It's going to be incredibly difficult to stop Iran being able to kneecap both the global economy and in particular the gulf states, who are going to be motivated to put maximum pressure on the US to sue for peace. Incredible hubris and a lobotomised diplomatic and intelligence infrastructure in the name of ideological purity, quite the combination.
Wars are hard to predict and the economy is hard to predict. There's easy money in the making for those who are sure the oil price is going to continue way up.
The blog you reference has inaccuracies. Drones are generally not shot by THAAD is a glaring one. It's very much not 2-3 million dollars to $50k. Helicopter gunships shoot down drones with bullets these days is very common and there are other economic means of bringing them down.
Most of the heavy lifting in suppressing these attacks is done by other drones patrolling the skies and attacking anything that tries to fire. Those also don't use extremely expensive munitions.
"Iran produces approximately 500 of these drones per day and holds a stockpile estimated at around 80,000 units.". Both these are false today. I'd also question if they were true when Iran was attacked. These figures don't pass the smell test and either way any stockpile is an instant target.
Everyone seems to be an expert today.
It's obviously not great that the Hormuz straits are more or less closed. We've seen in Yemen that a ragtag force can be massively attacked and still manage to fire at ships on a much larger body of water. That said we didn't really see if they can sustain it for months under heavy attack which is a possible premise here.
There are some pipelines bypassing the straits but their capacity is much smaller. It's also about 20% of the world supply so definitely other suppliers can make up for some of the loss at a cost.
I'm not an expert. But the current oil price reflects what the experts think best. And that price is still below what it was for about half of 2022. And fluctuating. What will matter is the price over months.
> The blog you reference has inaccuracies. Drones are generally not shot by THAAD is a glaring one
It's obvious that the author doesn't mean THAAD but Patriot, which are indeed used against drones. You can tell that by the missle cost the author mentions, which is 1/10th of the THAAD missle. As the argument is a cost effectiveness argument the logic holds, just replace THAAD with Patriot.
Even though Ukraine offered their cost effective solution, they have a war to fight so any serious capacity increase will probably take months if not years and these things are not static and are quickly shaped on the battlefield so the Gulf states and Israel and USA will need to develop talent that is on the battlefield, like Russia and Ukraine did.
Absolutely agree there's both some dubious suppositions and hand-waving there. The real question is I suspect how much pressure the GCC can withstand and how much pressure they can apply to Trump directly given business ties etc. If they lose a serious chunk of desalination capacity for example the situation becomes dire extremely quickly. For Dubai simply not having a decent supply of fresh food would alone be an economic catastrophe, every day this drags on is doing reputational damage that'll take years to fully recover from long after the hotel facades are patched up.
Whatever points this author was trying to make were completely obliterated by the LLM it was run through or used to generate it.
A shame because it seems to have interesting points, but was too wordy and LLMified to keep attention. Stop telling me what it's not every other sentence, and just say what you mean. I wish folks would just use their own words.
Japan, an island nation with virtually no natural resources of its own, depends on it for a staggering 75% of its oil. Japan’s Prime Minister has warned plainly that if the Strait closes, the entire Japanese economy will collapse within eight to nine months. Not slow down. Not a contract. Collapse.
I am failing to an article about this, but that is absolutely incredible if true.
1/ When authors use AI for editing, it reduces their credibility.
2/ As much as I don't like the current administration (and Israel leadership), there is absolutely no way the assumptions this article makes about them are false.
There is no way the US/Israel didn't calculate that:
- the straight would be closed
- a new leader may represent similar idiologies of the past leader.
Everything that has happened so far (in regards to Iran attacking neighbors) has been extremely predictable. There is just no way these weren't calculated in.
Maybe the US military commanders, generals and Pentagon knew this but the civilian leadership at the top chose to completely ignore it and can't really articulate a plan or what the plan ever was.
This conflict was a long time coming: Trump claimed Biden or Obama will start a war in Iran and that is why they are weak presidents. Trump sees himself as a peacemaker (flying in to negotiate deals with TH and KH, negotiating Ukraine war, etc).
I think there is more going on to cause Trump drastically change his self-image.
I don't think this is a Trump administration driven decision.
>there is just no way these weren't calculated in.
the American government is publishing war footage intercut with Call of Duty scenes. The American secretary of defense is a former television personality with more tattoos than people in a trailer park. He said rules of engagement are stupid because they stop you from "winning" while the US bombed a girl's school.
They literally fired the people who calculate things and wage war based on memes, vibes and chatgpt recommendations
> There is no way the US/Israel didn't calculate that: ... the straight would be closed
It has always had this potential, as it has happened before: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Earnest_Will (1987). But based on this history I would assume that many in the admin did not find the threat as credible as it was then. We dont seem to have a good grasp on how things have gone in the black sea. We clearly did not anticipate the level of drone attacks that have been put out by Iran.
Nothing says "we did not have a plan" when easing Russian sanctions while you ask Ukraine for help with defenses.
> a new leader may represent similar idiologies of the past leader.
I could see making a bet that with the current water crisis there the this would tip them into an "Arab spring" moment. For any one aware of the history there, it was a poor one at best.
If the US decided that stopping oil production in Iran was important (restricting global oil supply), what other options does the US have ease the impact on oil prices other than Russian sanction easement?
Yeah, it looks bad, but there just isn't really any other ways for the US to magically pump more oil out of the ground instantaneously to compensate for the war.
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is reported to have recommended against further air strikes on Iran[1].
----------
"Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General Dan Caine, has warned that strikes against Iran could be risky, potentially drawing the US into a prolonged conflict, US media report.
Caine has reportedly cautioned that a military action could have repercussions across the region, potentially including retaliatory strikes by Iranian proxies or a larger conflict that would require more US forces.
In a lengthy post on Truth Social, Trump described the reports as "fake news".
I agree that many people inside and outside the US gov didn't want this war for various reasons, but of the people that wanted this war, they must have calculated these very obvious risks.
The article touches on this topic, but my guess is Iran isn't part of the USD/petrol trading. If the US can convince the new leadership in Iran to start trading in USD, then that would be very good for the USA (and bad for CN, RU, and IN).
If the POTUS starts a war against the advice of the The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, he should have a plan beyond "wag the dog" to distract from the Epstein files. I'm not convinced Trump actually has a plan unfortunately.
> There is no way the US/Israel didn't calculate that:
I don't really believe the buffoons in US leadership calculate much. It's all vibes.
I firmly believe it will become a case study in how many ways a comically incompetent government can damage a country.
As for Israel... I think their calculation is simple. They don't really care about how much damage they cause to the world economy, as long as they get to kill Muslims in general and Iranians in particular. They want death.
If its all vibes, then how does trump hungry for a world peace prize vibe with the war? Or the many clips of Trump trashing Obama and Biden for potentially starting a war in Iran?
> There is no way the US/Israel didn't calculate that - the straight would be closed, a new leader may represent similar idiologies of the past leader.
A few things to remember here. First, Israel and US have divergent strategic goals. (Well, that presumes the US has strategic goals, which appears to be false given the struggle the administration has had over the past week to explain why the fuck we're at war with Iran.) Israel's apparent goal is the complete destruction of the Iranian state, and Netanyahu certainly seems to believe that Israel will suffer no consequences as a result.
The second is that Trump has never faced any consequences for his actions. If anything goes wrong, he just lies and says that it's all right, changes the topic and since no one talks about anymore, hey, it's been fixed. It also seems as if he believes that nobody else truly has agency, so the idea that the enemy gets a vote in war may truly be foreign to him.
Note also the quality of people that Trump has surrounded himself with in this term. The head of the military is someone who washed out of the military officer corps (and also essentially failed in every managerial career he's had since them). They openly denigrate the importance of things like logistics in military, in favor of big, manly things like the awesome power of their missile salvos. I believe Hegseth legitimately doesn't give a crap about the boring things like naval escort missions because that's not manly, and instead cares more about how much big kaboom has been delivered to Iran, and so far the evidence of how the operation has gone to doubt completely vindicates that belief.
Fourth, even almost two weeks into the strait being closed, the US military has done nothing to reopen it. The strait is not closed because of the existence of mines, or because Iran is targeting ships; it is closed because shippers are absolutely terrified to send their ships through it. Reopening it thus requires giving those people confidence to send their ships through it, and that confidence of course requires clear, public statements. That is not happening. Instead, we get Trump giving off a different explanation of how to reopen it everytime he's asked, followed up by the US Navy denying whatever Trump said (e.g., the US Navy is unwilling to provide any naval escort). There is insufficient materiel in the theater right now to reopen the strait, and nothing is being shipped to the strait that can reopen it. From all apparent evidence, the current plan for reopening the strait is praying that it reopens tomorrow, although I have doubts that there is enough self-awareness or religiosity to actually do any praying here.
The risk of Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz is so obvious, the catastrophe of such an action is so well-known, that you would have to be a colossal idiot to go into a situation where Iran might plausibly close the strait without a plan to reopen it swiftly. And yet all available evidence leans in that direction. So now many, many people are forced to countenance the sobering idea that the US government is led by an idiot who will destroy the economy without realizing that's what he's doing. It's time for us to wake up to the fact that there are no adults in the US government anymore and do something about that.
I think you give too much credit to the US and zionists. They probably convinced Trump that it would be another Venezuela, and because of their hubris they decided to go for it anyway. Remember how at the beginning it was supposed to only last for 2-3 days? Then 1 week, then 2 weeks, then 4 weeks, then until September. They clearly didn't see this far.
I'm very surprised anyone would think Iran would be a Venezuela.
Venezuela's leadership was barely legitimate (with voter fraud / dictactorship 3 years ago) whereas the supreme leader in Iran has had power for 36 years.
This is written a bit like the US dollar depends solely on the price of oil, which isn't true.
It also seems like if we're to game theory this, we'd need to plot out the full escalation capacity of the USA, which the author is failing to do here. I don't like the idea of doing that because the thought is sickening, but it's necessary to consider the entire decision tree to make a remotely rational model.
In retrospect I guess game theory is used kind of rhetorically here. If you consider what's written through that lens, it's very poorly developed and doesn't make sense. Maybe this is a thing, though? Am I misunderstanding what the author means by game theory here?
I do think the asymmetry of war costs are a serious problem for the USA, and the less they're willing to escalate or otherwise mitigate this, the more serious that problem becomes. If I were to make a statement like the author did about the war, I'd frame it more like "this is going to be insanely fucking risky and expensive for the USA", but certainly not that they'll lose.
edit: Listening to the Professor Jiang analysis and I understand why game theory was referenced now. He seems much more thorough and analytical so far.
edit again: he claims Dubai will probably go bankrupt in one scenario. This seems exceedingly unlikely, but he doesn't explain why it could be true
You might expect events like this to fundamentally change the global order or bring some sanity to U.S. policymaking. But nothing is going to change. It will be chaotic few years, but soon enough, everything will be conveniently forgotten. Iranian/Syrian/Afganian threat will reappear, the war-mongers and Israel-lobby will once more push for pre-emptive strikes, assassinations of leaders or generals. Rinse and repeat.
At its core, the problem is a militarized, propaganda-driven state masquareding itself as a necessary guarantor of global order, while its sole objective is nothing more than letting no other nation threaten its supremacy. And much of the world continuing to accept that narrative either because of lack of alternatives or out of necessity.
The core of the problem is that the US stepped back under Obama from being the guarantor of global order. The world needs policing and deterrence is the sad reality otherwise everything goes to hell.
Why did Russia attack Ukraine? Why is China threatening to attack Taiwan? Without the US (and the west more generally) Russia would retake half of Europe and China would have taken Taiwan. If you think there would be world peace you are so very much mistaken (speaking of propaganda). If you goal is to speak Russian and Chinese and live in those sorts of regimes then that's very much aligned with the US and the West just stepping back and not using force ever.
> The core of the problem is that the US stepped back under Obama from being the guarantor of global order.
That is not the core of the problem. We can go a bit further:
- Obama was a reaction to overstepping under Bush. As a 'guarantor of global order' the US created a lot of disorder with Iraq and Afganistan. That is actually more in line with what historically the US understands under 'the global order': the US does what it wants to do and calls it the global order.
- also the relative standing of the US since the end of the 90s is falling, because of the rise of other countries. That was widely expected and forecasted. What was also expected is that empires on their way out don't act rationally, because there is ample historical precendent to that. And so here we are.
That's a lot of words for describing "attempting MAD doctrine with conventional weapons". Hell, we even got to see a "first strike decapitation countered by autonomous cells with pre-written second strike directives" scenario play out.
Israel and the US completely control their airspace and Iran's entire navy got demolished. I think the US prefers not to got too far as they prefer to keep the negotiation talks open. According to reports they asked Israel not to target energy for example.
> Israel and the US completely control their airspace
Maybe the soldiers sending shaheds and missiles hitting other countries every day haven't gotten the memo? Did somebody forget to put a cover sheet on it?
Normally what happens in these scenarios is that both sides declare victory and go home to lick their wounds.
The US and Israel can claim that they've caused the IRGC sufficient damage to set them back a decade or more.
Iran will declare that they've fought off a superpower with minimal real losses. They can also claim that -- despite intense foreign interference -- they got to choose and keep their preferred leader, alive. For now.
Normally yes, but without regime change the Iranian leadership will have even more resolve than ever to continue weapons programs (nuclear or not) and prepare retaliation for the inevitable next round of bombing…
I'm not claiming either side is actually winning, I'm merely predicting that they'll both claim to have won.
On the topic of the weapons program: The Israeli approach is to regularly "mow the lawn" to keep their regional opponents perpetually behind. Iran's nuclear weapons and ICBM programmes have almost certainly been damaged, perhaps enough to delay them for half a decade or more. Then it'll be time to mow the lawn again, or hope that by then a more moderate leadership can sign an agreement with a new US president that's a bit more trustworthy than the current one.
That's not a reasonable option, it's a bear-trap. Once troops are on the ground it will be another decades-long slog, and one that ends like Afghanistan at best. At worst, this looks like America's version of Ukraine.
I can argue both sides but under the assumption (which I think is true) that 80%-90% of Iranians want to remove the regime there's some possibility of success. That said there's also the possibility of screwing things up completely and getting the entire population to fight you as an invader.
One thing for sure, it's not going to look like Russia invading Ukraine. The Iranians don't have the resolve or the support or the capabilities that Ukraine had and has. It will look more like Iraq in terms of the ability of the military to put up any resistance.
The problem with "boots on the ground" isn't that it can't succeed. The problem is it has zero support from the American public. People feel about this a lot more strongly than the other topics dividing the public.
Trump, the neo-cons, and much of the Republican party might as well hang up their hats if they put boots on the ground (beyond special forces which is often ignored for some reason).
The US will be bogged down for years at a minimum if we entered Iran on the ground, or we would lose quickly and tuck tail.
This isn't a fight to be won in a conventional war, the administration put every chip they had on a gamble that regime change was possible with air superiority alone. I don't know of any historical example of that working, but I guess we'll see what happens.
Everyone says there's no historical examples but there is no exact parallel either. I wouldn't argue based on historical precedence here.
The challenge is that regime is large and armed and they can hide and weather the storm. They'll hide in hospitals, and mosques, and schools and amongst civilians.
Getting them and disrupting their organization to a point where a popular revolt can take over seems ... lessay hard.
What needs to happen is that some parts of the military, who are a bit less fanatic, switches sides. The probability of that is very hard to gauge. There are stories of some defecting but hard to know if it's true or not.
The ground deployment to the mountains on Iran's side of the strait will have to be absolutely insane to actually eliminate the threat (if it's even possible to) of Iran launching drones or suicide boats at tankers.
I think it’s wild to me just how much my mainstream news doesn’t feel like it’s covering some of what’s really going on. I have to go to YouTube to see that Iran is successfully fighting back in many ways including hitting oil tankers and depots.
Not that I’m claiming the CBC and such are doing something sinister here. Just that I no-longer get the full story vibe I recall getting back in previous U.S. wars.
The CBC hasn't done any good reporting in the last decade that I can tell. They just copy-paste from news agencies based on their ideological principles or something.
You can definitely get some color on YouTube. Iran is fighting back but that's not what's going to decide the war (e.g. the damage to Israel or to the Gulf states). They are taking a lot more damage then they're dishing out and the scale of their counters goes down every day. The straits are a very different story since it doesn't take much to threaten the ships to the extent nobody wants to take a chance. One drone, or mine, or a missile, and the straits are closed. Even if the US and Israel are able to pretty much completely suppress Iranian attacks on Israel and the Gulf states the straits might remain closed.
I was just talking with a friend about this on Sunday, just before the big oil price runup—it was very curious to me that I had had to hunt around a bit for coverage of what was going on with the strait.
Closure was something I had known was a risk with any conflict with Iran after learning about the Tanker War in some politics class in college, and following the various threats over the past 15 years or so. It seemed like something that should have had tons of coverage as soon as I heard the US had attacked Iran, and I wanted to know what was actually going on with it...yet all of the mainstream press seemed to skirt around it until oil prices finally spiked on Sunday, even though traffic through the strait had fallen off a cliff a week beforehand.
Figuring out what takes its place is a hard problem that no one seems to have cracked. I don't know if its replacement will be very profitable, but we all lose out when media isn't working. Having a shared reality is fundamental for a healthy society.
It is similar to way how Russia / Ukraine war is fought. Both sides will show you when civilian area is hit and both sides will try to conceal actual hits on sensitive military targets.
So in the news you will see that Iranians are bombing hotels, but what you won't see is that Iranians were able to knock out for example THAAD and now USA needs to move one in Korea into the Middle East.
They randomly shoot in all directions but they also managed to hit some things (e.g. the US installation in Kuwait and a US radar) that are probably actual legit targets. But yes, hotels, apartment buildings, (civilian) airports, container ships etc. are high on the list of things hit.
They're all afraid of America's dictator whose only interest is his own personal image. This is how corruption kills nations, overbearing unchecked power meeting a lack of bravery or conviction in those who matter.
The irony of drill, baby drill, and removing the environmental restrictions, encouraging the sale of petrol cars... And then causing the prices to be jacked up.
2026 I swear..., I'm expected a post on top of HN any day about
"i've written all code by hand this month, here is what i learnt".
This is worrying about trivialities. We need to be rapidly phasing out fossils usage to mitigate the climate catastrophe. Which of course requires a much much smaller supply of oil.
There should be ~ $250/barrel cost added to the market price to account for externalities (barrel of oil releases 0.43 tons of co2 and avg social cost of carbon from https://arxiv.org/html/2402.09125v3 is $500+/ton)
I've found it mind boggling for at least a decade (since solar panels started being a relatively normal consumer addition to the home) that a transition to electric and away from fossil fuels hasn't been an, essentially, national security priority for all countries other than those that produce oil.
The dependence, of literally almost everything, on the continuous flow of oil from few parts of the world has been an obvious point of strangulation for longer than I've been alive.
I mean, I understand that it's so entrenched that politics is owned by it, but, hell, it's been, what a week and a bit, and already Australian media is trying to talk down panic about petrol shortages.
And of course mitigating the climate catastrophe should be much more entrenched, there's vastly more voters whose lives will be impacted by it than by fortunes of the oil business.
The stat has been raised frequently of late that 20% of the world's oil floes through the Straight.
My understanding is that its 20% of total oil, but that around half of all oil production is used domestically where it is produced and never enters global markets.
Unless I missed something when fact checking that, Iran is capable cutting off 40% of all purchasable oil.
To begin with, it assumes that oil currently used domestically isn't on the market, but what do you expect oil producers to do if foreign buyers make a higher bid for the "domestic" oil? Or to put it another way, there's a reason the market price goes up by essentially the same amount in the oil-producing countries as everywhere else.
Then it assumes that oil that currently goes through the Strait has to. Oil can also leave the middle east by going west, e.g. to Europe. You might think that doesn't help India or China, but it's still a global commodity with a global price. India and China could then buy oil from Russia, Kazakhstan or whatever other country that Europe had been buying from and now isn't because they're getting more oil from the middle east.
Does this still raise the price? Yes it does, because there is a reason they were doing it the other way previously -- doing something else will have higher transportation costs. But does it mean 20% of global oil supplies will be cut off? Not really, it mostly means you'll have to increase the average distance it gets transported and pay a few percent more to cover the higher transportation costs.
No, in the sense that he people who set oil prices and government policy alike can trade in those prediction markets. I'm all for the markets, very democratic and libertarian (not that I'm one), but policy makers, executives and other people from whom a conflict of interest by a prediction market translates into disaster for real people should be restricted from participating in these markets.
In this case however you can pretty much do the same thing with other financial instruments like future contract on oil. Either way, I agree decision makers shouldn't be allowed to trade (and I think are forbidden in most countries).
I feel this is good. It will push economies towards more alternatives(nuclear/solar/wind etc), increase electrification of transport/cooking. Amazon saw India induction stove sales jump 30x after LPG supply hit issues. There is no real reason to be importing expensive gas for cooking, when the induction stove are just much more efficient and cheaper. This is one way to change existing habits that people find uncomfortable letting go off.
Price moves have hysteresis. The risk element in moving Oil hasn't gone, and the companies are looking to recover lost income in the month(s) and so whilst there is supply, there aren't necessarily boats in convenient places, or complete freedoms to walk off contracts.
This theory of how the US loses in Iran is looking increasingly likely: https://kasperbenjamin.substack.com/p/why-the-us-will-lose-t...
It's going to be incredibly difficult to stop Iran being able to kneecap both the global economy and in particular the gulf states, who are going to be motivated to put maximum pressure on the US to sue for peace. Incredible hubris and a lobotomised diplomatic and intelligence infrastructure in the name of ideological purity, quite the combination.
Wars are hard to predict and the economy is hard to predict. There's easy money in the making for those who are sure the oil price is going to continue way up.
The blog you reference has inaccuracies. Drones are generally not shot by THAAD is a glaring one. It's very much not 2-3 million dollars to $50k. Helicopter gunships shoot down drones with bullets these days is very common and there are other economic means of bringing them down.
Most of the heavy lifting in suppressing these attacks is done by other drones patrolling the skies and attacking anything that tries to fire. Those also don't use extremely expensive munitions.
"Iran produces approximately 500 of these drones per day and holds a stockpile estimated at around 80,000 units.". Both these are false today. I'd also question if they were true when Iran was attacked. These figures don't pass the smell test and either way any stockpile is an instant target.
Everyone seems to be an expert today.
It's obviously not great that the Hormuz straits are more or less closed. We've seen in Yemen that a ragtag force can be massively attacked and still manage to fire at ships on a much larger body of water. That said we didn't really see if they can sustain it for months under heavy attack which is a possible premise here.
There are some pipelines bypassing the straits but their capacity is much smaller. It's also about 20% of the world supply so definitely other suppliers can make up for some of the loss at a cost.
I'm not an expert. But the current oil price reflects what the experts think best. And that price is still below what it was for about half of 2022. And fluctuating. What will matter is the price over months.
> The blog you reference has inaccuracies. Drones are generally not shot by THAAD is a glaring one
It's obvious that the author doesn't mean THAAD but Patriot, which are indeed used against drones. You can tell that by the missle cost the author mentions, which is 1/10th of the THAAD missle. As the argument is a cost effectiveness argument the logic holds, just replace THAAD with Patriot.
Even though Ukraine offered their cost effective solution, they have a war to fight so any serious capacity increase will probably take months if not years and these things are not static and are quickly shaped on the battlefield so the Gulf states and Israel and USA will need to develop talent that is on the battlefield, like Russia and Ukraine did.
> It's obvious that the author doesn't mean THAAD but Patriot
That's a bit sloppy.
Absolutely agree there's both some dubious suppositions and hand-waving there. The real question is I suspect how much pressure the GCC can withstand and how much pressure they can apply to Trump directly given business ties etc. If they lose a serious chunk of desalination capacity for example the situation becomes dire extremely quickly. For Dubai simply not having a decent supply of fresh food would alone be an economic catastrophe, every day this drags on is doing reputational damage that'll take years to fully recover from long after the hotel facades are patched up.
Whatever points this author was trying to make were completely obliterated by the LLM it was run through or used to generate it.
A shame because it seems to have interesting points, but was too wordy and LLMified to keep attention. Stop telling me what it's not every other sentence, and just say what you mean. I wish folks would just use their own words.
1/ When authors use AI for editing, it reduces their credibility.
2/ As much as I don't like the current administration (and Israel leadership), there is absolutely no way the assumptions this article makes about them are false.
There is no way the US/Israel didn't calculate that:
- the straight would be closed
- a new leader may represent similar idiologies of the past leader.
Everything that has happened so far (in regards to Iran attacking neighbors) has been extremely predictable. There is just no way these weren't calculated in.
Maybe the US military commanders, generals and Pentagon knew this but the civilian leadership at the top chose to completely ignore it and can't really articulate a plan or what the plan ever was.
This conflict was a long time coming: Trump claimed Biden or Obama will start a war in Iran and that is why they are weak presidents. Trump sees himself as a peacemaker (flying in to negotiate deals with TH and KH, negotiating Ukraine war, etc).
I think there is more going on to cause Trump drastically change his self-image.
I don't think this is a Trump administration driven decision.
They were calculated in, but the decision was made by someone who did not give a fuck about the math.
> There is no way the US
Eppur si muove.
These folks are not our best and brightest.
https://www.wsj.com/finance/u-s-plan-to-unblock-strait-of-ho...
>there is just no way these weren't calculated in.
the American government is publishing war footage intercut with Call of Duty scenes. The American secretary of defense is a former television personality with more tattoos than people in a trailer park. He said rules of engagement are stupid because they stop you from "winning" while the US bombed a girl's school.
They literally fired the people who calculate things and wage war based on memes, vibes and chatgpt recommendations
> There is no way the US/Israel didn't calculate that: ... the straight would be closed
It has always had this potential, as it has happened before: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Earnest_Will (1987). But based on this history I would assume that many in the admin did not find the threat as credible as it was then. We dont seem to have a good grasp on how things have gone in the black sea. We clearly did not anticipate the level of drone attacks that have been put out by Iran.
Nothing says "we did not have a plan" when easing Russian sanctions while you ask Ukraine for help with defenses.
> a new leader may represent similar idiologies of the past leader.
I could see making a bet that with the current water crisis there the this would tip them into an "Arab spring" moment. For any one aware of the history there, it was a poor one at best.
If the US decided that stopping oil production in Iran was important (restricting global oil supply), what other options does the US have ease the impact on oil prices other than Russian sanction easement?
Yeah, it looks bad, but there just isn't really any other ways for the US to magically pump more oil out of the ground instantaneously to compensate for the war.
This is why starting a war with Iran right now was a bad idea.
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is reported to have recommended against further air strikes on Iran[1].
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"Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General Dan Caine, has warned that strikes against Iran could be risky, potentially drawing the US into a prolonged conflict, US media report.
Caine has reportedly cautioned that a military action could have repercussions across the region, potentially including retaliatory strikes by Iranian proxies or a larger conflict that would require more US forces.
In a lengthy post on Truth Social, Trump described the reports as "fake news".
------------
[1]https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn0zrwzr519o
I agree that many people inside and outside the US gov didn't want this war for various reasons, but of the people that wanted this war, they must have calculated these very obvious risks.
The article touches on this topic, but my guess is Iran isn't part of the USD/petrol trading. If the US can convince the new leadership in Iran to start trading in USD, then that would be very good for the USA (and bad for CN, RU, and IN).
If the POTUS starts a war against the advice of the The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, he should have a plan beyond "wag the dog" to distract from the Epstein files. I'm not convinced Trump actually has a plan unfortunately.
> There is no way the US/Israel didn't calculate that:
I don't really believe the buffoons in US leadership calculate much. It's all vibes.
I firmly believe it will become a case study in how many ways a comically incompetent government can damage a country.
As for Israel... I think their calculation is simple. They don't really care about how much damage they cause to the world economy, as long as they get to kill Muslims in general and Iranians in particular. They want death.
If its all vibes, then how does trump hungry for a world peace prize vibe with the war? Or the many clips of Trump trashing Obama and Biden for potentially starting a war in Iran?
No, this was a calculated decision.
> There is no way the US/Israel didn't calculate that - the straight would be closed, a new leader may represent similar idiologies of the past leader.
A few things to remember here. First, Israel and US have divergent strategic goals. (Well, that presumes the US has strategic goals, which appears to be false given the struggle the administration has had over the past week to explain why the fuck we're at war with Iran.) Israel's apparent goal is the complete destruction of the Iranian state, and Netanyahu certainly seems to believe that Israel will suffer no consequences as a result.
The second is that Trump has never faced any consequences for his actions. If anything goes wrong, he just lies and says that it's all right, changes the topic and since no one talks about anymore, hey, it's been fixed. It also seems as if he believes that nobody else truly has agency, so the idea that the enemy gets a vote in war may truly be foreign to him.
Note also the quality of people that Trump has surrounded himself with in this term. The head of the military is someone who washed out of the military officer corps (and also essentially failed in every managerial career he's had since them). They openly denigrate the importance of things like logistics in military, in favor of big, manly things like the awesome power of their missile salvos. I believe Hegseth legitimately doesn't give a crap about the boring things like naval escort missions because that's not manly, and instead cares more about how much big kaboom has been delivered to Iran, and so far the evidence of how the operation has gone to doubt completely vindicates that belief.
Fourth, even almost two weeks into the strait being closed, the US military has done nothing to reopen it. The strait is not closed because of the existence of mines, or because Iran is targeting ships; it is closed because shippers are absolutely terrified to send their ships through it. Reopening it thus requires giving those people confidence to send their ships through it, and that confidence of course requires clear, public statements. That is not happening. Instead, we get Trump giving off a different explanation of how to reopen it everytime he's asked, followed up by the US Navy denying whatever Trump said (e.g., the US Navy is unwilling to provide any naval escort). There is insufficient materiel in the theater right now to reopen the strait, and nothing is being shipped to the strait that can reopen it. From all apparent evidence, the current plan for reopening the strait is praying that it reopens tomorrow, although I have doubts that there is enough self-awareness or religiosity to actually do any praying here.
The risk of Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz is so obvious, the catastrophe of such an action is so well-known, that you would have to be a colossal idiot to go into a situation where Iran might plausibly close the strait without a plan to reopen it swiftly. And yet all available evidence leans in that direction. So now many, many people are forced to countenance the sobering idea that the US government is led by an idiot who will destroy the economy without realizing that's what he's doing. It's time for us to wake up to the fact that there are no adults in the US government anymore and do something about that.
I think you give too much credit to the US and zionists. They probably convinced Trump that it would be another Venezuela, and because of their hubris they decided to go for it anyway. Remember how at the beginning it was supposed to only last for 2-3 days? Then 1 week, then 2 weeks, then 4 weeks, then until September. They clearly didn't see this far.
I'm very surprised anyone would think Iran would be a Venezuela.
Venezuela's leadership was barely legitimate (with voter fraud / dictactorship 3 years ago) whereas the supreme leader in Iran has had power for 36 years.
This is written a bit like the US dollar depends solely on the price of oil, which isn't true.
It also seems like if we're to game theory this, we'd need to plot out the full escalation capacity of the USA, which the author is failing to do here. I don't like the idea of doing that because the thought is sickening, but it's necessary to consider the entire decision tree to make a remotely rational model.
In retrospect I guess game theory is used kind of rhetorically here. If you consider what's written through that lens, it's very poorly developed and doesn't make sense. Maybe this is a thing, though? Am I misunderstanding what the author means by game theory here?
I do think the asymmetry of war costs are a serious problem for the USA, and the less they're willing to escalate or otherwise mitigate this, the more serious that problem becomes. If I were to make a statement like the author did about the war, I'd frame it more like "this is going to be insanely fucking risky and expensive for the USA", but certainly not that they'll lose.
edit: Listening to the Professor Jiang analysis and I understand why game theory was referenced now. He seems much more thorough and analytical so far.
edit again: he claims Dubai will probably go bankrupt in one scenario. This seems exceedingly unlikely, but he doesn't explain why it could be true
You might expect events like this to fundamentally change the global order or bring some sanity to U.S. policymaking. But nothing is going to change. It will be chaotic few years, but soon enough, everything will be conveniently forgotten. Iranian/Syrian/Afganian threat will reappear, the war-mongers and Israel-lobby will once more push for pre-emptive strikes, assassinations of leaders or generals. Rinse and repeat.
At its core, the problem is a militarized, propaganda-driven state masquareding itself as a necessary guarantor of global order, while its sole objective is nothing more than letting no other nation threaten its supremacy. And much of the world continuing to accept that narrative either because of lack of alternatives or out of necessity.
The core of the problem is that the US stepped back under Obama from being the guarantor of global order. The world needs policing and deterrence is the sad reality otherwise everything goes to hell.
Why did Russia attack Ukraine? Why is China threatening to attack Taiwan? Without the US (and the west more generally) Russia would retake half of Europe and China would have taken Taiwan. If you think there would be world peace you are so very much mistaken (speaking of propaganda). If you goal is to speak Russian and Chinese and live in those sorts of regimes then that's very much aligned with the US and the West just stepping back and not using force ever.
> The core of the problem is that the US stepped back under Obama from being the guarantor of global order.
That is not the core of the problem. We can go a bit further:
- Obama was a reaction to overstepping under Bush. As a 'guarantor of global order' the US created a lot of disorder with Iraq and Afganistan. That is actually more in line with what historically the US understands under 'the global order': the US does what it wants to do and calls it the global order.
- also the relative standing of the US since the end of the 90s is falling, because of the rise of other countries. That was widely expected and forecasted. What was also expected is that empires on their way out don't act rationally, because there is ample historical precendent to that. And so here we are.
Things don't change... until they do.
That's a lot of words for describing "attempting MAD doctrine with conventional weapons". Hell, we even got to see a "first strike decapitation countered by autonomous cells with pre-written second strike directives" scenario play out.
Israel and the US completely control their airspace and Iran's entire navy got demolished. I think the US prefers not to got too far as they prefer to keep the negotiation talks open. According to reports they asked Israel not to target energy for example.
> Israel and the US completely control their airspace
Maybe the soldiers sending shaheds and missiles hitting other countries every day haven't gotten the memo? Did somebody forget to put a cover sheet on it?
Normally what happens in these scenarios is that both sides declare victory and go home to lick their wounds.
The US and Israel can claim that they've caused the IRGC sufficient damage to set them back a decade or more.
Iran will declare that they've fought off a superpower with minimal real losses. They can also claim that -- despite intense foreign interference -- they got to choose and keep their preferred leader, alive. For now.
Normally yes, but without regime change the Iranian leadership will have even more resolve than ever to continue weapons programs (nuclear or not) and prepare retaliation for the inevitable next round of bombing…
There is no winning here for anyone.
I'm not claiming either side is actually winning, I'm merely predicting that they'll both claim to have won.
On the topic of the weapons program: The Israeli approach is to regularly "mow the lawn" to keep their regional opponents perpetually behind. Iran's nuclear weapons and ICBM programmes have almost certainly been damaged, perhaps enough to delay them for half a decade or more. Then it'll be time to mow the lawn again, or hope that by then a more moderate leadership can sign an agreement with a new US president that's a bit more trustworthy than the current one.
Not really. The U.S. can send in the ground force to restore the trade around the Gulf. The BUT is obvious in this case tho.
That's not a reasonable option, it's a bear-trap. Once troops are on the ground it will be another decades-long slog, and one that ends like Afghanistan at best. At worst, this looks like America's version of Ukraine.
I can argue both sides but under the assumption (which I think is true) that 80%-90% of Iranians want to remove the regime there's some possibility of success. That said there's also the possibility of screwing things up completely and getting the entire population to fight you as an invader.
One thing for sure, it's not going to look like Russia invading Ukraine. The Iranians don't have the resolve or the support or the capabilities that Ukraine had and has. It will look more like Iraq in terms of the ability of the military to put up any resistance.
The problem with "boots on the ground" isn't that it can't succeed. The problem is it has zero support from the American public. People feel about this a lot more strongly than the other topics dividing the public.
Trump, the neo-cons, and much of the Republican party might as well hang up their hats if they put boots on the ground (beyond special forces which is often ignored for some reason).
The US will be bogged down for years at a minimum if we entered Iran on the ground, or we would lose quickly and tuck tail.
This isn't a fight to be won in a conventional war, the administration put every chip they had on a gamble that regime change was possible with air superiority alone. I don't know of any historical example of that working, but I guess we'll see what happens.
Everyone says there's no historical examples but there is no exact parallel either. I wouldn't argue based on historical precedence here.
The challenge is that regime is large and armed and they can hide and weather the storm. They'll hide in hospitals, and mosques, and schools and amongst civilians.
Getting them and disrupting their organization to a point where a popular revolt can take over seems ... lessay hard.
What needs to happen is that some parts of the military, who are a bit less fanatic, switches sides. The probability of that is very hard to gauge. There are stories of some defecting but hard to know if it's true or not.
The ground deployment to the mountains on Iran's side of the strait will have to be absolutely insane to actually eliminate the threat (if it's even possible to) of Iran launching drones or suicide boats at tankers.
I think it’s wild to me just how much my mainstream news doesn’t feel like it’s covering some of what’s really going on. I have to go to YouTube to see that Iran is successfully fighting back in many ways including hitting oil tankers and depots.
Not that I’m claiming the CBC and such are doing something sinister here. Just that I no-longer get the full story vibe I recall getting back in previous U.S. wars.
You'd be surprised that Israeli media has decent coverage of the damage from Iran's attacks to Israel and the gulf. Random e.g.: https://www.timesofisrael.com/at-least-25-iranian-attacks-ha...
The CBC hasn't done any good reporting in the last decade that I can tell. They just copy-paste from news agencies based on their ideological principles or something.
Another source is: https://understandingwar.org/analysis/middle-east/iran-updat...
You can definitely get some color on YouTube. Iran is fighting back but that's not what's going to decide the war (e.g. the damage to Israel or to the Gulf states). They are taking a lot more damage then they're dishing out and the scale of their counters goes down every day. The straits are a very different story since it doesn't take much to threaten the ships to the extent nobody wants to take a chance. One drone, or mine, or a missile, and the straits are closed. Even if the US and Israel are able to pretty much completely suppress Iranian attacks on Israel and the Gulf states the straits might remain closed.
EDIT: https://www.ynet.co.il/news/blogs/article/skwano1cbe#autopla...
This is Hebrew but I just saw reporting about 6 ships on fire from Iranian attacks and there are photos...
I was just talking with a friend about this on Sunday, just before the big oil price runup—it was very curious to me that I had had to hunt around a bit for coverage of what was going on with the strait.
Closure was something I had known was a risk with any conflict with Iran after learning about the Tanker War in some politics class in college, and following the various threats over the past 15 years or so. It seemed like something that should have had tons of coverage as soon as I heard the US had attacked Iran, and I wanted to know what was actually going on with it...yet all of the mainstream press seemed to skirt around it until oil prices finally spiked on Sunday, even though traffic through the strait had fallen off a cliff a week beforehand.
Al Jazeera, AP News, NYT, etc have been doing "live blogs" every day of the war since it started.
CBC does it too. https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/livestory/iran-israel-us-war-d...
Though I will say CBC's seems to not include as many individual strike and counterstrike posts as others.
Corporate media in this moment is... not great.
Figuring out what takes its place is a hard problem that no one seems to have cracked. I don't know if its replacement will be very profitable, but we all lose out when media isn't working. Having a shared reality is fundamental for a healthy society.
News organizations need to not be part of larger corporations and a nontrivial amount of their funding needs to be some kind of endowment.
Media mergers need to just be illegal, Disney/Viacomm/TimeWarner (god I don't even know what the big ones are any more) need to be broken up.
"we don't want to make the administration mad so our merger will be let through" is just absurd.
"fighting back" == blowing 3rd party civilian installations.
It is similar to way how Russia / Ukraine war is fought. Both sides will show you when civilian area is hit and both sides will try to conceal actual hits on sensitive military targets.
So in the news you will see that Iranians are bombing hotels, but what you won't see is that Iranians were able to knock out for example THAAD and now USA needs to move one in Korea into the Middle East.
They randomly shoot in all directions but they also managed to hit some things (e.g. the US installation in Kuwait and a US radar) that are probably actual legit targets. But yes, hotels, apartment buildings, (civilian) airports, container ships etc. are high on the list of things hit.
PBS has been alright in this regard
They're all afraid of America's dictator whose only interest is his own personal image. This is how corruption kills nations, overbearing unchecked power meeting a lack of bravery or conviction in those who matter.
Maybe Le Monde give the right balance?
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/
The irony of drill, baby drill, and removing the environmental restrictions, encouraging the sale of petrol cars... And then causing the prices to be jacked up.
2026 I swear..., I'm expected a post on top of HN any day about
"i've written all code by hand this month, here is what i learnt".
This is worrying about trivialities. We need to be rapidly phasing out fossils usage to mitigate the climate catastrophe. Which of course requires a much much smaller supply of oil.
There should be ~ $250/barrel cost added to the market price to account for externalities (barrel of oil releases 0.43 tons of co2 and avg social cost of carbon from https://arxiv.org/html/2402.09125v3 is $500+/ton)
I've found it mind boggling for at least a decade (since solar panels started being a relatively normal consumer addition to the home) that a transition to electric and away from fossil fuels hasn't been an, essentially, national security priority for all countries other than those that produce oil.
The dependence, of literally almost everything, on the continuous flow of oil from few parts of the world has been an obvious point of strangulation for longer than I've been alive.
I mean, I understand that it's so entrenched that politics is owned by it, but, hell, it's been, what a week and a bit, and already Australian media is trying to talk down panic about petrol shortages.
The blind leading the blind.
Yes indeed.
And of course mitigating the climate catastrophe should be much more entrenched, there's vastly more voters whose lives will be impacted by it than by fortunes of the oil business.
The stat has been raised frequently of late that 20% of the world's oil floes through the Straight.
My understanding is that its 20% of total oil, but that around half of all oil production is used domestically where it is produced and never enters global markets.
Unless I missed something when fact checking that, Iran is capable cutting off 40% of all purchasable oil.
There are several issues with that math.
To begin with, it assumes that oil currently used domestically isn't on the market, but what do you expect oil producers to do if foreign buyers make a higher bid for the "domestic" oil? Or to put it another way, there's a reason the market price goes up by essentially the same amount in the oil-producing countries as everywhere else.
Then it assumes that oil that currently goes through the Strait has to. Oil can also leave the middle east by going west, e.g. to Europe. You might think that doesn't help India or China, but it's still a global commodity with a global price. India and China could then buy oil from Russia, Kazakhstan or whatever other country that Europe had been buying from and now isn't because they're getting more oil from the middle east.
Does this still raise the price? Yes it does, because there is a reason they were doing it the other way previously -- doing something else will have higher transportation costs. But does it mean 20% of global oil supplies will be cut off? Not really, it mostly means you'll have to increase the average distance it gets transported and pay a few percent more to cover the higher transportation costs.
75% of Japan’s oil. 60% of India’s oil. 40% of China’s oil. is what i’ve heard.
It's going higher, there is no viable TACO here and they can keep the strait shut indefinitely.
Plus the longer it goes, the harder it is to bring back up production or refining capacity.
https://polymarket.com/event/will-crude-oil-cl-hit-by-end-of...
I wonder how prediction markets are affecting all this.
In the sense that someone is manipulating the real world to make money in the prediction markets? Otherwise it's just like options.
No, in the sense that he people who set oil prices and government policy alike can trade in those prediction markets. I'm all for the markets, very democratic and libertarian (not that I'm one), but policy makers, executives and other people from whom a conflict of interest by a prediction market translates into disaster for real people should be restricted from participating in these markets.
OK. So I think your answer is actually a yes?
In this case however you can pretty much do the same thing with other financial instruments like future contract on oil. Either way, I agree decision makers shouldn't be allowed to trade (and I think are forbidden in most countries).
That's more like unregulated options market than a prediction market.
I feel this is good. It will push economies towards more alternatives(nuclear/solar/wind etc), increase electrification of transport/cooking. Amazon saw India induction stove sales jump 30x after LPG supply hit issues. There is no real reason to be importing expensive gas for cooking, when the induction stove are just much more efficient and cheaper. This is one way to change existing habits that people find uncomfortable letting go off.
Price moves have hysteresis. The risk element in moving Oil hasn't gone, and the companies are looking to recover lost income in the month(s) and so whilst there is supply, there aren't necessarily boats in convenient places, or complete freedoms to walk off contracts.
Give it 30 days, things might have changed.
That's because oil tankers are going up in flames: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTzdxq0trb0
Saw a Chevron station in Silicon Valley today with a price above $7/gallon. That's not typical, but it's real.
it's not like they found anyway to open the Hormuz strait, why should the price be lower.
one again the world suffers thank to US stupidity.