strategic goals of the war are supposed to be.
The problem with the claim of nuclear weapons program is that the dominant assessment of the intelligence communities is that Iran didn't have a nuclear weapons program at all. Khamenei the elder was known to be against having a nuclear weapons program, and the US's achievement is to replace him with his son... who is known to be in the pro-nuclear weapons program. Considering that the nuclear enrichment centers were targeted in last year's strikes, it's not even clear that the strikes this year have had a meaningful effect in even a temporary delay in enrichment progress.
At this point, I suspect that Trump never had any strategic war aims in the first place, but was instead motivated by an operational aim (regime change in Iran, à la the Venezuela operation), and has been flailing about since then because the administration simply doesn't have anyone with the capacity to actually understand the strategic reality of the situation and is substituting operational and tactical goals for strategic ones.
> The primary US strategic war goal was to slow down Iran's nuclear weapons program.
Let’s be realistic, this was probably about Israeli domestic politics first and US domestic politics second, and maybe thirdly as a favor to the Saudis. It’s crooks running all three countries for their own purposes and issuing BS PR cover stories.
You should watch “Wag the Dog”, a 1997 movie about a president who starts a war to distract from a sex scandal. The real goals here have nothing to do with anything Iran has ever done.
Here's a video of Trump in 2015 talking about how he would make sure Iran never got a bomb [1]. Crazy that the Israelis we're already planning it then.
Blowing shit up and killing people isn't winning. Winning is getting what you want strategically and operationally. Unless you are 12, most outcomes aren't just big explosions.
> Hilariously the USS George HW Bush had to go the long way around Africa rather than risk transiting the Bab El Mandeb after the Houthis defeated the US Navy last year.
The ship went the long way around because why risk being attacked by missiles? It's less that the US Navy "was defeated", which itself is a plainly asinine comment which only serves a purpose of trying to incite others, and more so a practical safety concern.
But if you really want to argue that the US Navy was defeated, I would submit our next step should be to utilize nuclear weapons on Yemen and destroy the Houthis. That way you can't make these claims and we'll see who really is defeating who :)
You mean smart things like going into a war with zero plans beyond the first day, bombing girl's schools, then being forced to run away by a country whose entire GDP is less than your military budget?
You mean that these mafia style insurances are a joke, but free (as in safe and not taxed) access to the seas is something many wars have been fought over. "Insurance" selling by navies was the norm until WW1 at least.
The reason the US is blockading is because Iran is only partially blockading it. If Iran wasn't blockading at all then America wouldn't either. But it's pretty clear that "only shops whose countries pay a lot of money to Iran" would help Iran.
I think this is incorrect. The point is to show that if Iran does this, then they will not be the only ones that can do it. The last thing that should happen is to reward Iran for rent seeking on the Strait. Others can also seek rent then, and the whole strait gets shut down..which encompassed around 90% of all Iranian oil exports, which in turn was about 90% of their economic exports.
I am not sure if in the long term it is our interest to allow Iran to extract rent from this trade route, which would only strengthen China. It seems to me that the hurt is spread around the world quite widely, with inordinate impacts on Iran and China, not the U.S. or Europe [1].
It's not really in my interest for a cabal of pedophiles to win this one. I dispute the conflation of the interests of the capitalist class with the american people.
Wow. You know, I think Trump is dangerous to our Republic, almost certainly committing graft and fraud using the Office of the President for personal gain, probably a rapist and maybe a pedophile. I don't know. But that has nothing, I repeat, NOTHING to do with our national security and the geopolitical reality of the Russian-Iranian-Chinese-North Korean Axis and the threat that axis poses to the democratic free-world. Separate your concerns, walk and chew gum, and face the real world.
Those countries are all very different with very different interests in their respective regions. China doesn't care about Ukraine, Russia doesn't care about Taiwan, and both were very muted in their reaction to the attacks on Iran.
The major thing they have in common is not respecting American trade embargoes against themselves, which, of course they don't.
You think a dangerous man at the helm with skeletons in his closet has no effect on national security?
I don't think these concerns are separable. If it weren't for Trump, we probably would not be at war right now. Russia might be more contained by diplomacy and sanctions. If it weren't for Trump's first term, Iran might have been less threatening right now.
And, in some sense, this doesn't matter, because like you say it's the real world and it's happening regardless of why or whose fault it is. I guess I don't want to sign on, even rhetorically on the internet, to destroying this axis that is effectively being created by vile and stupid men because Trump wanted to end the Epstein news cycle.
It's not a matter of good or bad. Innocent passage through national waters (including straits) without paying tolls has been a fundamental principle of maritime law for a long time. Allowing Iran to charge a toll for passage through the Strait of Hormuz would set a bad precedent and encourage other countries to do the same. Iran might be able to get some of the weaker countries to pay up but the USA has no incentive to agree; more likely they would just continue the blockade, and possibly impose secondary sanctions against any entities that send money to Iran.
Yeah, and "don't launch wars of aggression or bomb girls' schools on a whim" has been a principle for about the same amount of time.
Iran has been pretty clear that they'll open the strait if the USA lifts the blockade. How can we complain about fair passage while maintaining a blockade ourselves?
Straits have always been points of local control. This isn't new. We will have to pay if we want to play. For all people bluster about the US being exempt, I don't see what leverage we can use that isn't more expensive than just paying up. Marinetime law is only as meaningful as can be enforced.
Bullshit. The right of innocent passage has long applied to straits. But as a practical matter very few US flagged merchant vessels even go through there, so if anyone actually pays it's going to be someone else.
No they are not right now, otherwise we would have full news every day of it. Defense rockets for stuff like Patriot ran out, those systems are trivial to overwhelm and deplete in the age of cheap drones and become useless quickly.
Same for the major airports, they keep working, people keep flying to the asia, albeit in less numbers.
Exactly. The US just announces that they will take any vessel that pays for transit. So, what happens then? Any vessel that goes through and the IRGC doesn't shoot them, the US seizes. So, no one pays since they can't pay for successful transit. The fun game is that all the vessels just go at once. Any that the IRGC doesn't shoot the US takes. Any that it does shoot sink. So, no transit. Unless IRGC doesn't shoot at all, in which case everyone gets out of there with just one vessel paying the ransom. Ultimately this doesn't work for the IRGC as the US is far more capable of closing the strait than Iran is.
The US can also fuck with Iran by getting slight cooperation from ships in the Gulf of Oman by getting some small inflatable boats with remote control and AIS transmitters on them. Put the boat in the water next to a ship, turn of the ship's AIS, turn on the boats AIS, and send the boat through. Send hundreds of them. IRGC won't know what to shoot at or will expose their positions by firing at a rubber raft.
The horizon at sea level is about 3 miles. The strait of Hormuz is 35+ miles wide. Any mechanism used to get around this would be detectable and could be attacked with relatively inexpensive ordinance.
1. US fucks up by engaging Iran, Iran closes strait.
2. US fucks up the negotiations and fails to reopen the strait.
3. US decides to try and rescue its initial war goals, through a mutual blockade with Iran, starts sinking the very vessels it demands Iran gives passage to.
A combination of enough insurance to make it worth the time of the owner + offer the workers a generous amount to their next of kin could make it worth it. Being turned into minced meat might be worth it for some people if it means their families become rich.
Military history is full of quotes like "war is too important to be left to the generals". When you put people who focus on technical matters in charge, they often make poor decisions, as they are not looking at the big picture.
The question is not about whether the US can blockade the Hormuz Strait but who gets blamed for the blockade. Iran is messaging that it is making serious attempts to reopen the strait, while China and Russia are probably reinforcing the message. When people around the world suffer from the consequences of the blockade, they are more likely to blame America for their troubles. Or at least that's what Iran is trying to achieve.
No government have accepted Iranian tolls so far, that is just not going to fly ever. If every country controlling a strait started taking out such tolls that would cause much worse issues than we are seeing currently, nobody will have that.
No government has accepted Iranian tolls so far, but some shippers sure have; ships have been passing through the strait. Those shipments go on to countries with governments. I don't think you can actually know that there wasn't government support for any of those payments so far.
And cryptocurrency should be even better for deniability. In reality it would be a really good idea for certain governments that rely heavily on Middle Eastern oil (e.g. Philippines) to pay fees in the short term. More than a month ago the Philippines was already claiming to have "safe and preferential access", if that involves money they'll pay it. (https://www.rappler.com/business/philippine-flagged-ships-sa...)
You think people care? The average guy on the street doesn't even think about the fact that part of the price they paid for their lunch went to Panama for the use of a canal.
Iran doesn’t have to do anything, really. The Hormuz blockade is entirely on the moronic US, their feeble leader as well as their utterly corrupt and incompetent politicians.
A toxic mix of staggering arrogance, moral bankruptcy, a lack of strategic thinking, non-existing historical awareness and a desperate need to divert attention because of the Epstein files.
Try debating a MAGA supporter. The stupidity is astounding.
I can see how this is confusing. The American foreign policy establishment's consensus definition of "isolationism" is something like "not invading or planning to invade other countries", it doesn't mean not trading with them.
For Americans, not bombing something in Asia at least every couple of months is considered an isolationist tendency. And of course Central and South America don't even count, that's our "back yard" after all.
They "released the files" and handed out binders of Epstein documents to influencers. There was a ton of posting as though something monumental had happened. They were entirely comprised pre-existing publicly released information.
That's how much the admin respects the intelligence of its base and that's how much its loudest supporters think things through.
You and the parent may be talking about two different events.
There was an initial release of "binders" to known rightwing influencers in a choreographed photo event. It was a predominantly bullshit release that pissed off the conspiratorial wing of MAGA and the Epstein Republicans (Massie et al). This happened in early 2025.
The blowback from this event resulted in Congress passing the Epstein Transparency Act in Nov. 2025.
The biggest dump of files came after this (tho congressmen are claiming most files are still unreleased) , which is what you might be referring to.
You'd think the Epstein class would get along better with Iran, seeing as you can get 'temporary' marriages to underage girls in Iran. (google 'iran child bride' and 'iran temporary marriage').
On the hierarchy of disagreement, attacking the character of either side is the lowest form of intelligent commentary you can make: https://paulgraham.com/disagree.html
> Do you not think horrible behaviors should be highlighted/called out/brought up? Or just that US leadership Epstein connections should be?
If non-sequiturs are your best argument, then yes, you you have nothing to contribute by participating in good-faith speculation. Iranian child marriages do not reframe the "Tail that Wags the Dog" scenario in Washington. It's textbook whataboutism that you failed to elevate into meaningful commentary, making you look suspiciously disengaged.
I simply stated "You'd think these Epstein file guys would be on better terms with a country whose religious and political leaders sanctify that kind of behavior, not going to war with them.". Seems like a reasonable comment. They are all awful people.
Paul Graham is saying you should not call people you are in a discussion with names. If I called OP names your link would fit. Calling out a horrific regime that murders their people and rents out children under the sanction of their religious leaders is not that.
Calling the person you are in a discussion with names = bad.
Call the subject of the discussion bad, when they legitimately are horrific, is normal discussion. Trump is awful. The Islamic Republic is awful. Both of those are normal and acceptable things to state in a discussion. You DeadFred are a <xyz negative statement>, not normal or acceptable.
However Hacker New's ACTUAL guidelines state reguarding comments "Converse curiously; don't cross-examine." which your post seems to explicitly violate.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I responded to bigyabai phrase of "On the hierarchy of disagreement, attacking the character of either side". Which I did not do. I did not go after someone I disagreed with's in the discussions character. I simply said 'you would think both sides monsters would be on friendlier terms with each other'. Responding with a wall of text relating to the entirety of the PG article would have been odd. I addressed the point made in the comment I replied to.
From the article on ad homimen "Saying that an author lacks" again, I never went after the other posters here (until later in this reply in order to productively highlight points brought up by others). PGs article is about responding to posts and how speak civilly (the posters here being 'the author' he is referring to). I see quite a few posts replying to me speaking to me specifically contrary to the entire point of the PG article.
For example "Only if you don't care to read past bullet point 1. If you had cared enough to read" of your own post.
But to your point, the original comment by spiderfarmer that I responded to initially must really trigger your 'ad hominem attack' concerns:
" the moronic US, their feeble leader as well as their utterly corrupt and incompetent politicians.
A toxic mix of staggering arrogance, moral bankruptcy, a lack of strategic thinking, non-existing historical awareness and a desperate need to divert attention because of the Epstein files.
Try debating a MAGA supporter. The stupidity is astounding."
Israel too to be fair "They're 15, Married With Children: Inside an Israeli Hasidic Cult's Code of Silence" (the gov and the population knows it, but it's ok) : https://archive.is/v9Amc#selection-699.0-699.83
I'm not seeing where they rent out their children via temporarily marriages as the Shia mullahs in Iran have given religious sanction/approval/doctrine of or like the similar behaviors highlighted in the Epstein files. Can you help me find that bit that relates to what I was speaking to?
That said allowing child brides is horrific, I agree. Especially when it seems to be accepted by the highest levels of a religion or even worse when it's practiced by a religions leaders. We hate that, right?
Sure, but when it happens it's no longer Iran's problem - it's your problem. (And maybe America's problem, unless America gains anything from the global trade burning down.)
It's a pressure campaign to get a nuclear deal. NYT reported Iran already offered to open the strait, end hostilities, and negotiate a nuclear deal later, but the US rejected that offer as they want to pressure them into giving up their uranium.
Now Iran is demanding money in exchange for the uranium which is the primary roadblock.
It's a pressure campaign to get the Iranian leadership in one place so that Israel can bomb them again. There was a deal, the president cancelled it in his previous term.
Nobody credible said or believed Iran was making nuclear weapons. Iran had made it a fatwa against the Islamic law to develop such weapons and Obama had referenced that. They also dont believe bolivian fishermen could reach the US with stocks of drugs, they dont believe venezuela’s president was a hidden drug kingpin, and they also dont believe that Cuba is a credible threat that needs to be blockaded to the stone age.
These are power plays to signal that world dominance is not decaying but in case of Iran it has backfired and pushes China’s narrative as a pillar of stability.
There is still lots of evidence that Iran started enriching uranium towards weapons grade over the past decade. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-64810145 Largely a legacy of Trump's sanctions failing to get a nuclear deal the first term and back firing. You'd have to be naive to think they don't want a bomb in the first place before that though.
Saddam played the same game where they pretended they just wanted nuclear for energy, even though they were a petrol state... which is why in 1981 Iran helped bomb Iraq's reactors (where Iran teamed up with Israel to do so) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Opera
If Iran didn't believe Iraq's peaceful nuclear intentions, I'm not sure why anyone would believe Iran then buying tons of uranium from Russia was any different. Not to mention building underground lairs to enrich it while also building ICBMs.
The best way to thread the needle I can see was that maintaining highly enriched uranium was a deterrance/bargaining strategy. Doesn't break the fatwa but sends a message. Obviously it wasn't successful, they should have either built a bomb or not bothered, in hindsight.
> Obviously it wasn't successful, they should have either built a bomb or not bothered, in hindsight.
The JCPOA obviated the need for a nuke. It was a reasonable assumption that the US would honor its side of the agreement under the doctrine of continuity. Even in hindsight, you cannot have productive diplomacy without good faith
Iran really had no need for a nuke in the first place if they weren't constantly provoking the entire region, unless that need is destroying Israel.
> Even in hindsight, you cannot have productive diplomacy without good faith
Iran never really negotiates in good faith either, the JCPOA didn't really do anything at all to restrict their ballistic missile program and terrorist proxies.
Many countries have nuclear power without any enrichment capability. Iran could try not being a pariah state and buy enriched uranium like many countries do. The only real reason to spend so much money and endure so much hardships for uranium enrichment is if they wanted at least the option to make nuclear weapons.
> After you say why you don't have a problem with the Israeli terrorists having them already.
There are no "Israeli terrorists" in control of Israel's nuclear weapons, the government of Israel is certainly not controlled by terrorists like the Iranian government is.
Israel also does not have a policy of destroying Iran, while Iran does have a clear policy of destroying Israel[0].
There's a clear difference in their ideologies as well, the Islamic government of Iran clearly believes in dangerous ideologies like Martyrdom and Jihad(holy war), organizations with these sort of ideological beliefs should never be allowed to have nuclear weapons because typical deterrence strategies like mutually assured destruction are unlikely to be effective.
What is the definition of a terrorist and why does the destruction and genocide in Gaza not fall under that term? Cite your sources when you define terrorism, please.
> What is the definition of a terrorist and why does the destruction and genocide in Gaza not fall under that term?
There is certainly no genocide in Gaza, the destruction is clearly the end result of a war started by Hamas. In fact Hamas did have genocidal intent in their attacks on Oct 7th but did not have the military capability to carry out that intent. Israel on the other hand clearly has that military capability but not the intent.
> Cite your sources when you define terrorism, please.
There is no universally accepted definition of terrorism. Obviously that cause problems. [0]
"There is certainly no genocide in Gaza" -- you are directly contradicting a formal UN Commission of Inquiry finding from September 2025. This is not an opinion piece or a fringe report. The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory concluded after a two-year investigation that Israel committed four of the five genocidal acts defined under the 1948 Genocide Convention, and that genocidal intent was established through direct statements from Israeli leadership including the Prime Minister, President, and Defence Minister. Your claim that Israel lacks genocidal intent is directly contradicted by the Commission's finding that genocidal intent was "the only reasonable inference" from both the statements of Israeli leadership and the pattern of conduct of Israeli forces. [0]
You said there is no universally accepted definition of terrorism. So let me use the official definition from the United States government.
The US State Department definition under 22 USC 2656f(d) defines terrorism as "premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents." [1]
The US domestic terrorism statute under 18 USC 2331(5) defines it as activities that "appear to be intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population." [2]
You say there is no universally accepted definition of terrorism, then said nothing to explain how you applied the term with such confidence to the Iranian government in your original post. By your own admission, you invoked a contested label selectively against one state while exempting another. That is a political preference dressed up as a principled argument, not anything of rigorous analysis.
Now apply that to Gaza. The same UN Commission found that Israel deliberately targeted civilians, deliberately destroyed healthcare and education infrastructure, imposed starvation conditions, and directly targeted children. That is premeditated. It is politically motivated. It is violence against noncombatants. By the U.S. government's definition, it fits.
On Greater Israel, calling it "vague" does not explain away the fact that sitting members of the current Israeli government have explicitly stated their intent to annex Palestinian territory.
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said at a Jerusalem Day rally four days ago: "The time has come to finally erase the lines that separate Areas A, B, and C. The entire Land of Israel is ours." He also declared the war "must end with the expansion of the borders of the State of Israel" and called on Netanyahu to order the IDF to prepare for "full occupation of the Gaza Strip" and establish Israeli settlements there. [3]
National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir stated from the Temple Mount: "Conquer all of Gaza, declare sovereignty over the entire Strip, eliminate every Hamas member, and encourage voluntary emigration. This is the only way." [4]
These are not fringe backbenchers. These are cabinet ministers in the current Israeli government. This is declared policy, not a vague expression.
You still have not answered why Israel is allowed to have nuclear weapons.
> The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory
The UN(which is itself a party that has perpetuated the conflict through mismanagement of the UNRWA) has essentially zero credibility in regard to anything involving Israel[0].
> You say there is no universally accepted definition of terrorism, then said nothing to explain how you applied the term with such confidence to the Iranian government in your original post.
The Iranian government is engaged in both direct and indirect terrorism throughout the region by virtually all commonly used definitions including the ones you listed. They have directly attacked virtually all countries in the region. They are driven by dangerous ideologies of Martyrdom and Jihad.
> The same UN Commission found that Israel deliberately targeted civilians, deliberately destroyed healthcare and education infrastructure, imposed starvation conditions, and directly targeted children. That is premeditated. It is politically motivated. It is violence against noncombatants. By the U.S. government's definition, it fits.
A highly biased UN commission claiming something doesn't actually make it true.[1] Israel does not have a policy of deliberately targeting civilians, although in a war there is often collateral damage. This is why properly analyzing intent is so important.
> These are not fringe backbenchers. These are cabinet ministers in the current Israeli government. This is declared policy, not a vague expression.
Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich are highly unpopular in Israel and have been largely excluded from making war related decisions, Israel has a parliamentary system of government which makes it easier for extremists to get elected than in a system of government like the United States, their statements should certainly not be taken as official Israeli government policy.
> You still have not answered why Israel is allowed to have nuclear weapons.
Legally they are not a party to the NPT[2]. From a practical standpoint they are a small country facing existential threats to their existence so it's not surprising they would want to have nuclear weapons as a deterrence.
> Nobody credible said or believed Iran was making nuclear weapons.
Then why were they enriching uranium to levels well above what is needed for civilian purposes? You simply don't do that unless you intend to make nuclear weapons at some point.
> Iran had made it a fatwa against the Islamic law to develop such weapons and Obama had referenced that.
Iran obviously has the ability to lie, and regularly does so.
They don't seem that bad. Trump shouting fake news whenever they say something he's not keen on doesn't necessarily make them non credible.
Looking on Wikipedia for NYT controversies it has them saying killing Palestinians may be bad and saying sex change ops for kids may be bad which don't seem especially terrible positions.
> Nobody credible said or believed Iran was making nuclear weapons.
Tell that to Iran's former parliamentary deputy speaker who said 'When we began our nuclear activity, our goal was indeed to build a bomb. There is no need to beat around the bush.'[1]
to be fair, I bet more human knows that USA is much more dangerous to the world "order" than Iran having a nuclear weapon (Pakistan and even Israel has it, so why not Iran and Mozambic too?)
Why you'd want to play this 'tough guy' game in the era of the Internet is wholly beyond me. You have a fantastically well outfitted military that in the absence of diplomacy stands a really good chance at getting us all killed.
If you phrase it as an "insurance scheme", then sure they can? All insurance schemes work by giving you money if bad stuff you don't control happens. I'm sure they could.
Even if Iran would charge $2 million per ship (like it has done) it would be manageable cost for for shipping companies and would generate same amount of income as Iran's domestic oil production.
When the US violates the law of the sea in the South America, why not. Everybody complains but understands.
1) no one owns the strait, Iran has never owned it, its international waters.
2) Who says they keep it at $2 million? Due to the location they could say anything and people would pay it, that would have a massive impact in worlds economy. And any plans to bypass the strait would get heavy attention from Iran and their friends - because no one wants to lose their cash cow.
3) if Iran is allowed to do that, everyone starts to do that - you think oil is expansive now? Good luck when every country with similar bottlenecks nearby starts their tolls. Again, these are international waters.
As for the US breaking law of the sea in South America, I assume you mean blowing up boats? Has anyone proven that they have been civilians and that they have lied about the targets?
Did you notice that you emphasize the rule of law in your argument 1) but let the rule of law walk the plank (and drown in the south sea so to speak) with your fourth statement?
Even if it's $3 million or more, I think it may still be a better deal for the world. Iran would be happy because it gets money. The world is happy because they get oil again.
Much cheaper than participating in another endless war.
Yes, this may mean an end to international orders and more countries will take opportunities to charge tolls. But the US-led world order is fading away anyway no matter what.
> Much cheaper than participating in another endless war.
Let's see first if this ends as an endless war - although you could make the argument that there has been a "war" between those two nations for about 47 years, which yes seems like an endless war :/
That's the problem for US. You'll indeed disagree that this is a good outcome. Indeed there's just no good outcome left for you, and you can continue your endless war however you like.
The rest of the world has another option. No outcome is good, but it's at least better than being dragged into this pointless war.
Fair enough, seems that it is not considered international waters, but according to UN neither Iran or Oman has the right to block traffic in the Strait:
"However, the strait is governed by international law under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). This grants international vessels and aircraft the right of transit passage, meaning coastal states cannot suspend this movement, provided ships transit continuously and expeditiously for the sole purpose of normal travel."
Which makes the blockade and asking for tolls illegal under the international law, though pretty sure most countries do not care about international law at all.
>Has anyone proven that they have been civilians and that they have lied about the targets?
(not relevant question)
The United States is not legally allowed to use "shoot-to-kill" force or launch deadly military strikes on drug-trafficking boats in international waters. '
The Baseline Rule: Lethal force is restricted to self-defense or the defense of others if the suspects present an immediate threat of death or serious physical harm.
Disabling Fire: To stop a fleeing boat, law enforcement is permitted to use "disabling fire" (such as firing at the engines or using boat-trapping nets), but they must explicitly minimize the risk of injury or death to the crew. Carrying illegal narcotics alone does not carry a death penalty, nor does it justify lethal force.
The US has killed over 160 people illegally using airstrikes. so far.
Let say Iran charge 2 million per ship and US boards and takes control over all ships leaving Iran. Everybody complains but understands.
What happens at that point? Can shipping companies manage to pay both US and Iran? Will companies and nations complain to the international court, and will UN step in and prevent either side from doing this? As noted the US did this already in south America and nothing happened, and Iran has already started extracting a toll.
I would not work on a ship going anywhere near that area, and I wonder if investors are that willing to put money on that kind of venture. That leaves nations that are dependent on exports to put military personal on ships (like what Russia is doing), but will that be enough to discourage either US or Iran?
Much of the post-WW2 American-led world order was founded partially on the United States using its military to keep international waters open. It would be quite stunning Iran defeated the united states in this sense. The military might is there, but this administration clearly had no idea what they were getting themselves into and did not plan accordingly. (and does not have the will or public support to do so)
The baffling part of this is that nearly everyone was aware that Iran could close the straight if pressed hard enough. The fact that this outcome is surprising represents a very loud and public failure on the administration's part.
Ironically the US has never ratified UNCLOS. The American professed interest in maintaining right of passage does not appear to require them to be held to the same standards.
Also the Strait of Hormuz is an international strait not international waters. The entire strait lies within Iranian and Omani waters. Frankly it's a bit absurd to complain that your ships can't transit a country's waters while you bomb them.
They shot at neutral ships when they closed the strait, where do you get your info from?
If it was just USA and Israel and Nato even then you'd see a ton of ships go through and the world wouldn't be very affected, since almost all ships that go through the strait are not Nato aligned.
Because neutral ships also need permission to cross the strait, even if they have not been explicitly banned. Because the status of the blockade has changed and continues to change according to tensions in the region. Several countries have obtained permission to cross: China, Russia, India, Iraq, Pakistan, Malaysia, Thailand, and the Philippines. Even so, it is understandable that ships are hesitant to pass through there and are seeking less uncertain routes, because of the tensions, risk of war and because in addition to Iran, the United States also claims to have imposed a blockade and has attacked ships.
They shot at Indian vessels, so you are wrong they are blocking neutral nations. India is not allied to USA or Israel. That they let some vessels through doesn't mean they don't shoot at neutral ships, they shoot at most neutral ships.
That is illegal, that is equivalent to blocking it. No other country accepts existence of such a toll, and any company paying it will get sanctioned by the entire world since it would set such a bad precedent if countries started to toll their straits.
You don't pay money to terrorists to make them not bomb your stuff, you eliminate the terrorists, otherwise you get more terrorists.
It's only illegal if you recognize the law. Why is charging for passage in Ormuz illegal and not in the Panama or Suez canals? Iran can (legitimately) say they require compensation for reconstruction and keeping the security of the strait after the attacks from the terrorist states of Israel and US.
I don't know enough about the current state of naval warfare but I've assumed this is related to the asymmetry that's emerged around protecting capital warships, especially in the scenario of a very narrow strait and a long enemy-controlled coastline. They can shoot relatively low-cost, short-range guided missiles from anywhere along the coast. Even if a warship stops the vast majority of them, only one has to get through to sink a multi-billion dollar ship that takes a decade to replace.
There are now similar asymmetries emerging across war-fighting and even though warships can still be effective (and less vulnerable) in other scenarios, this specific one seems especially bad. The other factor is that most of what ships carry through the straight isn't going directly to the U.S. so the impact on the U.S. is mostly secondary, reducing the risk the U.S. is willing to take. Of course, all this was known beforehand by military strategists which makes this all look even worse for the U.S. administration.
Cheap drones taking out an AWACS is a great example of this. The US has only 16 of these and it will cost $700 million to replace, and was taken out by a drone that probably cost less than your car.
The US military is also just less powerful than it was at its peak at the end of the Cold War as well.
Still the most powerful navy in the world, but spread increasingly thin (turns out "the whole world" is quite a big place).
This is no longer Reagan's (almost) 600 ship navy, and projecting power halfway round the world is no mean feat when your opponent can lob missiles and drones at you from their back garden
I don't see how more more American war ships in the strait would change the calculus of the Iran war without. Even if they packed the strait with ships so that an admiral could walk from Oman to Iran without getting their shoes wet, Iran could still lob drones and missiles from inland.
Yep both things are true - it would be harder to operate in the gulf today than it was in 1990 because of better drones and missiles, but also they are short of ships and it’s limiting their options.
They don’t have enough ships to simultaneously attack Iran, defend US bases and their gulf “allies” and also enforce this blockade, so they’re forced to pick and choose and it is constraining them strategically.
Having twice as many ships wouldn’t solve the fundamental problem (they’re fairly screwed either way at this point), but it would give them more optionality
> I don't know enough about the current state of naval warfare but I've assumed this is related to the asymmetry that's emerged around protecting capital warships, especially in the scenario of a very narrow strait and a long enemy-controlled coastline.
It's not the billion-dollar warships that transport oil, it's the much more fragile and unarmed tankers.
Even if the US Navy begins full escort duty, it can't remain on-station forever. What are shippers to do afterwards? One drone strike might cause a tanker to have a very bad day, yet it's extremely difficult to so permanently degrade an entire country that they become incapable of launching sporadic attacks.
Ultimately, the status of the Strait must be settled diplomatically, and the US and Iran are each betting that the other side will blink first.
It's not even the strait that's the important geopolitical entity here. It's all the oil pumps and refineries in Saudi Arabia, Qatar or UAE.
The US began to patrol the strait with Destroyers and immediately stopped when the scared Saudis immediately realized that Iran was about to attack Saudi oil rigs.
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Iran has too many targets and the only thing that can stop them is the equivalent to an Israeli Iron Dome across the entirety of the Middle East, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and UAE, maybe more.
I think this is not discussed enough. These are huge investments and destroying them requires a significant time to recover. Our key growth play being AI which is a huge energy consumer, impacting the long term supply chain for energy is questionable.
> Iran has too many targets and the only thing that can stop them is the equivalent to an Israeli Iron Dome
Wasn't Iron Dome coverage deteriorating due to low munitions? The cost asymmetry between drones and interceptors makes any drawn-out conflicts mutually punishing - unless someone on the future decides to gamble on another decapitation strike. The Iron Dome is great against improvised pipe-rockets, but less effective against ballistic missile salvos.
> Iran has too many targets and the only thing that can stop them is the equivalent to an Israeli Iron Dome across the entirety of the Middle East, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and UAE, maybe more.
Another key issue is Iran's regional neighbors haven't invested significantly enough becoming credible military threats against Iran. Instead they tried to play an in-between game of being tacit frenemies because Iran and its proxies could be politically useful. But in the last 3 years, Iran lost most of its proxies through a series of catastrophic miscalculations, dramatically shifting regional dynamics. Iran now has less reason to cooperate regionally and its neighbors lack of credible offense is costing them dearly.
A contributing factor is that the direct customers for much of what passes through the strait are Western European countries who've failed to sustain any real naval power beyond ceremonial presence. In recent years, the U.S. Navy had to quietly ask the German navy to stay away from the Western Indian ocean due to the additional burden of guaranteeing the safety of the German "warships" if they were attacked by Somali pirates.
Without going too far into the political weeds here, I'll say that the problem is less "Germany and UAE needs more guns" and more "maybe we shouldn't have pissed off Iran".
I agree with you that Trump's recent attack on Iran was an ill-advised strategic blunder.
However, it can be simultaneously true that most countries in Western Europe and many in the Middle East have under-invested in their military readiness for so long, they've lost the ability to secure their own strategic interests. You're right to be annoyed other countries provoked a regional bully for their own misguided reasons. While Trump is our problem, relying on a bully like Iran not being a bully against the EU's global interests is Europe's problem.
Unfortunately, we live in a world of super powers including Russia, China and, yes, even the U.S. who at best have their own strategic interests which may not always align with yours and at worst will take from you whatever you can't defend. If you can't secure your own economic interests militarily, there will eventually be steep costs. Even if your own country carefully tiptoes around bullies for fear of provoking them, you can still be trampled under the feet of other countries fighting for stupid reasons which have nothing to do with you.
Note: I say this as an American who likes our European allies and who thinks Trump has been an idiot on almost everything. Even back when Trump was just a bad reality TV host, I could see the U.S. should stop trying to be "World Police." It was never going to be sustainable over decades and it was distorting the behavior of other countries, both enemies and allies. Since the end of the cold war the U.S. has subtly harmed our allies by enabling some of them to under-invest in their own military readiness.
Modern US surface warships such as the DDG-52 Arleigh Burke class are pretty survivable. The Iranians (and their Houthi proxies) have made sustained attacks on them and don't seem to have hit anything. And a single hit would be highly unlikely to sink such as vessel: we're not talking about something like the Russian Moskva cruiser that was crewed by drunks and had inoperative defensive systems.
The real problem is that there are too few such vessels to sustain convoy escort operations. Each destroyer can only provide area air defense for a handful of merchant vessels, and they can only stay on station for a few days at a time before they have to cycle out to refuel, rearm, and conduct critical maintenance. Some of the key munitions also appear to running low. And it appears that the other Gulf states are refusing to allow use of their facilities over fears of Iranian retaliation.
Other countries generally aren't really in a position to assist as part of a coalition either. They either don't have sufficiently capable warships at all, or lack the logistics train to sustain them in the Persian Gulf / Gulf of Oman region. After the Cold War a lot of countries like the UK and Germany essentially dismantled their navies so that they now exist only as government jobs programs.
I don't know anything about this but I am a software engineer.
Stop laughing for a minute because I do have a point.
As a software engineer, I typically build something and engineer it so I can iterate quickly and improve it. I know that the first version won't work.
Isn't this a perfect opportunity for Iran to iterate on sinking cargo ships? I'm struggling to believe that a regime that is (allegedly) weeks away from a nuclear bomb wouldn't be able to keep launching missiles at ships until they notice the right type of hole.
Iterating on a rocket design is not like making a tweak to a line of code. It needs production line changes, manufacturing, testing, (repeat X times) where the process takes weeks, months or even years untill desired results can be achieved. And their manudacturing sites have been reduced to rubble, so that slows things down too.
As I said I'm only a software engineer but didn't Ukraine revolutionize the rules of asymetric warfare by drone iteration? Your statement rings true but I wonder if there are aspiring rocket engineers that really want to test their totally unproven new ideas without the constraint of a military hierarchy in peacetime.
The thing is, Iran doesn’t need to. US maybe can defend their ships, but they can’t defend commercial ships well enough for them to resume regular operations. Even unsuccessful attacks would cause insurance to make it not possible.
Houthis closed their straight some years ago and US wasn’t able to do anything about that neither. And Houthis are nowhere near as capable as Iran.
Yes, that is a fair point. However, the cost of drone versus latest generation ballistic missile that has a chance to reach us naval ship is very different. And in that sense, iterating on a drone is closer to iterating on a line of code because one drone would cost you a thousand bucks and your iteration is a small tweak like adding a different grenade triggering mechanism. Rockets require custom design, custom manufacturing lines, and generally much more difficult to modify and make more effective.
You also have a lot more tries with cheap drones since the target is lower value, so you have hundreds of data points on how each iteration performs vs hitting a naval ship which is an extremely rare event, so it's hard to see whether your iteration on a rocket actually succeeded.
Yes, Iran has already hit several merchant vessels. Their ability to do that occasionally is not in doubt. It's mostly a question of economics. The ship owners and insurers have to decide whether it's worth the risk to run their cargoes through. This has all happened before with the 1980s "Tanker War" between Iraq and Iran: despite some losses the traffic never completely stopped.
And large merchant ships, especially crude oil tankers, and quite tough to sink. When they take a hit it usually just causes some damage.
Iran doesn't want to sink merchant ships. They want to extort money from merchant shipping companies by threatening to sink their ships if they don't pay for 'protection'. All they need is a credible threat, which they already have absent any naval ships willing to stay at point blank range to defend merchant ships.
While there are religious, cultural and political aspects to this, the Iranian govt has primarily become a kleptocracy in recent years. It sustains power through the Revolutionary Guard (aka IRGC) which has grown into what's essentially a state-run, money-making commercial enterprise. It collaborates and colludes with various entities across the Iranian economy which it controls either directly or via bribes and coercion. While reasonable people can debate what the recent attacks on Iran accomplished, they certainly nerfed a large part of the IRGC's income. The new Hormuz extortion scheme isn't just retaliation or vengeance, it's replacing lost income which is urgently needed to prop up the Iranian government.
The Iranians (and their Houthi proxies) have made sustained attacks on them and don't seem to have hit anything.
That's because the US has kept the surface combatants far back from the Persian Gulf for the duration of the war.
As far as we know, they have attempted to run the strait twice and had to turn back because they were under sustained attack.
I assume these ships can defend themselves for some period of time, but eventually the munitions run out, and they become sitting ducks. There is a reason the US Navy fled the Persian Gulf on Feb 26 and has not returned since.
> There is a reason the US Navy fled the Persian Gulf on Feb 26 and has not returned since.
Two US Arleigh Burke Class Destroyers transited Hormuz a couple of weeks ago without damage and are still there last I heard. The Iranians were really upset, but couldn't do anything to stop it.
I had not heard about that transit, thanks for sharing! The ships mentioned in our two links match up, so it certainly sounds like they spent a some number days in the Persian Gulf and transited back. There was also a transit that occurred in April which mentioned other ships joining the operation in the future, not sure if that happened or not.
Ships don’t need escort services because you don’t give command of oil tankers to risk taking thrill seekers. And insurance isn’t enough when the captain is literally on the ship, potentially getting killed.
Warships vs. insurers willing to underwrite a policy for merchant vessels to transit are definitely two very different things. The Iranian Government has a much higher pain threshold/resolve than Trump, but they're also in a lot more pain with the Gulf of Oman closed. Both sides are losing, who will get tired of it first?
Transiting by themselves is a lot different than escorting merchant vessels. By themselves warships are free to maneuver at any time and do so at military speeds. Convoy duty with merchant vessels requires repeatedly moving slowly along a predictable route for sustained periods. Mobility and speed are two of a warship's main strengths.
The extreme narrowness of the strait right next to so much enemy-controlled shoreline is a unique problem. All of the destroyers and frigates from all the world's navies combined couldn't sustain protecting the massive number of merchant vessels wishing to transit the Strait of Hormuz on a daily basis.
> Transiting by themselves is a lot different than escorting merchant vessels
The second crossing was conformed to be such an escort mission. They shot down everything Iran threw at them, but the cost assymetry still holds.
> All of the destroyers and frigates from all the world's navies combined couldn't sustain protecting the massive number of merchant vessels wishing to transit the Strait of Hormuz on a daily basis.
My point exactly: the argument that the "US Navy isn't as large as it used to be" is moot
Assisting the US with regard to Iran is phenomenally unpopular. The increase in energy prices isn't outweighing people's desire not to have their country assist.
And yet national leaders do phenomenally unpopular things all the time when they decide it's necessary. In this particular case it's mostly moot because none of the other impacted countries really has the capability to act regardless of popularity or lack thereof. Like the UK chose to spend all of their money on nationalized healthcare instead of the military. I don't mean that in a critical or negative way, on balance that might have been the right choice for them. But that choice does constrain their options in a crisis.
Would it not be pretty counterproductive for other countries to assist the US in this case? That seems only likely to prolong / exacerbate the war. The US giving up would be much faster.
Whether it would be counterproductive or not depends on what those other countries are trying to produce. None of them particularly want to pay tribute or protection money to Iran, especially because Iran could then decide to close the strait again or raise the fee at any time. They also don't want to set a precedent that other countries might exploit for charging transit fees through their national waters. And the USA might impose secondary sanctions on any country which makes payments to Iran. So the current stalemate might last quite a while.
Fair enough. There are a multiple additional reasons why the UK can no longer afford an expeditionary military to protect their overseas interests, but the full explanation can't fit into an HN comment. The exact reasons aren't relevant to the current state of affairs, the main point is that they lack the capability to do anything even if they wanted to.
The simple reason is, the british stopped being a big empire in the wave of decolonisation. They lost most of their colonies. Not just for military reasons, but human progress. Self determination of people etc. So had no need or funds to sustain a mighty global fleet anymore.
(And health care sounds like a way more useful thing to fund, than the capability to wage war around the globe)
Maybe the US needs to learn that lesson, too? Right now all the US with all its might achieved is blocking a former free flowing transit.
The US national security establishment is unlikely to learn any lasting lessons from this debacle. So the UK and other impacted countries will need to deal with the situation as it actually exists, not in some hypothetical alternate reality with a less interventionist US foreign policy.
Many countries have said they will help patrol the strait as long as the war stops. Iran wont be able to keep this after the war. Iran wont declare war against the entire world, so they wont shoot down their destroyers.
The attack on Iran was an attack on the globe, causing energy and supply chain issues for everybody, including the attackers.
Other countries are not volunteering to help prosecute more attacks on Iran, because they are already victims of those attacks, and it's bad enough that the USA and israel aren't even apologizing for hurting them, much less paying for the damages.
Thus, the offer to "help patrol the strait" once the USA and israel stop attacking is meant to persuade the USA and israel to stop attacking, not an indication of support for the USA and israel's attacks. Indeed, most countries do not support the USA and israel's attacks on Iran, were totally okay with the status quo, and would have preferred if the USA and israel had not attacked Iran.
So what? Attacking Iran was a stupid move, but the US and Israeli regimes don't particularly care about the other victims whining. If other countries are going to make themselves dependent on fossil fuels from the Persian Gulf region then they'll either have to secure their own sea lines of communication or accept that supplies are unreliable. Asking for apologies or payments won't accomplish anything. That is the geopolitical reality.
> the US and Israeli regimes don't particularly care about the other victims whining
This does seem to be true of israel, but as for the USA, it does not, hence the USA limiting their attacks.
> If other countries are going to make themselves dependent on fossil fuels from the Persian Gulf region then they'll either have to secure their own sea lines of communication or accept that supplies are unreliable.
This sort of rhetoric is why other countries do not support the USA and israel: the other countries already did that, then the USA and israel came and attacked those supply lines, thus attacking those countries.
It strikes me as gaslighting abuser language to attack someone else, then blame it on them for not protecting themselves better. It's better for the attackers to acknowledge their mistakes, apologize for them, and pay restitution.
It's not rhetoric. I'm not trying to convince anyone, I'm just explaining how things work. Since the other countries largely lack the ability to act, their support or lack thereof is irrelevant. The US and Israel have no incentive to apologize or pay restitution; more likely outcomes are that they either escalate, or unilaterally disengage and leave others to clean up the mess.
You're not thinking through the long-term consequences of that option. The Iranian extortion fees will likely escalate over time. Other countries will use that precedent to impose fees for passage through their territorial waters. Most of the countries that rely on maritime trade would prefer to avoid that outcome, even if it causes deaths and economic pain in the short term.
> Since the other countries largely lack the ability to act, their support or lack thereof is irrelevant.
How is their support, or lack thereof, irrelevant to our discussion that is literally about whether they support the war? Here is a reminder of the topic, from the post you replied to:
> Assisting the US with regard to Iran is phenomenally unpopular. The increase in energy prices isn't outweighing people's desire not to have their country assist.
That poster and I are just explaining how things work. Seems like you might agree with us here? Indeed, since most other countries do not support the war, their ability to act is irrelevant.
> You're really missing the point. Whether they support the war or not is largely irrelevant
Am I? No, I don't think so: Whether they support the war or not is literally the topic of discussion, so by definition it can't be irrelevant to the discussion.
> support doesn't count for anything
Whether or not you feel "support doesn't count for anything" is irrelevant to the discussion of whether the support is there in the first place.
It's also sour grapes: the USA tried to gain the support of other countries, and because it failed, the support it failed to get is suddenly "irrelevant". Lol. It sure wasn't irrelevant when the USA was begging and threatening countries to help them.
There are refeniries dependent on the Persian Gulf region(PGR) but the majority of countries are dependent on the the general commodities market of downstream products. The US famously produces more oil than it uses and is not generally receiving fuel that's downstream of the PGR and yet if you look at the gas prices in the US you'll realise that it's not as simple as being reliant on fossil fuels from the PGR.
That's without taking into account other things like high grade helium or specific niche products.
Yes but crude is not really fungible. About 14% of US crude imports are effected which is about 8% of overall crude refining.
By the US not being reliant on imports I was saying that even with just local crude oil production the US can satisfy internal demand for petroleum products.
My wider point is that of course everyone knows that that's not how the economy really works and I was replying to nradov oversimplifying by pointing out that if it was that simple US petrol prices wouldn't have gone up as much as they did. Because even though it's only a few countries with specific refineries that are actually reliant on the straight being open to get their specific required flavour of crude it's everyone in the refined markets that are actually effected by the supply of that crude because it effects the supply those refined products.
The other thing is: even if a country like the UK committed billions of dollars to joining the fight in the gulf - there’s no reason to think it’d lower their energy prices, or earn them any favours from Trump.
Short of a nuclear strike (which isn’t on the cards thankfully) nothing short of a ceasefire can get shipping moving again. Sending more warships doesn’t help with that.
So it’s not just that helping Trump would be incredibly unpopular at home - there’s also no guarantee the huge expense would lower energy bills at all.
Is it even worth to escort tankers? The money you spend on countering cheap drones would be massive, and this administration would likely ask the escorted ships to pay for protection. At that point, they might as well just pay Iran.
The rub is the insurance for the tankers. The providers are looking at the risk and saying “hard pass.” Unless the US govt wants to get in the tanker insurance business they are stuck.
All of this was well known before the war though. The idea that navy is incredibly vulnerable modern anti-ship defenses has been a major consideration in the Taiwan situation for at least a decade (mostly in relation to the ability of the US navy to even operate in the area in a war). More recently, Ukraine has made a great show of sinking navy ships with cheap unmanned surface vehicles
Back in WWII you could sail your navy up a river and expect positive results. In the 21st century, the idea of attacking an enemy-held strait with navy doesn't work
suppose one has N independently developed interception systems (from detection till physical interception attempt), each with an intercept success rate of 90%.
a rudimentary calculation then gives the probability of hitting (not sinking) the ship as 0.1^N per launched missile; so it seems that given enough budget to spend on independently developed missile interception systems allows to drive down the penetration success rate arbitrarily.
Multi-billion sounds like $ 10^10; so assuming an attacker can launch say a million missile attempts then the statistical loss would be 0.1^N * 10^10 * 10^6; so the statistical loss can be driven down arbitrarily say to $ 1 by developing ~ 16 independent interception systems.
16 independently developed intercept systems doesn't sound like unobtainium for a vested nuclear power.
furthermore, the development cost of 16 independent intercept systems can be amortized over many more installations than a single ship, it can be amortized over multiple ships, multiple bases, multiple strategic assets across the globe.
Unless your interceptor system is unobtainium laser system with unobtainium cooling system, backed-up by unobtainium power source, you are going to run out of interceptor missiles (or even Phalanx bullets) way sooner than 'million missile attempts'.
Quite possibly 100-200 Shaheds + half a dozen proper anti-ship missiles will cause you to turn tail.
there are so many options from coil guns, to lasers, to jammers, to non-nuclear EMP's, ... that don't involve the caricature of a million dollar missile intercepting it.
The bigger issue is the tankers. The US Navy isn't going to be happy patrolling the strait sure, but even if they did they wouldn't be able to protect the tankers enough for it to make sense for tankers to take the risk.
The last time this happened the US opened the strait by accidentally shooting down an Iranian passenger plane after sinking a large chunk of Iranian navy. The Iranians assumed the US shoot the passenger plane down on intentionally as a war crime and assumed the US would was planning to escalate the conflict. This fear deterred further Iranian attacks on tankers.
This isn't going to work this time because the US started the war by performing of the most serious escalations possible, a decapitation strike against top Iranian leadership in a surprise attack using a diplomatic negotiation as cover. The US did this while the strait was open and Iran was considering a peace deal.
Threats of escalation are no longer effective at deterring Iran because Iran now believes the US will take such actions regardless of what Iran does. What does Iranian leadership have to lose by staying the course? Very little. On the other hand if Iranian leadership back down, they loose all their leverage, they look weak internally, they look weak externally and the US might decide to attack them out of the blue again.
This is why decapitation strikes are generally not done. They remove options and they undermine deterrence and paint belligerents into a corner.
On a much smaller scale, this is advice I give to just about everyone: If your decisions won't affect how they treat you, then just do what you want. The fact that they won't like it doesn't matter, they didn't like you before.
The dead leadership can't change their decisions anymore. And the new leadership has no reason to assume that considering a peace deal will keep them alive. The US has already shown that they are happy to break the deal, then a couple years alter kill you anyways. Staying the course at least keeps the internal threats down (which are just as capable of killing any autocrat)
Threatening autocrats might work, but just bolt out of the blue decapitation strikes undermine future threats because they figure they'll get no warning. If you are threatening, you are bluffing and when you aren't bluffing, there are no threats.
I think "Iran was considering a peace deal" is a bit of a stretch here. Iran was stalling for time, not willing to give anything, and the Strait was indeed open. If they won't give anything now why should they have given anything before.
What does Iran still have to lose? Well, a lot. All their oil is exported through the strait that is now blockaded by the US. The regime while having survived so far and executing thousands of people is still vulnerable over the long term. Leaders can still be hit and potentially the penetrations that led to the success of the initial strikes is still there. Iran's energy sector which is what the regime needs to maintain control (pay salaries etc.) has still not been hit. Other strategic targets that are dual use have also still not been hit.
Iran is never going to capitulate, until it capitulates. Their rhetoric is going to remain that the US has no more levers and can't change anything, because admitting otherwise invites those levers to be engaged. There is some truth to certain individuals likely willing to pay a large price but it's far from clear how deep and wide that extends and what is the tipping point. It is possible that Iran can withstand an oil blockade and even a resumption of air strikes for a very long time but it's also possible they can't. I can't tell and I doubt many people can. There are analysts and various experts with all sorts of opinions.
EDIT: Some of you may remember the Iraqi rhetoric before the US invasion. Then when the US attacked Iraq it crumbled like a paper tiger. The US lost 139 people or so (the coalition lost a bit more) to take Iraq and the Iraqi army largely surrendered or ran away. Assad's huge army with tanks and fighter jets, supported by Russia, collapsed from a bunch of ragtag ex-ISIS guys on Toyotas. The Iranian regime is a lot weaker than what you'd think by listening to them talk because any projection of weakness is the end of them. Ofcourse the US Iraqi invasion ended up very badly after this tactical success and that's the actual problem. Defeating Iran on the battlefield - not so much.
> I think "Iran was considering a peace deal" is a bit of a stretch here.
Iran was considering a peace deal. I agree that the most plausible was they would reject it.
> What does Iran still have to lose? Well, a lot.
The US could do this, sure, but then Iran would have even less to lose. This might work if the US started small and threatened escalation to try to compel Iran, but the US started at massive escalation so any additional airstrikes are likely to be less escalatory and thus less of a threat.
Even worse, there is a fundamental problem with madman theory, if Iran believes they are dealing with a madman, then threats aren't effective because a mad man doesn't keep promises. If you think your opponent is not rational, then you should not expect them to follow cause and effect.
> Iran is never going to capitulate, until it capitulates. Their rhetoric is going to remain that the US has no more levers and can't change anything, because admitting otherwise invites those levers to be engaged.
I agree that we don't know exactly how much pressure is on Iran. Iran historically has been willing to suffer almost any cost. During the Iran Iraq war then sent enormous numbers of teenagers in human wave attacks over and over. It is my estimation that the current war with the US has helped to stabilize the Iranian government and that they benefit more from the war continuing than from a peace deal.
The only military lever the US has left on the table is an invasion of Iran. Maybe limited to the coastline or maybe complete regime change. Trump has not even attempted to bluff that he is doing this.
The Iran/Iraq war is why I made the edit about US vs. Iraq. Just because Iran and Iraq fought for years does not mean Iran or Iraq are able to fight a super power. They can not.
Iran does not think they are dealing with a madman. I don't believe for a second that they think that if all the demands made of them are met someone will harm them just for the fun of it. The maximalists demands. The problem is those maximalists demands run against everything this regime stands for. Not that those demands are bad for the Iranian people, they're actually good. What is true (and it's not a question of madman theory) is that the US and Israel will absolutely take some concessions and be willing to delay dealing with the rest of the problems. That is not irrational. That is 100% rational. And ofcourse the Iranians knows this as well. What the US and Israel want is a stop to the proxy wars, a stop to long range missiles, a stop to the nuclear program and a stop to "exporting the revolution". No workarounds or funny business.
I think the regime is very weak. Conditions in Iran are worse and a population that already wanted them gone now wants them even more gone. Their boisterous rhetoric is a sign of weakness that westerners misinterpret. The more they sound threatening and winning the more they are losing.
The "enemy of my enemy" concept suggests that even if the people hate their government, their immediate pain is being caused by the United States and Israel, so I'm less confident about that.
> Iran does not think they are dealing with a madman.
Iran does think they are dealing with a mad man, or at least a government practicing a policy (as the US administration's apologists have termed it) "intentional volatility".
A far more interesting issue here is the oil supplies available in the Pacific. Brunei, Malaysia, Vietnam, Indonesia, Australia, and others are all ramping up production capacity. Non-OPEC oil production is increasing generally in response. This is likely to undermine the Middle East's ability recovery from current constraints as non-OPEC players gain clout in the markets.
Right now people are talking about China and California have limited supplies. But those are enormous, powerful entities that are deploying multi-pronged strategies to secure energy resources. Look at what they're doing and bet there. You also see developing countries retooling to support less oil-intensive economies, like increasing work-from-home options. Solar and wind are currently feeling weak without their subsidies but are exhibiting staying power as people look to move off more petroleum-dependent energy resources.
As for the tactical issue, the concept people seem to be trying to get at is "cost-per-kill". That needs to come down. Yes, we can kill drones with supersonic interceptors. But spending $6M to shoot down a $6K drone has terrible long-term economics.
> Iran does think they are dealing with a mad man, or at least a government practicing a policy (as the US administration's apologists have termed it) "intentional volatility".
We're going to agree to disagree. I know this is what "people" are saying about the US. But it's not what Iran thinks and it's not what the US is actually doing. This is what Iran wants you to think, as it weakens the US, and what it's going to say. Are you saying that the US will go to war with Iran if all the demands I listed were fully and transparently met? A by the way there is that Europe and Canada (e.g.) also don't think the US administration is "mad". Everyone is playing their little geopolitical and local political games.
I also doubt Iranians think their immediate pains are caused by the US and Israel. Some might but most don't.
I agree with you the energy crisis aspect is overblown (I think that's what you're saying). Supply increases in other places and alternative power sources can displace some usage- certainly over time. The other thing that's going to happen are more strait bypassing pipelines.
EDIT: So the problem isn't mad people or rationality. The problem now, as before, is simply that the Iranian regime is religiously and ideologically unable to give in. Giving in will likely result in their fall even if they were able to give in. This is what's driving the main dynamics here. It's not Iranian negotiation tactics or the US supposed not negotiating in good faith or being "mad". The "mad man" are those that believe that Iran is interested in giving in on its exporting the revolution and the destruction of Israel.
> But it's not what Iran thinks and it's not what the US is actually doing.
I think you need to provide some evidence for your claim. The US had a deal with Iran. A madman ripped up that deal, started a war with a decapitation strike, and is now attempting to negotiate a deal we already had before we spent billions of dollars killing school kids. The “People” you dismiss includes scholars, strategists, experts on international relations.
You could possibly explain trumps behavior as rational if you believe he is trying to avoid getting arrested for pedophilia, but that doesn’t build trust. In any case, the issue of competence comes up. Even if you could trust the person who renamed the Defense department to the War department, that person simply isn’t competent.
Many including Trump have long said the deal was a terrible deal. You can disagree with that (and you'd be wrong) but I'm not sure how we get from that to your statements.
Enough evidence? What sort of evidence are you looking for? Can you provide evidence for your claims?
EDIT: Also can you prove that we are looking to get the "same deal" we used to have?
The JCPOA was set to expire on 18 October 2025 after which Iran would not have any limits on pursuing their nuclear program. Are you suggesting the US is seeking a deal now that Iran would pause their nuclear program until 2025? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_nuclear_deal#Expiration
EDIT2: The JCPOA:
- Kept the Iranian regime in power with massive capital influx resulting in horrendous human rights abuse and 10's of thousands of deaths.
- Was being violate by the Iranians. Iran had nuclear sites at Turquzabad, Varamin, and Marivan, which they hid from the IAEA (something that was discovered after Israel stole documents about the Iranian nuclear program). Iran hasn't declared those sites and generally refused access to them for years after the fact. When the sites were eventually inspected years later (in 2020) there was evidence of undeclared nuclear material. https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/06/1164291#:~:text=Iran%20...
- Was time bound and didn't address many other issues.
- Trump said he would withdraw from the agreement. That was his election promise. Trump also said on multiple occasions (and in fact it had been US policy forever) that Iran would never be allowed to have nuclear weapons.
Any rational person adding would agree that the US attack on Iran is in line with its long standing policy. They would also agree that Iran had no other reason for the amount of highly enriched Uranium they amassed other than the manufacturing of nuclear weapons. So I'm not seeing the irrationality here. Ofcourse if your position is that Iran should have nuclear weapons, should oppress their people, and should use proxies to attack others then from your perspective this is an unwelcome development. It's still rational though.
If reasons are given, and it's an election promise, and you win the election, and you deliver on your promise... Most people who say this is good and how democracy should work. I understand that you disagree with the decision and disagree with the reasons but something doing something you disagree with is not the definition of mad.
You seem to have missed the reference to Madman Theory above, interpreting it as a literal commentary on someone's / some group's sanity.
Whether or not actual mental deficiency is involved here is irrelevant; the strategy is the same whether performed intentionally or otherwise. Unfortunately, its track record is dismal in both cases.
> Iran does not think they are dealing with a madman.
No one knows but the Iranian leadership. The Iranian leadership has been famously bad at modeling the intentions and motivations of other nations leaderships. A bolt of the blue decapitation strike, followed by the US having plan if Iran closes the straits which is the obvious response by Iran, does at face value appear to be the work of a madman. Now in the US we might conclude that Trump and Hegseth are just wildly incompetent and unprepared, but it seems likely to me that Iranian leadership see irrationality instead of incompetence.
We're well within the realm of speculation but:
The Iranian leadership has prepared for decapitation attacks which is partly why they weren't as effective. Their so called "Mosaic Defense" was built for that. They have seen what Israel dealt to Hezbollah. So they must have known this would be an option. There was also no question that at some point force was going to get used, at least by Israel. Israel accounted for about half of the firepower (and really 100% of the firepower on Tehran pretty much) and for the entirety of the decapitations strikes. Israel said on multiple occasions it will attack Iran if Iran didn't stop pursuing its nuclear program. With Hezbollah weakened that threat/lever was less effective. Israel was very worried about Hezbollah's retaliation. Israel had already decimimated Iranian anti-aircraft defenses. So all of this is expected, rational, and what Iran accounted for. I agree the degree of US participation was a surprise but not a zero probability event, certainly after their participation in the last round, and their massive military buildup.
Likewise the closing of the strait was no surprise. These sort of scenarios are planned for and there is zero doubt the closing of the strait was a scenario considered by the US and Israel military planners.
Not a ton we can say other than that. Maybe the US and Israel thought the blow would be so hard the regime would crumble. Maybe they thought Iran wouldn't dare. Maybe they thought that if Iran closed the strait they'd be able to reopen it by force. Indeed this could be where over-confidence, or incompetence, or inexperience, comes in on the US side. It's also that one can never fully predict how things would develop. There could have been over-optimism and under-estimation of the Iranians ability to withstand the air campaign or to effectively close the strait.
All that said, both sides are rationally pursuing their interests. Iran's regime wants to survive and it wants to keep building missiles and nuclear weapons and expand it's religious and political influence. The US and Israel want to put a stop to this before Iran has an arsenal of nuclear weapons mounted on long range ballistic missiles. Both sides will do their best to not tell you what they think or what their plans are (and the Iranians are definitely much better at this than the current US admin).
US downing of Iran passenger plane was as much an accident as the triple tap they did of the girls school in Iran recently or the use of nuclear bomb on Nagasaki and Hiroshima in the past when Japan was already surrendering ie it was a terror tactic. I think americans have the false belief that US is some of kind of benevolent force acting for the good of the world and promoting freedom and democracy. Where as it is an empire that only looks at what is good for itself.
It was an accident, you can read the investigation. No one claims Nagasaki or Hiroshima were accidents.
> I think americans have the false belief that US is some of kind of benevolent force acting for the good of the world and promoting freedom and democracy.
A state can still make mistakes without saying it is good in everyway
> US downing of Iran passenger plane was as much an accident as the triple tap they did of the girls school in Iran recently or the use of nuclear bomb on Nagasaki and Hiroshima
The first and second event are undeniably different than the third in at least one crucial respect, the third was never even claimed to be unintentional by anyone involved - while the first two were repeatedly claimed to be unintentional by everyone involved. Of course, that doesn't prove they were unintentional but not even mentioning the accused's claims of innocence as you assert guilt does prove you're not presenting the comparison honestly.
> I think americans have the false belief that US is some of kind of benevolent force acting for the good of the world and promoting freedom and democracy.
I haven't thought that since I was a teenager, quite awhile ago. At certain points in history the U.S. did sometimes promote the cause of freedom and democracy but it was usually when doing so also aligned with U.S. strategic interests. A notable example was Radio Free Europe (aka Radio Liberty) started in 1950. The U.S. wisely realized the best counter to internal propaganda and totalitarian repression was just telling the truth, so RFERL was (almost always) genuinely unbiased, helpful for the cause of freedom AND good for U.S. strategic interests.
It's also worth mentioning that the Nagasaki bombing is often used as a case study on the ethics of war. They use it as a case study because, once I understood the full historical context of the war and what the U.S. side knew at the time, the decision to drop the A-bomb wasn't as clear-cut as I'd always thought. After spending four weeks on it in an advanced ethics class, my eventual assessment changed from absolute certainty to feeling the Hiroshima bomb was probably reasonably justified but that the Nagasaki bomb was not. The class started out 100% opposed to both but after four weeks was nearly evenly split on Nagasaki.
> After spending four weeks on it in an advanced ethics class, I feel the Hiroshima bomb was probably reasonably justified but that the Nagasaki bomb was not.
In the full context I'm kind of surprised there was any kind of split twixt the two given the full context that both H & N were on a very long target list being systematically worked through and both were destined to be destroyed and effectively levelled regardless of whether untrialled prototype nuclear weapons were tested on those cities or not.
As were 72 other cities (including Tokyo) prior to either H or N being touched.
ie. In the full ethical context the deeper question is really about programs of total war / total destruction rather than the edge case of using two targets as test sites for novel weapons.
I didn't want to digress too much on that sidebar but the split on Nagasaki was mostly centered around the number of days between Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I think nearly everyone would have agreed the second bomb was probably justified had it been dropped later. Many felt that given more time the Japanese side might have changed their minds without the second bomb.
Let's minimise the digression, I'll move on happily enough ..
I'll note that it appears as if the events were framed to your class as two events predestined to have an excessive impact that deserved pause and consideration rather than as (in the context of contemporary events) two orthogonal weapon designs being field tested and squeezed into an already ongoing, months in the execution, campaign of systematic destruction of urban areas one after the other.
Eg: Was it stressed that had the Nagasaki bomb not been dropped the city would still have been destroyed to the same degree via heavy explosives and incendiaries?
Honestly, it's been a few decades and I don't recall many details (other than there being a lot of details). I don't remember if it was directly stated Nagasaki would have been destroyed with or without the A-bomb but I do recall reviewing a shocking analysis on the devastating results of fire-bombing Japanese cities and the escalating run-rate of civilian casualties as air superiority over Japan was established. I also remember seeing large estimates of U.S. troop and Japanese civilian casualties should the allies be forced to do a ground invasion city by city.
The allies had good reason to believe much of the Japanese population would fight block by block without a formal surrender by the Emperor and the Japanese ambassador had privately conveyed that the Japanese high-command would die in honor before surrendering in shame (which he sincerely believed). This was supported by the number of kamikaze pilots which seemed endless and continued to shock U.S. commanders.
> The allies had good reason to believe much of the Japanese population would fight in the streets without a formal surrender by the Emperor and the assessments were that the Japanese high-command would rather die in honor than surrender in shame.
That's not something that's ever been in contention, it's very much the reason that was put forward to justify the ongoing and (relative to A-bomb) cheaper conventional weapons HE-I bombing missions.
Hence my pointing toward that bombing program as the real root of inspection re: ethics.
The nuclear program (put into motion by the Allied MAUD committee) was intended for the German theatre and after consuming vast resources was left hanging when Germany surrendered prior to the Trinity device test .. the argument to test the two weapon designs was (at that time) very much a zero friction zero consideration kind of thing that dovetailed into the existing targeting lists.
Worth bearing in mind that either or both weapon devices may very easily have failed in the field.
My interest in that event lies with it being a prime example of something that just flowed into happening at the time and was later retconned into being some kind of deeply considered a priori known to be significant and pivotal event.
The administration knew this very well. They've been swinging the markets wildly and intentionally several times and they and their buddies have made billions from it.
> United States using its military to keep international waters open
Being a little pedantic, as per my knowledge, the Strait of Hormuz is not “international waters”. It’s territorial waters belonging to Iran and Oman. AFAIK, Iran hasn’t ratified UNCLOS either, and claims it is not subject to it.
Wikipedia says it's been Iranian/Omani territorial waters for quite a while:
> In 1959, Iran altered the legal status of the strait by expanding its territorial sea to 12 nmi (22 km) and declaring it would recognize only transit by innocent passage through the newly expanded area. In 1972, Oman also expanded its territorial sea to 12 nmi (22 km) by decree. Thus, by 1972, the Strait of Hormuz was completely "closed" by the combined territorial waters of Iran and Oman.
Wikipedia does not say that the Strait is Iranian/Omani territorial waters. Wikipedia says that Iran and Oman claim that the Strait is Iranian/Omani territorial waters.
The Strait may well have some, but the traffic separation scheme for shipping is absolutely in Omani territorial waters, and another part of traversing the Strait includes passing through Iranian territorial waters.
No, the route is entirely outside of Iranian waters. They attacked ships that were in Oman waters and put mines in Oman waters and now shoot at anyone trying to removing those mines in Oman waters. Nobody, not even the Iranian government, claims that is their water.
All straits other than the Bosporus (which has some additional rights to Turkey given the proximity to a major city) are international waters for the purposes of free transit, under the Montreux Convention.
The US is is not blocking the Strait of Hormuz. There don't appear to be any US warships even in the Strait at the moment. What the US is doing is enforcing a partial blockade against Iran, largely in waters southeast of the Strait. We can argue about whether this is a good policy but let's not make things up.
It is ridiculous that countries like Australia (a party to a convention) have a say in whether Turkey should or should not pass ships through the strait. This looks like a legacy of colonization era. This convention should be repelled, and the new agreement should be made by Russia and Turkey and other Black sea countries ignoring the interests of colonizers.
Naval blockades of enemy ports during war are legal, that is what USA and Israel argue they are doing. That is not what Iran is doing, they are blocking fully neutral ships from going in other countries waterways.
US at war? We are past the 60 days for a military operation. From US law perspective, it’s illegal. From the constitutional perspective only congress can declare war which they haven’t.
International law only applies when you ratify a treaty so it becomes domestic law. Thats how treaties work, they actually laws of the country hence the term ratification into domestic law. Why US doesn't violate international law on land mines and cluster bombs. US never signed that treaty.
And Iran is blocking a strategic chokepoint during a war of defense, pressuring their enemies due to the war being illegal and unprovoked. See how easy it is to argue?
> It’s territorial waters belonging to Iran and Oman.
The trick is that it's still an 'international strait', or a segment of water that forms the only connection between two areas of high seas -- in this case the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman. The principle of freedom of navigation establishes that innocent traffic (civilian traffic, and even warships in peacetime) have a right to use the strait to go from one body of international water to the other.
Iran may claim that it doesn't have to abide by that right, but international law is never self-executing. One question to be resolved by this war is whether Iran will ultimately recognize the right to navigation in any settlement (and then choose to abide by said settlement).
You're saying international law has no value to iran because the US and Isreal have no violated it. Im saying Iran commited to violating international law long ago and thus in a war with Iran no one would expect international law to be followed by either party. Sounds like you agree with the last part but maybe disagree with the first claim?
As the nation that was attacked first, They have an unimpeachable argument for wanting to defend the rest of their territorial waters. The ludicrously escalatory rhetoric from the US President has turned this into an existential conflict. I can't take finger-wagging against Iran seriously to be honest, the idea that western powers would scrupulously adhere to international mores if subjected to a full-on kinetic attack by another nation state is absurd on its face.
> They have an unimpeachable argument for wanting to defend the rest of their territorial waters
They are shooting down neutral tankers outside of their territorial water, so stop with the bullshit. If they only shot ships in their own waters traffic in Hormuz would already have returned to normal.
> the idea that western powers would scrupulously adhere to international mores if subjected to a full-on kinetic attack by another nation state is absurd on its face.
We know they are, we have Ukraine as an example they don't start attacking neutral nations civilian vessels just because Russia attacked them. Only evil regimes do that, you don't "defend yourself" by committing terrorism against innocent neutral country ships that aren't shipping anything related to the country you are fighting.
There is no reason at all for Iran to start shooting ad Indian ships just because USA attacked Iran, no western nation would defend themselves that way, many western nations has been attacked and conquered in history so we know how they act.
Ukraine doesn't have a strategic choke point that gives them asymmetric economic leverage. Imagine that Brazil's and the world's economy was intrinsically linked to exports from the Mediterranean region, and China decided to launch a full-on war against Spain in concert with Belgium. What do you think Spain would do, sit there and suffer or make use of its geography? How do you think Spain came to be a powerful nation in the first place?
> evil
GMAFB, the US launched this war in a joint effort with Israel and smoked a school full of children on the very first day. Iran is pursuing its strategic interests by exploiting its geography and inflicting pain on countries on the other side of the Persian gulf who chose to ally themselves with the US and allow the US to bases from which to launch war.
One can argue that they have a "good reason" for ignoring international rules, but I would voice a risk here. Other nations that control important straits are watching what is happening and many of them could benefit more by taxing their straits than allowing free passage, and as more do it, the benefit only increase. It is a kind of prisoner dilemma in that defecting becomes the best strategy as soon anyone else start defecting.
As with other recent trade wars, the value of this kind of behavior goes down when other nations start to retaliate. A ship might be able to pay the insurance from Iran, but can they afford to pay the same fee for each time they pass some other nations territorial waters? At some point the US blockade won't matter and the profitability of the venture will be zero.
> The principle of freedom of navigation establishes that innocent traffic
"freedom of navigation" seems to be from UNCLUS no? So why should a country (Iran) that didn't ratify UNCLUS care about the terms it binds it's signatories to?
If Iran doesn't want to observe the terms of the UNCLOS (regardless of whether they have ratified it or not) then their territorial waters claims revert to the older 3NM limit. They can't have it both ways. Of course, in practice those legalisms don't matter without a means of enforcement.
It's prohibited under international law to attack a sovereign nation, like the US has done to Iran, so the point of Iran closing the Strait in response to this is very much moot.
3 - Iran moderates are neutralized, so hardcore fanatics from IRGC take over. Loss for literally everybody.
Otherwise, 1) and 2) are true, Europe is bleeding through the nose with buying US oil and depending on its current antagonist, not smart long term situation that we need to move away asap.
Somebody in US government is making literal billions on shorts and various trade deals just before major announcements keep happening, those are not that hard to see in markets. Current top public bet on this is trumps family and his close coworkers, and their families. If you ever want a witch hunt on traitors and collaborators against US citizens and society, smart up, forget Wall street and just follow those money very directly to culprits.
Even if this analysis were accurate, I would feel much better if the administration had intentionally gone this route rather than accidentally blundering into it.
1 - A win for the shareholders of U.S. oil companies, close to half of which aren’t even Americans, but not a win for Americans even on a purely financial basis given that they are paying more for gas and food.
2 - China hasn’t lost its source of gas and oil. They have more reserves than the rest of the world put together and can outlast every other country, and they’re still getting shipments.
3 - The exact opposite of reality. Iran’s potential to acquire nuclear weapons was one of their biggest dangers for the rest of the world. But with this the U.S. has given Iran a new actual power that had been conjectured but never realized. Control over 20% of the world’s fuel supply and large percentages of other critical raw materials.
You don’t permanently remove 20% of the worlds oil, 30% of the fertilizer while having a incredibly financialized economy and somehow get on the other side of it healthy and rich.
For one, this would be the end of the Petrodollar and with it the ability to have huge trade deficits siphoning more than 1 trillion in goods and services from the rest of the world in exchange for fancy green paper.
Seems like piracy is more about the land than the sea. I can't think of any major american military action against piracy aside from actions against somali terrorists. Seems piracy as it was known historically died out as the old historic pirate havens of say Tortuga or Outer Banks went from places of anarchy to places that were controlled by some government in some capacity. And that is exactly where we see the somali piracy today: here is a state that is unable to govern its land mass and thus there is piracy, even with the american navy directly taking action against this piracy. Seemingly this has nothing to do with the american navy at all, even though that is supposedly one of its mandates and it takes actions in the spirit of advancing these anti piracy goals. The fundamentals of why piracy does and doesn't occur don't really change. It seems it comes down to government capacity on land, not from projecting naval power.
That also supports the government capacity argument. The US was able to make peace with the barbary states and extract a right of safe passage assurance from them. Why? Because the leadership of these states had enough government capacity to compel their domestic pirates into agreeing to the terms their government dictated. Today, in Somalia, we see what the lack of government capacity manifests as. I'm sure the government of Somalia does in fact have laws against piracy. The fact they aren't being enforced, and the pirate industry there exists, shows what happens when law and agreements meet the hard realities that there needs to be government capacity to see them enforced and heeded.
The Islamic governments there always had the capacity though contrary to your central point. As evidenced by the many treaties there were entered into by those governments, not by the Islamic pirates/slavers.
From the writings at the time 'Muslim sources, however, sometimes refer to the "Islamic naval jihad"—casting the conflicts as part of a sacred mission of war under Allah'
These Islamic pirate/slavers are the SPECIFIC pirates that "The Barbary threat led directly to the United States founding the United States Navy in March 1794.". These are the specific type of pirates that the US Navy was founded to combat to protect ships being seized and their crews sold into slavery.
Of course it gets a little muddy when you consider the europeans also had state sponsored privateers. I would not consider state sponsored pirates like this to be the same as pirates who operated against the interests of basically all states and required a little corner of the earth free of anyone's control to operate. Kind of a different phenomenon with different incentives and funding structures and goals.
No? I'm talking about who is sponsoring the somali pirates. I'm not connecting them to these groups. They are already connected to these groups in particular. I didn't just name three random terrorist organizations. These groups are all operating in somalia right now.
I'm not sure the extent to which either Daesh or Andar Allah are formally operating in Somalia, but I apologize if I cast unfair aspersions. I don't believe there are any formal or uniform or centralized funding of the pirates at all, though—many were simply fisherman who could no longer make a living. This is just my understanding however. I'm also open to the idea that the pirates aren't just from Somalia.
The level of ordinance is enough evidence that there is significant outside support. RPG-7s do not grow on trees in Somalia. I hazard to guess an RPG on the black market is also a great expense to anyone who isn't being given one by one of these groups connected to the arms trade in effort to advance their goals or position in some way.
Seems cheap to you and me but that is about the full annual income of someone from somalia. It isn't realistic for an individual to purchase one without external support.
Well it isn't like you can do very much hunting with an RPG-7. Its purpose is to destroy material that you cannot with small arm fire and that sort of limits the intended purpose and customer.
Same reasons as the context of this photo (1). One party would like to advance some geopolitical interest, another party is willing to do it if they are paid and supported as such. No different than any other business deal.
By that standard, pretty much every nation state in the world would be considered terrorist. I'm not against that definition, but i'm rather sure you didn't mean it.
> this administration clearly had no idea what they were getting themselves into
All of the advisors in the room with Trump (Cheung, Caine, etc.) told him explicitly after the meeting with Netanyahu that attacking Iran was a horrible idea. His military advisors told him that Strait closure was the most obvious consequence.
The root cause here, is that all decisions are being made by a single biological neural network with a really high error rate, which is increasing.
The gamble, which was certainly egged on by Israel, was that two stars aligned and it was high time to strike Iran.
The first star was intense civilian unrest, the months leading up to the strikes was marked by riots and protests.
The second star was the meeting of Iran's top brass in one spot at one time, both of which Israel knew about.
It was almost certainly sold to Trump as a domino event, where the US would blow the head off and the people of Iran would ravage the body. On paper it looks clean, and certainly he was riding on a high after the swift coup in Venezuela.
Of course though, that did not happen, and now he had to go to China to beg under a thin veil for them to pressure Iran to back off. Trump rolled a critical failure on what appeared to be a moderate-low risk attempt.
> what appeared to be a moderate-low risk attempt.
It looks like it appeared that way to Trump. But you make it sound like it appeared that way to most people. As one of those "most people", I can say that's wrong. The reaction of most people was "WTF is Trump thinking?".
It's been clear he's not the sharpest tool in the shed for a while. But he should be surrounded by very bright people for are able to provide frank and fearless advice. Looks like he fired most of those people, and whats left have been cowered into sycophants.
He is surrounded by very sharp people. They just happen to have undeclared dual allegiances to Israel. Who this war is helping achieving their regional objectives.
The chaos and stupidity narrative only mask and sustain the far grimmer reality of this operation.
The advancement of the Greater Israel project. US taxpayers directly and indirectly funding the regional expansion of a foreign state led by a genocidal maniac, which has no clear benefit to themselves.
Talk of the chaos and stupidity of Trump just obfuscates this grim political reality. Ie, focusing the narrative on political and operational incompetency misdirects the citizenry from the fact that money from their labor that could go to healthcare, education, and building community is diverted to an aggressive foreign entity.
The power wasn't there in the first place if the administration couldn't defend Hormuz. It's all the same capital and resources that prior administrations had. The actual blunder was exposing that weakness to the world. We could have done nothing and reputation would've carried the idea that we could.
That doesn't seem like the relevant question. A navy barely progressing as the technology progresses by leaps and bounds is just as problematic when you're measuring its strength compared to its adversaries.
It's fair to say the British navy is a shadow of the former British navy that more or less conquered the world. It's also obvious the current one with an aircraft carrier would beat the former one with wooden ships and cannons.
The same applies to the US navy even when the difference is the quality and quantity of integrated circuits and not the difference between a telescope and radar.
From most perspectives (civilian, political, financial), the "better" military is the one that wins. Your'e arguing that a navy can be a shadow of its former glory and still also be what is understood as "better" by most people. This doesn't make sense.
phil21 makes a relevant point that navies are used for different purposes, and the current US Navy is tuned for a different task than that which it currently faces in the Gulf.
It's both a shadow of it's former self, as well as being optimized for force projection vs. freedom of navigation/securing free trade.
It's probably even more powerful than peak cold war/WWII US Navy at force projection while adjusting for technology and adversary capability. Cruise missiles, much more capable aircraft, larger carriers, etc.
At securing the high seas or forcing open trade routes? Just the sheer loss in number of deployable warships available to surge into an area is nowhere comparable. That and logistical capability is nearly nonexistent and relies mostly on nearby basing vs. tankering/supply ships. Not to mention a much larger Merchant Marine they used to be able to fall back on.
There simply is not the ability for sustained operations at sea at any scale any longer, even if you had unlimited munitions to expend. You can certainly float a couple aircraft carriers 700 miles off some coast and keep them on station more or less indefinitely as you rotate them out, but that's really about it. And that's really the only sort of war the US Navy has had to fight for the past 30+ years.
Not necessarily. It's a matter of risk. How many resources do we want to commit? Are we comfortable putting a large number of troops in Iran? Are we comfortable with major losses as we try to enforce against drones and mines?
It's not that I think any of these things are wise, but this is part of the risk calculus you make when you decide to wage war. It's more like a debate: if you don't have a plan for uncomfortable questions you're a poor debater. The US has the physical means to prevent the closure, but I think it's quite clear that this administration ignored known risks and acted recklessly. And more importantly, apparently had very little contingency planning if things didn't go their way.
> The actual blunder was exposing that weakness to the world.
The world already knew.
The real strength of the prior admins was in simply not needing the military force. The 2015 Iran nuclear deal is a relevant example here. It didn't cost the US anything.
The Khomeini regime was always allowed to murder its own citizens, within its borders, with impunity. That's one of the priviledges of a sovereign state.
Yes they did, to the best of anyone's knowledge they did adhere to the nuclear deal until it was cancelled by Trump. Do you have sources that contradict this?
The power is there, they just don't want to pay the cost in terms of money, lives, and polling popularity. This was done on the whim of a man-child throwing a tantrum, backed by his deeply racist hatred towards Obama. There was no plan other than his usual bullying tactics. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad we are not investing insane amounts of money and large lives into this, but we absolutely could win this if we wanted to pay the cost.
The post-WW2 American-led world order was, at times, a shared world order between the United States and Soviet Union. Free trade, perhaps, was "enforced" by the United States Navy but that was for the benefit of all nations and it seems to me to have been something pretty widely understood.
If the US military fails to keep international waters open, that harms everyone, and everyone more so than the United States. There's this continued misunderstanding that America did this or that, or securing global shipping is for America to do, or what have you. But you can't have your cake and eat it too here. If you accept American hegemony of the seas and the associated benefits, you have to also accept American action in places like Iran. It's a package deal - you get both or neither. There seems to be a misunderstanding about that, I hope it's a little more clear now.
> It would be quite stunning Iran defeated the united states in this sense.
To this second point, the US can just keep the Strait closed. No big deal. It isn't really possible for Iran to forcibly win here because while the US has higher gas prices, we're the #1 oil and gas market and we can stomach the pain much longer less you get complaints from MAGA/far-left anti-American types. Iran would simply watch their entire economy collapse, while Americans are paying a couple bucks more for cheeseburgers and milkshakes.
But the perspective that the US would be defeated is the incorrect one. In fact, what would be defeated here is that very American-led world order. For the US to be defeated here, as so many seem to rejoice at the prospect of, you would also lose American naval power and security, and instead each and every country would have to spend a lot more human capital and treasure to secure their own shipping and trade arrangements, because there would be no America to come help and save the day. No more NATO. No more caring about Taiwan or Ukraine (remember Iran helps Russians kill Ukrainians?) or getting involved in expeditionary affairs. You can not separate these things. Iran happens for the same reason NATO happens. The world will be much more transactional - pay to play and a global American security tax. A scenario like the one in Iran, in which a genocidal dictatorship that is all to happy to steal tribute from weaker nations simply becomes the norm, if not simply more common, and the EU or China or whoever can deal with it.
So I'd say, be careful to join other isolationists and smugly cheer for the US to "lose" to Iran, and in which case you can expect much worse as the US says "forget it" and only seeks to protect its own vital interests without regard to the rest of the world - the Trumpian and far left view which is a marriage of convenience.
Forcing Iran to obtain a nuclear weapon, load up on missiles and drones and then use them to attack Gulf neighbors, destabilize Lebanon, Syria, or Iraq, or fund terrorists as recognized by both the United States and European Union (Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis).
Forcing North Korea to murder and starve its citizens and deprive them of medicine, food, and access to education and more. Nor is it forcing North Korea to go send Korean soldiers to die for Putin's war in Ukraine.
Speaking of - the US isn't forcing Russia to invade and murder Ukrainians.
The US didn't force Maduro to come to power and create a humanitarian crises in Venezuela resulting in 1/3rd of the population fleeing as refugees, nor did the US force their economy to be mismanaged for the enrichment of Maduro and his cronies.
The US isn't forcing China to threaten Taiwan.
There are plenty of other things. But without the US, China invades Taiwan, Ukraine falls (don't forget, it was the English and Americans who were flying in weapons and other equipment round-the-clock while Europe was having meetings to decide what to meet about), Iran obtains a nuclear weapon and seizes the Strait permanently or at least kicks off a nuclear arms race in the Gulf, and thugs like Maduro continue to kill and impoverish people throughout South America.
It is actually. Iran can see that their only viable path to stability is nuclear deterrence. This attack makes it more obvious.
>North Korea to murder and starve its citizens and deprive them of medicine, food, and access to education and more
No murder and starvation are US domestic policies.
>The US didn't force Maduro to come to power and create a humanitarian crises in Venezuela resulting in 1/3rd of the population fleeing as refugees, nor did the US force their economy to be mismanaged for the enrichment of Maduro and his cronies.
How far down into non sequitur are you at this point.
>If the US military fails to keep international waters open, that harms everyone, and everyone more so than the United States.
Only in the sense that the US has forgotten its a participant in trade. But that seems to be pretty standard at this point.
>There's this continued misunderstanding that America did this or that, or securing global shipping is for America to do, or what have you.
I honestly would be happy if the world implemented the total blockade on the US that it seems to desperately imagine would be the best outcome for its own economy. Like some giant north korea. Seal the US shut and watch its economy explode with amazing mercantilist economic forces.
It would be nice if they hadn't stuck their dick in this particular bee hive. Its not that we collectively expect the US to secure shipping, but that we would be happy if the US didn't take actions seemingly calculated to make life worse for everyone else on the planet.
>So I'd say, be careful to join other isolationists and smugly cheer for the US to "lose" to Iran, and in which case you can expect much worse as the US says "forget it" and only seeks to protect its own vital interests
I am just waiting for the EU\UK\AU to get its shit together and clean up Trumps mess, so we can move to the point where the global order works without the US. The US didn't provide these services just for the fun of it, its largely just a soft power move, to engender the willing support of other nations. We can and will have successful global trade without the USA. And we can and hopefully will just let the empire rot and seethe from behind its own closed borders.
>Iran would simply watch their entire economy collapse, while Americans are paying a couple bucks more for cheeseburgers and milkshakes.
Iran's economy wasn't exactly in the best position before this. I wouldn't underestimate them. At least not again.
>But the perspective that the US would be defeated is the incorrect one
The US losing decades of work on shoring up willing support and soft power is a massive defeat. And it comes off the back of several other similar losses. It used to be the case that a lot of the planet put "America first" but that's becoming an untenable position. Trump has successfully turned worldwide public opinion against the US. Its electoral suicide in a lot of countries to give in to his nonsense. Every ounce of good will towards the US bought since WW2 has been spent.
>No more caring about Taiwan or Ukraine
Not like a lot of this has been going on. Looks like France is supplying 2/3rds of Ukraines intelligence. Actually the reverse is true here. If the US wants to retain some shred of its predominant position, it needs to get stuck in. Otherwise honestly we will just manage without you.
>remember Iran helps Russians kill Ukrainians?
There's been US weapons in basically every war zone going back decades. ISIS loved Humvees. The US is helping Israelis kill a lot of people right now. If Israel doesn't have a plane capable of delivering the US ordnance, the US will step in to provide it. I don't think this is a glass house that any supporter of the US should be throwing rocks in. Heck I think the US bombed those F 14 Tomcats you supplied to Iran in the opening strikes of this war. "But but the arms sales" he cries as he sells arms to war criminals. This is exactly why the US developed soft power, so that it could say that certain arms sales were illegal and have people reliably agree with them. Those credits have been spent. Its crazy to me that you would expect people to treat you with the respect that you have demonstrated you don't deserve.
>you can expect much worse as the US says "forget it" and only seeks to protect its own vital interests without regard to the rest of the world
Literally current US foreign policy. Why warn people that what is currently happening, might happen? Only slight correction is that the US sees Israels interests as its own vital interests, or can be reliably fooled into doing so at everyone else's expense.
> Only in the sense that the US has forgotten its a participant in trade. But that seems to be pretty standard at this point.
The US already has a navy and already can and will protect US shipping interests (which may include allies or other entities). What will the rest of the world do?
> It would be nice if they hadn't stuck their dick in this particular bee hive. It's not that we collectively expect the US to secure shipping, but that we would be happy if the US didn't take actions seemingly calculated to make life worse for everyone else on the planet.
You don't expect the US to secure shipping but the rest of the world does. Don't mistake your fantasies (let's blockade the US? Are you American? Do you hate yourself that much?) for what the rest of the world thinks.
> I am just waiting for the EU\UK\AU to get its shit together and clean up Trumps mess, so we can move to the point where the global order works without the US.
Not going to happen. More likely the UK and Australia will join the US. The European Union just is not capable politically to solve or address these sorts of problems. Does Germany even have a navy? What will France do, park their one aircraft carrier outside of some random country and yell very loudly? There's no will or ability to do these things.
And for what it's worth, I admire the EU in a lot of respects and love visiting various countries in Europe. Everyone is incredibly nice and happy to talk to Americans.
But while I'm being harsh here, it's the truth. Europe has no will or ability to do things that need to be done militarily. You cannot diplomatically solve every problem. Iran will be happy to meet you, sell you a story, then go build a nuclear weapon and seize the Strait and laugh at the stupid Europeans behind their backs. This is how they operate.
> The US didn't provide these services just for the fun of it, it's largely just a soft power move, to engender the willing support of other nations. We can and will have successful global trade without the USA. And we can and hopefully will just let the empire rot and seethe from behind its own closed borders.
It's a soft power and hard power move. You won't have successful trade without the USA - please stop these immature fantasies. They're not healthy for you.
> Iran's economy wasn't exactly in the best position before this.
Yes, and you can think the Ayatollah and IRGC for that. Instead of spending money on their people they spend them on missiles for no reason. But the oil trade is a lifeline for their economy. The blockade is working pretty well and now Iran is flailing around trying hare-brained schemes like trying to get ships to pay Bitcoin to get permission to pass through the Strait that the US has blockaded.
> I wouldn't underestimate them. At least not again.
We haven't underestimated them.
> The US losing decades of work on shoring up willing support and soft power is a massive defeat. And it comes off the back of several other similar losses. It used to be the case that a lot of the planet put "America first" but that's becoming an untenable position. Trump has successfully turned worldwide public opinion against the US. It's electoral suicide in a lot of countries to give in to his nonsense. Every ounce of good will towards the US bought since WW2 has been spent.
If it was so cheaply lost it wasn't worth much in the first place.
> Not like a lot of this has been going on. Looks like France is supplying 2/3rds of Ukraines intelligence. Actually the reverse is true here. If the US wants to retain some shred of its predominant position, it needs to get stuck in. Otherwise honestly we will just manage without you.
Ok if you'll manage without us I say we just stop altogether and lift sanctions on Russia. We can withdraw from NATO and move American forces from Europe. If that's what you want, of course. (It's not)
Oh and how conveniently you forget the US and UK were the ones actually delivering missiles and intelligence and more to Ukraine at the early stages of the war. The US even today is bombing Iran and taking out drone manufacturing capabilities so they can't supply Russia who turns around and bombs Ukrainians.
> There's been US weapons in basically every war zone going back decades.
You're so ready to defend Iran/Russia that you're twisting in circles saying the US didn't bomb Iran enough, and the US is also bad because we left some light trucks in Iraq, and coming to the moral defense of Iran building drones to sell to Russia to kill Ukrainians because US bad. You know European countries, China, and Russia and more sell weapons too, right?
> Only slight correction is that the US sees Israels interests as its own vital interests, or can be reliably fooled into doing so at everyone else's expense.
Maybe the US and Israel are just right and you're wrong. I certainly think so too.
>The US already has a navy and already can and will protect US shipping interests (which may include allies or other entities). What will the rest of the world do?
What they currently do. There arent US armed escorts everywhere.
>You don't expect the US to secure shipping but the rest of the world does.
No they dont.
>More likely the UK and Australia will join the US.
>You won't have successful trade without the USA - please stop these immature fantasies. They're not healthy for you.
Actually your ability for fantasy far outstretches anyone elses.
>We haven't underestimated them.
Now you are just telling jokes.
>If it was so cheaply lost it wasn't worth much in the first place.
Its been degrading for the last decade. It didnt disappear yesterday. It took more than a single administration of threatening and attempting to humiliate allies before you lost it all.
>Ok if you'll manage without us I say we just stop altogether and lift sanctions on Russia.
Ok bye.
>The US even today is bombing Iran and taking out drone manufacturing capabilities so they can't supply Russia who turns around and bombs Ukrainians.
I love how these retrospective justifications turn up when the original ones are completely destroyed.
1000 times as many US weapons are in hands of people dangerous to the world.
>You're so ready to defend Iran/Russia that you're twisting in circles saying the US didn't bomb Iran enough, and the US is also bad because we left some light trucks in Iraq, and coming to the moral defense of Iran building drones to sell to Russia to kill Ukrainians because US bad. You know European countries, China, and Russia and more sell weapons too, right?
No you just cant read.
>Maybe the US and Israel are just right and you're wrong. I certainly think so too.
Yes its clear you have gorged yourself on their propaganda.
> The US prepared for _this_ war with Iran for a couple of weeks.
That's a little unfair, it would be more accurate to say that the US has war gamed the region for decades and had a good grasp of the pitfalls and requirements, and then to add that the current US administration ignored all that prior work and insight and simply blundered in on a whim.
The US didn't win the Vietnam War and didn't even unambiguously win the Korean War.
What the US did was show it would make life uncomfortable for those who challenged the liberal trade order and politically-and-economically offer benefits for those who embraced this order.
What Trump has done is just attack Iran (during negotiations) with no real counter-offer. Iran has responded by attacking everything in sight because nothing was being offered by the US.
Clearly the result is indeed a serious failure on the part of the Trump administration but it's a failure that seems to come from not even understanding that "Pax Americana" has depended on the carrot and the stick.
The Department of Defense is run by a weekend morning show host and the President is a reality TV star. It would be baffling if things were going well.
> It would be quite stunning Iran defeated the united states in this sense.
> The fact that this outcome is surprising represents a very loud and public failure on the administration's part.
You can't teach stupid!! The coward, sleepy, dementia ridden, pretentious commander-in-chief declared victory over Iran the next day after starting the war.
Trump thought it would go exactly as Venezuela and has no idea how to fix it. They tried to kill enough of Iran's leadership to get to somebody that would be subservient but it turns out nobody is left alive in Iran that is.
Well regardless this situation strengthens USA's economic position and weakens China, so its not a bad spot to be in. That it also strengthens Russia doesn't matter much since they are no longer seen as the great enemy, after their performance in the Ukraine war was lacking.
This only strengthens USA's oil sector and ideally we all know the perils of dutch disease. The weakening of every other american export for a dieing industry is not strengthing it.
You're not wrong, except that USA is/was not always literally "keeping waters open" for everyone. The Cuba blockade, which is another form of war and has dire consequences for the population, has been going on for decades: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_embargo_against_...
This is factually incorrect. Blockade is not a synonym of embargo. Blockade is generally an act of war, and embargo is not. Dealing with Cuba is certainly a huge PITA for the majority of trading actors because of potential blacklisting in the US, but waters around Cuba are as open as they can be, and you can check marine traffic to make sure that ships arrive to Cuban ports. Even from the US itself (cause there are exceptions from embargo such as food, and medicines).
Sorry, english is not my first language. I did not realize there was a strong difference between blockade and embargo. Thanks for the correction.
Though to be fair, there is currently an actual oil blockade run by the USA. And the previous embargo imposed sanctions on international entities dealing with Cuba, so it was not exactly 100% open even though technically you could sail there.
> Much of the post-WW2 American-led world order was founded partially on the United States using its military to keep international waters open.
This completely ignores the MAD era and the Soviets taking over Eastern Europe by force. It also ignores the Korean war stalemate, the Vietnam war loss, as well the most recent Afghan loss.
Post-Soviet disintegration management, the successful integration of Eastern Europe, China, and India into the Western Bloc ways were genuine wins. That's post-1989, not post-ww2 (yes, I realize technically that's post-ww2). So there was not really a world-wide dependency between WW2 and 1989 on the American military. Western Bloc, yes, world-wide no.
The current stalemate is only a surprise to the unaware and folks listening only to American news channels. Before the beginning of the current conflict, even $20 chatgpt provided enough insight to accurately chart the course of the conflict in probabilities. Even without chatgpt, folks keeping track and keeping an eye on real news and past policy decisions and progress were able to predict that Ukraine had a very good chance of stopping Russia in its tracks.
The trouble isn't with the availability of this data, it's hubris. Time and time again. Caesar. Napoleon. Hitler. Korea. Johnson in Vietnam. Soviets in Afghanistan. US in Afghanistan. Ukraine. Iran.
But hubris exists because sometimes it works, and for quite some time. Genghis Khan. Pax Romana. Soviets in Eastern Europe. US in Western Europe. Europeans in the Americas. Russians in Eastern Asia. Europeans in Asia and Africa. Palestine. Tibet.
Why it works, and why it doesn't, is an active research topic. [1]
Analysts paid to predict the future will of course argue this vehemently from their pet PoV. And the decision-makers are too domain-challenged to know whom to believe*. They didn't have chatgpt :-)
American navy has blockaded countries all over the world, so it's more true that they closed international waters. Waters were open before America existed. If Americans would actually learn their history they would see that the USA blockade was the reason Japan attacked Pearl Harbour, as the Japanese needed the water to open and thought taking out Pearl Harbour would prevent the US Navy controlling the Pacific. Japan attacked the American base, USA attacked Japanese civilians with nukes.
Are you saying there are no pirates now? US navy has solved all the world's problems? The blockades have killed millions of people, even in the last 30 years. When US sanctioned Iraq after the first war, they killed 500k people every year, and then US invaded Iraq on lies. The world would be safer without the US Navy.
The framing in general of “Japan only took military action and the US sank to attacking civilians” is wrong too. Take a look at what Japan did to the Chinese during that time period if you think they were only attacking military targets.
No, Japan had not surrendered before the bombs. There is no evidence of that in Japanese or western history. Where are you getting that from?
> Are you saying USA cared about the Chinese?
I’m saying it was not beneath Japan to commit horrific atrocities on civilians. You can’t pretend they were some high moral actor that was only performing a military action to defend themselves.
Did I say the Japanese were good guys?
Everything the Japanese did, UK, USA and other European countries have done worse. They're still doing it. Going back to the original reply, US Navy only benefited the US by screwing over the rest of the world
It was the US that made all these countries stop committing atrocities, so they are the good guys.
World war 2 was the war of 3 different evil ideologies, you had the fascists vs the communists vs the imperialist England and France. The war ended with both the Imperialists and the Fascists defeated so European imperialism ended there, England and France had to give up their colonies.
If not for USA likely Europe would still have colonies and just be as imperialist as they used to be, same with Japan. USA might not be as good as these defeated imperialists, but it was still USA that ended the age of European imperialism that was so much worse than anything USA has done since ww2.
Why would you post such nonsense given how easy it is these days to determine bullshit? By the time of Pearl Harbor, Japan was formally aligned with Nazi Germany. Japan, Germany, and Italy signed the Tripartite Pact in Sept 1940 creating the Axis alliance. Pearl Harbor happened in Dec 1941, so Japan had been formally tied to Germany for more than a year.
“The American navy closed international waters.”
Not in the Pearl Harbor context. Before Pearl Harbor the U.S. was not conducting a naval blockade of Japan that closed international waters. The U.S. cut off Japan from US oil in July 1941. That is not the same thing as the U.S. Navy closing the Pacific.
“The USA blockade was the reason Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.”
False. Japan attacked Pearl Harbor because it wanted to neutralize the U.S. Pacific Fleet while Japan seized the "Southern Resource Area”, especially oil-rich East Indies, Malaya and other regions in the pacific. The U.S. oil embargo might have played a small factor, but that wasn't a US-only thing; various countries were increasingly unwilling to sell oil and other resources to Nazi-aligned Japan while they were attempting to conquer China and most of the Southeast Pacific.
Japan didn't have any problems with USA because USA was not part of allied forces. In fact USA sold weapons to both UK and Germans. USA only joined after Pearl Harbour. Japan attacked because US Navy prevented oil being shipped to Japan, Japan had no other source.
The U.S. Navy did not blockade Japan or “prevent oil being shipped” by closing the seas. The U.S. imposed an oil embargo and froze Japanese assets after Japan expanded its war in China and moved to invade other pacific countries. Surely you can understand why that was a good thing.
This spin is such a weird way of thinking about this. Hormuz was open! Hormuz had been open for decades! Iran "closed" it as part of a war that the United States started.
We weren't defeated in a attempt to "keep Hormuz open". Hormuz closed because we we started an entirely unrelated war. And lost. There's a difference!
The cascade of self-injury and self-sabotage required for the US to end up in this position cannot be understated. It's much easier to defend against an attacker whose first move is to blind and disarm themselves.
We've been planning interventions in Iran for 40 years and they constantly get revised or updated. Iran is literally one of few countries known for drones, which they based on stolen drone tech from western countries. It's not realistic that we entered this conflict unaware that Iran could harass the strait cheaply.
The problem is that Israel bombed their entire leadership structure and there's seemingly nobody to deal with now. It's fragmented between people who want to make deals, people who can even facilitate any kinds of agreement and the radicals who simply want the world to burn and will throw any human in the way to die for that end.
We can absolutely continue destroying their capacity to do things, but the terrorists do not care about their own people or the world. They will use human shields and continue seeking nuclear weapons. They do not value human life or rules. This is why they can never have a nuclear weapon.
At the same time, showing the vulnerabilities in getting oil from that region means China is now buying more oil in USD and even directly from the US via the Pacific which helps further deter World War 3. In the case that something did still happen as part of a global strategy by China, Iran no longer exists as a lever that can be pulled to expand the chaos of a war with the aim of further diffusing the US military away from the Pacific.
If we wanted to fully end this mess, we would probably have to send the military in on the ground, which nobody wants except Iran. They are extremists in general and willing to die over this nuclear issue.
Barring that, we've largely neutered their capacity to make war and reorganized oil trade further in favor of the US. We will have to wait to see if Iran's leadership structure sorts itself out and they come to the table. Until then, if Iran wants to prevent their neighbors from benefiting from international shipping, Iran can be denied that too. Countries are developing workarounds to rely less on the strait, so the longer Iran sticks with this strategy the weaker it will get over the years.
It's popular to say the US lost this or the US lost that and it's a ridiculous country, but it's usually some kind of political gymnastics or financial judgement as it pertains to cost vs benefit. We always lose fewer soldiers and generally come out of it better than if we hadn't done anything at all. We almost always go into something for many more reasons than are publicly stated. A lot of the benefits of intervening in Iran seem to be paying off right now.
Sometimes doing the right thing is unpopular, but you should still do it.
> We can absolutely continue destroying their capacity to do things, but the terrorists do not care about their own people or the world. They will use human shields and continue seeking nuclear weapons. They do not value human life or rules. This is why they can never have a nuclear weapon.
It's the US and Israel that are the "terrorists" and yet both have nuclear weapons. You literally say yourself that we can "continue destroying their capacity to do things", and like your definition of terrorists, the US/Israel are using us (US citizens) as human shields.
> and like your definition of terrorists, the US/Israel are using us (US citizens) as human shields.
No they don't, that is ridiculous. In what way could US citizens take collateral damage in this war? They aren't in harms way at all. You could argue they use Israeli and Arab civilians as human shields since they are the ones taking the attacks, but not American ones. And even for the Arabs that has US bases there are no girl schools inside those US bases like Iran puts in theirs. (the girl school was inside the walls of an irgc base, probably an old repurposed house)
Iran has been terrorizing the entire region, exporting radicalism and funding terrorism. Many of the wars that have occurred in the middle east were caused by Iran. If you look at the history of Israeli attacks, they have essentially been reactions to Iran-backed terrorist attacks against Israel.
Why did Saudi Arabia attack Yemen? For fun? No, they were reacting to Iran-backed terrorist groups. Why did Iraq attack Iran, for fun? No, even back then they were reacting to Iran exporting their terrorism to Iraq.
Their strategy has been to try to look innocent by avoiding direct attacks from Iran and have diplomats that pretend Iran is a nice actor on the international stage, while using their country as a stable foundation for exporting terrorism. This isn't exclusively a strategy for achieving state power, it is a religious imperative to achieve a radical vision of global Islam.
The US has worked with the Middle East for many years to settle on some kind of peace after thousands of years of conflict (which was also the case for Europe). There can never be peace as long as Iran manufactures conflict regularly.
When the US does things, there is usually a strong and valuable logic behind it, even if it is not expressed publicly. For Iran, the reasons tend to be religious. Their goals and behaviors are not the same as you would expect from a rational state actor.
You can’t just label all of Israel’s enemies “terrorists”. The history of the Zionist colony is well know at this point. I’m a US citizen and fully aligned with Iran against Israel and the US presence in the Middle East.
> A lot of the benefits of intervening in Iran seem to be paying off right now
I, umm, disagree fairly wholeheartedly.
Maybe there's some long term <something> that has changed direction slightly as a result, but right now literally everything immediate is worse than it was beforehand.
Has there been an administration that knew what they were getting themselves into? IIRC, US hasn’t won a conflict since WW2. Thus, the plethora of WW2 movies.
I think US blocked international waters around Cuba, without any legal basis (although there is no such thing as international law anyway) at the time of Cuban crisis. And now US seems to block international waters near Iran threatening to attack any ship going to or from Iran, without any legal basis.
Why is everyone obsessed with US military when the news seems to be Bitcoin? Just like that the US Dollar suffered because clearly a crypto currency may well become what the US Dollar was, a commodity to exchange value in a way that nobody can reasonably refuse. Whether that is for better or worse, I think that is bigger news then whose got the bigger gun.
One thing I'd wonder is whether using bitcoin actually involves real de-dollarization. Most stable coin is dollar based and other stable-coin don't seem like strong US competitors. China bans bitcoin trading so any Yuan/rmb based stable coin is marginal. So bitcoin seems strongly related to dollars.
Because people are not going to pay this. The US will block or even seize the ships that pay Iran fees, whether in Bitcoin or other currencies. Iran isn't the only one who can close the strait.
They are using Bitcoin exactly for what it's good at, which is to support sanctioned regimes against the interests of the West. We've seen Russia and North Korea siphon money from gullible Bitcoin promoters this way, and now Iran is getting in on the action.
The problem with bitcoin for this-it is very traceable. The US government can declare paying Iran Hormuz “insurance” to be a sanctions violation (they probably already have). Any Western company - even non-US - paying this “insurance” will be faced with the full ire of the US government.
I guess it might work if shipping company is non-Western (such as Chinese or Russian) - but I’m not sure what the advantage of bitcoin is in that case, as opposed to simply paying in yuan or rubles
How does it matter that it's traceable? Everyone knows the ships going in and out thanks to AIS. Many of these ships are already either falsely flagged, sanctioned, or just Iranian flagged. And as far as paying in rubles or yuan, this tells me that Iran doesn't think the shipping companies are willing to pay in either or think there's a safe/effective way to accept payment through those currencies.
I'm curious what makes your think these ships are unknown. There are 2 blockades in place and suspicion of mines in the conventional shipping route through Omani controlled waters.
The significance of being traceable is simply that US could tell you to not abide by Iran's insurance scheme by threatening sanctions if you do.
Whereas if it's not traceable then all that others know is that your ship got through the strait and there's at least some plausible deniability of why it got through
Iran is already sanctioned. The actors willing to ignore the US's feedback on Iran's insurance plans are already not playing by US rules. This is insurance for the shipping companies that are already operating on sanctioned fleet and oil.
The US should be happy about this. Maybe. Iran seeking reparations is a reasonable demand, this gives the US a way to satisfy a demand without having to pay themselves - which certainly would not be popular, to say the least - making an exit easier. There is of course the risk of setting an undesirable precedent and it is not clear what the consequences of that would be.
The US allowing Iran to levy a toll on Hormuz would completely discredit the US and set the precedent for other countries to levy their own shipping tolls . It's a non-starter.
If anything we hand them tons of cash near 0% to rebuild and they join the Eurodollar cartel pushing our hegemony further. Politicians would need to do a better job explaining deficit spending and Keynesianism more generally.
Iran has been funding terrorists for decades and the IRGC has murdered tens of thousands of Iranians. There are no reparations for terrorists getting their comeuppance.
Americans understand. We're allowed to fund terrorists, Iran isnt. Its not even a bad take if your goal is just domestic happiness. Iran funds terrorists that are opposed to American interests, it's the opposed to american interests part that is unacceptable.
The problem with this attitude is that no-one other than jingoistic Americans will want to support your country if you behave like that. There’s no difference between you and Russia then.
I don’t think this is true. You just need to work with countries whose values and incentives align with your own. Luckily American values line up very nicely with most western countries.
I do agree that ignoring the suffering you cause other people is pretty immoral, I just think most people tend to be kind of ok with that, especially in out of sight out of mind situations. Most people don’t mind if their enemies suffer, its just a balancing act of making sure that mostly it’s your enemies that you make suffer.
Not really any different than eating meat, another immoral act that almost everyone does anyway.
Especially when you look at Iran-Contra, where the US cut out the middleman and supplied arms directly to Iran and supported terrorists at the same time!
Americans don't care what the rest of the world says. It's a privilege that comes from a position of power. In any case, the Iranian people themselves have protested their own regime many times, so no one needs to listen to the US position on this. Just listen to the Iranian people.
We agree with them. Their regime needs to go.
In the US, we will be rid of the current administration in less than 3 years and MAGA will end with it. If the Iranian people had the same choice American citizens do, they would have voted their regime out and current events would be very different.
Replace Iran and IRGC with Israel and IDF and you have a winner - one that is actually in possession of undeclared nuclear arms and refuses to cooperate with the IAEA.
It's the US that has been funding Zionist terrorists for decades. It's wild how the generational divide between those who have been subjected to a lifetime of Zionist propaganda vs those of us who have had access to the truth is completely irreconcilable.
Now.. and I am speaking just from the perspective of trying to achieve specific goals ( and accepting a level of pain for what those goals can demand ), if there was ever a possibility that US may ban/fully sanction bitcoin use, this actually might be it.
They don’t need to ban bitcoin use - they just declare paying “insurance” or “tolls” to the Iranian government to be a sanctions violation, irrespective of the means of payment. Then this becomes a complete non-starter for any US company, and any non-US company in nations where the US has significant influence (i.e. most of the West)
I get where you are coming from, but that assumes .. the old world order. Not to search very far, China told its refineries only last week to ignore those particular sets of US sanctions ( and more importantly, we did not hear anything about it since Trump's visit to China ).
Isn't this bad for bitcoin? I expect the US will immediately say "No don't pay that" and start prosecuting people that pay via bitcoin, because of course it's traceable. Am I missing something?
How is this a change from status quo? Bitcoin has been the currency of crime since soon after its inception. Back when you could mine on a CPU it was the way to monetize stolen compute. It was the way to buy illegal things on the now-pardoned silk road. It was the way to pay off ransomware. It is now the currency of dark influence money.
Using it to pay off a shipping protection racket is prettymuch par for the course.
I think it's different because of the message it sends. Using bitcoin to do generic illegal things is an 'offense' to anyone that wants to stop illegal things. But there's already lots of targets to aim for if somebody wants to enforce the law, the method of payment is kindof a small deal. However, in this case using bitcoin is an offense to the other party in the war -- the US. I think the US has a more obvious target, and is more capable to do something about the "problem" than general law-loving-folk are about illegal activity. At the very least, I'd think it breaks the embargo? And the US really has (historically) cared about that.
I’m not convinced that bitcoin is stable enough to use in insurance products. The currency volatility risk is too high to reasonably cover the covered losses which will need to be covered in some other currency to do things like replace boats etc.
The volatility is only an issue if you need to convert the bitcoin in the near future. If you are willing to wait, volatility goes in your advantage. Bitcoin is volatile enough that if you wait for maybe a few years you will probably hit a pump that will far exceed the growth of most other investments. You don't even need to sell at the high to do this, the run up is often plenty enough gain.
They were charging 0BTC per ship before, so they come out ahead no matter the current value of the coin. They can change their fees by the day as well.
> Iran has started a Bitcoin-backed insurance service for Iranian shipping companies that want to transit the Strait of Hormuz, the semi-official Fars news agency reported, citing documents obtained from the country’s Ministry of Economy and Financial Affairs.
> According to a screen shot of the insurance company’s website, dubbed Hormuz Safe and shared by Fars news, it “provides Iranian shipping companies and cargo owners with fast, verifiable digital insurance.” Fars didn’t give a detailed break down of how the insurance works and whether it’s available to foreign shipping companies and vessels.
It's worth remembering that the Iranians have as yet never claimed that the strait is mined. They have said that it may be. A lot of reporting misses this and assumes (perhaps deliberately) that the presence of mines is a fact.
But of course Iran doesn't need mines to enforce the blockade. They have drones and missiles that can be operated safely from 100's of kilometres away. They have anti-ship sea-skimming missiles. Not to mention the very large fleet of small armed fastboats.
I don’t know stuff but I feel I’ve learned that the Americans can make basic commerce unbelievably painful for whoever they choose through sanctions and disconnection from various financial systems.
In this case it does. You can't funnel huge amounts through a coin with usually small volume and market cap and expect any sense of anonymity or privacy. The delta makes it obvious. It would probably be visible via movements on markets too.
For smaller amounts this is not a problem for the same coin and network.
I mean, kind of. If I give you an address to use to send me money, and I don't tell anyone else that address, and you don't tell anyone else that address, then nobody else can be sure who is behind the transaction.
Let’s be frank. Iran could have built at least crude gun type fission bombs since they reached industrial scale for enrichment. And this being very dismissing of Iranian scientific and technological capabilities.
Given modern computer consumer hardware, I don’t see why they couldn’t even have built implosion lens based fission devices without testing. DPRK would probably provide them with all the data they needed for the simulations.
Iran has been a few weeks from having a few bombs for the last 30 years because they decided not to build it.
Which, when you think about it, shows that the 'Iran cannot have a nuclear bomb' argument for this war is not exactly the true motivation (not to say that the US and Israel really don't want them to have a bomb).
This war is about trashing Iran. Adding it to the string of other failed states in the area. It would be more honest for Trump and Netanyahu to say that the motivation for this war is to ensure that Iran becomes a state that is incapable of developing the bomb (i.e. a failed and fractured, or weak and compliant).
Yes, the war is about Israel extreme far right removing an obstacle for their crazy expansionist ideas and about keeping America hegemonic power in the region.
Besides, nuclear weapons are- if usable at all- a defensive weapon. The claim that Iran would attack Israel with nuclear weapons is primarily meant to suggest that they're crazy fanatics blinded by such a hatred that they would be happy to destroy themselves together with their enemy.
On the other hand, I'm not exactly sure why Iran doesn't give up all its nuclear capabilities. It would cost them nothing except pride, and would remove any excuse from the table for the US and Israel for their aggression and sanctions.
Exactly, even with conventional ammunitions they have shown a lot of restraint to avoid a nuclear response from Israel.
Israel doesn't have much in the way of a credible defense against Iranians advanced hypersonic missiles. Iran could create a mess in Israel by obliterating their de-salinization installations. If they were the blood thirsty fanatics propaganda paints them to be, that would be exactly what they would do, even knowing that in that case Israel wouldn't have much choice than making Tehran a giant glass parking lot.
This is quite the, ahem, coup, for Bitcoin. I suppose it was inevitable in a fractured world. This will likely delay, or perhaps even block Pax-Sinica from taking shape.
It's quite the achievement, that the inventor(s) of Bitcoin have continued to stay anonymous to this day.
I guess I'm just surprised they even bother trying to mask an obvious shake down under the euphemism "insurance" when it's such a trope. Obligatory Sopranos clip of old school mobsters trying to sell "protective insurance" to a Starbucks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Gsz7Gu6agA
You're the US and you're planning a 51% attack in a few weeks which will reverse NK and Iranian fortunes and claim the BTC of anyone who helped them. Any other objectives?
A 51% attack doesn't allow you to steal other people's coins, nor does it let you easily alter deep historical transactions. To rewrite the past, an attacker would have to continuously outpace the rest of the network to rebuild the chain from that exact point forward. The primary threat of a 51% attack is that the attacker could double spend their own coins or censor or block specific transactions.
If they put a substantial portion of their wealth into bitcoin we might witness the ultimate rugpull when the BTC creators cash in their large share of previously untouched coins.
If this was open to non-Iranian shipping companies, it would be some Trump-level trolling. The aggressor that starts threatening tankers becomes the protector mobster, using non-USD as a middle finger. The US/Israel can't really start shooting at tankers without becoming the villain no one can accept. They're already low on trust capital everywhere.
So the few payouts for normal claims would be dwarfed by the war insurance premium currently being charged. They could even offer a discount to loyal clients and still have insane margins.
Yeah, I don't see how the US is coming out ahead in this conflict. Israel might have won some against their adversaries, setting them back a while or two.
crypto insurance products have been very successful in the DeFi space for more than half a decade, a protocol you are using gets hacked and instead of whaling about it on hackernews the insurance policy you opened pays out immediately
there is a lot of examples on how to design it, and it doesn't really seem like this Iranian one for shipping is designed well if its just an insurance pool in bitcoin at all times
but if they are using the bitcoin blockchain to sign the insurance records of a policy and claim, and then the state administrator is acquiring bitcoin to pay out policies at time of claim, then that could work. that was one of the bullish cases theorized for bitcoin back in 2011, 2012, its a long list
Are we just going to have yearly events now pushing up the cost of everything, in perpetuity? I feel like the billionaires got a bit addicted to post-COVID highs
I had fairly deep knowledge about the bitcoin code base 7 years ago and I got a weird vibe from it as I've seen government code before. When I learned that Tor was funded by the Navy something clicked. Just as it makes sense to have a large onion network to allow spies abroad to surf the web anonymously, it would make sense to also have a currency you can use to fund agents or groups abroad that lived outside the banking system. Bitcoin makes sense for that purpose. If you have a large border-less digital currency with many people on it, even if it is traceable, it's still less risky then using cash which you would have to launder.
The fact that many states are now using it for funding purposes to get around the banking system further adds proof to bitcoin's potential origin.
Also, it doesn't help that Satoshi Nakamoto means basically central intelligence in Japanese...
I'm not saying Bitcoin was created by the government, but if it was there are signs...
It's a lot easier to carry bitcoins than suitcases full of foreign cash or gold bars too. In China, they moved to digital currencies in part I believe to defeat CIA bags of cash (no point in getting stacks of paper money you can't use...). However, censorship resistant digital currencies allow them to continue their sneaky tricks.
This kind of thing explains in part why despite being an obvious scam, the government allowed cryptocurrencies to grow so large that eventually they formed their own feedback loop so strong that crypto bros were the biggest funders the 2024 presidential campaigns.
Iran could easily have garnered a lot of international sympathy and support. Instead, they attacked their neighbors, impacted the world economy, and now are basically asking for blackmail money: "nice ship you have there...".
And what has this done to help Iran so far? Trump doesn't care about peoples opinions, US oil is making record profits thanks to the war so there wont be pushback from them, and Trump has 5 more months until midterms that is still plenty of time.
The main thing it resulted in is the Europe led coalition that aims to ensure the strait will never get blocked again, so Iran can never play this card again, that will lose them a lot of political power in the future since this card is now gone.
Well, first of all, the USA already bombed Iran, so closing the strait is an effect, not a cause.
Second of all, it's also more likely the USA will back down as a result of widespread disapproval, than it is that USA will effectuate a full ground invasion (which would result in heavy losses).
Whereas if they had complied with the don's demand that they be a vassal state of the USA and israel, they would not be a sovereign country anymore.
This isn't exactly abnormal: for a USA analogue, look at Patrick Henry's comments on liberty.
5 more months until midterms is plenty of time to do what exactly? Tell us that he won the war on Iran twice a day every, just like he has been doing for the last 2 months? The economic impact of this is just starting to be felt and will get increasingly painful for at least the remainder of the calendar year (depending on how much longer the straight stays closed). There is no mechanism for him to just sweep this under the rug. Perhaps you believe him every time he says he won, I think most us don't believe it and never will not matter how many times he repeats the lie.
"never get blocked again" just like when it was claimed by the U.S. it wouldn't be blocked in the first place, or that it would only be a few days...sure sure. I'm sure the IRGC is about to call the European and U.S. leaders and tell them how bigly they are and how scared of more bombing they are.
Well the strait was open and freely navigable before trump bombed them.
What Iran has learned from this is they don’t need sympathy, they need to exercise the leverage they do have, and there’s no way they’re ever going to willingly give that leverage up - they’ve seen what would happen.
I used to see so many headlines about how North Korea was a breath away from causing global catastrophe. And then they got theirs. I don't see much now.
> [Iran] now are basically asking for blackmail money: "nice ship you have there..."
This doesn't sound like the don to you? "hey Iran, nice country you have there..."
> Maybe Trump should bomb them some more?
If the USA is going to be bombing every country which doesn't give up their sovereignty and bend the knee to the don, then the USA is going to need more bombs.
Huh? You're saying your whole post was sarcasm? Including the part where you criticize Iran for "blackmail" while the don has been doing the same thing since even before starting the war?
Poe's Law in action, I guess. In general, sarcasm isn't a good way to have a good discussion. Better to just say what you mean, rather than the opposite of what you mean, with the assumption that everyone will know you didn't actually mean it.
Iran was attacked by the US and Israel (the state committing genocide right now).
International law, rules and agreements don't seem to matter when it comes to the US and Israel.
Fortunately, the world is becoming more and more multi-polar, and the decline of the US (which to a certain extent is probably caused by how Israel is dragging them to wars) is necessary to have some world peace.
I do have to note that I feel sorry for the bulk of Americans who are just trying to live their lives.
This is an incredible 180 degree misinterpretation of who attacked whom. Iran is garnering incredible international sympathy and support. There is no just war theory that can support what America has done to Iran. It is immoral, illegal aggression.
There are protests against the war/against the US/against Israel in major capitals, the Lego videos go viral, news regularly mention EU heads of state talking to Iranian ministers. After weeks of the strait being shut, no EU country has joined US and Israel. Every EU opposition party is including the end of the war in their manifesto. Does any of that look like no support?
For most of the world, Iran is the victim of two dangerous countries. I bet you a tenner that when the US and Israel give up and the end of the war is officially announced, there'll be dancing in your streets.
Were they theirs? Germany has nukes too but they're not theirs, they're from the US. Germany can't say "fuck off" to the ~50k Americans stationed in the country, leave NATO and get to keep the nukes.
Iran is more popular than ever before because they've stood up to the Zionists. Have you not seen the Boom Boom Tel Aviv music video? Or the Lego videos?
There's no insurance scheme the IRGC can concoct that protects against the US navy hitting your rudder with a 20mm gun.
US Navy has shown particular strength in this conflict against Iran, sitting in the international waters many (many, many) miles away and chillin :)
I would have never realised that things would have taken such an Onion worthy scatological turn.
s/n/d/6
Whats weak about doing the smart thing?
American destroyers and aircraft carriers have been chased away from the Strait multiple times now.
Hilariously the USS George HW Bush had to go the long way around Africa rather than risk transiting the Bab El Mandeb after the Houthis defeated the US Navy last year.
In what way were they chased away? Iran tried to sink them and didn't hit any shots, and many on Iran's side died trying. Many IRGC soldiers dying and not even scratching the paint on US vessels doesn't show US to be weak.
> Hilariously the USS George HW Bush had to go the long way around Africa rather than risk transiting the Bab El Mandeb after the Houthis defeated the US Navy last year.
Valuing the lives of your crewmen and avoid terrorists is bad how? USA not wanting their soldiers to die is weak? Would you want more deaths on US side to show strength?
USA can win this war with barely any casualties, why would you not do that? And USA being able to do this with barely any losses shows tremendous strength to me, Iran was more powerful than Ukraine but USA could establish aerial superiority immediately with no losses, this is so much stronger than what Russia displayed.
Given how expensive they are they were presumably supposed to do more than primarily stay out of range. There are less expensive ways of doing that.
They block Iranian ports so Iran can no longer export oil, that is doing a lot.
And Iran has blocked the strait too. It's at best a stalemate.
But this stalemate benefits US corporations by raising the price for oil, so its not really hurting the attacker. In order to hurt a plutocracy like USA you need to hurt the American stock market but American stocks are doing great.
That's true. Both USA and Russia should be quite happy with the current state of affairs. China not so much.
Rest of the world is quite pissed with USA. But that's just emotion. Unless it gets realised into something concrete it matters little.
Trump is at -20% net approval and it's steadily getting worse even now. Seems like most Americans don't decide whether things are going great by looking at S&P 500.
neither he nor people that will decide 2026 election give a hoot about his net approval rating. they should not even poll this. the only thing worth polling is few states that could swing the election one way or another (and this is even smaller number than normal for upcoming midterms). what americans think on the whole has stopped mattering awhile ago…
It benefits a few corporations in the short term but not America in general. And if the oil prices rise and stay high, there will be demand destruction. US sits on top of the capital food chain and will be hurt.
We are quite incapable of dealing with a mass attack by Iranian small boats with bombs.
They are not, they updated their tactics to account for that so they destroyed a lot of Iranian small boats with bombs trying to attack the vessels. If they were incapable of countering that we would have seen American casualties in these skirmishes but only Iranians died.
> USA can win this war with barely any casualties
What do you mean by "win"? What strategic goals can the US achieve in this war? We're at a point where merely achieving status quo ante bellum--i.e., Iran doesn't charge for passage through the Strait of Hormuz--seems to require giving concessions elsewhere.
In many ways, this looks like the American version of Pearl Harbor--a stunning tactical victory that is simultaneously a crushing strategic loss.
> We're at a point where merely achieving status quo ante bellum--i.e., Iran doesn't charge for passage through the Strait of Hormuz--seems to require giving concessions elsewhere.
No, there is no reality where the world will let Iran take tolls here, no matter what happens that part wont happen. The world depends too much on straits being open and toll free, if you let that slide once it will be done by others and that will break down the entire world order.
Which as they say, will require concessions elsewhere to achieve.
What you're skipping over here is how that happens. If Iran wants to charge tolls on the strait, someone has to do something to keep Iran from doing that. And when you start gaming out the possible identities of that someone, the possible things of that something... well, the most likely route of this is via negotiating some concessions to Iran (i.e., at minimum sanctions relief and maybe even concrete progress to a nuclear bomb). That assumes that Trump even considers freedom of navigation as something worth concessions in the first place, which I don't take as a given.
So now you pivoted from the US to the world. Yeah Trump tried that, first to engage 'the Europe', then eastern Asia (Japan, South Korea), now China. He has to own his failure, nobody will solve it for him. Meanwhile the SPR is draining, reserves all over the world are dwindling, thw world is hungry for oil - they will pay the tolls happily.
Buddy, I have bad news about that world order already...
The primary US strategic war goal was to slow down Iran's nuclear weapons program. That was not a smart reason to launch an attack, but the attack was at least somewhat successful in achieving the goal. Much of Iran's critical equipment is now destroyed or buried, so from the US perspective that's at least a minor, temporary strategic gain. I'm not claiming that any of this was a good idea or that it will work out well in the long run but let's be clear about the real goals.
The US administration has given several contradictory claims as to what the strategic goals of the war are supposed to be.
The problem with the claim of nuclear weapons program is that the dominant assessment of the intelligence communities is that Iran didn't have a nuclear weapons program at all. Khamenei the elder was known to be against having a nuclear weapons program, and the US's achievement is to replace him with his son... who is known to be in the pro-nuclear weapons program. Considering that the nuclear enrichment centers were targeted in last year's strikes, it's not even clear that the strikes this year have had a meaningful effect in even a temporary delay in enrichment progress.
At this point, I suspect that Trump never had any strategic war aims in the first place, but was instead motivated by an operational aim (regime change in Iran, à la the Venezuela operation), and has been flailing about since then because the administration simply doesn't have anyone with the capacity to actually understand the strategic reality of the situation and is substituting operational and tactical goals for strategic ones.
> The primary US strategic war goal was to slow down Iran's nuclear weapons program.
Let’s be realistic, this was probably about Israeli domestic politics first and US domestic politics second, and maybe thirdly as a favor to the Saudis. It’s crooks running all three countries for their own purposes and issuing BS PR cover stories.
> let's be clear about the real goals.
You should watch “Wag the Dog”, a 1997 movie about a president who starts a war to distract from a sex scandal. The real goals here have nothing to do with anything Iran has ever done.
Ultimately Israel started this war. Is it a useful distraction from Epstein, sure, but that’s clearly not the primary reason for this war.
Here's a video of Trump in 2015 talking about how he would make sure Iran never got a bomb [1]. Crazy that the Israelis we're already planning it then.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIDNonMDSo8
Blowing shit up and killing people isn't winning. Winning is getting what you want strategically and operationally. Unless you are 12, most outcomes aren't just big explosions.
> Hilariously the USS George HW Bush had to go the long way around Africa rather than risk transiting the Bab El Mandeb after the Houthis defeated the US Navy last year.
The ship went the long way around because why risk being attacked by missiles? It's less that the US Navy "was defeated", which itself is a plainly asinine comment which only serves a purpose of trying to incite others, and more so a practical safety concern.
But if you really want to argue that the US Navy was defeated, I would submit our next step should be to utilize nuclear weapons on Yemen and destroy the Houthis. That way you can't make these claims and we'll see who really is defeating who :)
Not one U.S. ship was damaged by the Houthis. Meanwhile airstrikes took out a ton of Houthi assets.
Americans always say they are winning. Nobody believes it.
Starting a war and then not fighting in it is pretty stupid honestly. Either fight or dont start a pointless war
Everyone has a plan until they get punched on the mouth. The plan was a quick decapitation strike, perhaps followed by a Venezuela-like arrangement.
There was no plan. The plan of Israel was to trick the incompetent leadership of the US into a war with Iran, which they did.
You mean smart things like going into a war with zero plans beyond the first day, bombing girl's schools, then being forced to run away by a country whose entire GDP is less than your military budget?
Thats untrue, they sank the unarmed Iranian vessel Dena after it attended the International Fleet Review 2026 naval exercise hosted by India.
It goes without saying that many are saying it was one of the greatest naval battles of all time.
Just wait for CENTCOM bulletin with their USDC blockade insurance address
You mean that these mafia style insurances are a joke, but free (as in safe and not taxed) access to the seas is something many wars have been fought over. "Insurance" selling by navies was the norm until WW1 at least.
bc1qxy2kgdytzdonaldjlostiranwartrump
Hah, far more likely that it would be $TRUMP or $PATRIOT shitcoins. Gotta skim somehow.
You realize that America "in theory" wants ships to transit the strait right? The US blockade is self-defeating.
You can't block the strait if we block the strait! lmao
The reason the US is blockading is because Iran is only partially blockading it. If Iran wasn't blockading at all then America wouldn't either. But it's pretty clear that "only shops whose countries pay a lot of money to Iran" would help Iran.
The US is blockading the Iranian coast, not the entirety of the Strait.
I think this is incorrect. The point is to show that if Iran does this, then they will not be the only ones that can do it. The last thing that should happen is to reward Iran for rent seeking on the Strait. Others can also seek rent then, and the whole strait gets shut down..which encompassed around 90% of all Iranian oil exports, which in turn was about 90% of their economic exports.
There is truth to this but it's basically we'll hurt ourselves to hurt you more. This is a lose-lose strategy.
I am not sure if in the long term it is our interest to allow Iran to extract rent from this trade route, which would only strengthen China. It seems to me that the hurt is spread around the world quite widely, with inordinate impacts on Iran and China, not the U.S. or Europe [1].
[1] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charted-oil-trade-through-t...
It's not really in my interest for a cabal of pedophiles to win this one. I dispute the conflation of the interests of the capitalist class with the american people.
Wow. You know, I think Trump is dangerous to our Republic, almost certainly committing graft and fraud using the Office of the President for personal gain, probably a rapist and maybe a pedophile. I don't know. But that has nothing, I repeat, NOTHING to do with our national security and the geopolitical reality of the Russian-Iranian-Chinese-North Korean Axis and the threat that axis poses to the democratic free-world. Separate your concerns, walk and chew gum, and face the real world.
Those countries are all very different with very different interests in their respective regions. China doesn't care about Ukraine, Russia doesn't care about Taiwan, and both were very muted in their reaction to the attacks on Iran.
The major thing they have in common is not respecting American trade embargoes against themselves, which, of course they don't.
They had muted (visible) reaction because they could do little about it.
An axis would have shown a lot more solidarity. Hezbollah/Hamas/Iran for example.
Their muted reaction is a tacit approval.
> NOTHING to do with our national security
You think a dangerous man at the helm with skeletons in his closet has no effect on national security?
I don't think these concerns are separable. If it weren't for Trump, we probably would not be at war right now. Russia might be more contained by diplomacy and sanctions. If it weren't for Trump's first term, Iran might have been less threatening right now.
And, in some sense, this doesn't matter, because like you say it's the real world and it's happening regardless of why or whose fault it is. I guess I don't want to sign on, even rhetorically on the internet, to destroying this axis that is effectively being created by vile and stupid men because Trump wanted to end the Epstein news cycle.
The most dangerous thing to your republic is that belief that the whole world needs to be under the boot for its security.
I have nothing against china, and I have no interest in the companies operating from our soil. They certainly view us with contempt.
I am talking about geopolitical security.
The entire idea that we exist in opposition to china is silly. Geopolitically we stand to thrive in mutual partnership. What other option is there?
But there is certainly no future where China is somehow a junior partner.
Why is it so bad that countries want rent over the areas they control?
It's not a matter of good or bad. Innocent passage through national waters (including straits) without paying tolls has been a fundamental principle of maritime law for a long time. Allowing Iran to charge a toll for passage through the Strait of Hormuz would set a bad precedent and encourage other countries to do the same. Iran might be able to get some of the weaker countries to pay up but the USA has no incentive to agree; more likely they would just continue the blockade, and possibly impose secondary sanctions against any entities that send money to Iran.
.
What's your point? Innocent passage never applied to artificial canals. You seem to be unclear on the basics of maritime law.
Yeah, and "don't launch wars of aggression or bomb girls' schools on a whim" has been a principle for about the same amount of time.
Iran has been pretty clear that they'll open the strait if the USA lifts the blockade. How can we complain about fair passage while maintaining a blockade ourselves?
Straits have always been points of local control. This isn't new. We will have to pay if we want to play. For all people bluster about the US being exempt, I don't see what leverage we can use that isn't more expensive than just paying up. Marinetime law is only as meaningful as can be enforced.
Bullshit. The right of innocent passage has long applied to straits. But as a practical matter very few US flagged merchant vessels even go through there, so if anyone actually pays it's going to be someone else.
> The right of innocent passage has long applied to straits.
Not even for one hundred years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreux_Convention_Regarding_...
In any case, the cost will be passed on to the markets. Which country claims the vessel doesn't matter much.
I think US established a naval blockage against Cuba and other countries multiple times in history, blocking passage of ships in international waters.
A Iran drone then bombing UAE's oil infrastructure as payback?
They are already doing that so it wouldn't change anything.
No they are not right now, otherwise we would have full news every day of it. Defense rockets for stuff like Patriot ran out, those systems are trivial to overwhelm and deplete in the age of cheap drones and become useless quickly.
Same for the major airports, they keep working, people keep flying to the asia, albeit in less numbers.
>No they are not right now, otherwise we would have full news every day of it.
Yesterday Iran stuck a nuclear plant with a drone, and launched them at other targets as well. And there is news on it even...
https://apnews.com/article/iran-us-uae-nuclear-drones-71e7e5...
UAE is firing weapons at Iran's oil infrastructure.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-u-a-e-has-been-secretly-car...
Just to be clear, Iran has been accused of the attack.
So.... just fuck the world economy out of national american embarrassment?
Exactly. The US just announces that they will take any vessel that pays for transit. So, what happens then? Any vessel that goes through and the IRGC doesn't shoot them, the US seizes. So, no one pays since they can't pay for successful transit. The fun game is that all the vessels just go at once. Any that the IRGC doesn't shoot the US takes. Any that it does shoot sink. So, no transit. Unless IRGC doesn't shoot at all, in which case everyone gets out of there with just one vessel paying the ransom. Ultimately this doesn't work for the IRGC as the US is far more capable of closing the strait than Iran is.
The US can also fuck with Iran by getting slight cooperation from ships in the Gulf of Oman by getting some small inflatable boats with remote control and AIS transmitters on them. Put the boat in the water next to a ship, turn of the ship's AIS, turn on the boats AIS, and send the boat through. Send hundreds of them. IRGC won't know what to shoot at or will expose their positions by firing at a rubber raft.
Or they'll use a pair of binoculars (or a drone with a camera) to ignore the decoys and shoot at the actual ship...
The horizon at sea level is about 3 miles. The strait of Hormuz is 35+ miles wide. Any mechanism used to get around this would be detectable and could be attacked with relatively inexpensive ordinance.
About 20 meter elevation would be needed to cover the navigable part of the strait. So, a couple of tall ladders?
Look at the map. They have mountains. Not much rain/fog in that area to block the sight lines. Maybe haze.
This is some wacky races shit that boils down to:
1. US fucks up by engaging Iran, Iran closes strait.
2. US fucks up the negotiations and fails to reopen the strait.
3. US decides to try and rescue its initial war goals, through a mutual blockade with Iran, starts sinking the very vessels it demands Iran gives passage to.
Does Mutley get a medal?
A combination of enough insurance to make it worth the time of the owner + offer the workers a generous amount to their next of kin could make it worth it. Being turned into minced meat might be worth it for some people if it means their families become rich.
Military history is full of quotes like "war is too important to be left to the generals". When you put people who focus on technical matters in charge, they often make poor decisions, as they are not looking at the big picture.
The question is not about whether the US can blockade the Hormuz Strait but who gets blamed for the blockade. Iran is messaging that it is making serious attempts to reopen the strait, while China and Russia are probably reinforcing the message. When people around the world suffer from the consequences of the blockade, they are more likely to blame America for their troubles. Or at least that's what Iran is trying to achieve.
No government have accepted Iranian tolls so far, that is just not going to fly ever. If every country controlling a strait started taking out such tolls that would cause much worse issues than we are seeing currently, nobody will have that.
No government has accepted Iranian tolls so far, but some shippers sure have; ships have been passing through the strait. Those shipments go on to countries with governments. I don't think you can actually know that there wasn't government support for any of those payments so far.
And cryptocurrency should be even better for deniability. In reality it would be a really good idea for certain governments that rely heavily on Middle Eastern oil (e.g. Philippines) to pay fees in the short term. More than a month ago the Philippines was already claiming to have "safe and preferential access", if that involves money they'll pay it. (https://www.rappler.com/business/philippine-flagged-ships-sa...)
You think people care? The average guy on the street doesn't even think about the fact that part of the price they paid for their lunch went to Panama for the use of a canal.
Iran doesn’t have to do anything, really. The Hormuz blockade is entirely on the moronic US, their feeble leader as well as their utterly corrupt and incompetent politicians.
A toxic mix of staggering arrogance, moral bankruptcy, a lack of strategic thinking, non-existing historical awareness and a desperate need to divert attention because of the Epstein files.
Try debating a MAGA supporter. The stupidity is astounding.
Remember when MAGA was about isolationism?
Where did they manufacture those hats?
I can see how this is confusing. The American foreign policy establishment's consensus definition of "isolationism" is something like "not invading or planning to invade other countries", it doesn't mean not trading with them.
For Americans, not bombing something in Asia at least every couple of months is considered an isolationist tendency. And of course Central and South America don't even count, that's our "back yard" after all.
> because of the Epstein files.
> The stupidity is astounding.
They "released the files" and handed out binders of Epstein documents to influencers. There was a ton of posting as though something monumental had happened. They were entirely comprised pre-existing publicly released information.
That's how much the admin respects the intelligence of its base and that's how much its loudest supporters think things through.
> They were entirely comprised pre-existing publicly released information.
This is not true. This is in fact straightforwardly false.
You and the parent may be talking about two different events.
There was an initial release of "binders" to known rightwing influencers in a choreographed photo event. It was a predominantly bullshit release that pissed off the conspiratorial wing of MAGA and the Epstein Republicans (Massie et al). This happened in early 2025.
The blowback from this event resulted in Congress passing the Epstein Transparency Act in Nov. 2025.
The biggest dump of files came after this (tho congressmen are claiming most files are still unreleased) , which is what you might be referring to.
But feel free to argue your point either way.
You'd think the Epstein class would get along better with Iran, seeing as you can get 'temporary' marriages to underage girls in Iran. (google 'iran child bride' and 'iran temporary marriage').
Why would anyone post this comment?
To highlight that both sides are horrific when it comes to the topic being discussed and that both sides need leadership to be changed?
Do you not think horrible behaviors should be highlighted/called out/brought up? Or just that US leadership Epstein connections should be?
On the hierarchy of disagreement, attacking the character of either side is the lowest form of intelligent commentary you can make: https://paulgraham.com/disagree.html
> Do you not think horrible behaviors should be highlighted/called out/brought up? Or just that US leadership Epstein connections should be?
If non-sequiturs are your best argument, then yes, you you have nothing to contribute by participating in good-faith speculation. Iranian child marriages do not reframe the "Tail that Wags the Dog" scenario in Washington. It's textbook whataboutism that you failed to elevate into meaningful commentary, making you look suspiciously disengaged.
I simply stated "You'd think these Epstein file guys would be on better terms with a country whose religious and political leaders sanctify that kind of behavior, not going to war with them.". Seems like a reasonable comment. They are all awful people.
Paul Graham is saying you should not call people you are in a discussion with names. If I called OP names your link would fit. Calling out a horrific regime that murders their people and rents out children under the sanction of their religious leaders is not that.
Calling the person you are in a discussion with names = bad. Call the subject of the discussion bad, when they legitimately are horrific, is normal discussion. Trump is awful. The Islamic Republic is awful. Both of those are normal and acceptable things to state in a discussion. You DeadFred are a <xyz negative statement>, not normal or acceptable.
However Hacker New's ACTUAL guidelines state reguarding comments "Converse curiously; don't cross-examine." which your post seems to explicitly violate. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Paul Graham is saying you should not call people you are in a discussion with names
Only if you don't care to read past bullet point 1. If you had cared enough to read at least one paragraph further, you would have found:
> DH1. Ad Hominem.
> An ad hominem attack is not quite as weak as mere name-calling. [..] It's still a very weak form of disagreement, though
I responded to bigyabai phrase of "On the hierarchy of disagreement, attacking the character of either side". Which I did not do. I did not go after someone I disagreed with's in the discussions character. I simply said 'you would think both sides monsters would be on friendlier terms with each other'. Responding with a wall of text relating to the entirety of the PG article would have been odd. I addressed the point made in the comment I replied to.
From the article on ad homimen "Saying that an author lacks" again, I never went after the other posters here (until later in this reply in order to productively highlight points brought up by others). PGs article is about responding to posts and how speak civilly (the posters here being 'the author' he is referring to). I see quite a few posts replying to me speaking to me specifically contrary to the entire point of the PG article. For example "Only if you don't care to read past bullet point 1. If you had cared enough to read" of your own post.
But to your point, the original comment by spiderfarmer that I responded to initially must really trigger your 'ad hominem attack' concerns:
" the moronic US, their feeble leader as well as their utterly corrupt and incompetent politicians. A toxic mix of staggering arrogance, moral bankruptcy, a lack of strategic thinking, non-existing historical awareness and a desperate need to divert attention because of the Epstein files.
Try debating a MAGA supporter. The stupidity is astounding."
Iranian child marriages do not reframe
Israel too to be fair "They're 15, Married With Children: Inside an Israeli Hasidic Cult's Code of Silence" (the gov and the population knows it, but it's ok) : https://archive.is/v9Amc#selection-699.0-699.83
I'm not seeing where they rent out their children via temporarily marriages as the Shia mullahs in Iran have given religious sanction/approval/doctrine of or like the similar behaviors highlighted in the Epstein files. Can you help me find that bit that relates to what I was speaking to?
That said allowing child brides is horrific, I agree. Especially when it seems to be accepted by the highest levels of a religion or even worse when it's practiced by a religions leaders. We hate that, right?
"both sides are horrific" is convenient, but only one keep invading and bombing others since decades
Sure, but when it happens it's no longer Iran's problem - it's your problem. (And maybe America's problem, unless America gains anything from the global trade burning down.)
The US fundamentally wants the oil to flow globally.
Its secondary blockade of the Strait seems to be driven by optics and PR rather than strategic value.
It's a pressure campaign to get a nuclear deal. NYT reported Iran already offered to open the strait, end hostilities, and negotiate a nuclear deal later, but the US rejected that offer as they want to pressure them into giving up their uranium.
Now Iran is demanding money in exchange for the uranium which is the primary roadblock.
It's a pressure campaign to get the Iranian leadership in one place so that Israel can bomb them again. There was a deal, the president cancelled it in his previous term.
Nobody credible said or believed Iran was making nuclear weapons. Iran had made it a fatwa against the Islamic law to develop such weapons and Obama had referenced that. They also dont believe bolivian fishermen could reach the US with stocks of drugs, they dont believe venezuela’s president was a hidden drug kingpin, and they also dont believe that Cuba is a credible threat that needs to be blockaded to the stone age.
These are power plays to signal that world dominance is not decaying but in case of Iran it has backfired and pushes China’s narrative as a pillar of stability.
There is still lots of evidence that Iran started enriching uranium towards weapons grade over the past decade. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-64810145 Largely a legacy of Trump's sanctions failing to get a nuclear deal the first term and back firing. You'd have to be naive to think they don't want a bomb in the first place before that though.
Saddam played the same game where they pretended they just wanted nuclear for energy, even though they were a petrol state... which is why in 1981 Iran helped bomb Iraq's reactors (where Iran teamed up with Israel to do so) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Opera
If Iran didn't believe Iraq's peaceful nuclear intentions, I'm not sure why anyone would believe Iran then buying tons of uranium from Russia was any different. Not to mention building underground lairs to enrich it while also building ICBMs.
The best way to thread the needle I can see was that maintaining highly enriched uranium was a deterrance/bargaining strategy. Doesn't break the fatwa but sends a message. Obviously it wasn't successful, they should have either built a bomb or not bothered, in hindsight.
> Obviously it wasn't successful, they should have either built a bomb or not bothered, in hindsight.
The JCPOA obviated the need for a nuke. It was a reasonable assumption that the US would honor its side of the agreement under the doctrine of continuity. Even in hindsight, you cannot have productive diplomacy without good faith
> The JCPOA obviated the need for a nuke.
Iran really had no need for a nuke in the first place if they weren't constantly provoking the entire region, unless that need is destroying Israel.
> Even in hindsight, you cannot have productive diplomacy without good faith
Iran never really negotiates in good faith either, the JCPOA didn't really do anything at all to restrict their ballistic missile program and terrorist proxies.
> Doesn't break the fatwa but sends a message. Obviously it wasn't successful, they should have either built a bomb or not bothered, in hindsight.
I think Israel and probably the US interpreted this tactic as Iran stalling until they Iran had the technology to build a nuclear ICBM.
Many countries have nuclear power without any enrichment capability. Iran could try not being a pariah state and buy enriched uranium like many countries do. The only real reason to spend so much money and endure so much hardships for uranium enrichment is if they wanted at least the option to make nuclear weapons.
They definitely wanted the option, that’s indisputable really.
The strongest case for developing nuclear weapons is our lack of invasions of nuclear powers.
It's funny how he tore up a nuclear arms embargo / agreement and then acted as though they (Iran) were a threat that couldn't be tolerated.
Common saying: "They sell us the sickness and then sell us the cure."
Nuclear weapons have been a strictly self defense capability since 1945 I don't know why the White House is crying about Iran getting them.
> I don't know why the White House is crying about Iran getting them.
How does one not see a problem with terrorists(i.e. the Islamic regime in Iran) getting nuclear weapons?
After you say why you don't have a problem with the Israeli terrorists having them already.
> After you say why you don't have a problem with the Israeli terrorists having them already.
There are no "Israeli terrorists" in control of Israel's nuclear weapons, the government of Israel is certainly not controlled by terrorists like the Iranian government is.
Israel also does not have a policy of destroying Iran, while Iran does have a clear policy of destroying Israel[0].
There's a clear difference in their ideologies as well, the Islamic government of Iran clearly believes in dangerous ideologies like Martyrdom and Jihad(holy war), organizations with these sort of ideological beliefs should never be allowed to have nuclear weapons because typical deterrence strategies like mutually assured destruction are unlikely to be effective.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_of_Israel_in_Irani...
What is the definition of a terrorist and why does the destruction and genocide in Gaza not fall under that term? Cite your sources when you define terrorism, please.
Also, are you just patently unaware? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Israel
Also you didn't state why Israel is allowed to have nuclear weapons.
> What is the definition of a terrorist and why does the destruction and genocide in Gaza not fall under that term?
There is certainly no genocide in Gaza, the destruction is clearly the end result of a war started by Hamas. In fact Hamas did have genocidal intent in their attacks on Oct 7th but did not have the military capability to carry out that intent. Israel on the other hand clearly has that military capability but not the intent.
> Cite your sources when you define terrorism, please.
There is no universally accepted definition of terrorism. Obviously that cause problems. [0]
> Also, are you just patently unaware? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Israel
It's a vague expression without a clear definition.
[0] https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-49238-9_...
"There is certainly no genocide in Gaza" -- you are directly contradicting a formal UN Commission of Inquiry finding from September 2025. This is not an opinion piece or a fringe report. The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory concluded after a two-year investigation that Israel committed four of the five genocidal acts defined under the 1948 Genocide Convention, and that genocidal intent was established through direct statements from Israeli leadership including the Prime Minister, President, and Defence Minister. Your claim that Israel lacks genocidal intent is directly contradicted by the Commission's finding that genocidal intent was "the only reasonable inference" from both the statements of Israeli leadership and the pattern of conduct of Israeli forces. [0]
You said there is no universally accepted definition of terrorism. So let me use the official definition from the United States government.
The US State Department definition under 22 USC 2656f(d) defines terrorism as "premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents." [1]
The US domestic terrorism statute under 18 USC 2331(5) defines it as activities that "appear to be intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population." [2]
You say there is no universally accepted definition of terrorism, then said nothing to explain how you applied the term with such confidence to the Iranian government in your original post. By your own admission, you invoked a contested label selectively against one state while exempting another. That is a political preference dressed up as a principled argument, not anything of rigorous analysis.
Now apply that to Gaza. The same UN Commission found that Israel deliberately targeted civilians, deliberately destroyed healthcare and education infrastructure, imposed starvation conditions, and directly targeted children. That is premeditated. It is politically motivated. It is violence against noncombatants. By the U.S. government's definition, it fits.
On Greater Israel, calling it "vague" does not explain away the fact that sitting members of the current Israeli government have explicitly stated their intent to annex Palestinian territory.
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said at a Jerusalem Day rally four days ago: "The time has come to finally erase the lines that separate Areas A, B, and C. The entire Land of Israel is ours." He also declared the war "must end with the expansion of the borders of the State of Israel" and called on Netanyahu to order the IDF to prepare for "full occupation of the Gaza Strip" and establish Israeli settlements there. [3]
National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir stated from the Temple Mount: "Conquer all of Gaza, declare sovereignty over the entire Strip, eliminate every Hamas member, and encourage voluntary emigration. This is the only way." [4]
These are not fringe backbenchers. These are cabinet ministers in the current Israeli government. This is declared policy, not a vague expression.
You still have not answered why Israel is allowed to have nuclear weapons.
[0] https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/09/israel-has-c... [1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/22/2656f [2] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/part-I/chapter-11... [3] https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-896309 [4] https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/on-temple-mount...
> The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory
The UN(which is itself a party that has perpetuated the conflict through mismanagement of the UNRWA) has essentially zero credibility in regard to anything involving Israel[0].
> You say there is no universally accepted definition of terrorism, then said nothing to explain how you applied the term with such confidence to the Iranian government in your original post.
The Iranian government is engaged in both direct and indirect terrorism throughout the region by virtually all commonly used definitions including the ones you listed. They have directly attacked virtually all countries in the region. They are driven by dangerous ideologies of Martyrdom and Jihad.
> The same UN Commission found that Israel deliberately targeted civilians, deliberately destroyed healthcare and education infrastructure, imposed starvation conditions, and directly targeted children. That is premeditated. It is politically motivated. It is violence against noncombatants. By the U.S. government's definition, it fits.
A highly biased UN commission claiming something doesn't actually make it true.[1] Israel does not have a policy of deliberately targeting civilians, although in a war there is often collateral damage. This is why properly analyzing intent is so important.
> These are not fringe backbenchers. These are cabinet ministers in the current Israeli government. This is declared policy, not a vague expression.
Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich are highly unpopular in Israel and have been largely excluded from making war related decisions, Israel has a parliamentary system of government which makes it easier for extremists to get elected than in a system of government like the United States, their statements should certainly not be taken as official Israeli government policy.
> You still have not answered why Israel is allowed to have nuclear weapons.
Legally they are not a party to the NPT[2]. From a practical standpoint they are a small country facing existential threats to their existence so it's not surprising they would want to have nuclear weapons as a deterrence.
[0] https://unwatch.org/pillay-commission/
[1] https://unwatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/UN-Watch-Rebu...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_on_the_Non-Proliferatio...
For many people "terrorists" are the one bombing and invading, which means that Iran is currently victim of terrorism.
Because Iran is an extremist theocracy who literally regards USA as Satan and openly calls for its destruction. Pretty obvious.
> Nobody credible said or believed Iran was making nuclear weapons.
Then why were they enriching uranium to levels well above what is needed for civilian purposes? You simply don't do that unless you intend to make nuclear weapons at some point.
> Iran had made it a fatwa against the Islamic law to develop such weapons and Obama had referenced that.
Iran obviously has the ability to lie, and regularly does so.
Is NYT even a credible source these days?
As opposed to the orange clown who changes his stance daily and sometimes hourly? Yeah, of course.
as opposed to media that don't tow the official US foreign policy line, and don't uncritically parrot the official US narrative?
Anything that got us into this mess should be questioned.
They don't seem that bad. Trump shouting fake news whenever they say something he's not keen on doesn't necessarily make them non credible.
Looking on Wikipedia for NYT controversies it has them saying killing Palestinians may be bad and saying sex change ops for kids may be bad which don't seem especially terrible positions.
> Nobody credible said or believed Iran was making nuclear weapons.
Tell that to Iran's former parliamentary deputy speaker who said 'When we began our nuclear activity, our goal was indeed to build a bomb. There is no need to beat around the bush.'[1]
[1] https://www.dailymail.com/sciencetech/article-15732615/iran-...
to be fair, I bet more human knows that USA is much more dangerous to the world "order" than Iran having a nuclear weapon (Pakistan and even Israel has it, so why not Iran and Mozambic too?)
No, they don't: they want allied (UAE, Saudi) oil to flow, but not Iranian oil. The US is embargoing most of the Far East from essential fuel.
Why would the US navy be attacking ships in the strait of hormuz
They are doing this because they blockaded Iran.
because Baron trump has a bet on polymarket paying 100:1?
Because Trump said they would. Because he is insane.
Knuckling under to the imperial ambitions of others is always the more sane solution for the slaveminded man.
To prevent Iran from controlling it. Of course it’s dumb but this is why.
Yea there is. It's called "nuclear weapons."
Why you'd want to play this 'tough guy' game in the era of the Internet is wholly beyond me. You have a fantastically well outfitted military that in the absence of diplomacy stands a really good chance at getting us all killed.
Jingoism is a mind poison.
If you phrase it as an "insurance scheme", then sure they can? All insurance schemes work by giving you money if bad stuff you don't control happens. I'm sure they could.
They probably won't.
The US begged, like a dog.
There’s no assurance the US army can concoct that protects against the IRGC mines.
Guess who lost more?
Even if Iran would charge $2 million per ship (like it has done) it would be manageable cost for for shipping companies and would generate same amount of income as Iran's domestic oil production.
When the US violates the law of the sea in the South America, why not. Everybody complains but understands.
Few things:
1) no one owns the strait, Iran has never owned it, its international waters.
2) Who says they keep it at $2 million? Due to the location they could say anything and people would pay it, that would have a massive impact in worlds economy. And any plans to bypass the strait would get heavy attention from Iran and their friends - because no one wants to lose their cash cow.
3) if Iran is allowed to do that, everyone starts to do that - you think oil is expansive now? Good luck when every country with similar bottlenecks nearby starts their tolls. Again, these are international waters.
As for the US breaking law of the sea in South America, I assume you mean blowing up boats? Has anyone proven that they have been civilians and that they have lied about the targets?
Did you notice that you emphasize the rule of law in your argument 1) but let the rule of law walk the plank (and drown in the south sea so to speak) with your fourth statement?
Fair point
Do you think you are American?
What does that have to do with anything?
Even if it's $3 million or more, I think it may still be a better deal for the world. Iran would be happy because it gets money. The world is happy because they get oil again.
Much cheaper than participating in another endless war.
Yes, this may mean an end to international orders and more countries will take opportunities to charge tolls. But the US-led world order is fading away anyway no matter what.
The least worst option.
> Much cheaper than participating in another endless war.
Let's see first if this ends as an endless war - although you could make the argument that there has been a "war" between those two nations for about 47 years, which yes seems like an endless war :/
> The least worst option.
Personally I disagree with that conclusion.
That's the problem for US. You'll indeed disagree that this is a good outcome. Indeed there's just no good outcome left for you, and you can continue your endless war however you like.
The rest of the world has another option. No outcome is good, but it's at least better than being dragged into this pointless war.
What do you base "its international waters" on? It is considerably narrower than the 12nm limit for territorial waters.
Fair enough, seems that it is not considered international waters, but according to UN neither Iran or Oman has the right to block traffic in the Strait:
"However, the strait is governed by international law under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). This grants international vessels and aircraft the right of transit passage, meaning coastal states cannot suspend this movement, provided ships transit continuously and expeditiously for the sole purpose of normal travel."
Which makes the blockade and asking for tolls illegal under the international law, though pretty sure most countries do not care about international law at all.
> according to UN
Very bold to use the UN as a source to defend US' actions. The same UN that Pedophile Trump denounced as a "feckless institution"?
> no one owns the strait
US doesn't own the middle east either, yet it routinely acts like it does.
If they hadn't been tricked by Israel to attack Iran, none of this would've happened.
>Has anyone proven that they have been civilians and that they have lied about the targets?
(not relevant question)
The United States is not legally allowed to use "shoot-to-kill" force or launch deadly military strikes on drug-trafficking boats in international waters. '
The Baseline Rule: Lethal force is restricted to self-defense or the defense of others if the suspects present an immediate threat of death or serious physical harm.
Disabling Fire: To stop a fleeing boat, law enforcement is permitted to use "disabling fire" (such as firing at the engines or using boat-trapping nets), but they must explicitly minimize the risk of injury or death to the crew. Carrying illegal narcotics alone does not carry a death penalty, nor does it justify lethal force.
The US has killed over 160 people illegally using airstrikes. so far.
Let say Iran charge 2 million per ship and US boards and takes control over all ships leaving Iran. Everybody complains but understands.
What happens at that point? Can shipping companies manage to pay both US and Iran? Will companies and nations complain to the international court, and will UN step in and prevent either side from doing this? As noted the US did this already in south America and nothing happened, and Iran has already started extracting a toll.
I would not work on a ship going anywhere near that area, and I wonder if investors are that willing to put money on that kind of venture. That leaves nations that are dependent on exports to put military personal on ships (like what Russia is doing), but will that be enough to discourage either US or Iran?
>US boards and takes control over all ships leaving Iran.
They do that already. US destroyers have shot round into the engine room of many Iranian oil tankers. Iranian oil is not getting trough.
Much of the post-WW2 American-led world order was founded partially on the United States using its military to keep international waters open. It would be quite stunning Iran defeated the united states in this sense. The military might is there, but this administration clearly had no idea what they were getting themselves into and did not plan accordingly. (and does not have the will or public support to do so)
The baffling part of this is that nearly everyone was aware that Iran could close the straight if pressed hard enough. The fact that this outcome is surprising represents a very loud and public failure on the administration's part.
I would amend that to be that everyone thought Iran could close the straight, but now they _know_ they can close the straight.
Ironically the US has never ratified UNCLOS. The American professed interest in maintaining right of passage does not appear to require them to be held to the same standards.
Also the Strait of Hormuz is an international strait not international waters. The entire strait lies within Iranian and Omani waters. Frankly it's a bit absurd to complain that your ships can't transit a country's waters while you bomb them.
The original ship channel was in Omani waters, not Iranian. It is entirely unreasonable to consider it reasonable for Iran to mine Omani waters.
It is reasonable for Iran to do things that hurt the US (and the world) when the US hurts them.
> It is reasonable for Iran to do things that hurt the US
Yes
> (and the world)
No
It is not the world. Only Israel, USA and their direct allies are explicitly banned. Most of the world is not.
They shot at neutral ships when they closed the strait, where do you get your info from?
If it was just USA and Israel and Nato even then you'd see a ton of ships go through and the world wouldn't be very affected, since almost all ships that go through the strait are not Nato aligned.
Because neutral ships also need permission to cross the strait, even if they have not been explicitly banned. Because the status of the blockade has changed and continues to change according to tensions in the region. Several countries have obtained permission to cross: China, Russia, India, Iraq, Pakistan, Malaysia, Thailand, and the Philippines. Even so, it is understandable that ships are hesitant to pass through there and are seeking less uncertain routes, because of the tensions, risk of war and because in addition to Iran, the United States also claims to have imposed a blockade and has attacked ships.
Oman was not neutral and did not bar it's airspace to Israel/US planes/troops/ships, so it's a legitimate target.
> Frankly it's a bit absurd to complain that your ships can't transit a country's waters while you bomb them.
The issue is they block all non-Iranian ships, not just American ships. Basically nobody would have complained if they only blocked American ships.
Incorrect, plenty of countries have had their ships transit the Strait including China, Philippines and Pakistan
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c79jqx1xdy9o
They shot at Indian vessels, so you are wrong they are blocking neutral nations. India is not allied to USA or Israel. That they let some vessels through doesn't mean they don't shoot at neutral ships, they shoot at most neutral ships.
https://iranwire.com/en/news/152407-30-ships-passed-through-...
Pay toll and don't get your ship bombed.
They likely didn't pay to move their goods through the strait.
That is illegal, that is equivalent to blocking it. No other country accepts existence of such a toll, and any company paying it will get sanctioned by the entire world since it would set such a bad precedent if countries started to toll their straits.
You don't pay money to terrorists to make them not bomb your stuff, you eliminate the terrorists, otherwise you get more terrorists.
It's only illegal if you recognize the law. Why is charging for passage in Ormuz illegal and not in the Panama or Suez canals? Iran can (legitimately) say they require compensation for reconstruction and keeping the security of the strait after the attacks from the terrorist states of Israel and US.
No one owns anything or has the right to anything.
Everything is either what you hold by force, or have a friend who holds it by force for you.
I don't know enough about the current state of naval warfare but I've assumed this is related to the asymmetry that's emerged around protecting capital warships, especially in the scenario of a very narrow strait and a long enemy-controlled coastline. They can shoot relatively low-cost, short-range guided missiles from anywhere along the coast. Even if a warship stops the vast majority of them, only one has to get through to sink a multi-billion dollar ship that takes a decade to replace.
There are now similar asymmetries emerging across war-fighting and even though warships can still be effective (and less vulnerable) in other scenarios, this specific one seems especially bad. The other factor is that most of what ships carry through the straight isn't going directly to the U.S. so the impact on the U.S. is mostly secondary, reducing the risk the U.S. is willing to take. Of course, all this was known beforehand by military strategists which makes this all look even worse for the U.S. administration.
Cheap drones taking out an AWACS is a great example of this. The US has only 16 of these and it will cost $700 million to replace, and was taken out by a drone that probably cost less than your car.
The very definition of asymmetric.
The US military is also just less powerful than it was at its peak at the end of the Cold War as well.
Still the most powerful navy in the world, but spread increasingly thin (turns out "the whole world" is quite a big place).
This is no longer Reagan's (almost) 600 ship navy, and projecting power halfway round the world is no mean feat when your opponent can lob missiles and drones at you from their back garden
I don't see how more more American war ships in the strait would change the calculus of the Iran war without. Even if they packed the strait with ships so that an admiral could walk from Oman to Iran without getting their shoes wet, Iran could still lob drones and missiles from inland.
Yep both things are true - it would be harder to operate in the gulf today than it was in 1990 because of better drones and missiles, but also they are short of ships and it’s limiting their options.
They don’t have enough ships to simultaneously attack Iran, defend US bases and their gulf “allies” and also enforce this blockade, so they’re forced to pick and choose and it is constraining them strategically.
Having twice as many ships wouldn’t solve the fundamental problem (they’re fairly screwed either way at this point), but it would give them more optionality
> I don't know enough about the current state of naval warfare but I've assumed this is related to the asymmetry that's emerged around protecting capital warships, especially in the scenario of a very narrow strait and a long enemy-controlled coastline.
It's not the billion-dollar warships that transport oil, it's the much more fragile and unarmed tankers.
Even if the US Navy begins full escort duty, it can't remain on-station forever. What are shippers to do afterwards? One drone strike might cause a tanker to have a very bad day, yet it's extremely difficult to so permanently degrade an entire country that they become incapable of launching sporadic attacks.
Ultimately, the status of the Strait must be settled diplomatically, and the US and Iran are each betting that the other side will blink first.
It's not even the strait that's the important geopolitical entity here. It's all the oil pumps and refineries in Saudi Arabia, Qatar or UAE.
The US began to patrol the strait with Destroyers and immediately stopped when the scared Saudis immediately realized that Iran was about to attack Saudi oil rigs.
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Iran has too many targets and the only thing that can stop them is the equivalent to an Israeli Iron Dome across the entirety of the Middle East, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and UAE, maybe more.
I think this is not discussed enough. These are huge investments and destroying them requires a significant time to recover. Our key growth play being AI which is a huge energy consumer, impacting the long term supply chain for energy is questionable.
> Iran has too many targets and the only thing that can stop them is the equivalent to an Israeli Iron Dome
Wasn't Iron Dome coverage deteriorating due to low munitions? The cost asymmetry between drones and interceptors makes any drawn-out conflicts mutually punishing - unless someone on the future decides to gamble on another decapitation strike. The Iron Dome is great against improvised pipe-rockets, but less effective against ballistic missile salvos.
> Iran has too many targets and the only thing that can stop them is the equivalent to an Israeli Iron Dome across the entirety of the Middle East, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and UAE, maybe more.
Another key issue is Iran's regional neighbors haven't invested significantly enough becoming credible military threats against Iran. Instead they tried to play an in-between game of being tacit frenemies because Iran and its proxies could be politically useful. But in the last 3 years, Iran lost most of its proxies through a series of catastrophic miscalculations, dramatically shifting regional dynamics. Iran now has less reason to cooperate regionally and its neighbors lack of credible offense is costing them dearly.
A contributing factor is that the direct customers for much of what passes through the strait are Western European countries who've failed to sustain any real naval power beyond ceremonial presence. In recent years, the U.S. Navy had to quietly ask the German navy to stay away from the Western Indian ocean due to the additional burden of guaranteeing the safety of the German "warships" if they were attacked by Somali pirates.
Without going too far into the political weeds here, I'll say that the problem is less "Germany and UAE needs more guns" and more "maybe we shouldn't have pissed off Iran".
I agree with you that Trump's recent attack on Iran was an ill-advised strategic blunder.
However, it can be simultaneously true that most countries in Western Europe and many in the Middle East have under-invested in their military readiness for so long, they've lost the ability to secure their own strategic interests. You're right to be annoyed other countries provoked a regional bully for their own misguided reasons. While Trump is our problem, relying on a bully like Iran not being a bully against the EU's global interests is Europe's problem.
Unfortunately, we live in a world of super powers including Russia, China and, yes, even the U.S. who at best have their own strategic interests which may not always align with yours and at worst will take from you whatever you can't defend. If you can't secure your own economic interests militarily, there will eventually be steep costs. Even if your own country carefully tiptoes around bullies for fear of provoking them, you can still be trampled under the feet of other countries fighting for stupid reasons which have nothing to do with you.
Note: I say this as an American who likes our European allies and who thinks Trump has been an idiot on almost everything. Even back when Trump was just a bad reality TV host, I could see the U.S. should stop trying to be "World Police." It was never going to be sustainable over decades and it was distorting the behavior of other countries, both enemies and allies. Since the end of the cold war the U.S. has subtly harmed our allies by enabling some of them to under-invest in their own military readiness.
Modern US surface warships such as the DDG-52 Arleigh Burke class are pretty survivable. The Iranians (and their Houthi proxies) have made sustained attacks on them and don't seem to have hit anything. And a single hit would be highly unlikely to sink such as vessel: we're not talking about something like the Russian Moskva cruiser that was crewed by drunks and had inoperative defensive systems.
The real problem is that there are too few such vessels to sustain convoy escort operations. Each destroyer can only provide area air defense for a handful of merchant vessels, and they can only stay on station for a few days at a time before they have to cycle out to refuel, rearm, and conduct critical maintenance. Some of the key munitions also appear to running low. And it appears that the other Gulf states are refusing to allow use of their facilities over fears of Iranian retaliation.
Other countries generally aren't really in a position to assist as part of a coalition either. They either don't have sufficiently capable warships at all, or lack the logistics train to sustain them in the Persian Gulf / Gulf of Oman region. After the Cold War a lot of countries like the UK and Germany essentially dismantled their navies so that they now exist only as government jobs programs.
I don't know anything about this but I am a software engineer.
Stop laughing for a minute because I do have a point.
As a software engineer, I typically build something and engineer it so I can iterate quickly and improve it. I know that the first version won't work.
Isn't this a perfect opportunity for Iran to iterate on sinking cargo ships? I'm struggling to believe that a regime that is (allegedly) weeks away from a nuclear bomb wouldn't be able to keep launching missiles at ships until they notice the right type of hole.
And, think of the apprenticeship opportunities.
Iterating on a rocket design is not like making a tweak to a line of code. It needs production line changes, manufacturing, testing, (repeat X times) where the process takes weeks, months or even years untill desired results can be achieved. And their manudacturing sites have been reduced to rubble, so that slows things down too.
As I said I'm only a software engineer but didn't Ukraine revolutionize the rules of asymetric warfare by drone iteration? Your statement rings true but I wonder if there are aspiring rocket engineers that really want to test their totally unproven new ideas without the constraint of a military hierarchy in peacetime.
The thing is, Iran doesn’t need to. US maybe can defend their ships, but they can’t defend commercial ships well enough for them to resume regular operations. Even unsuccessful attacks would cause insurance to make it not possible.
Houthis closed their straight some years ago and US wasn’t able to do anything about that neither. And Houthis are nowhere near as capable as Iran.
US gambled on decapitation strike and failed.
It's clearly clogged, could PNE's unclog it?
Yes, that is a fair point. However, the cost of drone versus latest generation ballistic missile that has a chance to reach us naval ship is very different. And in that sense, iterating on a drone is closer to iterating on a line of code because one drone would cost you a thousand bucks and your iteration is a small tweak like adding a different grenade triggering mechanism. Rockets require custom design, custom manufacturing lines, and generally much more difficult to modify and make more effective.
You also have a lot more tries with cheap drones since the target is lower value, so you have hundreds of data points on how each iteration performs vs hitting a naval ship which is an extremely rare event, so it's hard to see whether your iteration on a rocket actually succeeded.
Yes, Iran has already hit several merchant vessels. Their ability to do that occasionally is not in doubt. It's mostly a question of economics. The ship owners and insurers have to decide whether it's worth the risk to run their cargoes through. This has all happened before with the 1980s "Tanker War" between Iraq and Iran: despite some losses the traffic never completely stopped.
And large merchant ships, especially crude oil tankers, and quite tough to sink. When they take a hit it usually just causes some damage.
Iran doesn't want to sink merchant ships. They want to extort money from merchant shipping companies by threatening to sink their ships if they don't pay for 'protection'. All they need is a credible threat, which they already have absent any naval ships willing to stay at point blank range to defend merchant ships.
While there are religious, cultural and political aspects to this, the Iranian govt has primarily become a kleptocracy in recent years. It sustains power through the Revolutionary Guard (aka IRGC) which has grown into what's essentially a state-run, money-making commercial enterprise. It collaborates and colludes with various entities across the Iranian economy which it controls either directly or via bribes and coercion. While reasonable people can debate what the recent attacks on Iran accomplished, they certainly nerfed a large part of the IRGC's income. The new Hormuz extortion scheme isn't just retaliation or vengeance, it's replacing lost income which is urgently needed to prop up the Iranian government.
The Iranians (and their Houthi proxies) have made sustained attacks on them and don't seem to have hit anything.
That's because the US has kept the surface combatants far back from the Persian Gulf for the duration of the war.
As far as we know, they have attempted to run the strait twice and had to turn back because they were under sustained attack.
I assume these ships can defend themselves for some period of time, but eventually the munitions run out, and they become sitting ducks. There is a reason the US Navy fled the Persian Gulf on Feb 26 and has not returned since.
> There is a reason the US Navy fled the Persian Gulf on Feb 26 and has not returned since.
Two US Arleigh Burke Class Destroyers transited Hormuz a couple of weeks ago without damage and are still there last I heard. The Iranians were really upset, but couldn't do anything to stop it.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/2-us-navy-destroyers-transit-st...
Do you have supporting evidence they are still there? I though they exited toward the Gulf of Oman around May 6/7 https://www.centcom.mil/MEDIA/PRESS-RELEASES/Press-Release-V...
I had not heard about that transit, thanks for sharing! The ships mentioned in our two links match up, so it certainly sounds like they spent a some number days in the Persian Gulf and transited back. There was also a transit that occurred in April which mentioned other ships joining the operation in the future, not sure if that happened or not.
If it went so swimmingly, why only twice then, when there are thousands of marooned ships in need of escort services?
Ships don’t need escort services because you don’t give command of oil tankers to risk taking thrill seekers. And insurance isn’t enough when the captain is literally on the ship, potentially getting killed.
Ships need a robust, sustained ceasefire.
Warships vs. insurers willing to underwrite a policy for merchant vessels to transit are definitely two very different things. The Iranian Government has a much higher pain threshold/resolve than Trump, but they're also in a lot more pain with the Gulf of Oman closed. Both sides are losing, who will get tired of it first?
Transiting by themselves is a lot different than escorting merchant vessels. By themselves warships are free to maneuver at any time and do so at military speeds. Convoy duty with merchant vessels requires repeatedly moving slowly along a predictable route for sustained periods. Mobility and speed are two of a warship's main strengths.
The extreme narrowness of the strait right next to so much enemy-controlled shoreline is a unique problem. All of the destroyers and frigates from all the world's navies combined couldn't sustain protecting the massive number of merchant vessels wishing to transit the Strait of Hormuz on a daily basis.
> Transiting by themselves is a lot different than escorting merchant vessels
The second crossing was conformed to be such an escort mission. They shot down everything Iran threw at them, but the cost assymetry still holds.
> All of the destroyers and frigates from all the world's navies combined couldn't sustain protecting the massive number of merchant vessels wishing to transit the Strait of Hormuz on a daily basis.
My point exactly: the argument that the "US Navy isn't as large as it used to be" is moot
Assisting the US with regard to Iran is phenomenally unpopular. The increase in energy prices isn't outweighing people's desire not to have their country assist.
And yet national leaders do phenomenally unpopular things all the time when they decide it's necessary. In this particular case it's mostly moot because none of the other impacted countries really has the capability to act regardless of popularity or lack thereof. Like the UK chose to spend all of their money on nationalized healthcare instead of the military. I don't mean that in a critical or negative way, on balance that might have been the right choice for them. But that choice does constrain their options in a crisis.
Would it not be pretty counterproductive for other countries to assist the US in this case? That seems only likely to prolong / exacerbate the war. The US giving up would be much faster.
Whether it would be counterproductive or not depends on what those other countries are trying to produce. None of them particularly want to pay tribute or protection money to Iran, especially because Iran could then decide to close the strait again or raise the fee at any time. They also don't want to set a precedent that other countries might exploit for charging transit fees through their national waters. And the USA might impose secondary sanctions on any country which makes payments to Iran. So the current stalemate might last quite a while.
The UK spends a lower fraction of its GDP on health than the US (the US is an outlier because of its system).
The UK's NHS is not why it's not taking part in this mess.
"Like the UK chose to spend all of their money on nationalized healthcare instead of the military"
I believe the equation is a bit more complex than that.
Fair enough. There are a multiple additional reasons why the UK can no longer afford an expeditionary military to protect their overseas interests, but the full explanation can't fit into an HN comment. The exact reasons aren't relevant to the current state of affairs, the main point is that they lack the capability to do anything even if they wanted to.
The simple reason is, the british stopped being a big empire in the wave of decolonisation. They lost most of their colonies. Not just for military reasons, but human progress. Self determination of people etc. So had no need or funds to sustain a mighty global fleet anymore.
(And health care sounds like a way more useful thing to fund, than the capability to wage war around the globe)
Maybe the US needs to learn that lesson, too? Right now all the US with all its might achieved is blocking a former free flowing transit.
The US national security establishment is unlikely to learn any lasting lessons from this debacle. So the UK and other impacted countries will need to deal with the situation as it actually exists, not in some hypothetical alternate reality with a less interventionist US foreign policy.
Many countries have said they will help patrol the strait as long as the war stops. Iran wont be able to keep this after the war. Iran wont declare war against the entire world, so they wont shoot down their destroyers.
The attack on Iran was an attack on the globe, causing energy and supply chain issues for everybody, including the attackers.
Other countries are not volunteering to help prosecute more attacks on Iran, because they are already victims of those attacks, and it's bad enough that the USA and israel aren't even apologizing for hurting them, much less paying for the damages.
Thus, the offer to "help patrol the strait" once the USA and israel stop attacking is meant to persuade the USA and israel to stop attacking, not an indication of support for the USA and israel's attacks. Indeed, most countries do not support the USA and israel's attacks on Iran, were totally okay with the status quo, and would have preferred if the USA and israel had not attacked Iran.
So what? Attacking Iran was a stupid move, but the US and Israeli regimes don't particularly care about the other victims whining. If other countries are going to make themselves dependent on fossil fuels from the Persian Gulf region then they'll either have to secure their own sea lines of communication or accept that supplies are unreliable. Asking for apologies or payments won't accomplish anything. That is the geopolitical reality.
> the US and Israeli regimes don't particularly care about the other victims whining
This does seem to be true of israel, but as for the USA, it does not, hence the USA limiting their attacks.
> If other countries are going to make themselves dependent on fossil fuels from the Persian Gulf region then they'll either have to secure their own sea lines of communication or accept that supplies are unreliable.
This sort of rhetoric is why other countries do not support the USA and israel: the other countries already did that, then the USA and israel came and attacked those supply lines, thus attacking those countries.
It strikes me as gaslighting abuser language to attack someone else, then blame it on them for not protecting themselves better. It's better for the attackers to acknowledge their mistakes, apologize for them, and pay restitution.
It's not rhetoric. I'm not trying to convince anyone, I'm just explaining how things work. Since the other countries largely lack the ability to act, their support or lack thereof is irrelevant. The US and Israel have no incentive to apologize or pay restitution; more likely outcomes are that they either escalate, or unilaterally disengage and leave others to clean up the mess.
The world does have another much better option: they can pay the Iranian ransom and call it a day. No need to participate in another war.
You're not thinking through the long-term consequences of that option. The Iranian extortion fees will likely escalate over time. Other countries will use that precedent to impose fees for passage through their territorial waters. Most of the countries that rely on maritime trade would prefer to avoid that outcome, even if it causes deaths and economic pain in the short term.
The world must go multipolar. US has proved us repeatedly that it cannot lead.
It may mean that we'll have to pay tolls everywhere, but that's still better and cheaper than getting f*ked by the US now and then.
> The Iranian extortion fees will likely escalate over time.
Nowhere near as much as the American extortion costs.
> Since the other countries largely lack the ability to act, their support or lack thereof is irrelevant.
How is their support, or lack thereof, irrelevant to our discussion that is literally about whether they support the war? Here is a reminder of the topic, from the post you replied to:
> Assisting the US with regard to Iran is phenomenally unpopular. The increase in energy prices isn't outweighing people's desire not to have their country assist.
That poster and I are just explaining how things work. Seems like you might agree with us here? Indeed, since most other countries do not support the war, their ability to act is irrelevant.
You're really missing the point. Whether they support the war or not is largely irrelevant because support doesn't count for anything.
> You're really missing the point. Whether they support the war or not is largely irrelevant
Am I? No, I don't think so: Whether they support the war or not is literally the topic of discussion, so by definition it can't be irrelevant to the discussion.
> support doesn't count for anything
Whether or not you feel "support doesn't count for anything" is irrelevant to the discussion of whether the support is there in the first place.
It's also sour grapes: the USA tried to gain the support of other countries, and because it failed, the support it failed to get is suddenly "irrelevant". Lol. It sure wasn't irrelevant when the USA was begging and threatening countries to help them.
There are refeniries dependent on the Persian Gulf region(PGR) but the majority of countries are dependent on the the general commodities market of downstream products. The US famously produces more oil than it uses and is not generally receiving fuel that's downstream of the PGR and yet if you look at the gas prices in the US you'll realise that it's not as simple as being reliant on fossil fuels from the PGR.
That's without taking into account other things like high grade helium or specific niche products.
The us imports more crude oil than it exports. An easily looked up fact.
The us does export more refined products than it imports but it’s highly dependent on crude imports for it’s significant refining capacity.
Yes but crude is not really fungible. About 14% of US crude imports are effected which is about 8% of overall crude refining.
By the US not being reliant on imports I was saying that even with just local crude oil production the US can satisfy internal demand for petroleum products.
My wider point is that of course everyone knows that that's not how the economy really works and I was replying to nradov oversimplifying by pointing out that if it was that simple US petrol prices wouldn't have gone up as much as they did. Because even though it's only a few countries with specific refineries that are actually reliant on the straight being open to get their specific required flavour of crude it's everyone in the refined markets that are actually effected by the supply of that crude because it effects the supply those refined products.
The other thing is: even if a country like the UK committed billions of dollars to joining the fight in the gulf - there’s no reason to think it’d lower their energy prices, or earn them any favours from Trump.
Short of a nuclear strike (which isn’t on the cards thankfully) nothing short of a ceasefire can get shipping moving again. Sending more warships doesn’t help with that.
So it’s not just that helping Trump would be incredibly unpopular at home - there’s also no guarantee the huge expense would lower energy bills at all.
this is in no small part because Iran is viewed a bit like America's Poland.
Yes, I know ww2 comparisons are tired but honestly the Lebensraum explanation makes more sense than what trump has said publicly, so here we are...
I really doubt USA is planning to settle Iran and replace Iranians by Americans at conquered land.
Is it even worth to escort tankers? The money you spend on countering cheap drones would be massive, and this administration would likely ask the escorted ships to pay for protection. At that point, they might as well just pay Iran.
The rub is the insurance for the tankers. The providers are looking at the risk and saying “hard pass.” Unless the US govt wants to get in the tanker insurance business they are stuck.
The US government is already in the shipping insurance business. That hasn't helped. War risk insurance is also still available from other carriers.
https://www.insurancebusinessmag.com/us/news/breaking-news/w...
All of this was well known before the war though. The idea that navy is incredibly vulnerable modern anti-ship defenses has been a major consideration in the Taiwan situation for at least a decade (mostly in relation to the ability of the US navy to even operate in the area in a war). More recently, Ukraine has made a great show of sinking navy ships with cheap unmanned surface vehicles
Back in WWII you could sail your navy up a river and expect positive results. In the 21st century, the idea of attacking an enemy-held strait with navy doesn't work
> Even if a warship stops the vast majority of them, only one has to get through to sink a multi-billion dollar ship that takes a decade to replace.
Even worse. They don't need to attack _warships_. They can just attack civilian vessels, especially tanker ships, that don't have any defenses.
A hit on a tanker and the subsequent oil spill would be catastrophic.
suppose one has N independently developed interception systems (from detection till physical interception attempt), each with an intercept success rate of 90%.
a rudimentary calculation then gives the probability of hitting (not sinking) the ship as 0.1^N per launched missile; so it seems that given enough budget to spend on independently developed missile interception systems allows to drive down the penetration success rate arbitrarily.
Multi-billion sounds like $ 10^10; so assuming an attacker can launch say a million missile attempts then the statistical loss would be 0.1^N * 10^10 * 10^6; so the statistical loss can be driven down arbitrarily say to $ 1 by developing ~ 16 independent interception systems.
16 independently developed intercept systems doesn't sound like unobtainium for a vested nuclear power.
furthermore, the development cost of 16 independent intercept systems can be amortized over many more installations than a single ship, it can be amortized over multiple ships, multiple bases, multiple strategic assets across the globe.
You have abstracted things a bit too far.
Unless your interceptor system is unobtainium laser system with unobtainium cooling system, backed-up by unobtainium power source, you are going to run out of interceptor missiles (or even Phalanx bullets) way sooner than 'million missile attempts'.
Quite possibly 100-200 Shaheds + half a dozen proper anti-ship missiles will cause you to turn tail.
equally unobtainium as the 1 M missiles aimed at the ship.
Is it? Russia’s making 60k Shaheds a year, and they are in the middle of an active conflict that has other needs.
60k / year = about 180 per day = 7 per hour.
there are so many options from coil guns, to lasers, to jammers, to non-nuclear EMP's, ... that don't involve the caricature of a million dollar missile intercepting it.
You’re proposing largely experimental or theoretical solutions to a today problem.
And the Ukraine war has demonstrated the issues with jammers.
I agree launching 1 M Shahed drones at a ship would be purely theoretical, and won't solve Iran's today problems...
The bigger issue is the tankers. The US Navy isn't going to be happy patrolling the strait sure, but even if they did they wouldn't be able to protect the tankers enough for it to make sense for tankers to take the risk.
The last time this happened the US opened the strait by accidentally shooting down an Iranian passenger plane after sinking a large chunk of Iranian navy. The Iranians assumed the US shoot the passenger plane down on intentionally as a war crime and assumed the US would was planning to escalate the conflict. This fear deterred further Iranian attacks on tankers.
This isn't going to work this time because the US started the war by performing of the most serious escalations possible, a decapitation strike against top Iranian leadership in a surprise attack using a diplomatic negotiation as cover. The US did this while the strait was open and Iran was considering a peace deal.
Threats of escalation are no longer effective at deterring Iran because Iran now believes the US will take such actions regardless of what Iran does. What does Iranian leadership have to lose by staying the course? Very little. On the other hand if Iranian leadership back down, they loose all their leverage, they look weak internally, they look weak externally and the US might decide to attack them out of the blue again.
This is why decapitation strikes are generally not done. They remove options and they undermine deterrence and paint belligerents into a corner.
On a much smaller scale, this is advice I give to just about everyone: If your decisions won't affect how they treat you, then just do what you want. The fact that they won't like it doesn't matter, they didn't like you before.
This is very good career advice to any juniors reading
> This is why decapitation strikes are generally not done. They remove options and they undermine deterrence and paint belligerents into a corner.
You don't think autocrats have a strong incentive to not die?
The dead leadership can't change their decisions anymore. And the new leadership has no reason to assume that considering a peace deal will keep them alive. The US has already shown that they are happy to break the deal, then a couple years alter kill you anyways. Staying the course at least keeps the internal threats down (which are just as capable of killing any autocrat)
Threatening autocrats might work, but just bolt out of the blue decapitation strikes undermine future threats because they figure they'll get no warning. If you are threatening, you are bluffing and when you aren't bluffing, there are no threats.
Some religions create a strong incentive for adherent to die in certain ways (X number of virgins when you get into heaven, that sort of stuff).
But anyway, once they are dead, your option to target them is gone.
I think "Iran was considering a peace deal" is a bit of a stretch here. Iran was stalling for time, not willing to give anything, and the Strait was indeed open. If they won't give anything now why should they have given anything before.
What does Iran still have to lose? Well, a lot. All their oil is exported through the strait that is now blockaded by the US. The regime while having survived so far and executing thousands of people is still vulnerable over the long term. Leaders can still be hit and potentially the penetrations that led to the success of the initial strikes is still there. Iran's energy sector which is what the regime needs to maintain control (pay salaries etc.) has still not been hit. Other strategic targets that are dual use have also still not been hit.
Iran is never going to capitulate, until it capitulates. Their rhetoric is going to remain that the US has no more levers and can't change anything, because admitting otherwise invites those levers to be engaged. There is some truth to certain individuals likely willing to pay a large price but it's far from clear how deep and wide that extends and what is the tipping point. It is possible that Iran can withstand an oil blockade and even a resumption of air strikes for a very long time but it's also possible they can't. I can't tell and I doubt many people can. There are analysts and various experts with all sorts of opinions.
EDIT: Some of you may remember the Iraqi rhetoric before the US invasion. Then when the US attacked Iraq it crumbled like a paper tiger. The US lost 139 people or so (the coalition lost a bit more) to take Iraq and the Iraqi army largely surrendered or ran away. Assad's huge army with tanks and fighter jets, supported by Russia, collapsed from a bunch of ragtag ex-ISIS guys on Toyotas. The Iranian regime is a lot weaker than what you'd think by listening to them talk because any projection of weakness is the end of them. Ofcourse the US Iraqi invasion ended up very badly after this tactical success and that's the actual problem. Defeating Iran on the battlefield - not so much.
> I think "Iran was considering a peace deal" is a bit of a stretch here.
Iran was considering a peace deal. I agree that the most plausible was they would reject it.
> What does Iran still have to lose? Well, a lot.
The US could do this, sure, but then Iran would have even less to lose. This might work if the US started small and threatened escalation to try to compel Iran, but the US started at massive escalation so any additional airstrikes are likely to be less escalatory and thus less of a threat.
Even worse, there is a fundamental problem with madman theory, if Iran believes they are dealing with a madman, then threats aren't effective because a mad man doesn't keep promises. If you think your opponent is not rational, then you should not expect them to follow cause and effect.
> Iran is never going to capitulate, until it capitulates. Their rhetoric is going to remain that the US has no more levers and can't change anything, because admitting otherwise invites those levers to be engaged.
I agree that we don't know exactly how much pressure is on Iran. Iran historically has been willing to suffer almost any cost. During the Iran Iraq war then sent enormous numbers of teenagers in human wave attacks over and over. It is my estimation that the current war with the US has helped to stabilize the Iranian government and that they benefit more from the war continuing than from a peace deal.
The only military lever the US has left on the table is an invasion of Iran. Maybe limited to the coastline or maybe complete regime change. Trump has not even attempted to bluff that he is doing this.
The Iran/Iraq war is why I made the edit about US vs. Iraq. Just because Iran and Iraq fought for years does not mean Iran or Iraq are able to fight a super power. They can not.
Iran does not think they are dealing with a madman. I don't believe for a second that they think that if all the demands made of them are met someone will harm them just for the fun of it. The maximalists demands. The problem is those maximalists demands run against everything this regime stands for. Not that those demands are bad for the Iranian people, they're actually good. What is true (and it's not a question of madman theory) is that the US and Israel will absolutely take some concessions and be willing to delay dealing with the rest of the problems. That is not irrational. That is 100% rational. And ofcourse the Iranians knows this as well. What the US and Israel want is a stop to the proxy wars, a stop to long range missiles, a stop to the nuclear program and a stop to "exporting the revolution". No workarounds or funny business.
I think the regime is very weak. Conditions in Iran are worse and a population that already wanted them gone now wants them even more gone. Their boisterous rhetoric is a sign of weakness that westerners misinterpret. The more they sound threatening and winning the more they are losing.
> I think the regime is very weak.
The "enemy of my enemy" concept suggests that even if the people hate their government, their immediate pain is being caused by the United States and Israel, so I'm less confident about that.
> Iran does not think they are dealing with a madman.
Iran does think they are dealing with a mad man, or at least a government practicing a policy (as the US administration's apologists have termed it) "intentional volatility".
A far more interesting issue here is the oil supplies available in the Pacific. Brunei, Malaysia, Vietnam, Indonesia, Australia, and others are all ramping up production capacity. Non-OPEC oil production is increasing generally in response. This is likely to undermine the Middle East's ability recovery from current constraints as non-OPEC players gain clout in the markets.
Right now people are talking about China and California have limited supplies. But those are enormous, powerful entities that are deploying multi-pronged strategies to secure energy resources. Look at what they're doing and bet there. You also see developing countries retooling to support less oil-intensive economies, like increasing work-from-home options. Solar and wind are currently feeling weak without their subsidies but are exhibiting staying power as people look to move off more petroleum-dependent energy resources.
As for the tactical issue, the concept people seem to be trying to get at is "cost-per-kill". That needs to come down. Yes, we can kill drones with supersonic interceptors. But spending $6M to shoot down a $6K drone has terrible long-term economics.
> Iran does think they are dealing with a mad man, or at least a government practicing a policy (as the US administration's apologists have termed it) "intentional volatility".
We're going to agree to disagree. I know this is what "people" are saying about the US. But it's not what Iran thinks and it's not what the US is actually doing. This is what Iran wants you to think, as it weakens the US, and what it's going to say. Are you saying that the US will go to war with Iran if all the demands I listed were fully and transparently met? A by the way there is that Europe and Canada (e.g.) also don't think the US administration is "mad". Everyone is playing their little geopolitical and local political games.
I also doubt Iranians think their immediate pains are caused by the US and Israel. Some might but most don't.
I agree with you the energy crisis aspect is overblown (I think that's what you're saying). Supply increases in other places and alternative power sources can displace some usage- certainly over time. The other thing that's going to happen are more strait bypassing pipelines.
EDIT: So the problem isn't mad people or rationality. The problem now, as before, is simply that the Iranian regime is religiously and ideologically unable to give in. Giving in will likely result in their fall even if they were able to give in. This is what's driving the main dynamics here. It's not Iranian negotiation tactics or the US supposed not negotiating in good faith or being "mad". The "mad man" are those that believe that Iran is interested in giving in on its exporting the revolution and the destruction of Israel.
> But it's not what Iran thinks and it's not what the US is actually doing.
I think you need to provide some evidence for your claim. The US had a deal with Iran. A madman ripped up that deal, started a war with a decapitation strike, and is now attempting to negotiate a deal we already had before we spent billions of dollars killing school kids. The “People” you dismiss includes scholars, strategists, experts on international relations.
You could possibly explain trumps behavior as rational if you believe he is trying to avoid getting arrested for pedophilia, but that doesn’t build trust. In any case, the issue of competence comes up. Even if you could trust the person who renamed the Defense department to the War department, that person simply isn’t competent.
Trump promised he would end the deal and he ended the deal. Why is that "madman ripped up that deal"?
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-kept-his...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_withdrawal_from_...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/08/world/middleeast/trump-ir...
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/trump-...
Many including Trump have long said the deal was a terrible deal. You can disagree with that (and you'd be wrong) but I'm not sure how we get from that to your statements.
Enough evidence? What sort of evidence are you looking for? Can you provide evidence for your claims?
EDIT: Also can you prove that we are looking to get the "same deal" we used to have?
The JCPOA was set to expire on 18 October 2025 after which Iran would not have any limits on pursuing their nuclear program. Are you suggesting the US is seeking a deal now that Iran would pause their nuclear program until 2025? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_nuclear_deal#Expiration
EDIT2: The JCPOA:
- Kept the Iranian regime in power with massive capital influx resulting in horrendous human rights abuse and 10's of thousands of deaths.
- Was being violate by the Iranians. Iran had nuclear sites at Turquzabad, Varamin, and Marivan, which they hid from the IAEA (something that was discovered after Israel stole documents about the Iranian nuclear program). Iran hasn't declared those sites and generally refused access to them for years after the fact. When the sites were eventually inspected years later (in 2020) there was evidence of undeclared nuclear material. https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/06/1164291#:~:text=Iran%20...
- Was time bound and didn't address many other issues.
- Trump said he would withdraw from the agreement. That was his election promise. Trump also said on multiple occasions (and in fact it had been US policy forever) that Iran would never be allowed to have nuclear weapons.
Any rational person adding would agree that the US attack on Iran is in line with its long standing policy. They would also agree that Iran had no other reason for the amount of highly enriched Uranium they amassed other than the manufacturing of nuclear weapons. So I'm not seeing the irrationality here. Ofcourse if your position is that Iran should have nuclear weapons, should oppress their people, and should use proxies to attack others then from your perspective this is an unwelcome development. It's still rational though.
"I'm gonna stab myself in the face!" - stabs self in face
Sure, clearly not a madman if he tells you he's going to do it first. o_O
If reasons are given, and it's an election promise, and you win the election, and you deliver on your promise... Most people who say this is good and how democracy should work. I understand that you disagree with the decision and disagree with the reasons but something doing something you disagree with is not the definition of mad.
You seem to have missed the reference to Madman Theory above, interpreting it as a literal commentary on someone's / some group's sanity.
Whether or not actual mental deficiency is involved here is irrelevant; the strategy is the same whether performed intentionally or otherwise. Unfortunately, its track record is dismal in both cases.
> Iran does not think they are dealing with a madman.
No one knows but the Iranian leadership. The Iranian leadership has been famously bad at modeling the intentions and motivations of other nations leaderships. A bolt of the blue decapitation strike, followed by the US having plan if Iran closes the straits which is the obvious response by Iran, does at face value appear to be the work of a madman. Now in the US we might conclude that Trump and Hegseth are just wildly incompetent and unprepared, but it seems likely to me that Iranian leadership see irrationality instead of incompetence.
We're well within the realm of speculation but: The Iranian leadership has prepared for decapitation attacks which is partly why they weren't as effective. Their so called "Mosaic Defense" was built for that. They have seen what Israel dealt to Hezbollah. So they must have known this would be an option. There was also no question that at some point force was going to get used, at least by Israel. Israel accounted for about half of the firepower (and really 100% of the firepower on Tehran pretty much) and for the entirety of the decapitations strikes. Israel said on multiple occasions it will attack Iran if Iran didn't stop pursuing its nuclear program. With Hezbollah weakened that threat/lever was less effective. Israel was very worried about Hezbollah's retaliation. Israel had already decimimated Iranian anti-aircraft defenses. So all of this is expected, rational, and what Iran accounted for. I agree the degree of US participation was a surprise but not a zero probability event, certainly after their participation in the last round, and their massive military buildup.
Likewise the closing of the strait was no surprise. These sort of scenarios are planned for and there is zero doubt the closing of the strait was a scenario considered by the US and Israel military planners.
Not a ton we can say other than that. Maybe the US and Israel thought the blow would be so hard the regime would crumble. Maybe they thought Iran wouldn't dare. Maybe they thought that if Iran closed the strait they'd be able to reopen it by force. Indeed this could be where over-confidence, or incompetence, or inexperience, comes in on the US side. It's also that one can never fully predict how things would develop. There could have been over-optimism and under-estimation of the Iranians ability to withstand the air campaign or to effectively close the strait.
All that said, both sides are rationally pursuing their interests. Iran's regime wants to survive and it wants to keep building missiles and nuclear weapons and expand it's religious and political influence. The US and Israel want to put a stop to this before Iran has an arsenal of nuclear weapons mounted on long range ballistic missiles. Both sides will do their best to not tell you what they think or what their plans are (and the Iranians are definitely much better at this than the current US admin).
US downing of Iran passenger plane was as much an accident as the triple tap they did of the girls school in Iran recently or the use of nuclear bomb on Nagasaki and Hiroshima in the past when Japan was already surrendering ie it was a terror tactic. I think americans have the false belief that US is some of kind of benevolent force acting for the good of the world and promoting freedom and democracy. Where as it is an empire that only looks at what is good for itself.
People who are "already surrendering" don't need to be nuked twice.
Yes we are in agreement
It was an accident, you can read the investigation. No one claims Nagasaki or Hiroshima were accidents.
> I think americans have the false belief that US is some of kind of benevolent force acting for the good of the world and promoting freedom and democracy.
A state can still make mistakes without saying it is good in everyway
> US downing of Iran passenger plane was as much an accident as the triple tap they did of the girls school in Iran recently or the use of nuclear bomb on Nagasaki and Hiroshima
The first and second event are undeniably different than the third in at least one crucial respect, the third was never even claimed to be unintentional by anyone involved - while the first two were repeatedly claimed to be unintentional by everyone involved. Of course, that doesn't prove they were unintentional but not even mentioning the accused's claims of innocence as you assert guilt does prove you're not presenting the comparison honestly.
> I think americans have the false belief that US is some of kind of benevolent force acting for the good of the world and promoting freedom and democracy.
I haven't thought that since I was a teenager, quite awhile ago. At certain points in history the U.S. did sometimes promote the cause of freedom and democracy but it was usually when doing so also aligned with U.S. strategic interests. A notable example was Radio Free Europe (aka Radio Liberty) started in 1950. The U.S. wisely realized the best counter to internal propaganda and totalitarian repression was just telling the truth, so RFERL was (almost always) genuinely unbiased, helpful for the cause of freedom AND good for U.S. strategic interests.
It's also worth mentioning that the Nagasaki bombing is often used as a case study on the ethics of war. They use it as a case study because, once I understood the full historical context of the war and what the U.S. side knew at the time, the decision to drop the A-bomb wasn't as clear-cut as I'd always thought. After spending four weeks on it in an advanced ethics class, my eventual assessment changed from absolute certainty to feeling the Hiroshima bomb was probably reasonably justified but that the Nagasaki bomb was not. The class started out 100% opposed to both but after four weeks was nearly evenly split on Nagasaki.
Makes sense that Trump would shutoff Voice of America since it was originally designed to counter Nazi and then Communist propaganda.
> After spending four weeks on it in an advanced ethics class, I feel the Hiroshima bomb was probably reasonably justified but that the Nagasaki bomb was not.
In the full context I'm kind of surprised there was any kind of split twixt the two given the full context that both H & N were on a very long target list being systematically worked through and both were destined to be destroyed and effectively levelled regardless of whether untrialled prototype nuclear weapons were tested on those cities or not.
As were 72 other cities (including Tokyo) prior to either H or N being touched.
ie. In the full ethical context the deeper question is really about programs of total war / total destruction rather than the edge case of using two targets as test sites for novel weapons.
I didn't want to digress too much on that sidebar but the split on Nagasaki was mostly centered around the number of days between Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I think nearly everyone would have agreed the second bomb was probably justified had it been dropped later. Many felt that given more time the Japanese side might have changed their minds without the second bomb.
Let's minimise the digression, I'll move on happily enough ..
I'll note that it appears as if the events were framed to your class as two events predestined to have an excessive impact that deserved pause and consideration rather than as (in the context of contemporary events) two orthogonal weapon designs being field tested and squeezed into an already ongoing, months in the execution, campaign of systematic destruction of urban areas one after the other.
Eg: Was it stressed that had the Nagasaki bomb not been dropped the city would still have been destroyed to the same degree via heavy explosives and incendiaries?
Honestly, it's been a few decades and I don't recall many details (other than there being a lot of details). I don't remember if it was directly stated Nagasaki would have been destroyed with or without the A-bomb but I do recall reviewing a shocking analysis on the devastating results of fire-bombing Japanese cities and the escalating run-rate of civilian casualties as air superiority over Japan was established. I also remember seeing large estimates of U.S. troop and Japanese civilian casualties should the allies be forced to do a ground invasion city by city.
The allies had good reason to believe much of the Japanese population would fight block by block without a formal surrender by the Emperor and the Japanese ambassador had privately conveyed that the Japanese high-command would die in honor before surrendering in shame (which he sincerely believed). This was supported by the number of kamikaze pilots which seemed endless and continued to shock U.S. commanders.
> The allies had good reason to believe much of the Japanese population would fight in the streets without a formal surrender by the Emperor and the assessments were that the Japanese high-command would rather die in honor than surrender in shame.
That's not something that's ever been in contention, it's very much the reason that was put forward to justify the ongoing and (relative to A-bomb) cheaper conventional weapons HE-I bombing missions.
Hence my pointing toward that bombing program as the real root of inspection re: ethics.
The nuclear program (put into motion by the Allied MAUD committee) was intended for the German theatre and after consuming vast resources was left hanging when Germany surrendered prior to the Trinity device test .. the argument to test the two weapon designs was (at that time) very much a zero friction zero consideration kind of thing that dovetailed into the existing targeting lists.
Worth bearing in mind that either or both weapon devices may very easily have failed in the field.
My interest in that event lies with it being a prime example of something that just flowed into happening at the time and was later retconned into being some kind of deeply considered a priori known to be significant and pivotal event.
The administration knew this very well. They've been swinging the markets wildly and intentionally several times and they and their buddies have made billions from it.
> United States using its military to keep international waters open
Being a little pedantic, as per my knowledge, the Strait of Hormuz is not “international waters”. It’s territorial waters belonging to Iran and Oman. AFAIK, Iran hasn’t ratified UNCLOS either, and claims it is not subject to it.
No, the Strait is international waters and always have been.
Wikipedia says it's been Iranian/Omani territorial waters for quite a while:
> In 1959, Iran altered the legal status of the strait by expanding its territorial sea to 12 nmi (22 km) and declaring it would recognize only transit by innocent passage through the newly expanded area. In 1972, Oman also expanded its territorial sea to 12 nmi (22 km) by decree. Thus, by 1972, the Strait of Hormuz was completely "closed" by the combined territorial waters of Iran and Oman.
Wikipedia does not say that the Strait is Iranian/Omani territorial waters. Wikipedia says that Iran and Oman claim that the Strait is Iranian/Omani territorial waters.
Claiming it does not make it so.
The Strait may well have some, but the traffic separation scheme for shipping is absolutely in Omani territorial waters, and another part of traversing the Strait includes passing through Iranian territorial waters.
Ok, so just de facto iranian.
However, I believe Oman also collects fees. So in practice the distinction wrt shipping is moot
Oman doesn't collect fees...
> Ok, so just de facto iranian.
No, the route is entirely outside of Iranian waters. They attacked ships that were in Oman waters and put mines in Oman waters and now shoot at anyone trying to removing those mines in Oman waters. Nobody, not even the Iranian government, claims that is their water.
ok, I guess the strait is just straight iranian
All straits other than the Bosporus (which has some additional rights to Turkey given the proximity to a major city) are international waters for the purposes of free transit, under the Montreux Convention.
The Montreux Convention only covers the Bosporus and Dardanelles straits. Not all straits in the world.
Why is US blocking hormuz straits then?
The US is is not blocking the Strait of Hormuz. There don't appear to be any US warships even in the Strait at the moment. What the US is doing is enforcing a partial blockade against Iran, largely in waters southeast of the Strait. We can argue about whether this is a good policy but let's not make things up.
https://www.centcom.mil/MEDIA/PRESS-RELEASES/Press-Release-V...
The US is not blocking the strait because they'd be at the bottom of the sea if they got closer lol
It is ridiculous that countries like Australia (a party to a convention) have a say in whether Turkey should or should not pass ships through the strait. This looks like a legacy of colonization era. This convention should be repelled, and the new agreement should be made by Russia and Turkey and other Black sea countries ignoring the interests of colonizers.
> Iran hasn’t ratified UNCLOS either, and claims it is not subject to it.
Which isn't unique. Bunch of countries haven't ratified it and aren't legally bound by it but do follow it in spirit. US, Turkey, UAE, Israel etc.
Do you really think the US wouldn't abandon it in a heartbeat if it became a matter of strategic necessity?
Countries that haven't signed do violate it. Israel prevents ships free transit to the Gaza strip. US does naval blockades and blows up boats.
Naval blockades of enemy ports during war are legal, that is what USA and Israel argue they are doing. That is not what Iran is doing, they are blocking fully neutral ships from going in other countries waterways.
US at war? We are past the 60 days for a military operation. From US law perspective, it’s illegal. From the constitutional perspective only congress can declare war which they haven’t.
> From US law perspective, it’s illegal
But US law is not international law. Internationally you are at war, whatever you call it internally doesn't matter to me.
International law only applies when you ratify a treaty so it becomes domestic law. Thats how treaties work, they actually laws of the country hence the term ratification into domestic law. Why US doesn't violate international law on land mines and cluster bombs. US never signed that treaty.
Are we at war with Cuba? US navy had been blockading the island from receiving fuel.
If you perform acts of war then you are at war even if nobody uses that word.
And Iran is blocking a strategic chokepoint during a war of defense, pressuring their enemies due to the war being illegal and unprovoked. See how easy it is to argue?
> It’s territorial waters belonging to Iran and Oman.
The trick is that it's still an 'international strait', or a segment of water that forms the only connection between two areas of high seas -- in this case the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman. The principle of freedom of navigation establishes that innocent traffic (civilian traffic, and even warships in peacetime) have a right to use the strait to go from one body of international water to the other.
Iran may claim that it doesn't have to abide by that right, but international law is never self-executing. One question to be resolved by this war is whether Iran will ultimately recognize the right to navigation in any settlement (and then choose to abide by said settlement).
International law isn’t worth the time someone spent to write the words. It means approximately nothing. OPEC is a cartel, for example.
OPEC is not against international law.
International Law now has no value when the America-Israel alliance has been skirting said laws to commit mass atrocities in recent history.
international law is an agreement between both parties.
I think that agreement broke when the US illegally bombed Iran, including a girls' school, and killed their leader.
I'm not making the case they should follow international law you are.
I'm not, either.
You're saying international law has no value to iran because the US and Isreal have no violated it. Im saying Iran commited to violating international law long ago and thus in a war with Iran no one would expect international law to be followed by either party. Sounds like you agree with the last part but maybe disagree with the first claim?
As the nation that was attacked first, They have an unimpeachable argument for wanting to defend the rest of their territorial waters. The ludicrously escalatory rhetoric from the US President has turned this into an existential conflict. I can't take finger-wagging against Iran seriously to be honest, the idea that western powers would scrupulously adhere to international mores if subjected to a full-on kinetic attack by another nation state is absurd on its face.
> They have an unimpeachable argument for wanting to defend the rest of their territorial waters
They are shooting down neutral tankers outside of their territorial water, so stop with the bullshit. If they only shot ships in their own waters traffic in Hormuz would already have returned to normal.
> the idea that western powers would scrupulously adhere to international mores if subjected to a full-on kinetic attack by another nation state is absurd on its face.
We know they are, we have Ukraine as an example they don't start attacking neutral nations civilian vessels just because Russia attacked them. Only evil regimes do that, you don't "defend yourself" by committing terrorism against innocent neutral country ships that aren't shipping anything related to the country you are fighting.
There is no reason at all for Iran to start shooting ad Indian ships just because USA attacked Iran, no western nation would defend themselves that way, many western nations has been attacked and conquered in history so we know how they act.
Ukraine doesn't have a strategic choke point that gives them asymmetric economic leverage. Imagine that Brazil's and the world's economy was intrinsically linked to exports from the Mediterranean region, and China decided to launch a full-on war against Spain in concert with Belgium. What do you think Spain would do, sit there and suffer or make use of its geography? How do you think Spain came to be a powerful nation in the first place?
> evil GMAFB, the US launched this war in a joint effort with Israel and smoked a school full of children on the very first day. Iran is pursuing its strategic interests by exploiting its geography and inflicting pain on countries on the other side of the Persian gulf who chose to ally themselves with the US and allow the US to bases from which to launch war.
One can argue that they have a "good reason" for ignoring international rules, but I would voice a risk here. Other nations that control important straits are watching what is happening and many of them could benefit more by taxing their straits than allowing free passage, and as more do it, the benefit only increase. It is a kind of prisoner dilemma in that defecting becomes the best strategy as soon anyone else start defecting.
As with other recent trade wars, the value of this kind of behavior goes down when other nations start to retaliate. A ship might be able to pay the insurance from Iran, but can they afford to pay the same fee for each time they pass some other nations territorial waters? At some point the US blockade won't matter and the profitability of the venture will be zero.
> The principle of freedom of navigation establishes that innocent traffic
"freedom of navigation" seems to be from UNCLUS no? So why should a country (Iran) that didn't ratify UNCLUS care about the terms it binds it's signatories to?
If Iran doesn't want to observe the terms of the UNCLOS (regardless of whether they have ratified it or not) then their territorial waters claims revert to the older 3NM limit. They can't have it both ways. Of course, in practice those legalisms don't matter without a means of enforcement.
It's prohibited under international law to attack a sovereign nation, like the US has done to Iran, so the point of Iran closing the Strait in response to this is very much moot.
Or is it posible this administration just took a win-win-win position?
1 - US oil and gas companies make money as oil proces rise. The US is the largest producer in the world.
2 - China loses it's major source of oil and gas.
3 - Iran gets neutralized. It may not look like it now, but it will probably end up that way.
3 - Iran moderates are neutralized, so hardcore fanatics from IRGC take over. Loss for literally everybody.
Otherwise, 1) and 2) are true, Europe is bleeding through the nose with buying US oil and depending on its current antagonist, not smart long term situation that we need to move away asap.
Somebody in US government is making literal billions on shorts and various trade deals just before major announcements keep happening, those are not that hard to see in markets. Current top public bet on this is trumps family and his close coworkers, and their families. If you ever want a witch hunt on traitors and collaborators against US citizens and society, smart up, forget Wall street and just follow those money very directly to culprits.
Even if this analysis were accurate, I would feel much better if the administration had intentionally gone this route rather than accidentally blundering into it.
1 - A win for the shareholders of U.S. oil companies, close to half of which aren’t even Americans, but not a win for Americans even on a purely financial basis given that they are paying more for gas and food. 2 - China hasn’t lost its source of gas and oil. They have more reserves than the rest of the world put together and can outlast every other country, and they’re still getting shipments. 3 - The exact opposite of reality. Iran’s potential to acquire nuclear weapons was one of their biggest dangers for the rest of the world. But with this the U.S. has given Iran a new actual power that had been conjectured but never realized. Control over 20% of the world’s fuel supply and large percentages of other critical raw materials.
People can try to come up with 4D chess explanations for the Trump admin's actions here all they want, but the truth is this is 0D chess.
Just a massive strategic blunder, one for the history books.
Any minor damage to China is tiny compared to the strategic loss America has undergone here
You don’t permanently remove 20% of the worlds oil, 30% of the fertilizer while having a incredibly financialized economy and somehow get on the other side of it healthy and rich.
For one, this would be the end of the Petrodollar and with it the ability to have huge trade deficits siphoning more than 1 trillion in goods and services from the rest of the world in exchange for fancy green paper.
>US oil and gas companies make money as oil proces rise. The US is the largest producer in the world.
Its a win for me laughing at Americans spending more on oil based products.
>China loses it's major source of oil and gas.
Its like 12% of Chinas Oil. China is 90% of Irans oil market. I think people get this around the wrong way.
>Iran gets neutralized. It may not look like it now, but it will probably end up that way.
Why is death and economic destruction a good thing? Like 99.99999% of these effects are worn by iranian citizens, not their government.
Seems like piracy is more about the land than the sea. I can't think of any major american military action against piracy aside from actions against somali terrorists. Seems piracy as it was known historically died out as the old historic pirate havens of say Tortuga or Outer Banks went from places of anarchy to places that were controlled by some government in some capacity. And that is exactly where we see the somali piracy today: here is a state that is unable to govern its land mass and thus there is piracy, even with the american navy directly taking action against this piracy. Seemingly this has nothing to do with the american navy at all, even though that is supposedly one of its mandates and it takes actions in the spirit of advancing these anti piracy goals. The fundamentals of why piracy does and doesn't occur don't really change. It seems it comes down to government capacity on land, not from projecting naval power.
I mean that is ignoring the American military experience with Islamic pirates and Islamic slavers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbary_corsairs
That also supports the government capacity argument. The US was able to make peace with the barbary states and extract a right of safe passage assurance from them. Why? Because the leadership of these states had enough government capacity to compel their domestic pirates into agreeing to the terms their government dictated. Today, in Somalia, we see what the lack of government capacity manifests as. I'm sure the government of Somalia does in fact have laws against piracy. The fact they aren't being enforced, and the pirate industry there exists, shows what happens when law and agreements meet the hard realities that there needs to be government capacity to see them enforced and heeded.
The Islamic governments there always had the capacity though contrary to your central point. As evidenced by the many treaties there were entered into by those governments, not by the Islamic pirates/slavers.
From the writings at the time 'Muslim sources, however, sometimes refer to the "Islamic naval jihad"—casting the conflicts as part of a sacred mission of war under Allah'
These Islamic pirate/slavers are the SPECIFIC pirates that "The Barbary threat led directly to the United States founding the United States Navy in March 1794.". These are the specific type of pirates that the US Navy was founded to combat to protect ships being seized and their crews sold into slavery.
Of course it gets a little muddy when you consider the europeans also had state sponsored privateers. I would not consider state sponsored pirates like this to be the same as pirates who operated against the interests of basically all states and required a little corner of the earth free of anyone's control to operate. Kind of a different phenomenon with different incentives and funding structures and goals.
Let us not confuse north africa with the horn of africa. Two wholly different people with different cultures, motivations, and practices.
> somali terrorists
Pirates are many things, maybe even criminals under international law, but terrorists they are certainly not.
Are they not commingled with Al Shabaab, Daesh, and the Houthis?
Sir do you just think all muslims are the same people? What else ties these groups together?
No? I'm talking about who is sponsoring the somali pirates. I'm not connecting them to these groups. They are already connected to these groups in particular. I didn't just name three random terrorist organizations. These groups are all operating in somalia right now.
I'm not sure the extent to which either Daesh or Andar Allah are formally operating in Somalia, but I apologize if I cast unfair aspersions. I don't believe there are any formal or uniform or centralized funding of the pirates at all, though—many were simply fisherman who could no longer make a living. This is just my understanding however. I'm also open to the idea that the pirates aren't just from Somalia.
The level of ordinance is enough evidence that there is significant outside support. RPG-7s do not grow on trees in Somalia. I hazard to guess an RPG on the black market is also a great expense to anyone who isn't being given one by one of these groups connected to the arms trade in effort to advance their goals or position in some way.
They cost under $500/launcher: https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/one-for-history-books...
$300/launcher here: https://www.un.org/depts/los/nippon/unnff_programme_home/fel...
A decade ago it wasn't terrorist groups funding them.
Seems cheap to you and me but that is about the full annual income of someone from somalia. It isn't realistic for an individual to purchase one without external support.
> full annual income of someone from somalia.
Not if they seize a cargo ship it isn't. Criminals can afford the tools to commit crimes by using those tools to commit crimes.
> The level of ordinance is enough evidence that there is significant outside support.
"I have no evidence, but I can't think of other scenarios so it must be true!"
Well it isn't like you can do very much hunting with an RPG-7. Its purpose is to destroy material that you cannot with small arm fire and that sort of limits the intended purpose and customer.
Well why do you think they want to raid these ships? To buy more RPG-7s, of course!
But seriously, if they were being funded by other groups, why pirate in the first place?
Same reasons as the context of this photo (1). One party would like to advance some geopolitical interest, another party is willing to do it if they are paid and supported as such. No different than any other business deal.
1. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b8/Reagan_s...
Is there any evidence of this? Why would pirates not advance this claim?
I think it's much more likely it's just easy money and is relatively cheap to pull off.
By that standard, pretty much every nation state in the world would be considered terrorist. I'm not against that definition, but i'm rather sure you didn't mean it.
> maybe even criminals under international law
Piracy has to be the canonical example of criminals under international law...
there is only one man who is surprised and he is Orange and Extremely Ignorant
Iran defeated the US the minute trump was sworn in.
In a sense, this is the defeat of the US by bin Laden - it's been a steady slide until the trump cliff since then.
Side note that the US offered the same plan as Iran. Selling insurance (in USD) to shippers to transit the Strait. They have done $0 in business.
https://www.ft.com/content/eabadd1a-a712-4b44-99bf-bb50eb753...
Say what you want but it seems like Iran are the ones playing 4D chess here.
> this administration clearly had no idea what they were getting themselves into
All of the advisors in the room with Trump (Cheung, Caine, etc.) told him explicitly after the meeting with Netanyahu that attacking Iran was a horrible idea. His military advisors told him that Strait closure was the most obvious consequence.
The root cause here, is that all decisions are being made by a single biological neural network with a really high error rate, which is increasing.
This outcome is still favorable for nethyanandu and he used trump and USA as tool.
The gamble, which was certainly egged on by Israel, was that two stars aligned and it was high time to strike Iran.
The first star was intense civilian unrest, the months leading up to the strikes was marked by riots and protests.
The second star was the meeting of Iran's top brass in one spot at one time, both of which Israel knew about.
It was almost certainly sold to Trump as a domino event, where the US would blow the head off and the people of Iran would ravage the body. On paper it looks clean, and certainly he was riding on a high after the swift coup in Venezuela.
Of course though, that did not happen, and now he had to go to China to beg under a thin veil for them to pressure Iran to back off. Trump rolled a critical failure on what appeared to be a moderate-low risk attempt.
> what appeared to be a moderate-low risk attempt.
It looks like it appeared that way to Trump. But you make it sound like it appeared that way to most people. As one of those "most people", I can say that's wrong. The reaction of most people was "WTF is Trump thinking?".
It's been clear he's not the sharpest tool in the shed for a while. But he should be surrounded by very bright people for are able to provide frank and fearless advice. Looks like he fired most of those people, and whats left have been cowered into sycophants.
He is surrounded by very sharp people. They just happen to have undeclared dual allegiances to Israel. Who this war is helping achieving their regional objectives.
The chaos and stupidity narrative only mask and sustain the far grimmer reality of this operation.
> The chaos and stupidity narrative only mask and sustain the far grimmer reality of this operation.
Can you elucidate?
The advancement of the Greater Israel project. US taxpayers directly and indirectly funding the regional expansion of a foreign state led by a genocidal maniac, which has no clear benefit to themselves.
Talk of the chaos and stupidity of Trump just obfuscates this grim political reality. Ie, focusing the narrative on political and operational incompetency misdirects the citizenry from the fact that money from their labor that could go to healthcare, education, and building community is diverted to an aggressive foreign entity.
The plan was ostensibly to distract and insider trade. Winning would be counter productive anyway.
The power wasn't there in the first place if the administration couldn't defend Hormuz. It's all the same capital and resources that prior administrations had. The actual blunder was exposing that weakness to the world. We could have done nothing and reputation would've carried the idea that we could.
> It's all the same capital and resources that prior administrations had.
Is it? Depending on how far back into "prior administrations" you go, the modern US Navy is a shadow of itself.
This leads to an interesting thought experiment.
Using conventional weapons only, what prior year's US Navy could beat the 2026 US Navy in combat?
That doesn't seem like the relevant question. A navy barely progressing as the technology progresses by leaps and bounds is just as problematic when you're measuring its strength compared to its adversaries.
Separate discussion. I'm addressing the comment that the US Navy of today is a shadow of its former self.
No, the same discussion.
It's fair to say the British navy is a shadow of the former British navy that more or less conquered the world. It's also obvious the current one with an aircraft carrier would beat the former one with wooden ships and cannons.
The same applies to the US navy even when the difference is the quality and quantity of integrated circuits and not the difference between a telescope and radar.
You're not making a cogent argument.
From most perspectives (civilian, political, financial), the "better" military is the one that wins. Your'e arguing that a navy can be a shadow of its former glory and still also be what is understood as "better" by most people. This doesn't make sense.
phil21 makes a relevant point that navies are used for different purposes, and the current US Navy is tuned for a different task than that which it currently faces in the Gulf.
It's both a shadow of it's former self, as well as being optimized for force projection vs. freedom of navigation/securing free trade.
It's probably even more powerful than peak cold war/WWII US Navy at force projection while adjusting for technology and adversary capability. Cruise missiles, much more capable aircraft, larger carriers, etc.
At securing the high seas or forcing open trade routes? Just the sheer loss in number of deployable warships available to surge into an area is nowhere comparable. That and logistical capability is nearly nonexistent and relies mostly on nearby basing vs. tankering/supply ships. Not to mention a much larger Merchant Marine they used to be able to fall back on.
There simply is not the ability for sustained operations at sea at any scale any longer, even if you had unlimited munitions to expend. You can certainly float a couple aircraft carriers 700 miles off some coast and keep them on station more or less indefinitely as you rotate them out, but that's really about it. And that's really the only sort of war the US Navy has had to fight for the past 30+ years.
Not necessarily. It's a matter of risk. How many resources do we want to commit? Are we comfortable putting a large number of troops in Iran? Are we comfortable with major losses as we try to enforce against drones and mines?
It's not that I think any of these things are wise, but this is part of the risk calculus you make when you decide to wage war. It's more like a debate: if you don't have a plan for uncomfortable questions you're a poor debater. The US has the physical means to prevent the closure, but I think it's quite clear that this administration ignored known risks and acted recklessly. And more importantly, apparently had very little contingency planning if things didn't go their way.
> The actual blunder was exposing that weakness to the world.
The world already knew.
The real strength of the prior admins was in simply not needing the military force. The 2015 Iran nuclear deal is a relevant example here. It didn't cost the US anything.
It did, however, allow the Khomeini regime to murder its own citizens with impunity. So someone paid.
That same regime is still allowed to murder its own citizens, now more so than before. The US attacks have only made the regime stronger.
> The US attacks have only made the regime stronger.
This claim is not supported by evidence. The "best" we can say about the regime is that it persists. So far.
The Khomeini regime was always allowed to murder its own citizens, within its borders, with impunity. That's one of the priviledges of a sovereign state.
I mean it really didn't get us anything either. It's not like Iran stopped working towards nuke when they signed it.
Yes they did, to the best of anyone's knowledge they did adhere to the nuclear deal until it was cancelled by Trump. Do you have sources that contradict this?
The power is there, they just don't want to pay the cost in terms of money, lives, and polling popularity. This was done on the whim of a man-child throwing a tantrum, backed by his deeply racist hatred towards Obama. There was no plan other than his usual bullying tactics. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad we are not investing insane amounts of money and large lives into this, but we absolutely could win this if we wanted to pay the cost.
The post-WW2 American-led world order was, at times, a shared world order between the United States and Soviet Union. Free trade, perhaps, was "enforced" by the United States Navy but that was for the benefit of all nations and it seems to me to have been something pretty widely understood.
If the US military fails to keep international waters open, that harms everyone, and everyone more so than the United States. There's this continued misunderstanding that America did this or that, or securing global shipping is for America to do, or what have you. But you can't have your cake and eat it too here. If you accept American hegemony of the seas and the associated benefits, you have to also accept American action in places like Iran. It's a package deal - you get both or neither. There seems to be a misunderstanding about that, I hope it's a little more clear now.
> It would be quite stunning Iran defeated the united states in this sense.
To this second point, the US can just keep the Strait closed. No big deal. It isn't really possible for Iran to forcibly win here because while the US has higher gas prices, we're the #1 oil and gas market and we can stomach the pain much longer less you get complaints from MAGA/far-left anti-American types. Iran would simply watch their entire economy collapse, while Americans are paying a couple bucks more for cheeseburgers and milkshakes.
But the perspective that the US would be defeated is the incorrect one. In fact, what would be defeated here is that very American-led world order. For the US to be defeated here, as so many seem to rejoice at the prospect of, you would also lose American naval power and security, and instead each and every country would have to spend a lot more human capital and treasure to secure their own shipping and trade arrangements, because there would be no America to come help and save the day. No more NATO. No more caring about Taiwan or Ukraine (remember Iran helps Russians kill Ukrainians?) or getting involved in expeditionary affairs. You can not separate these things. Iran happens for the same reason NATO happens. The world will be much more transactional - pay to play and a global American security tax. A scenario like the one in Iran, in which a genocidal dictatorship that is all to happy to steal tribute from weaker nations simply becomes the norm, if not simply more common, and the EU or China or whoever can deal with it.
So I'd say, be careful to join other isolationists and smugly cheer for the US to "lose" to Iran, and in which case you can expect much worse as the US says "forget it" and only seeks to protect its own vital interests without regard to the rest of the world - the Trumpian and far left view which is a marriage of convenience.
Is it truly 'US Navy securing safe shipping for everyone'? From whom? Where?
When was the last time they actually did that?
> 'because there would be no America to come help and save the day'
No more American meddling would result in much saner and safer world. Wherever they stick their fingers, the instability and wars ensue.
> pay to play and a global American security tax That's the current world.
>Is it truly 'US Navy securing safe shipping for everyone'? From whom? Where?
Imagination land.
>No more American meddling would result in much saner and safer world. Wherever they stick their fingers, the instability and wars ensue.
We need the USA to defend us against the results of the USA defending us.
The US is not:
Forcing Iran to obtain a nuclear weapon, load up on missiles and drones and then use them to attack Gulf neighbors, destabilize Lebanon, Syria, or Iraq, or fund terrorists as recognized by both the United States and European Union (Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis).
Forcing North Korea to murder and starve its citizens and deprive them of medicine, food, and access to education and more. Nor is it forcing North Korea to go send Korean soldiers to die for Putin's war in Ukraine.
Speaking of - the US isn't forcing Russia to invade and murder Ukrainians.
The US didn't force Maduro to come to power and create a humanitarian crises in Venezuela resulting in 1/3rd of the population fleeing as refugees, nor did the US force their economy to be mismanaged for the enrichment of Maduro and his cronies.
The US isn't forcing China to threaten Taiwan.
There are plenty of other things. But without the US, China invades Taiwan, Ukraine falls (don't forget, it was the English and Americans who were flying in weapons and other equipment round-the-clock while Europe was having meetings to decide what to meet about), Iran obtains a nuclear weapon and seizes the Strait permanently or at least kicks off a nuclear arms race in the Gulf, and thugs like Maduro continue to kill and impoverish people throughout South America.
>Forcing Iran to obtain a nuclear weapon
It is actually. Iran can see that their only viable path to stability is nuclear deterrence. This attack makes it more obvious.
>North Korea to murder and starve its citizens and deprive them of medicine, food, and access to education and more
No murder and starvation are US domestic policies.
>The US didn't force Maduro to come to power and create a humanitarian crises in Venezuela resulting in 1/3rd of the population fleeing as refugees, nor did the US force their economy to be mismanaged for the enrichment of Maduro and his cronies.
How far down into non sequitur are you at this point.
>If the US military fails to keep international waters open, that harms everyone, and everyone more so than the United States.
Only in the sense that the US has forgotten its a participant in trade. But that seems to be pretty standard at this point.
>There's this continued misunderstanding that America did this or that, or securing global shipping is for America to do, or what have you.
I honestly would be happy if the world implemented the total blockade on the US that it seems to desperately imagine would be the best outcome for its own economy. Like some giant north korea. Seal the US shut and watch its economy explode with amazing mercantilist economic forces.
It would be nice if they hadn't stuck their dick in this particular bee hive. Its not that we collectively expect the US to secure shipping, but that we would be happy if the US didn't take actions seemingly calculated to make life worse for everyone else on the planet.
>So I'd say, be careful to join other isolationists and smugly cheer for the US to "lose" to Iran, and in which case you can expect much worse as the US says "forget it" and only seeks to protect its own vital interests
I am just waiting for the EU\UK\AU to get its shit together and clean up Trumps mess, so we can move to the point where the global order works without the US. The US didn't provide these services just for the fun of it, its largely just a soft power move, to engender the willing support of other nations. We can and will have successful global trade without the USA. And we can and hopefully will just let the empire rot and seethe from behind its own closed borders.
>Iran would simply watch their entire economy collapse, while Americans are paying a couple bucks more for cheeseburgers and milkshakes.
Iran's economy wasn't exactly in the best position before this. I wouldn't underestimate them. At least not again.
>But the perspective that the US would be defeated is the incorrect one
The US losing decades of work on shoring up willing support and soft power is a massive defeat. And it comes off the back of several other similar losses. It used to be the case that a lot of the planet put "America first" but that's becoming an untenable position. Trump has successfully turned worldwide public opinion against the US. Its electoral suicide in a lot of countries to give in to his nonsense. Every ounce of good will towards the US bought since WW2 has been spent.
>No more caring about Taiwan or Ukraine
Not like a lot of this has been going on. Looks like France is supplying 2/3rds of Ukraines intelligence. Actually the reverse is true here. If the US wants to retain some shred of its predominant position, it needs to get stuck in. Otherwise honestly we will just manage without you.
>remember Iran helps Russians kill Ukrainians?
There's been US weapons in basically every war zone going back decades. ISIS loved Humvees. The US is helping Israelis kill a lot of people right now. If Israel doesn't have a plane capable of delivering the US ordnance, the US will step in to provide it. I don't think this is a glass house that any supporter of the US should be throwing rocks in. Heck I think the US bombed those F 14 Tomcats you supplied to Iran in the opening strikes of this war. "But but the arms sales" he cries as he sells arms to war criminals. This is exactly why the US developed soft power, so that it could say that certain arms sales were illegal and have people reliably agree with them. Those credits have been spent. Its crazy to me that you would expect people to treat you with the respect that you have demonstrated you don't deserve.
>you can expect much worse as the US says "forget it" and only seeks to protect its own vital interests without regard to the rest of the world
Literally current US foreign policy. Why warn people that what is currently happening, might happen? Only slight correction is that the US sees Israels interests as its own vital interests, or can be reliably fooled into doing so at everyone else's expense.
> Only in the sense that the US has forgotten its a participant in trade. But that seems to be pretty standard at this point.
The US already has a navy and already can and will protect US shipping interests (which may include allies or other entities). What will the rest of the world do?
> It would be nice if they hadn't stuck their dick in this particular bee hive. It's not that we collectively expect the US to secure shipping, but that we would be happy if the US didn't take actions seemingly calculated to make life worse for everyone else on the planet.
You don't expect the US to secure shipping but the rest of the world does. Don't mistake your fantasies (let's blockade the US? Are you American? Do you hate yourself that much?) for what the rest of the world thinks.
> I am just waiting for the EU\UK\AU to get its shit together and clean up Trumps mess, so we can move to the point where the global order works without the US.
Not going to happen. More likely the UK and Australia will join the US. The European Union just is not capable politically to solve or address these sorts of problems. Does Germany even have a navy? What will France do, park their one aircraft carrier outside of some random country and yell very loudly? There's no will or ability to do these things.
And for what it's worth, I admire the EU in a lot of respects and love visiting various countries in Europe. Everyone is incredibly nice and happy to talk to Americans.
But while I'm being harsh here, it's the truth. Europe has no will or ability to do things that need to be done militarily. You cannot diplomatically solve every problem. Iran will be happy to meet you, sell you a story, then go build a nuclear weapon and seize the Strait and laugh at the stupid Europeans behind their backs. This is how they operate.
> The US didn't provide these services just for the fun of it, it's largely just a soft power move, to engender the willing support of other nations. We can and will have successful global trade without the USA. And we can and hopefully will just let the empire rot and seethe from behind its own closed borders.
It's a soft power and hard power move. You won't have successful trade without the USA - please stop these immature fantasies. They're not healthy for you.
> Iran's economy wasn't exactly in the best position before this.
Yes, and you can think the Ayatollah and IRGC for that. Instead of spending money on their people they spend them on missiles for no reason. But the oil trade is a lifeline for their economy. The blockade is working pretty well and now Iran is flailing around trying hare-brained schemes like trying to get ships to pay Bitcoin to get permission to pass through the Strait that the US has blockaded.
> I wouldn't underestimate them. At least not again.
We haven't underestimated them.
> The US losing decades of work on shoring up willing support and soft power is a massive defeat. And it comes off the back of several other similar losses. It used to be the case that a lot of the planet put "America first" but that's becoming an untenable position. Trump has successfully turned worldwide public opinion against the US. It's electoral suicide in a lot of countries to give in to his nonsense. Every ounce of good will towards the US bought since WW2 has been spent.
If it was so cheaply lost it wasn't worth much in the first place.
> Not like a lot of this has been going on. Looks like France is supplying 2/3rds of Ukraines intelligence. Actually the reverse is true here. If the US wants to retain some shred of its predominant position, it needs to get stuck in. Otherwise honestly we will just manage without you.
Ok if you'll manage without us I say we just stop altogether and lift sanctions on Russia. We can withdraw from NATO and move American forces from Europe. If that's what you want, of course. (It's not)
Oh and how conveniently you forget the US and UK were the ones actually delivering missiles and intelligence and more to Ukraine at the early stages of the war. The US even today is bombing Iran and taking out drone manufacturing capabilities so they can't supply Russia who turns around and bombs Ukrainians.
> There's been US weapons in basically every war zone going back decades.
You're so ready to defend Iran/Russia that you're twisting in circles saying the US didn't bomb Iran enough, and the US is also bad because we left some light trucks in Iraq, and coming to the moral defense of Iran building drones to sell to Russia to kill Ukrainians because US bad. You know European countries, China, and Russia and more sell weapons too, right?
> Only slight correction is that the US sees Israels interests as its own vital interests, or can be reliably fooled into doing so at everyone else's expense.
Maybe the US and Israel are just right and you're wrong. I certainly think so too.
>The US already has a navy and already can and will protect US shipping interests (which may include allies or other entities). What will the rest of the world do?
What they currently do. There arent US armed escorts everywhere.
>You don't expect the US to secure shipping but the rest of the world does.
No they dont.
>More likely the UK and Australia will join the US.
They have already signed up to Frances plan. https://www.minister.defence.gov.au/statements/2026-05-13/de...
And rejected Trumps.
>You won't have successful trade without the USA - please stop these immature fantasies. They're not healthy for you.
Actually your ability for fantasy far outstretches anyone elses.
>We haven't underestimated them.
Now you are just telling jokes.
>If it was so cheaply lost it wasn't worth much in the first place.
Its been degrading for the last decade. It didnt disappear yesterday. It took more than a single administration of threatening and attempting to humiliate allies before you lost it all.
>Ok if you'll manage without us I say we just stop altogether and lift sanctions on Russia.
Ok bye.
>The US even today is bombing Iran and taking out drone manufacturing capabilities so they can't supply Russia who turns around and bombs Ukrainians.
I love how these retrospective justifications turn up when the original ones are completely destroyed.
1000 times as many US weapons are in hands of people dangerous to the world.
>You're so ready to defend Iran/Russia that you're twisting in circles saying the US didn't bomb Iran enough, and the US is also bad because we left some light trucks in Iraq, and coming to the moral defense of Iran building drones to sell to Russia to kill Ukrainians because US bad. You know European countries, China, and Russia and more sell weapons too, right?
No you just cant read.
>Maybe the US and Israel are just right and you're wrong. I certainly think so too.
Yes its clear you have gorged yourself on their propaganda.
> but this administration clearly had no idea what they were getting themselves into and did not plan accordingly.
You can reuse this line for most of things this administration has been doing.
It would not be that stunning, given that a much poorer Iranic country decisively defeated the U.S. in a ~20 year war ending only a few years ago.
I presume you mean Islamic.
More to the point, Iran has been preparing for war with the US for decades. The US prepared for _this_ war with Iran for a couple of weeks.
> The US prepared for _this_ war with Iran for a couple of weeks.
That's a little unfair, it would be more accurate to say that the US has war gamed the region for decades and had a good grasp of the pitfalls and requirements, and then to add that the current US administration ignored all that prior work and insight and simply blundered in on a whim.
No, I meant Iranic. Pashtun and Parsi "Dari" speakers are canonically Iranic ethnic groups.
I stand corrected! Apologies.
The US didn't win the Vietnam War and didn't even unambiguously win the Korean War.
What the US did was show it would make life uncomfortable for those who challenged the liberal trade order and politically-and-economically offer benefits for those who embraced this order.
What Trump has done is just attack Iran (during negotiations) with no real counter-offer. Iran has responded by attacking everything in sight because nothing was being offered by the US.
Clearly the result is indeed a serious failure on the part of the Trump administration but it's a failure that seems to come from not even understanding that "Pax Americana" has depended on the carrot and the stick.
no idea what they were getting themselves into and did not plan accordingly
That is the modus operandi of this administration.
All tactics, no strategy.
The Department of Defense is run by a weekend morning show host and the President is a reality TV star. It would be baffling if things were going well.
> It would be quite stunning Iran defeated the united states in this sense.
> The fact that this outcome is surprising represents a very loud and public failure on the administration's part.
You can't teach stupid!! The coward, sleepy, dementia ridden, pretentious commander-in-chief declared victory over Iran the next day after starting the war.
The plan was for it to stay closed and have the US sell oil.
The US is now exporting more oil than it has in a decade.
Why can none of these supposedly smart people see this plan?
There's no 4d chess plan here.
Trump thought it would go exactly as Venezuela and has no idea how to fix it. They tried to kill enough of Iran's leadership to get to somebody that would be subservient but it turns out nobody is left alive in Iran that is.
Well regardless this situation strengthens USA's economic position and weakens China, so its not a bad spot to be in. That it also strengthens Russia doesn't matter much since they are no longer seen as the great enemy, after their performance in the Ukraine war was lacking.
How?
This only strengthens USA's oil sector and ideally we all know the perils of dutch disease. The weakening of every other american export for a dieing industry is not strengthing it.
It weakens China and Europe even more, so it strengthens USA compared to the rest of the world. That is why the US stock market is going strong.
China is the world's largest exporter of alternatives to oil. This adventure has done nothing but strengthen their relative economic position.
You're not wrong, except that USA is/was not always literally "keeping waters open" for everyone. The Cuba blockade, which is another form of war and has dire consequences for the population, has been going on for decades: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_embargo_against_...
This is factually incorrect. Blockade is not a synonym of embargo. Blockade is generally an act of war, and embargo is not. Dealing with Cuba is certainly a huge PITA for the majority of trading actors because of potential blacklisting in the US, but waters around Cuba are as open as they can be, and you can check marine traffic to make sure that ships arrive to Cuban ports. Even from the US itself (cause there are exceptions from embargo such as food, and medicines).
Our Blessed Homeland :: Their Barbarous Wastes
Our Glorious Leader :: Their Wicked Despot
Our Great Religion :: Their Primitive Superstition
Our Noble Populace :: Their Backward Savages
Our Heroic Adventurers :: Their Brutish Invaders
Our Legal Embargo :: Their Illegal Blockade
Sorry, english is not my first language. I did not realize there was a strong difference between blockade and embargo. Thanks for the correction.
Though to be fair, there is currently an actual oil blockade run by the USA. And the previous embargo imposed sanctions on international entities dealing with Cuba, so it was not exactly 100% open even though technically you could sail there.
> Much of the post-WW2 American-led world order was founded partially on the United States using its military to keep international waters open.
This completely ignores the MAD era and the Soviets taking over Eastern Europe by force. It also ignores the Korean war stalemate, the Vietnam war loss, as well the most recent Afghan loss.
Post-Soviet disintegration management, the successful integration of Eastern Europe, China, and India into the Western Bloc ways were genuine wins. That's post-1989, not post-ww2 (yes, I realize technically that's post-ww2). So there was not really a world-wide dependency between WW2 and 1989 on the American military. Western Bloc, yes, world-wide no.
The current stalemate is only a surprise to the unaware and folks listening only to American news channels. Before the beginning of the current conflict, even $20 chatgpt provided enough insight to accurately chart the course of the conflict in probabilities. Even without chatgpt, folks keeping track and keeping an eye on real news and past policy decisions and progress were able to predict that Ukraine had a very good chance of stopping Russia in its tracks.
The trouble isn't with the availability of this data, it's hubris. Time and time again. Caesar. Napoleon. Hitler. Korea. Johnson in Vietnam. Soviets in Afghanistan. US in Afghanistan. Ukraine. Iran.
But hubris exists because sometimes it works, and for quite some time. Genghis Khan. Pax Romana. Soviets in Eastern Europe. US in Western Europe. Europeans in the Americas. Russians in Eastern Asia. Europeans in Asia and Africa. Palestine. Tibet.
Why it works, and why it doesn't, is an active research topic. [1]
Analysts paid to predict the future will of course argue this vehemently from their pet PoV. And the decision-makers are too domain-challenged to know whom to believe*. They didn't have chatgpt :-)
[1] https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/phillips-payson-obr...
* Or they just don't care
American navy has blockaded countries all over the world, so it's more true that they closed international waters. Waters were open before America existed. If Americans would actually learn their history they would see that the USA blockade was the reason Japan attacked Pearl Harbour, as the Japanese needed the water to open and thought taking out Pearl Harbour would prevent the US Navy controlling the Pacific. Japan attacked the American base, USA attacked Japanese civilians with nukes.
> Waters were open before America existed.
A huge part of the reason sovereign nations built navies was to fight piracy. It’s not really true that waters were open historically.
Are you saying there are no pirates now? US navy has solved all the world's problems? The blockades have killed millions of people, even in the last 30 years. When US sanctioned Iraq after the first war, they killed 500k people every year, and then US invaded Iraq on lies. The world would be safer without the US Navy.
Your first comment was good but here you're not responding to GP.
Nukes were not a response to Pearl Harbor.
The framing in general of “Japan only took military action and the US sank to attacking civilians” is wrong too. Take a look at what Japan did to the Chinese during that time period if you think they were only attacking military targets.
Japan also invaded an Alaskan island. https://prologue.blogs.archives.gov/2010/06/07/the-japanese-...
Are you saying USA cared about the Chinese? Japan had already surrendered before US nuked them
No, Japan had not surrendered before the bombs. There is no evidence of that in Japanese or western history. Where are you getting that from?
> Are you saying USA cared about the Chinese?
I’m saying it was not beneath Japan to commit horrific atrocities on civilians. You can’t pretend they were some high moral actor that was only performing a military action to defend themselves.
Did I say the Japanese were good guys? Everything the Japanese did, UK, USA and other European countries have done worse. They're still doing it. Going back to the original reply, US Navy only benefited the US by screwing over the rest of the world
It was the US that made all these countries stop committing atrocities, so they are the good guys.
World war 2 was the war of 3 different evil ideologies, you had the fascists vs the communists vs the imperialist England and France. The war ended with both the Imperialists and the Fascists defeated so European imperialism ended there, England and France had to give up their colonies.
If not for USA likely Europe would still have colonies and just be as imperialist as they used to be, same with Japan. USA might not be as good as these defeated imperialists, but it was still USA that ended the age of European imperialism that was so much worse than anything USA has done since ww2.
(I'm a European)
Why would you post such nonsense given how easy it is these days to determine bullshit? By the time of Pearl Harbor, Japan was formally aligned with Nazi Germany. Japan, Germany, and Italy signed the Tripartite Pact in Sept 1940 creating the Axis alliance. Pearl Harbor happened in Dec 1941, so Japan had been formally tied to Germany for more than a year.
“The American navy closed international waters.” Not in the Pearl Harbor context. Before Pearl Harbor the U.S. was not conducting a naval blockade of Japan that closed international waters. The U.S. cut off Japan from US oil in July 1941. That is not the same thing as the U.S. Navy closing the Pacific.
“The USA blockade was the reason Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.” False. Japan attacked Pearl Harbor because it wanted to neutralize the U.S. Pacific Fleet while Japan seized the "Southern Resource Area”, especially oil-rich East Indies, Malaya and other regions in the pacific. The U.S. oil embargo might have played a small factor, but that wasn't a US-only thing; various countries were increasingly unwilling to sell oil and other resources to Nazi-aligned Japan while they were attempting to conquer China and most of the Southeast Pacific.
Japan didn't have any problems with USA because USA was not part of allied forces. In fact USA sold weapons to both UK and Germans. USA only joined after Pearl Harbour. Japan attacked because US Navy prevented oil being shipped to Japan, Japan had no other source.
The U.S. Navy did not blockade Japan or “prevent oil being shipped” by closing the seas. The U.S. imposed an oil embargo and froze Japanese assets after Japan expanded its war in China and moved to invade other pacific countries. Surely you can understand why that was a good thing.
Good thing for whom? Who tf is US to embargo anyone.
"Waters were open before America existed."
The United States formed our Navy because of Islamic Pirate/Slavers causing a lack of open waters.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbary_corsairs
"The Barbary threat led directly to the United States founding the United States Navy in March 1794."
Have you tried reading anything other than Wikipedia
Lol let's not talk about slavery when it comes to the USA
We should always talk about, challenge, and address slavery. Always.
US navy literally doing piracy right now taking ships in international waters, destroying boats in Venezuela and Trump admitting to piracy.
This spin is such a weird way of thinking about this. Hormuz was open! Hormuz had been open for decades! Iran "closed" it as part of a war that the United States started.
We weren't defeated in a attempt to "keep Hormuz open". Hormuz closed because we we started an entirely unrelated war. And lost. There's a difference!
the US probably trains the best experts in military history & strategy. At their officer schools like WestPoint & other programs.
problem is when your Commander in Chief is a Idiot In Chief who wants to surround himself with "YES" men.
actual solid pragmatic advice won't be listened to - i.e that Iran is a millennial empire with asymmetrical advantages.
if you have no strategy to counter that asymmetrical strategy - then don't fight the war.
Maybe there was another reason for the Iran strikes?
https://www.facebook.com/reel/1448330470095627
Thank you for letting me in!
Sol Roth
PS:
Hope you like the décor. I’m redecorating your thoughts permanently.
The cascade of self-injury and self-sabotage required for the US to end up in this position cannot be understated. It's much easier to defend against an attacker whose first move is to blind and disarm themselves.
We've been planning interventions in Iran for 40 years and they constantly get revised or updated. Iran is literally one of few countries known for drones, which they based on stolen drone tech from western countries. It's not realistic that we entered this conflict unaware that Iran could harass the strait cheaply.
The problem is that Israel bombed their entire leadership structure and there's seemingly nobody to deal with now. It's fragmented between people who want to make deals, people who can even facilitate any kinds of agreement and the radicals who simply want the world to burn and will throw any human in the way to die for that end.
We can absolutely continue destroying their capacity to do things, but the terrorists do not care about their own people or the world. They will use human shields and continue seeking nuclear weapons. They do not value human life or rules. This is why they can never have a nuclear weapon.
At the same time, showing the vulnerabilities in getting oil from that region means China is now buying more oil in USD and even directly from the US via the Pacific which helps further deter World War 3. In the case that something did still happen as part of a global strategy by China, Iran no longer exists as a lever that can be pulled to expand the chaos of a war with the aim of further diffusing the US military away from the Pacific.
If we wanted to fully end this mess, we would probably have to send the military in on the ground, which nobody wants except Iran. They are extremists in general and willing to die over this nuclear issue.
Barring that, we've largely neutered their capacity to make war and reorganized oil trade further in favor of the US. We will have to wait to see if Iran's leadership structure sorts itself out and they come to the table. Until then, if Iran wants to prevent their neighbors from benefiting from international shipping, Iran can be denied that too. Countries are developing workarounds to rely less on the strait, so the longer Iran sticks with this strategy the weaker it will get over the years.
It's popular to say the US lost this or the US lost that and it's a ridiculous country, but it's usually some kind of political gymnastics or financial judgement as it pertains to cost vs benefit. We always lose fewer soldiers and generally come out of it better than if we hadn't done anything at all. We almost always go into something for many more reasons than are publicly stated. A lot of the benefits of intervening in Iran seem to be paying off right now.
Sometimes doing the right thing is unpopular, but you should still do it.
> We can absolutely continue destroying their capacity to do things, but the terrorists do not care about their own people or the world. They will use human shields and continue seeking nuclear weapons. They do not value human life or rules. This is why they can never have a nuclear weapon.
It's the US and Israel that are the "terrorists" and yet both have nuclear weapons. You literally say yourself that we can "continue destroying their capacity to do things", and like your definition of terrorists, the US/Israel are using us (US citizens) as human shields.
> and like your definition of terrorists, the US/Israel are using us (US citizens) as human shields.
No they don't, that is ridiculous. In what way could US citizens take collateral damage in this war? They aren't in harms way at all. You could argue they use Israeli and Arab civilians as human shields since they are the ones taking the attacks, but not American ones. And even for the Arabs that has US bases there are no girl schools inside those US bases like Iran puts in theirs. (the girl school was inside the walls of an irgc base, probably an old repurposed house)
Iran has been terrorizing the entire region, exporting radicalism and funding terrorism. Many of the wars that have occurred in the middle east were caused by Iran. If you look at the history of Israeli attacks, they have essentially been reactions to Iran-backed terrorist attacks against Israel.
Why did Saudi Arabia attack Yemen? For fun? No, they were reacting to Iran-backed terrorist groups. Why did Iraq attack Iran, for fun? No, even back then they were reacting to Iran exporting their terrorism to Iraq.
Their strategy has been to try to look innocent by avoiding direct attacks from Iran and have diplomats that pretend Iran is a nice actor on the international stage, while using their country as a stable foundation for exporting terrorism. This isn't exclusively a strategy for achieving state power, it is a religious imperative to achieve a radical vision of global Islam.
The US has worked with the Middle East for many years to settle on some kind of peace after thousands of years of conflict (which was also the case for Europe). There can never be peace as long as Iran manufactures conflict regularly.
When the US does things, there is usually a strong and valuable logic behind it, even if it is not expressed publicly. For Iran, the reasons tend to be religious. Their goals and behaviors are not the same as you would expect from a rational state actor.
You can’t just label all of Israel’s enemies “terrorists”. The history of the Zionist colony is well know at this point. I’m a US citizen and fully aligned with Iran against Israel and the US presence in the Middle East.
> A lot of the benefits of intervening in Iran seem to be paying off right now
I, umm, disagree fairly wholeheartedly.
Maybe there's some long term <something> that has changed direction slightly as a result, but right now literally everything immediate is worse than it was beforehand.
> The fact that this outcome is surprising represents a very loud and public failure on the administration's part.
True but unfortunately there are enough dumb people in the US to vote them in again so it doesn't matter.
Has there been an administration that knew what they were getting themselves into? IIRC, US hasn’t won a conflict since WW2. Thus, the plethora of WW2 movies.
I think US blocked international waters around Cuba, without any legal basis (although there is no such thing as international law anyway) at the time of Cuban crisis. And now US seems to block international waters near Iran threatening to attack any ship going to or from Iran, without any legal basis.
Proof: https://apnews.com/article/us-iran-war-navy-blockade-strait-...
Bloggers promoting cryptocurrency are calling this a "landmark moment" for Bitcoin
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/a-landmark-moment-fo...
https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA20wRuK...
Why is everyone obsessed with US military when the news seems to be Bitcoin? Just like that the US Dollar suffered because clearly a crypto currency may well become what the US Dollar was, a commodity to exchange value in a way that nobody can reasonably refuse. Whether that is for better or worse, I think that is bigger news then whose got the bigger gun.
It is bigger news indeed. I think previously China and Saudi were settling their account deficit with gold, a big airplane load every now and then.
I think this is more due to the fact that the Iranian currency has completely collapsed.
One thing I'd wonder is whether using bitcoin actually involves real de-dollarization. Most stable coin is dollar based and other stable-coin don't seem like strong US competitors. China bans bitcoin trading so any Yuan/rmb based stable coin is marginal. So bitcoin seems strongly related to dollars.
> Why is everyone obsessed with US military
Shock of the unsavvy
I would have thought so too, but the current bitcoin prices do not suggest the market agrees?
Because people are not going to pay this. The US will block or even seize the ships that pay Iran fees, whether in Bitcoin or other currencies. Iran isn't the only one who can close the strait.
They are using Bitcoin exactly for what it's good at, which is to support sanctioned regimes against the interests of the West. We've seen Russia and North Korea siphon money from gullible Bitcoin promoters this way, and now Iran is getting in on the action.
The problem with bitcoin for this-it is very traceable. The US government can declare paying Iran Hormuz “insurance” to be a sanctions violation (they probably already have). Any Western company - even non-US - paying this “insurance” will be faced with the full ire of the US government.
I guess it might work if shipping company is non-Western (such as Chinese or Russian) - but I’m not sure what the advantage of bitcoin is in that case, as opposed to simply paying in yuan or rubles
How does it matter that it's traceable? Everyone knows the ships going in and out thanks to AIS. Many of these ships are already either falsely flagged, sanctioned, or just Iranian flagged. And as far as paying in rubles or yuan, this tells me that Iran doesn't think the shipping companies are willing to pay in either or think there's a safe/effective way to accept payment through those currencies.
I'm curious what makes your think these ships are unknown. There are 2 blockades in place and suspicion of mines in the conventional shipping route through Omani controlled waters.
The significance of being traceable is simply that US could tell you to not abide by Iran's insurance scheme by threatening sanctions if you do.
Whereas if it's not traceable then all that others know is that your ship got through the strait and there's at least some plausible deniability of why it got through
Iran is already sanctioned. The actors willing to ignore the US's feedback on Iran's insurance plans are already not playing by US rules. This is insurance for the shipping companies that are already operating on sanctioned fleet and oil.
More than USA would sanction you if you start paying terrorists to pass a strait, none of the big players wants that.
The US should be happy about this. Maybe. Iran seeking reparations is a reasonable demand, this gives the US a way to satisfy a demand without having to pay themselves - which certainly would not be popular, to say the least - making an exit easier. There is of course the risk of setting an undesirable precedent and it is not clear what the consequences of that would be.
The US allowing Iran to levy a toll on Hormuz would completely discredit the US and set the precedent for other countries to levy their own shipping tolls . It's a non-starter.
Every country has that right though.
If anything we hand them tons of cash near 0% to rebuild and they join the Eurodollar cartel pushing our hegemony further. Politicians would need to do a better job explaining deficit spending and Keynesianism more generally.
Iran has been funding terrorists for decades and the IRGC has murdered tens of thousands of Iranians. There are no reparations for terrorists getting their comeuppance.
> Iran has been funding terrorists for decades
Americans not understanding that half of the world says the same thing about them is the funniest shit ever... Propaganda is one hell of a drug
Americans understand. We're allowed to fund terrorists, Iran isnt. Its not even a bad take if your goal is just domestic happiness. Iran funds terrorists that are opposed to American interests, it's the opposed to american interests part that is unacceptable.
We are the terrorists mate
The problem with this attitude is that no-one other than jingoistic Americans will want to support your country if you behave like that. There’s no difference between you and Russia then.
I don’t think this is true. You just need to work with countries whose values and incentives align with your own. Luckily American values line up very nicely with most western countries.
I do agree that ignoring the suffering you cause other people is pretty immoral, I just think most people tend to be kind of ok with that, especially in out of sight out of mind situations. Most people don’t mind if their enemies suffer, its just a balancing act of making sure that mostly it’s your enemies that you make suffer.
Not really any different than eating meat, another immoral act that almost everyone does anyway.
Yeah it's crazy how it's not obvious to them even when Trump is in power.
They did under Trump 1.
Which is why Trump 2 promptly started bombing foreign countries.
The pure ironic inversion of our world is wild to live through.
Especially when you look at Iran-Contra, where the US cut out the middleman and supplied arms directly to Iran and supported terrorists at the same time!
Americans don't care what the rest of the world says. It's a privilege that comes from a position of power. In any case, the Iranian people themselves have protested their own regime many times, so no one needs to listen to the US position on this. Just listen to the Iranian people.
We agree with them. Their regime needs to go.
In the US, we will be rid of the current administration in less than 3 years and MAGA will end with it. If the Iranian people had the same choice American citizens do, they would have voted their regime out and current events would be very different.
Here we are.
Replace Iran and IRGC with Israel and IDF and you have a winner - one that is actually in possession of undeclared nuclear arms and refuses to cooperate with the IAEA.
It's the US that has been funding Zionist terrorists for decades. It's wild how the generational divide between those who have been subjected to a lifetime of Zionist propaganda vs those of us who have had access to the truth is completely irreconcilable.
> Iran has been funding terrorists for decades
So is USA.
Now.. and I am speaking just from the perspective of trying to achieve specific goals ( and accepting a level of pain for what those goals can demand ), if there was ever a possibility that US may ban/fully sanction bitcoin use, this actually might be it.
They don’t need to ban bitcoin use - they just declare paying “insurance” or “tolls” to the Iranian government to be a sanctions violation, irrespective of the means of payment. Then this becomes a complete non-starter for any US company, and any non-US company in nations where the US has significant influence (i.e. most of the West)
I get where you are coming from, but that assumes .. the old world order. Not to search very far, China told its refineries only last week to ignore those particular sets of US sanctions ( and more importantly, we did not hear anything about it since Trump's visit to China ).
This is good for Bitcoin.
Isn't this bad for bitcoin? I expect the US will immediately say "No don't pay that" and start prosecuting people that pay via bitcoin, because of course it's traceable. Am I missing something?
How is this a change from status quo? Bitcoin has been the currency of crime since soon after its inception. Back when you could mine on a CPU it was the way to monetize stolen compute. It was the way to buy illegal things on the now-pardoned silk road. It was the way to pay off ransomware. It is now the currency of dark influence money.
Using it to pay off a shipping protection racket is prettymuch par for the course.
I think it's different because of the message it sends. Using bitcoin to do generic illegal things is an 'offense' to anyone that wants to stop illegal things. But there's already lots of targets to aim for if somebody wants to enforce the law, the method of payment is kindof a small deal. However, in this case using bitcoin is an offense to the other party in the war -- the US. I think the US has a more obvious target, and is more capable to do something about the "problem" than general law-loving-folk are about illegal activity. At the very least, I'd think it breaks the embargo? And the US really has (historically) cared about that.
> Bitcoin has been the currency of crime
Like, say, cash, or check, or wires, or any other payment mechanism?
I’m not convinced that bitcoin is stable enough to use in insurance products. The currency volatility risk is too high to reasonably cover the covered losses which will need to be covered in some other currency to do things like replace boats etc.
The volatility is only an issue if you need to convert the bitcoin in the near future. If you are willing to wait, volatility goes in your advantage. Bitcoin is volatile enough that if you wait for maybe a few years you will probably hit a pump that will far exceed the growth of most other investments. You don't even need to sell at the high to do this, the run up is often plenty enough gain.
They were charging 0BTC per ship before, so they come out ahead no matter the current value of the coin. They can change their fees by the day as well.
This isnt an insurance product though. Its “insurance”, aka extortion.
...it's the same picture.
I see. I misunderstood
No, it’s actual insurance:
> Iran has started a Bitcoin-backed insurance service for Iranian shipping companies that want to transit the Strait of Hormuz, the semi-official Fars news agency reported, citing documents obtained from the country’s Ministry of Economy and Financial Affairs.
> According to a screen shot of the insurance company’s website, dubbed Hormuz Safe and shared by Fars news, it “provides Iranian shipping companies and cargo owners with fast, verifiable digital insurance.” Fars didn’t give a detailed break down of how the insurance works and whether it’s available to foreign shipping companies and vessels.
That appears to be a long winded description of extortion under the cover of insurance, like the gp said
My first thought: what mining power does Iran have? Seems important.
It's worth remembering that the Iranians have as yet never claimed that the strait is mined. They have said that it may be. A lot of reporting misses this and assumes (perhaps deliberately) that the presence of mines is a fact.
But of course Iran doesn't need mines to enforce the blockade. They have drones and missiles that can be operated safely from 100's of kilometres away. They have anti-ship sea-skimming missiles. Not to mention the very large fleet of small armed fastboats.
I think the question is about bitcoin mining power and now actual mines
Ha! You would be right. My mistake.
Bitcoin does make the transaction publicly traceable. Either they have not realised that, seems unlikely, or they prefer it that way.
It's not about traceability, it's about not having to use the dollar as currency.
I don’t know stuff but I feel I’ve learned that the Americans can make basic commerce unbelievably painful for whoever they choose through sanctions and disconnection from various financial systems.
That's significant messaging though -- we don't have anything to hide, down with the dollar.
I have read many comments that the regime wants to money launder the inflow. Bitcoin would be rather inconvenient for that.
What would be a reason to money launder the inflow?!?
I have no clue.
What difference does it make?
> Bitcoin does make the transaction publicly traceable
It can be untraceable with CashFusion
I read that as coldfusion and I got some ptsd
No, that doesn't work with Bitcoin, it only works with a fork of Bitcoin that has less than 0.5% of the value of Bitcoin.
Value doesn't have anything to do with utility
In this case it does. You can't funnel huge amounts through a coin with usually small volume and market cap and expect any sense of anonymity or privacy. The delta makes it obvious. It would probably be visible via movements on markets too.
For smaller amounts this is not a problem for the same coin and network.
Your volume might support $10k but not $10m.
I mean, kind of. If I give you an address to use to send me money, and I don't tell anyone else that address, and you don't tell anyone else that address, then nobody else can be sure who is behind the transaction.
Oh they are well aware and using bitcoin for years. Nobitex is an Iranian exchange and they have been processing billions using crypto networks:
https://www.reuters.com/investigations/how-trumps-crypto-ven...
More of a "Bitcoin-Backed Protection Racket", presumably?
We know they are just going to spend it all on polymarket.
Let’s be frank. Iran could have built at least crude gun type fission bombs since they reached industrial scale for enrichment. And this being very dismissing of Iranian scientific and technological capabilities.
Given modern computer consumer hardware, I don’t see why they couldn’t even have built implosion lens based fission devices without testing. DPRK would probably provide them with all the data they needed for the simulations.
Iran has been a few weeks from having a few bombs for the last 30 years because they decided not to build it.
Exactly.
Which, when you think about it, shows that the 'Iran cannot have a nuclear bomb' argument for this war is not exactly the true motivation (not to say that the US and Israel really don't want them to have a bomb).
This war is about trashing Iran. Adding it to the string of other failed states in the area. It would be more honest for Trump and Netanyahu to say that the motivation for this war is to ensure that Iran becomes a state that is incapable of developing the bomb (i.e. a failed and fractured, or weak and compliant).
Yes, the war is about Israel extreme far right removing an obstacle for their crazy expansionist ideas and about keeping America hegemonic power in the region.
Besides, nuclear weapons are- if usable at all- a defensive weapon. The claim that Iran would attack Israel with nuclear weapons is primarily meant to suggest that they're crazy fanatics blinded by such a hatred that they would be happy to destroy themselves together with their enemy.
On the other hand, I'm not exactly sure why Iran doesn't give up all its nuclear capabilities. It would cost them nothing except pride, and would remove any excuse from the table for the US and Israel for their aggression and sanctions.
You don't need a truthful reason to have an excuse. Remember the whole Iraq WMD debacle?
Or, for that matter, Ukraine giving up its nuclear capabilities.
Exactly, even with conventional ammunitions they have shown a lot of restraint to avoid a nuclear response from Israel.
Israel doesn't have much in the way of a credible defense against Iranians advanced hypersonic missiles. Iran could create a mess in Israel by obliterating their de-salinization installations. If they were the blood thirsty fanatics propaganda paints them to be, that would be exactly what they would do, even knowing that in that case Israel wouldn't have much choice than making Tehran a giant glass parking lot.
No need for insurance. Just start a prediction market, wait for an insider to play their cards, and traverse or not based on that.
This is quite the, ahem, coup, for Bitcoin. I suppose it was inevitable in a fractured world. This will likely delay, or perhaps even block Pax-Sinica from taking shape.
It's quite the achievement, that the inventor(s) of Bitcoin have continued to stay anonymous to this day.
I guess I'm just surprised they even bother trying to mask an obvious shake down under the euphemism "insurance" when it's such a trope. Obligatory Sopranos clip of old school mobsters trying to sell "protective insurance" to a Starbucks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Gsz7Gu6agA
It lets people not look up. And given the slightest opportunity an awful lot of people will take the don't look up answer.
I assume it's to discredit the current international insurance scheme for shipping that doubles as a method of enforcing sanctions.
You're the US and you're planning a 51% attack in a few weeks which will reverse NK and Iranian fortunes and claim the BTC of anyone who helped them. Any other objectives?
I've actually wondered how many datacenters it would take to effectively perform a 51% attack on bitcoin.
It seems like most newly built computing resources are at the disposal of a few companies and a few people...
A 51% attack doesn't allow you to steal other people's coins, nor does it let you easily alter deep historical transactions. To rewrite the past, an attacker would have to continuously outpace the rest of the network to rebuild the chain from that exact point forward. The primary threat of a 51% attack is that the attacker could double spend their own coins or censor or block specific transactions.
Nice ship you have there. Be a shame if something...happened to it.
nasıl bunu yapabilirler nasıl
If they put a substantial portion of their wealth into bitcoin we might witness the ultimate rugpull when the BTC creators cash in their large share of previously untouched coins.
This global tax will be Trump’s legacy. It will be what the world knows him for generations after he is gone.
That seems like a smart move, given how much the Trump Dynasty seems to be enmeshed in the Bitcoin ecosystem.
[Hearsay, I don't actually know more than what has been reported in the news ...]
Crypto but not Bitcoin.
If this was open to non-Iranian shipping companies, it would be some Trump-level trolling. The aggressor that starts threatening tankers becomes the protector mobster, using non-USD as a middle finger. The US/Israel can't really start shooting at tankers without becoming the villain no one can accept. They're already low on trust capital everywhere.
So the few payouts for normal claims would be dwarfed by the war insurance premium currently being charged. They could even offer a discount to loyal clients and still have insane margins.
Yeah, I don't see how the US is coming out ahead in this conflict. Israel might have won some against their adversaries, setting them back a while or two.
One man’s insurance premium, is another man’s blackmail fee.
"Insurance"
crypto insurance products have been very successful in the DeFi space for more than half a decade, a protocol you are using gets hacked and instead of whaling about it on hackernews the insurance policy you opened pays out immediately
there is a lot of examples on how to design it, and it doesn't really seem like this Iranian one for shipping is designed well if its just an insurance pool in bitcoin at all times
but if they are using the bitcoin blockchain to sign the insurance records of a policy and claim, and then the state administrator is acquiring bitcoin to pay out policies at time of claim, then that could work. that was one of the bullish cases theorized for bitcoin back in 2011, 2012, its a long list
Are we just going to have yearly events now pushing up the cost of everything, in perpetuity? I feel like the billionaires got a bit addicted to post-COVID highs
https://archive.ph/r8TuZ
Corrupted but there's more I guess.
Syndicated here: https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/crypto/articles/iran-start...
“Insurance”
I had fairly deep knowledge about the bitcoin code base 7 years ago and I got a weird vibe from it as I've seen government code before. When I learned that Tor was funded by the Navy something clicked. Just as it makes sense to have a large onion network to allow spies abroad to surf the web anonymously, it would make sense to also have a currency you can use to fund agents or groups abroad that lived outside the banking system. Bitcoin makes sense for that purpose. If you have a large border-less digital currency with many people on it, even if it is traceable, it's still less risky then using cash which you would have to launder.
The fact that many states are now using it for funding purposes to get around the banking system further adds proof to bitcoin's potential origin.
Also, it doesn't help that Satoshi Nakamoto means basically central intelligence in Japanese...
I'm not saying Bitcoin was created by the government, but if it was there are signs...
It's a lot easier to carry bitcoins than suitcases full of foreign cash or gold bars too. In China, they moved to digital currencies in part I believe to defeat CIA bags of cash (no point in getting stacks of paper money you can't use...). However, censorship resistant digital currencies allow them to continue their sneaky tricks.
This kind of thing explains in part why despite being an obvious scam, the government allowed cryptocurrencies to grow so large that eventually they formed their own feedback loop so strong that crypto bros were the biggest funders the 2024 presidential campaigns.
Iran could easily have garnered a lot of international sympathy and support. Instead, they attacked their neighbors, impacted the world economy, and now are basically asking for blackmail money: "nice ship you have there...".
Maybe Trump should bomb them some more?
Iran knows hard currency is better than soft power
Sympathy gets you Gaza, West Bank and a few refugee camps.
Geopolitics understands one language alone.
And what has this done to help Iran so far? Trump doesn't care about peoples opinions, US oil is making record profits thanks to the war so there wont be pushback from them, and Trump has 5 more months until midterms that is still plenty of time.
The main thing it resulted in is the Europe led coalition that aims to ensure the strait will never get blocked again, so Iran can never play this card again, that will lose them a lot of political power in the future since this card is now gone.
Survival.
In what way? What do you think would be different if Iran didn't block the strait?
Trump's tweets gave a clear indication of what's coming their way next.
Yes, USA will bomb Iran, so how did blocking the strait help them?
Well, first of all, the USA already bombed Iran, so closing the strait is an effect, not a cause.
Second of all, it's also more likely the USA will back down as a result of widespread disapproval, than it is that USA will effectuate a full ground invasion (which would result in heavy losses).
Whereas if they had complied with the don's demand that they be a vassal state of the USA and israel, they would not be a sovereign country anymore.
This isn't exactly abnormal: for a USA analogue, look at Patrick Henry's comments on liberty.
5 more months until midterms is plenty of time to do what exactly? Tell us that he won the war on Iran twice a day every, just like he has been doing for the last 2 months? The economic impact of this is just starting to be felt and will get increasingly painful for at least the remainder of the calendar year (depending on how much longer the straight stays closed). There is no mechanism for him to just sweep this under the rug. Perhaps you believe him every time he says he won, I think most us don't believe it and never will not matter how many times he repeats the lie.
"never get blocked again" just like when it was claimed by the U.S. it wouldn't be blocked in the first place, or that it would only be a few days...sure sure. I'm sure the IRGC is about to call the European and U.S. leaders and tell them how bigly they are and how scared of more bombing they are.
International law, much less "international sympathy", is a meaningless phrase in 2026.
Well the strait was open and freely navigable before trump bombed them.
What Iran has learned from this is they don’t need sympathy, they need to exercise the leverage they do have, and there’s no way they’re ever going to willingly give that leverage up - they’ve seen what would happen.
Some idiot tore up the JCPOA, the only thing really preventing Iran from getting nukes. The lesson here is: get nukes
See Ukraine for another reason to have nukes.
I used to see so many headlines about how North Korea was a breath away from causing global catastrophe. And then they got theirs. I don't see much now.
> [Iran] now are basically asking for blackmail money: "nice ship you have there..."
This doesn't sound like the don to you? "hey Iran, nice country you have there..."
> Maybe Trump should bomb them some more?
If the USA is going to be bombing every country which doesn't give up their sovereignty and bend the knee to the don, then the USA is going to need more bombs.
My comment about Trump was meant to be sarcastic. Sorry, if that was not obvious...
Huh? You're saying your whole post was sarcasm? Including the part where you criticize Iran for "blackmail" while the don has been doing the same thing since even before starting the war?
Poe's Law in action, I guess. In general, sarcasm isn't a good way to have a good discussion. Better to just say what you mean, rather than the opposite of what you mean, with the assumption that everyone will know you didn't actually mean it.
Iran was attacked by the US and Israel (the state committing genocide right now). International law, rules and agreements don't seem to matter when it comes to the US and Israel. Fortunately, the world is becoming more and more multi-polar, and the decline of the US (which to a certain extent is probably caused by how Israel is dragging them to wars) is necessary to have some world peace. I do have to note that I feel sorry for the bulk of Americans who are just trying to live their lives.
"Iran could easily have garnered a lot of international sympathy and support"
What? I understand sympathy but I am not understanding what the path could've been to meaningful support against US aggression here.
This is an incredible 180 degree misinterpretation of who attacked whom. Iran is garnering incredible international sympathy and support. There is no just war theory that can support what America has done to Iran. It is immoral, illegal aggression.
> Iran is garnering incredible international sympathy and support.
From who?
Look around you mate.
There are protests against the war/against the US/against Israel in major capitals, the Lego videos go viral, news regularly mention EU heads of state talking to Iranian ministers. After weeks of the strait being shut, no EU country has joined US and Israel. Every EU opposition party is including the end of the war in their manifesto. Does any of that look like no support?
For most of the world, Iran is the victim of two dangerous countries. I bet you a tenner that when the US and Israel give up and the end of the war is officially announced, there'll be dancing in your streets.
Where are you looking at? Maybe look at other places besides the ones you expose yourself to.
They ate getting relatively little sympathy. Why? Because they are pissing everyone off who might have sympathized.
Seriously dumb. And now this mafia-esque blackmail?
Yeah bombing a school filled with hundreds of children? They are not garnering any sympathy by doing that
Ukraine also gave up its nukes. Look how that worked out for them and Europe.
Were they theirs? Germany has nukes too but they're not theirs, they're from the US. Germany can't say "fuck off" to the ~50k Americans stationed in the country, leave NATO and get to keep the nukes.
If a country has nuclear weapons and can unilaterally launch them, then they are theirs. Who’s gonna come take them?
Who told you Ukraine had the ability to launch the nuclear weapons from the Soviet Union that happened to be deployed to its territory?
>can unilaterally launch them
Germany can't launch or even operate and maintain them without the US.
Well it worked to get USA and Israel to stop attacking.
Iran is more popular than ever before because they've stood up to the Zionists. Have you not seen the Boom Boom Tel Aviv music video? Or the Lego videos?
Yes, the antisemites are rejoicing all over the world. Let's not confuse negativity and hatred with genuine popularity.
Israel and Zionism are genuinely unpopular.