This is just so incredibly embarrassing. We're now negotiating to end a war with a country we have claimed to have defeated like 500 times now, over terms that will not even just return the region to the pre-war status quo, but (most likely) giving them more power than they had when the first bombs were dropped. Not to mention shattering the illusion that the US can somehow protect the gulf states, along with most of our bases in the region and 13 US lives. Even if the US somehow recovers the enriched uranium they now claim was the motive, why would Iran not want to build nukes now? It would be suicidal not to.
(I say this with no sympathy to the Iranian government, just looking at reality.)
> Why would Iran not want to build nukes now? It would be suicidal not to.
I feel like we have enough examples to be clear on this now, would you rather your country be treated by the major powers like Libya, Ukraine, Iraq... Or like North Korea.
That's a great point. This is also going to be disastrous for the case against nuclear proliferation, not just in Iran or the middle east -- especially when the co-aggressor has an undeclared nuclear stockpile.
I mean, Iran has been working on nukes for a while, and it has led them to a disastrous place of its own.
You could easily argue that the dictatorship is in a stronger place after getting nukes, but the act of building nukes have destabilized many regimes, including Iran. Iran could have been wealthy like UAE and the Saudis, with regional influence similar to Turkey, instead of being the punching bag of US and Israel.
It's reasonable to consider the counterfactual but it seems like the closest parallel here is Pakistan, which pulled off the gambit successfully.
The years leading up to and immediately following successful acquisition were tenuous and it seemed like they were destined to become a global pariah if not a failed state. And yet now, they are a regional power.
So if anything maybe Iran just missed its window. Now with the US seemingly ready to enter a forever war with no defined objectives other than nuclear deterrence it's presumably too late, but maybe a more competent regime could have pulled it off in time.
> (I say this with no sympathy to the Iranian government, just looking at reality.)
If we look at reality we see China is very active in Africa, and so also has undersea network cables (PEACE & 2Africa). If China allows this precedent to occur, they encourage any African nation nearby such cables to pull the same tricks on them. Hence a rational player in the shoes of China wouldn't allow this to happen. China should hint Iran that perhaps it should start addressing its real problems instead of making their problems someone else's problem again.
The past couple years have really brought into focus to me the asymmetry, if how easy and cheap destruction and ruining things is, and how much harder maintaining and defending and protecting can be.
It seems like a wild claim to me to make that no, Iran can't make some small/medium underwater drones to go harass and destroy underwater cables. Protecting miles of lines splayed out across a big hard to get to area seems like a hard challenge.
(Big years for pests everywhere. Really really coming out in legion force.)
Iranian regime (and adversaries, if they were frank) would argue they have been effective at maintaining/defending/protecting. Just look at current state of things
Iran's exports down 90% (you want to laugh? Ukraine claims half of what remains is Iran selling oil to Russia to export to Europe, especially to Spain)
Inflation somewhere between 60% and 140% (the higher number is for food).
Population complaining about massive layoffs everywhere.
There is a domestic oil shortage now in Iran.
Iran was in a continuous recession for over a decade, economic activity reducing 10% per year for a decade BEFORE the war started.
The lack of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz says otherwise. If Iran can successfully blockade the Strait in the face of the full military might of the US, certainly they can cut an undersea cable.
What prevents a consortium of network operators using similar hostage politics on Iran?
What prevents them from pooling together the funds for 2 decades of relentless cyberattacks on Iran, unless twice the same fee is payed in reverse to compensate for just the threat?
(currently unaffected network operators have an incentive to chip in, lest political factions local to or neighboring their cables start imitating Iran)
(unlike conventional warfare, cyberattacks can be highly directed to regime players, elites, etc. so targeting a network operator seems like the dumbest move one could make: conventional warfare can sometimes generate new supporters for the regime, hitting the elites or regime elements much less so)
> What prevents them from pooling together the funds for 2 decades of relentless cyberattacks on Iran, unless twice the same fee is payed in reverse to compensate for just the threat?
I thought it was clear to everyone that this is _exactly_ what the U.S. and Israel have been doing to Iran for literally 20+ years [0] [1]. In addition to economic warfare, other types of espionage, and acts of terrorism - e.g. blowing up a bunch of people's mobile devices and pagers (in before someone accuse the children and civilians harmed in the attack of being terrorists themselves).
Bad actors have been extracting all kinds of concessions and actions out of Iran for many decades now under all kinds of threats, tactics, and attacks.
This war was literally started by the U.S. and Israel blowing up peace talks in Iran.
> I thought it was clear to everyone that this is _exactly_ what the U.S. and Israel have been doing to Iran for literally 20+ years [0] [1].
You changed my proposition to a different one by equating
US & Israeli cyber warfare, with
US & Israeli & worldwide telecom sector cyber warfare.
I ask why risk that step? worldwide telecom sector is highly networked (by profession obviously) and is probably already picking up phones and coordinating a common response, together they stand, divided they fall, none of them look forward to potential normalization of nation states charging fees unilaterally.
Its an error to confuse big problems with even bigger ones than they already face.
Telecom sector might collectively demand public payment of twice the threatened fee (however small the actual demanded fee is) plus a public statement by Iran that they publically repeal the threat just to make clear this type of precedent won't be tolerated.
this makes no sense, you're saying that if some cable operator in some distant nation agrees to chip in to prevent such normalization worldwide, that Iran will come over to that nation to physically overpower the cable operator who doesn't have an army?
What makes Iran believe unilateral fees on subsea internet cables would be paid? If they start paying in this case, the rest of the world is going to start demanding unilateral fees from the operators.
If operators are going to pay up anyhow, they might prefer chipping in for NATO support than publically rewarding such behavior...
"chipping in" could range from symbolic to substantial, as the alternative would be facing a never-ending stream of unilateral fees worldwide, in fact even all unaffected operators of internet cables are hereby motivated to organize a collective crowd-funding for military support of these cables: the future affected party could otherwise be themselves!
They're just trolling the US. But if the US attacks and Iran again and Iran feels that the cables are vital to US military interests, they might destroy them. They have a right to: The cables cross the territory of the sovereign Iranian state.
I wasn't talking about rights, but about the incentive of network operators worldwide to prevent one another from paying unilateral fees. Of all sectors to weigh attacking, the networking sector seems like the worst sector to attack: they are well networked and a whole alliance of lucrative entities around the world becomes your enemy if you start applying unilateral fees.
Iran is in a vicious circle of generating self-fulfilling prophecies: persecution complex -> hostage politics -> more enemies -> persecution complex.
They show leadership on almost no front, they are not credible on a world stage. Try and picture some kind of future version of the current regime in Iran becoming a bigger and bigger world player, how will they start addressing real problems, like global warming? They only have experience in making their problems also someone else's problem. Suppose they continue and eventually achieve nuclear power status, will they blackmail the trees in the amazon rain forest to do photosynthesis faster, or else?
> The cables cross the territory of the sovereign Iranian state
The strait is not and has never been Iran's sovereign territory. Or should the UAE and Oman start trying to charge fees to ships trying to cross the strait too?
> The strait is not and has never been Iran's sovereign territory.
About half of it is, yes? Wikipedia has a nice map [1] which shows the agreed-upon maritime boundaries and there's also some disputed islands where there's no agreed up on boundaries listed. Wikipedia isn't absolutely correct, but where a body of water separates two sovereign states, the territorial waters tend to meet around the middle, with specific definition by treaty.
There's also a pretty detailed US state department report [2] on the boundaries in the Persian Gulf, Straight of Hormuz and Gulf of Oman that lines up with the wikipedia map by my eye.
I'm not sure if the TeleGeography [3] maps are supposed to be representative of where the cables are laid or more of a general picture idea like a subway map. Anyway, looking at the two maps at the same time, it seems like at least some of those cables are in Iranian territorial waters.
It would seem that, with care, new cables that don't land in Iran could be placed in the Persian Gulf and avoiding Iranian waters; although the Iranian waters in the Persian Gulf are quite a bit deeper, than waters on the other side; which is why the shipping lanes tend to be in Iranian waters. This reverses at the straight where the (depicted) lanes are in the deeper Omani waters.
> Or should the UAE and Oman start trying to charge fees to ships trying to cross the strait too?
Now seems like a good time to raise fees? Both countries have a chokepoint if Iran is going to play hardball.
Pretty much everyone agrees that 12 nautical miles is the edge of territorial waters; whether they're bound by the UNCLOS or not.
The UNCLOS Part II Section 2 Article 3 [1] states:
> Every State has the right to establish the breadth of its territorial sea up to a limit not exceeding 12 nautical miles, measured from baselines determined in accordance with this Convention.
It does not restrict this to member states or signatory states or etc. I don't know that the UNCLOS is binding on member states while operating in the territorial waters of non-member states, but I don't think there's a compelling reason to think territorial waters of non-members are limited to 3 nautical meters, given the consensus is territorial waters are 12 nautical meters.
> Iran passed its own law in 2003 claiming 12nm. They can only assert that claim through violence.
As a member state of the UN, they can assert a claim about territorial waters against another state at the International Court of Justice. It would seem to be a question of international law. If they were a member state of the UNCLOS, there are additional dispute resolution mechanisms available. Of course, violence is always an option for dispute resolution.
No snark: Why not? Unless you're saying that it doesn't exist or has been destroyed because the orange man or one of the alcoholics on the tiktok/foxnews proclaimed it to be true hundreds of times over the last two months?
Until they exercise it I suspect we can't truly know. They have demonstrated that have reliable drone manufacturing and ballistic capabilities. Whether those include submersibles or munitions that can strike submerged targets is unclear.
In terms of raw capabilities and ability to actually damage these cables as an entity. Yes they have them today, they don't need special naval craft for such an endeavor, you can drag a hook behind any vessel large enough for the conditions and damage the cables repeatedly. This has been happening in other parts of the globe for some time, with Russia using cargo ships, I believe. Other parties could try and prevent this, possibly with some success but it would either involve sinking those vessels at a distance (hope they're right about what those vessels are doing), or putting your own assets in danger of missile or drone strikes.
You destroy cables by trawling the ocean floor. I'm not sure how many trawlers were targeted, but perhaps they truly have no capability to carry out their threat.
Yup. Or submersibles or underwater demo crews. These things are not going to go unnoticed. That's a suicide mission, if the US even cares enough to intervene. I don't think those cables are particularly important. I mean, I guess Iranians are going to have to put up with extra latency...oh.
Seriously, though, other regional powers that have something on the line will have to decide whether this is worth action.
they can increase the fees until building infrastructure outside of their water/air/land becomes more economical, which means a long way to go. We will probably have a treaty at the end covering that strait too. And looks like it will have some fees in it. Until of course somebody delivers a crushing military defeat of Iran. And while technically i think US is capable of doing it, I wouldn't bet though that this pair of a pompous self-dealer and an incompetent alcoholic would be able to do it.
Indeed. Add them to the list that includes the instigators of the current conflict. In an admittedly cursory search, I don’t see any serious mention of similar threats to the subsea cables before the U.S. and Israel began attacking Iran. In a functioning government, these sorts of risks would be analyzed, risks/benefits weighed and carefully considered. I wonder if even the mafia itself has a better planning process than this.
"Esfandiary, of Bloomberg Economics, said Iran “theoretically knew” it had leverage over the strait but was uncertain how significant the impact would be if it acted on those threats.
Now, she added, Tehran “has discovered the impact.”
The thing that mystifies me is that U. S. war planners "theoretically knew" this, too; at least, I would assume. The whole war strikes me as the current administration finding out the hard way why previous administrations all the way back to Reagan didn't commit to warfare against Iran, even if they wanted to. "FAFO", as the kids say, I guess.
OTOH, I do have theory floating around in my head that someone got one of the letters wrong and confused Iran with Iraq: "we kicked their ass before, we'll do it again!"
"Uh, different and much better-armed country, sir."
Or, as has been famously said, "Don't confuse me with the facts." [0]
> The thing that mystifies me is that U. S. war planners "theoretically knew" this, too; at least, I would assume.
They would have, because this has been wargamed and written about for decades. It's playing out exactly as expected, which is why no US administration until this one was willing to go to an outright hot war with Iran. Unfortunately, this war dept and admin has a staggering amount of hubris, incompetency, and a strange devotion to carrying out every whim of a certain semi-allied state I won't name directly but can be inferred.
> They would have, because this has been wargamed and written about for decades.
From a think tank simulation from 2012:
> The simulation’s second move principally focused on the Iranian team and
how it would respond to the various American actions in the first move. The Iranian team chose to respond in several ways: […] It decided to create a threat to shipping in the Strait of Hormuz by ordering IRGC small boats to harass American naval ships passing through the strait, and—of far greater importance—laying a relatively small number of mines there. […]
The argument goes that, given the general disposition of Iran towards the US, its allies, and basically anyone who's not a Shiite Muslim, it wasn't a choice between war with Iran or no war with Iran. It was a choice between war with Iran now, or war with a stronger, possibly nuclear-armed Iran at some unspecified point in the future.
Personally I disagree war was inevitable; time can change a lot of things and it doesn't seem like there was any imminent threat, but I also don't see why you would find it so hard to believe others might disagree with that assessment.
Certainly "might be a threat" is way too uncertain to act on. But if they're actively threatening "death to [your country]", sponsoring terrorist attacks on their neighbors, regularly shooting ballistic missiles at your allies, and quietly working on nukes in the background? That's a different matter.
Again, not saying I agree with a preemptive strike in this case, but it's pretty easy to understand why others might think it necessary even if the short-term economic consequences of that are unpleasant.
Regularly scheduled reminder that if nuclear was the worry, Iran was actually abiding to existing agreements. In the USA Iran history, USA is consistent agressor and agreements breaker.
There was no imminent threat and per international law, that war is illegal. And even worst, situation where Iran does not have those anti-nuclear agreements was created by the very same people who started the war.
And even worst, they shown themselves ao untrustworthy, that no one can trust their future promisses. The only rational expectation Iran can have is that USA lies in negotiations and dont keep word. And attacks at will regardless of whether Iran keeps word or negotiates.
And note that it does not matter one bit that Iran has psychopatic goverment on its own right. Whatever irational paranoia they had was now validated.
Regularly shooting ballistic missiles at allied nations isn't an imminent threat?
And I don't see how "existing agreements" make a difference if those existing agreements allow them to build nukes.
If Iran stopped building nukes and stopped threatening their neighbors the US would have no reason to intervene. (Other the usual reason of Iran's human rights abuses of course, but historically the US generally lets those slide as long as the country isn't threatening to impose those abuses on its neighbors.)
I suspect they knew if oil can’t move out of the gulf, then US oil will gladly step in. Republicans have always had to be Oil company supported. Just look at the number of oil tankers leaving the Gulf of Mexico: https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/centerx:-86.3/cent...
It is, after all, well-documented that the current U.S. president ignores, or frankly is unable to pay attention to intelligence briefings. So it is almost irrelevant whether any analysis of risks and benefits took place. The U.S. president admits that his decision-making process is a seat-of-the-pants “feeling” about things.
- there is a concerted effort to target and topple oil producers which China relies on as a form of containment of the Chinese economy. Venezuela, Iran, eventually Russia in a more direct way. The current administration is willing to accept economic pain for just about everyone because they see the transition from petroleum to green energies as the death knell for US superiority. They see this as their last chance to derail China, so they are taking it. It provides incidental value (like giving pre-text for increasing domestic repression).
- they thought it would be easy after Venezuela and Trump was flattered by Netanyahu and pressured by evangelicals into doing it.
High oil prices only accelerate China's transition to renewables, and rewards them for all the investment they've made so far, both in national energy production and in selling panels and EVs to the world.
It hurts the US far more, especially with this admin's anti wind and solar policies.
China can't transition that fast. China has a lot of oil in storage but if the current situation continues or gets worse they are hurt. The US is a net exporter of oil so is okay though some areas use middle east oil and are hurt too.
This will take a long time to play out. Discount every short term prediction as both Iran and the US are forced to play a long game.
How does being a net exporter even help? There's a global market and prices rise globally. US companies and consumers will pay more no matter if we're importing or exporting.
Most are public so my 401k gains. Oil companies will expand in this scenario and those new employees pay taxes, both which benefit everyone in some way.
I drive an EV so I gain. Though most lose more than they gain, this isn't a complete loss for anyone.
Why would an increase in oil prices translate to new jobs? The price increase has no relation to value added, only to global scarcity, so there's no need for new jobs.
The price increase, and the anticipation of the price increase, means that if you have the ability to produce oil, now would be a great time to be drilling wells. Of course, you have to consider the late time between how long it takes to drill a well and get production versus how long you think this will go on. Still, it's a reasonable investment that the oil business should be looking at right now.
This is where tariffs help actually, if they could be approved. You bring in money from tariffs, use that to subsidize things - gas tax is one way but it is small, but there could be others. Of course no tariff on gas exports since everyone wants it :) But it needs Trump world view with Obama's level execution :)
You can't do things like "make plastics" or "run entire industrial districts" off of them, at least not yet. Both are incredibly important to China for the time being.
You also can't run most blue-water naval ships off of them, but that's a bit less impactful.
> The thing that mystifies me is that U. S. war planners "theoretically knew" this, too; at least, I would assume.
The other administrations you mentioned operated on the principle that the President should listen to his advisors and was ultimately accountable to the American people should his decisions result in poor outcomes.
This administration operates on the principle that the executive branch of the US federal government is now the Trump Organization but with access to taxpayer funds and the state's monopoly on violence. Since DJT was the undisputed leader of the Trump Organization, he was never questioned there, and he's not questioned now, whether it be about decisions to bomb Iran or about anything else.
These people wanted to do things like "keep their jobs" and "be able to receive a pension", so they went through with the orders from a man who is almost 80 years old and shows both declining cognitive skills and personality disorders.
Ideally, you have a judicial and legislative branch that would punish this behavior, but those people also want to keep their careers/lives. So the majority party, his own, cows to him as well.
If anything, those were lost (I'd argue Iraq was a draw of sorts and Korea was more-or-less a victory) due to lack of raw military power.
This is a country with enough nuclear warheads to end intelligent life on this planet. It has bombers that, even with conventional payloads, could wipe most cities off the map once air superiority is achieved - and it almost always is.
Instead, there's a tendency to try and move the nation into the American sphere of influence and let it defend itself under its own power, and that's where things fail, because that requires lots of ground troops over a period of years while the local allies in the conflict get ready to do the fighting.
The interesting wrinkle with Iran is that The World's Best Negotiator(TM) has essentially painted himself into a corner. Could the US do more to break Iran? Of course. Would those things be politically popular in the US or receive the support of the international community? Hell no. So he has to keep puffing his chest up. It'll be interesting to see what happens post-midterms.
There's some truth here as well, there's a very large political asymmetry at play here.
On Iran's side, no death will really matter to the regime, it's a political hydra which is capable of doing and sustaining lots of damage to stay in power.
On the US side though, the war is highly unpopular, every single death and every single side effect of the war is politically painful.
But I don't agree about the first part, there's definitely a "we're the biggest military in the world, we will win no matter what" mindset in the US military, which is the reason why they lost so many wars.
Having a military so large is a blessing and a curse, they are too confident and then trip on strategy.
Israel talked him into it, just like he has no interest in anything until the last person in the room whispers ideas into his ear
Lindsey Graham is this term's Rudy Giuliani and he was flying back and forth to Israel briefing their version of the CIA on what to tell Trump to get him to do this
Personally I think another aspect is once he realized American oil companies became massively profitable overnight for months now at $100+ a barrel, he just took a cut somehow
Remember it took Obama's team YEARS to get Iran to sign something, this is not ending this year or next for any number of bombs killing their innocent civilians, Iran doesn't care, executions are at an all time weekly high there
It's death-cult vs death-cult at this point, we all lose
Let's call it what it is. Israel didn't just "talk him into it", they played trump like a fiddle and tricked him into doing their dirty work.
With the blackmail they have on him provided by Epstien and associates, trump is exactly the type of person that our enemies love. He is a useful idiot at best.
Trump has hated the Iranian regime since the hostage crisis. He called for Ronald Reagan to invade Iran in a 1987 TV interview. He's been remarkably consistent on this issue.
I don’t think this argument really makes sense tbh. When you own the justice department and congress, what matter does it make? Epstein stuff was going to to stale regardless, as much as I hate that fact.
Agreed. I think the Epstein angle was just a bonus to a decision made by an incompetent commander-in-chief of the military. It being the sole reason seems farcical even for this administration.
pretty sure people already had epstein fatigue and didn't really care anymore.
yes billioanires participated in crazy unethical parties with human traffiked hookers, water is wet.
to be a billionaire you have to have an inherit evil inside you, otherwise your concious would simply never allow you to build up wealth to that point without redistributing it to employees, people who helped you get where you are, improving your community and so on.
eh, lazy writing on my part. intention was to describe the fact that they were forcefully turned into hookers and it doesn't matter that they're children or not: they're both extremely wrong, one more than the other, but in the grand scheme of things it doesn't make it any better if they were not children.
"human trafficked woman and children turned into hookers"*
They were not acquired, they were always there. Only fools didn't see them, and US 3 letter agencies are many things but usually not fools.
But what can they do when potus gets manipulated into war by netanyahu with quick win promises, despite many people around him telling him its a bad, bad idea. US has a weak president now and parts of the world are using it to the fullest.
Persians are and always were smart, not some sheep herders you can bomb into oblivion without a worry, rather educated engineers and similar level. I went there cca decade ago during more quiet times, and stroke random conversations about physics, chemistry or philosophy in parks. Not probably going to happen in say US.
Iran still didn't get the memo that the closure is precisely what the U.S. wants. Get Japan, South Korean and others on U.S. natural resources to control them like the EU.
Why Russia goes along with it is debatable. Maybe they hope that the EU buys again from them, maybe that whole scenario was discussed in Alaska between orange man and Putin. Who knows. We only get lies and the real plans unfold years after.
The EU should however stop guessing what goes on between the dictators in secret and simply pursue its own interests.
While folks here are quick to jump to blaming the US for this, it's also worth noting that the US is the one that has been enforcing international order so far.
So it gives us a bit of a glimpse of what would the world would look like with a more isolationist US, or a multipolar world.
This might be outdated, but last I heard the US was only blocking ships going to/from Iran and ships which paid Iran's protection money, right? Not all traffic through the strait?
And for Iran it seems "countries it opposes" is basically everyone...
Iran was quite happy to let Chinese and Russian flagged ships to pass. Now, the US is blocking those as well as anything heading toward Iran. The US recently had a short lived Operation Dumb Name to have the US Navy escort ships out of the straight. It lasted less than 48 hours.
I stand corrected then. Blocking "anything heading toward Iran" is perfectly reasonable given they're at war, and blocking Russian ships makes sense given the separate ongoing conflict in Ukraine, but I don't really see the point in the US blocking Chinese ships going to countries that aren't Iran, unless there's credible evidence China is giving direct aid to Iran. Is there? Otherwise, allowing them through seems like a pretty easy way to fix the oil shortage without much downside, at least until Iran starts blocking them again.
China is buying the oil. They don't care about US Sanctions. Not really sure what you mean by easy way to fix the shortage. Twenty percent of the world's oil trade is no longer trading because the straight is closed. The US is playing a game of "if we can't have any, nobody can have any".
China can't buy oil from Iran that they physically can't get (due to the US blockade). If they want to buy oil from other non-Iranian nations though I say let them! Oil is a global market; every barrel China buys from that section of the Middle East is a barrel they're not buying somewhere else, driving up the price. We could even let them re-flag a bunch of oil tankers under the banner of China and restart global oil trade to the Persian Gulf tomorrow. China would benefit from that of course, but unless they decide to invade Taiwan tomorrow or something I don't see a problem with that. Not like it helps Iran at all (again, this is all provided China isn't somehow aiding them in the war, otherwise the US blocking their ships seems justifiable to me).
Meanwhile, every other nation in the world with a navy should be putting pressure on Iran to stop blocking their ships.
The chain of events did not start there. 20 years ago it was not blocked, although it well could have been. ie A car hits a pedestrian. Claiming the pedestrian did damage to the car's fender misses the context of the conflict.
The chain of events probably started something like 2000 years ago depending on how you count it. The fact remains that threatening the ships of peaceful commercial traffic by uninvolved nations is entirely Iran's doing.
Trump was certainly warned that this would be Iran's response, and started bombing anyway. Trying to absolve the US administration of this is just propaganda.
Trying to absolve the US administration of Iran's actions? Again, my whole point here is that the US is not the one blocking the strait. The US is not responsible for the actions of an enemy nation, predictable or not.
What is this argument? Iran only started blocking after they were attacked by the US. They didn't wake up one day and decided to block the strait. If something happened due to your unprovoked action, it's your fault.
Please, lets end this lie about the "international order". It's always been a lawless world where rich and powerful nations did whatever they wanted. Now they've just stopped bothering to hide it.
Both things can be true: A lot of countries may suffer if the US is not a guarantor of their safety or an enforcer of safe passage through waterways. The USA can also suffer economically from no longer being a trusted partner and responsible actor. As an American, the problem for me is people who got so little benefit from the previous status quo that they don't care. I think of it like the unemployed and the pensioners who voted for Brexit. They just didn't have a lot to lose.
>the US is the one that has been enforcing international order so far.
I'd be with you here if the US CIA wasn't the one who overthrown the democratically elected Mosaddegh and replaced him with their puppet Shah, triggering the Islamic revolution.
But I'll give you a pass since I heard they don't teach this part in american public school history curriculum.
The US has never been able to change a regime without a lot of help from insiders. I have read this history and it is a lot more complicated then "the US waived its magic wand." If the US could change regimes that easily don't you think we would have done it in Cuba, or contemporary Iran?
It's just as ignorant to cherry pick one event in the history of Iran as the source of all it's problems as it is to say Americans don't know their own history. It's not that simple.
C. Less of a revolution as Shah had always been around, they just supported him in kicking out his own prime minister (and exerting autocratic rule as a result)
"While folks here are quick to jump to blaming the arsonist for this, it's also worth noting that the arsonist is a firefighter and was responsible for putting out numerous other fires."
You can very specifically blame Trump for not understanding this at all. Possibly a symptom of being born rich, he acts as though America's standing in the world is a given and he has infinite political capital to spend any way he chooses and every other president was a moron for not doing it first. Obviously America has abused/misused their authority many times, but this is really the most humiliating in how quickly it unfolded and how very foreseeable the outcome was. We had a solid deal 12 years ago and instead we now have a mess and it's entirely due to one man's hubris.
This is just so incredibly embarrassing. We're now negotiating to end a war with a country we have claimed to have defeated like 500 times now, over terms that will not even just return the region to the pre-war status quo, but (most likely) giving them more power than they had when the first bombs were dropped. Not to mention shattering the illusion that the US can somehow protect the gulf states, along with most of our bases in the region and 13 US lives. Even if the US somehow recovers the enriched uranium they now claim was the motive, why would Iran not want to build nukes now? It would be suicidal not to.
(I say this with no sympathy to the Iranian government, just looking at reality.)
> Why would Iran not want to build nukes now? It would be suicidal not to.
I feel like we have enough examples to be clear on this now, would you rather your country be treated by the major powers like Libya, Ukraine, Iraq... Or like North Korea.
That's a great point. This is also going to be disastrous for the case against nuclear proliferation, not just in Iran or the middle east -- especially when the co-aggressor has an undeclared nuclear stockpile.
I mean, Iran has been working on nukes for a while, and it has led them to a disastrous place of its own.
You could easily argue that the dictatorship is in a stronger place after getting nukes, but the act of building nukes have destabilized many regimes, including Iran. Iran could have been wealthy like UAE and the Saudis, with regional influence similar to Turkey, instead of being the punching bag of US and Israel.
It's reasonable to consider the counterfactual but it seems like the closest parallel here is Pakistan, which pulled off the gambit successfully.
The years leading up to and immediately following successful acquisition were tenuous and it seemed like they were destined to become a global pariah if not a failed state. And yet now, they are a regional power.
So if anything maybe Iran just missed its window. Now with the US seemingly ready to enter a forever war with no defined objectives other than nuclear deterrence it's presumably too late, but maybe a more competent regime could have pulled it off in time.
You’re not saying much. Iran could have not pursued this strategy that has turned them into a pariah, but they did
It was an active choice not a missed window
> (I say this with no sympathy to the Iranian government, just looking at reality.)
If we look at reality we see China is very active in Africa, and so also has undersea network cables (PEACE & 2Africa). If China allows this precedent to occur, they encourage any African nation nearby such cables to pull the same tricks on them. Hence a rational player in the shoes of China wouldn't allow this to happen. China should hint Iran that perhaps it should start addressing its real problems instead of making their problems someone else's problem again.
Putin and Trump have already made the world chaotic enough; don't let Xi get involved too.
Everybody is involved
It's pretty unlikely that this will happen. The government of Iran has made a lot of unreasonable demands, but has very little power to back them up.
The past couple years have really brought into focus to me the asymmetry, if how easy and cheap destruction and ruining things is, and how much harder maintaining and defending and protecting can be.
It seems like a wild claim to me to make that no, Iran can't make some small/medium underwater drones to go harass and destroy underwater cables. Protecting miles of lines splayed out across a big hard to get to area seems like a hard challenge.
(Big years for pests everywhere. Really really coming out in legion force.)
Iranian regime (and adversaries, if they were frank) would argue they have been effective at maintaining/defending/protecting. Just look at current state of things
Let's see.
Iran's exports down 90% (you want to laugh? Ukraine claims half of what remains is Iran selling oil to Russia to export to Europe, especially to Spain)
Inflation somewhere between 60% and 140% (the higher number is for food).
Population complaining about massive layoffs everywhere.
There is a domestic oil shortage now in Iran.
Iran was in a continuous recession for over a decade, economic activity reducing 10% per year for a decade BEFORE the war started.
Obviously, they cannot last very long like this.
The lack of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz says otherwise. If Iran can successfully blockade the Strait in the face of the full military might of the US, certainly they can cut an undersea cable.
What prevents a consortium of network operators using similar hostage politics on Iran?
What prevents them from pooling together the funds for 2 decades of relentless cyberattacks on Iran, unless twice the same fee is payed in reverse to compensate for just the threat?
(currently unaffected network operators have an incentive to chip in, lest political factions local to or neighboring their cables start imitating Iran)
(unlike conventional warfare, cyberattacks can be highly directed to regime players, elites, etc. so targeting a network operator seems like the dumbest move one could make: conventional warfare can sometimes generate new supporters for the regime, hitting the elites or regime elements much less so)
> What prevents them from pooling together the funds for 2 decades of relentless cyberattacks on Iran, unless twice the same fee is payed in reverse to compensate for just the threat?
I thought it was clear to everyone that this is _exactly_ what the U.S. and Israel have been doing to Iran for literally 20+ years [0] [1]. In addition to economic warfare, other types of espionage, and acts of terrorism - e.g. blowing up a bunch of people's mobile devices and pagers (in before someone accuse the children and civilians harmed in the attack of being terrorists themselves).
Bad actors have been extracting all kinds of concessions and actions out of Iran for many decades now under all kinds of threats, tactics, and attacks.
This war was literally started by the U.S. and Israel blowing up peace talks in Iran.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberwarfare_and_Iran
> I thought it was clear to everyone that this is _exactly_ what the U.S. and Israel have been doing to Iran for literally 20+ years [0] [1].
You changed my proposition to a different one by equating
US & Israeli cyber warfare, with
US & Israeli & worldwide telecom sector cyber warfare.
I ask why risk that step? worldwide telecom sector is highly networked (by profession obviously) and is probably already picking up phones and coordinating a common response, together they stand, divided they fall, none of them look forward to potential normalization of nation states charging fees unilaterally.
Its an error to confuse big problems with even bigger ones than they already face.
Telecom sector might collectively demand public payment of twice the threatened fee (however small the actual demanded fee is) plus a public statement by Iran that they publically repeal the threat just to make clear this type of precedent won't be tolerated.
Or they would just pay because telecom companies do not have armies.
this makes no sense, you're saying that if some cable operator in some distant nation agrees to chip in to prevent such normalization worldwide, that Iran will come over to that nation to physically overpower the cable operator who doesn't have an army?
What makes Iran believe unilateral fees on subsea internet cables would be paid? If they start paying in this case, the rest of the world is going to start demanding unilateral fees from the operators.
If operators are going to pay up anyhow, they might prefer chipping in for NATO support than publically rewarding such behavior...
"chipping in" could range from symbolic to substantial, as the alternative would be facing a never-ending stream of unilateral fees worldwide, in fact even all unaffected operators of internet cables are hereby motivated to organize a collective crowd-funding for military support of these cables: the future affected party could otherwise be themselves!
>What makes Iran believe unilateral fees on subsea internet cables would be paid?
Presumably because they will attempt to destroy them if the fees are not paid.
They're just trolling the US. But if the US attacks and Iran again and Iran feels that the cables are vital to US military interests, they might destroy them. They have a right to: The cables cross the territory of the sovereign Iranian state.
I wasn't talking about rights, but about the incentive of network operators worldwide to prevent one another from paying unilateral fees. Of all sectors to weigh attacking, the networking sector seems like the worst sector to attack: they are well networked and a whole alliance of lucrative entities around the world becomes your enemy if you start applying unilateral fees.
Iran is in a vicious circle of generating self-fulfilling prophecies: persecution complex -> hostage politics -> more enemies -> persecution complex.
They show leadership on almost no front, they are not credible on a world stage. Try and picture some kind of future version of the current regime in Iran becoming a bigger and bigger world player, how will they start addressing real problems, like global warming? They only have experience in making their problems also someone else's problem. Suppose they continue and eventually achieve nuclear power status, will they blackmail the trees in the amazon rain forest to do photosynthesis faster, or else?
> The cables cross the territory of the sovereign Iranian state
The strait is not and has never been Iran's sovereign territory. Or should the UAE and Oman start trying to charge fees to ships trying to cross the strait too?
> The strait is not and has never been Iran's sovereign territory.
About half of it is, yes? Wikipedia has a nice map [1] which shows the agreed-upon maritime boundaries and there's also some disputed islands where there's no agreed up on boundaries listed. Wikipedia isn't absolutely correct, but where a body of water separates two sovereign states, the territorial waters tend to meet around the middle, with specific definition by treaty.
There's also a pretty detailed US state department report [2] on the boundaries in the Persian Gulf, Straight of Hormuz and Gulf of Oman that lines up with the wikipedia map by my eye.
I'm not sure if the TeleGeography [3] maps are supposed to be representative of where the cables are laid or more of a general picture idea like a subway map. Anyway, looking at the two maps at the same time, it seems like at least some of those cables are in Iranian territorial waters.
It would seem that, with care, new cables that don't land in Iran could be placed in the Persian Gulf and avoiding Iranian waters; although the Iranian waters in the Persian Gulf are quite a bit deeper, than waters on the other side; which is why the shipping lanes tend to be in Iranian waters. This reverses at the straight where the (depicted) lanes are in the deeper Omani waters.
> Or should the UAE and Oman start trying to charge fees to ships trying to cross the strait too?
Now seems like a good time to raise fees? Both countries have a chokepoint if Iran is going to play hardball.
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ae/Strait_o...
[2] https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/LIS-94.pdf
[3] https://www.submarinecablemap.com/
Having failed to ratify UNCLOS, Iran is entitled to claim only 3nm of territorial water.
That's international law, as it stands.
Iran passed its own law in 2003 claiming 12nm. They can only assert that claim through violence.
Pretty much everyone agrees that 12 nautical miles is the edge of territorial waters; whether they're bound by the UNCLOS or not.
The UNCLOS Part II Section 2 Article 3 [1] states:
> Every State has the right to establish the breadth of its territorial sea up to a limit not exceeding 12 nautical miles, measured from baselines determined in accordance with this Convention.
It does not restrict this to member states or signatory states or etc. I don't know that the UNCLOS is binding on member states while operating in the territorial waters of non-member states, but I don't think there's a compelling reason to think territorial waters of non-members are limited to 3 nautical meters, given the consensus is territorial waters are 12 nautical meters.
> Iran passed its own law in 2003 claiming 12nm. They can only assert that claim through violence.
As a member state of the UN, they can assert a claim about territorial waters against another state at the International Court of Justice. It would seem to be a question of international law. If they were a member state of the UNCLOS, there are additional dispute resolution mechanisms available. Of course, violence is always an option for dispute resolution.
[1] https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/United_Nations_Convention_on_...
No snark: with what? Their navy?
No snark: Why not? Unless you're saying that it doesn't exist or has been destroyed because the orange man or one of the alcoholics on the tiktok/foxnews proclaimed it to be true hundreds of times over the last two months?
Yes, I've been led to believe that Iran's navy has taken heavy losses, but I'm asking. Does Iran have this capability?
Until they exercise it I suspect we can't truly know. They have demonstrated that have reliable drone manufacturing and ballistic capabilities. Whether those include submersibles or munitions that can strike submerged targets is unclear.
In terms of raw capabilities and ability to actually damage these cables as an entity. Yes they have them today, they don't need special naval craft for such an endeavor, you can drag a hook behind any vessel large enough for the conditions and damage the cables repeatedly. This has been happening in other parts of the globe for some time, with Russia using cargo ships, I believe. Other parties could try and prevent this, possibly with some success but it would either involve sinking those vessels at a distance (hope they're right about what those vessels are doing), or putting your own assets in danger of missile or drone strikes.
You destroy cables by trawling the ocean floor. I'm not sure how many trawlers were targeted, but perhaps they truly have no capability to carry out their threat.
Yup. Or submersibles or underwater demo crews. These things are not going to go unnoticed. That's a suicide mission, if the US even cares enough to intervene. I don't think those cables are particularly important. I mean, I guess Iranians are going to have to put up with extra latency...oh.
Seriously, though, other regional powers that have something on the line will have to decide whether this is worth action.
What do you think daddy NATO would do about your little network cable? You are living in a fictional world.
They’d simply tell whoever’s crying to start using dynamic routing protocols and accept the few more ms in latency.
And what's to stop them increasing the fees at any time for "protection"?
they can increase the fees until building infrastructure outside of their water/air/land becomes more economical, which means a long way to go. We will probably have a treaty at the end covering that strait too. And looks like it will have some fees in it. Until of course somebody delivers a crushing military defeat of Iran. And while technically i think US is capable of doing it, I wouldn't bet though that this pair of a pompous self-dealer and an incompetent alcoholic would be able to do it.
Same thing stopping Trump from randomly making up tariffs on allies or threatening to invade them.
The question for us is, do you side with the small bully, or the big bully?
Just another "mafia" that the world can do without ...
Indeed. Add them to the list that includes the instigators of the current conflict. In an admittedly cursory search, I don’t see any serious mention of similar threats to the subsea cables before the U.S. and Israel began attacking Iran. In a functioning government, these sorts of risks would be analyzed, risks/benefits weighed and carefully considered. I wonder if even the mafia itself has a better planning process than this.
Ahhh yes, the mafia who got bullied and fought back.
Look, I’m all for the Iranian gov to cease. But don’t pretend that the US and it’s scoundrels aren’t the mafia and criminals in this matter.
"Esfandiary, of Bloomberg Economics, said Iran “theoretically knew” it had leverage over the strait but was uncertain how significant the impact would be if it acted on those threats.
Now, she added, Tehran “has discovered the impact.”
The thing that mystifies me is that U. S. war planners "theoretically knew" this, too; at least, I would assume. The whole war strikes me as the current administration finding out the hard way why previous administrations all the way back to Reagan didn't commit to warfare against Iran, even if they wanted to. "FAFO", as the kids say, I guess.
OTOH, I do have theory floating around in my head that someone got one of the letters wrong and confused Iran with Iraq: "we kicked their ass before, we'll do it again!"
"Uh, different and much better-armed country, sir."
Or, as has been famously said, "Don't confuse me with the facts." [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_Landgrebe
> The thing that mystifies me is that U. S. war planners "theoretically knew" this, too; at least, I would assume.
They would have, because this has been wargamed and written about for decades. It's playing out exactly as expected, which is why no US administration until this one was willing to go to an outright hot war with Iran. Unfortunately, this war dept and admin has a staggering amount of hubris, incompetency, and a strange devotion to carrying out every whim of a certain semi-allied state I won't name directly but can be inferred.
> They would have, because this has been wargamed and written about for decades.
From a think tank simulation from 2012:
> The simulation’s second move principally focused on the Iranian team and how it would respond to the various American actions in the first move. The Iranian team chose to respond in several ways: […] It decided to create a threat to shipping in the Strait of Hormuz by ordering IRGC small boats to harass American naval ships passing through the strait, and—of far greater importance—laying a relatively small number of mines there. […]
* PDF: https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/us-iran...
Interview at the time with the organizers:
* https://www.npr.org/2012/09/24/161706698/simulated-war-betwe...
>a strange devotion to carrying out every whim of a certain semi-allied state I won't name directly
Israel. The White House is willing to sacrifice American power and prestige for Israel. We have to stop tip-toeing around the elephant in the room.
Not legally an ally under any treaty.
In the time of their declining empire, the US got late stage Nero instead of Marcus Aurelius.
The argument goes that, given the general disposition of Iran towards the US, its allies, and basically anyone who's not a Shiite Muslim, it wasn't a choice between war with Iran or no war with Iran. It was a choice between war with Iran now, or war with a stronger, possibly nuclear-armed Iran at some unspecified point in the future.
Personally I disagree war was inevitable; time can change a lot of things and it doesn't seem like there was any imminent threat, but I also don't see why you would find it so hard to believe others might disagree with that assessment.
Preemptives strikes against anybody who might be a threat sometime in the future seem like a really bad idea.
Certainly "might be a threat" is way too uncertain to act on. But if they're actively threatening "death to [your country]", sponsoring terrorist attacks on their neighbors, regularly shooting ballistic missiles at your allies, and quietly working on nukes in the background? That's a different matter.
Again, not saying I agree with a preemptive strike in this case, but it's pretty easy to understand why others might think it necessary even if the short-term economic consequences of that are unpleasant.
Regularly scheduled reminder that if nuclear was the worry, Iran was actually abiding to existing agreements. In the USA Iran history, USA is consistent agressor and agreements breaker.
There was no imminent threat and per international law, that war is illegal. And even worst, situation where Iran does not have those anti-nuclear agreements was created by the very same people who started the war.
And even worst, they shown themselves ao untrustworthy, that no one can trust their future promisses. The only rational expectation Iran can have is that USA lies in negotiations and dont keep word. And attacks at will regardless of whether Iran keeps word or negotiates.
And note that it does not matter one bit that Iran has psychopatic goverment on its own right. Whatever irational paranoia they had was now validated.
Regularly shooting ballistic missiles at allied nations isn't an imminent threat?
And I don't see how "existing agreements" make a difference if those existing agreements allow them to build nukes.
If Iran stopped building nukes and stopped threatening their neighbors the US would have no reason to intervene. (Other the usual reason of Iran's human rights abuses of course, but historically the US generally lets those slide as long as the country isn't threatening to impose those abuses on its neighbors.)
I suspect they knew if oil can’t move out of the gulf, then US oil will gladly step in. Republicans have always had to be Oil company supported. Just look at the number of oil tankers leaving the Gulf of Mexico: https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/centerx:-86.3/cent...
The current regime is staunchly anti-intellectual and regularly believes things are false solely because scientists say they are true.
14-month old article headline, but hasn't aged a bit:
American Foreign Policy Is Being Run by the Dumbest Motherfuckers Alive
(Daniel W. Drezner https://danieldrezner.substack.com/p/american-foreign-policy...)
We have reporting on this leaked by people who were in the meeting.
Netanyahu told Trump they wouldn't block the strait. The US military said they would. Trump went with Netanyahu.
It is, after all, well-documented that the current U.S. president ignores, or frankly is unable to pay attention to intelligence briefings. So it is almost irrelevant whether any analysis of risks and benefits took place. The U.S. president admits that his decision-making process is a seat-of-the-pants “feeling” about things.
Remember all those senior military officials being fired right before things kicked off?
They knew.
But all it takes is Trump and Hegseth YOLOing past them and all that institutional, historical knowledge counts for nothing.
I vacillate between two potential rationales:
- there is a concerted effort to target and topple oil producers which China relies on as a form of containment of the Chinese economy. Venezuela, Iran, eventually Russia in a more direct way. The current administration is willing to accept economic pain for just about everyone because they see the transition from petroleum to green energies as the death knell for US superiority. They see this as their last chance to derail China, so they are taking it. It provides incidental value (like giving pre-text for increasing domestic repression).
- they thought it would be easy after Venezuela and Trump was flattered by Netanyahu and pressured by evangelicals into doing it.
The China point doesn't make any sense to me.
High oil prices only accelerate China's transition to renewables, and rewards them for all the investment they've made so far, both in national energy production and in selling panels and EVs to the world.
It hurts the US far more, especially with this admin's anti wind and solar policies.
China can't transition that fast. China has a lot of oil in storage but if the current situation continues or gets worse they are hurt. The US is a net exporter of oil so is okay though some areas use middle east oil and are hurt too.
This will take a long time to play out. Discount every short term prediction as both Iran and the US are forced to play a long game.
How does being a net exporter even help? There's a global market and prices rise globally. US companies and consumers will pay more no matter if we're importing or exporting.
It means the us gains a lot from high prices. Different people see different effects of course, if you are not invested in oil it hurts.
US oil companies gain, you mean.
Most are public so my 401k gains. Oil companies will expand in this scenario and those new employees pay taxes, both which benefit everyone in some way.
I drive an EV so I gain. Though most lose more than they gain, this isn't a complete loss for anyone.
Why would an increase in oil prices translate to new jobs? The price increase has no relation to value added, only to global scarcity, so there's no need for new jobs.
The price increase, and the anticipation of the price increase, means that if you have the ability to produce oil, now would be a great time to be drilling wells. Of course, you have to consider the late time between how long it takes to drill a well and get production versus how long you think this will go on. Still, it's a reasonable investment that the oil business should be looking at right now.
> those new employees pay taxes, both which benefit everyone in some way.
The too-big-to-fail companies and Trump's cronies, you mean?
Couldn't a stroke of a pen (executive order) specify that US markets must be saturated prior to exporting?
That penstroke is just generating a black market.
This is where tariffs help actually, if they could be approved. You bring in money from tariffs, use that to subsidize things - gas tax is one way but it is small, but there could be others. Of course no tariff on gas exports since everyone wants it :) But it needs Trump world view with Obama's level execution :)
I am not saying the gambit is correct. I am purely trying to reason about what those in charge may believe.
If you know your enemy’s position strengthens with time while your position weakens with time, under a certain mentality, you attack now.
You can do a lot with renewables.
You can't do things like "make plastics" or "run entire industrial districts" off of them, at least not yet. Both are incredibly important to China for the time being.
You also can't run most blue-water naval ships off of them, but that's a bit less impactful.
The rush to renewables frees the oil to be focused on the non-transitional.
The last time the US tried to cut off a major pacific competitor from Oil, it resulted in pearl harbour getting bombed.
> The thing that mystifies me is that U. S. war planners "theoretically knew" this, too; at least, I would assume.
The other administrations you mentioned operated on the principle that the President should listen to his advisors and was ultimately accountable to the American people should his decisions result in poor outcomes.
This administration operates on the principle that the executive branch of the US federal government is now the Trump Organization but with access to taxpayer funds and the state's monopoly on violence. Since DJT was the undisputed leader of the Trump Organization, he was never questioned there, and he's not questioned now, whether it be about decisions to bomb Iran or about anything else.
These people wanted to do things like "keep their jobs" and "be able to receive a pension", so they went through with the orders from a man who is almost 80 years old and shows both declining cognitive skills and personality disorders.
Ideally, you have a judicial and legislative branch that would punish this behavior, but those people also want to keep their careers/lives. So the majority party, his own, cows to him as well.
It's always the same with the US, the US always overestimate raw military power and underestimate local and strategic conditions.
All the previous wars got lost the exact same way.
Trump is losing the same way the US lost in Afghanistan, Irak, Vietnam, Korea... Just faster than any anybody else.
If anything, those were lost (I'd argue Iraq was a draw of sorts and Korea was more-or-less a victory) due to lack of raw military power.
This is a country with enough nuclear warheads to end intelligent life on this planet. It has bombers that, even with conventional payloads, could wipe most cities off the map once air superiority is achieved - and it almost always is.
Instead, there's a tendency to try and move the nation into the American sphere of influence and let it defend itself under its own power, and that's where things fail, because that requires lots of ground troops over a period of years while the local allies in the conflict get ready to do the fighting.
The interesting wrinkle with Iran is that The World's Best Negotiator(TM) has essentially painted himself into a corner. Could the US do more to break Iran? Of course. Would those things be politically popular in the US or receive the support of the international community? Hell no. So he has to keep puffing his chest up. It'll be interesting to see what happens post-midterms.
There's some truth here as well, there's a very large political asymmetry at play here.
On Iran's side, no death will really matter to the regime, it's a political hydra which is capable of doing and sustaining lots of damage to stay in power.
On the US side though, the war is highly unpopular, every single death and every single side effect of the war is politically painful.
But I don't agree about the first part, there's definitely a "we're the biggest military in the world, we will win no matter what" mindset in the US military, which is the reason why they lost so many wars.
Having a military so large is a blessing and a curse, they are too confident and then trip on strategy.
it's even more simple than that
Israel talked him into it, just like he has no interest in anything until the last person in the room whispers ideas into his ear
Lindsey Graham is this term's Rudy Giuliani and he was flying back and forth to Israel briefing their version of the CIA on what to tell Trump to get him to do this
Personally I think another aspect is once he realized American oil companies became massively profitable overnight for months now at $100+ a barrel, he just took a cut somehow
Remember it took Obama's team YEARS to get Iran to sign something, this is not ending this year or next for any number of bombs killing their innocent civilians, Iran doesn't care, executions are at an all time weekly high there
It's death-cult vs death-cult at this point, we all lose
Let's call it what it is. Israel didn't just "talk him into it", they played trump like a fiddle and tricked him into doing their dirty work.
With the blackmail they have on him provided by Epstien and associates, trump is exactly the type of person that our enemies love. He is a useful idiot at best.
>Israel talked him into it,
Trump has hated the Iranian regime since the hostage crisis. He called for Ronald Reagan to invade Iran in a 1987 TV interview. He's been remarkably consistent on this issue.
The purpose of this war is to distract from the Epstein files, and it's been very successful
I don’t think this argument really makes sense tbh. When you own the justice department and congress, what matter does it make? Epstein stuff was going to to stale regardless, as much as I hate that fact.
Agreed. I think the Epstein angle was just a bonus to a decision made by an incompetent commander-in-chief of the military. It being the sole reason seems farcical even for this administration.
I don't think it's actually supposed to be an argument. It's just a Redditism that occasionally pops up here.
The purpose of everything is to distract from everything else. It's the "flood the zone" concept.
pretty sure people already had epstein fatigue and didn't really care anymore.
yes billioanires participated in crazy unethical parties with human traffiked hookers, water is wet.
to be a billionaire you have to have an inherit evil inside you, otherwise your concious would simply never allow you to build up wealth to that point without redistributing it to employees, people who helped you get where you are, improving your community and so on.
children, girls
Calling children who are sexual assault victims "hookers" is certainly a choice.
eh, lazy writing on my part. intention was to describe the fact that they were forcefully turned into hookers and it doesn't matter that they're children or not: they're both extremely wrong, one more than the other, but in the grand scheme of things it doesn't make it any better if they were not children.
"human trafficked woman and children turned into hookers"*
Iran is basically trolling the US with the superpowers it accidentally acquired after being attacked
They were not acquired, they were always there. Only fools didn't see them, and US 3 letter agencies are many things but usually not fools.
But what can they do when potus gets manipulated into war by netanyahu with quick win promises, despite many people around him telling him its a bad, bad idea. US has a weak president now and parts of the world are using it to the fullest.
Persians are and always were smart, not some sheep herders you can bomb into oblivion without a worry, rather educated engineers and similar level. I went there cca decade ago during more quiet times, and stroke random conversations about physics, chemistry or philosophy in parks. Not probably going to happen in say US.
Sounds like rent-seeking economics at the International level
FYI the article is viewable on CNN lite:
https://lite.cnn.com/2026/05/17/middleeast/iran-hormuz-under...
What's the difference between the two?
Lite has no images and no paywall, and generally loads very quickly. But some articles don't show up properly.
Iran still didn't get the memo that the closure is precisely what the U.S. wants. Get Japan, South Korean and others on U.S. natural resources to control them like the EU.
Why Russia goes along with it is debatable. Maybe they hope that the EU buys again from them, maybe that whole scenario was discussed in Alaska between orange man and Putin. Who knows. We only get lies and the real plans unfold years after.
The EU should however stop guessing what goes on between the dictators in secret and simply pursue its own interests.
Well...you said you were tired of US hegemony. Enjoy!
And a lot of oil has been well and truly stopped!
The strait was open and without fees before the Israel/U.S. attack.
What like a cent per Meg
While folks here are quick to jump to blaming the US for this, it's also worth noting that the US is the one that has been enforcing international order so far.
So it gives us a bit of a glimpse of what would the world would look like with a more isolationist US, or a multipolar world.
Lol, the USA is the one who creates havoc and started this mess in the first place. What international order?!
Iran is the one blocking the strait, not the US.
Iran is blocking transit of ships bearing the flag of countries it opposes. The US is blocking all other ships of countries Iran supports.
This might be outdated, but last I heard the US was only blocking ships going to/from Iran and ships which paid Iran's protection money, right? Not all traffic through the strait?
And for Iran it seems "countries it opposes" is basically everyone...
Iran was quite happy to let Chinese and Russian flagged ships to pass. Now, the US is blocking those as well as anything heading toward Iran. The US recently had a short lived Operation Dumb Name to have the US Navy escort ships out of the straight. It lasted less than 48 hours.
I stand corrected then. Blocking "anything heading toward Iran" is perfectly reasonable given they're at war, and blocking Russian ships makes sense given the separate ongoing conflict in Ukraine, but I don't really see the point in the US blocking Chinese ships going to countries that aren't Iran, unless there's credible evidence China is giving direct aid to Iran. Is there? Otherwise, allowing them through seems like a pretty easy way to fix the oil shortage without much downside, at least until Iran starts blocking them again.
China is buying the oil. They don't care about US Sanctions. Not really sure what you mean by easy way to fix the shortage. Twenty percent of the world's oil trade is no longer trading because the straight is closed. The US is playing a game of "if we can't have any, nobody can have any".
China can't buy oil from Iran that they physically can't get (due to the US blockade). If they want to buy oil from other non-Iranian nations though I say let them! Oil is a global market; every barrel China buys from that section of the Middle East is a barrel they're not buying somewhere else, driving up the price. We could even let them re-flag a bunch of oil tankers under the banner of China and restart global oil trade to the Persian Gulf tomorrow. China would benefit from that of course, but unless they decide to invade Taiwan tomorrow or something I don't see a problem with that. Not like it helps Iran at all (again, this is all provided China isn't somehow aiding them in the war, otherwise the US blocking their ships seems justifiable to me).
Meanwhile, every other nation in the world with a navy should be putting pressure on Iran to stop blocking their ships.
The chain of events did not start there. 20 years ago it was not blocked, although it well could have been. ie A car hits a pedestrian. Claiming the pedestrian did damage to the car's fender misses the context of the conflict.
The chain of events probably started something like 2000 years ago depending on how you count it. The fact remains that threatening the ships of peaceful commercial traffic by uninvolved nations is entirely Iran's doing.
As they say, all's fair in love and war.
Trump was certainly warned that this would be Iran's response, and started bombing anyway. Trying to absolve the US administration of this is just propaganda.
Trying to absolve the US administration of Iran's actions? Again, my whole point here is that the US is not the one blocking the strait. The US is not responsible for the actions of an enemy nation, predictable or not.
Ahem: https://www.politico.com/news/2026/04/12/trump-announces-str...
What is this argument? Iran only started blocking after they were attacked by the US. They didn't wake up one day and decided to block the strait. If something happened due to your unprovoked action, it's your fault.
i wonder why that happened
Please, lets end this lie about the "international order". It's always been a lawless world where rich and powerful nations did whatever they wanted. Now they've just stopped bothering to hide it.
True. I just happen to prefer the US to set the rules over an illegitimate, theocratic, and terrorist regime.
There are no rules. There's just what's convenient for some US corporations.
The US has been forcing on Latin America whatever some US corporation wants for more than a century. We've had coups over bananas!
Both things can be true: A lot of countries may suffer if the US is not a guarantor of their safety or an enforcer of safe passage through waterways. The USA can also suffer economically from no longer being a trusted partner and responsible actor. As an American, the problem for me is people who got so little benefit from the previous status quo that they don't care. I think of it like the unemployed and the pensioners who voted for Brexit. They just didn't have a lot to lose.
The US has pivoted to enforcing international disorder.
>the US is the one that has been enforcing international order so far.
I'd be with you here if the US CIA wasn't the one who overthrown the democratically elected Mosaddegh and replaced him with their puppet Shah, triggering the Islamic revolution.
But I'll give you a pass since I heard they don't teach this part in american public school history curriculum.
The US has never been able to change a regime without a lot of help from insiders. I have read this history and it is a lot more complicated then "the US waived its magic wand." If the US could change regimes that easily don't you think we would have done it in Cuba, or contemporary Iran?
It's just as ignorant to cherry pick one event in the history of Iran as the source of all it's problems as it is to say Americans don't know their own history. It's not that simple.
I thought that was A. MI6, not the Americans
B. 25 years earlier and
C. Less of a revolution as Shah had always been around, they just supported him in kicking out his own prime minister (and exerting autocratic rule as a result)
"While folks here are quick to jump to blaming the arsonist for this, it's also worth noting that the arsonist is a firefighter and was responsible for putting out numerous other fires."
I mean, yay?
You can very specifically blame Trump for not understanding this at all. Possibly a symptom of being born rich, he acts as though America's standing in the world is a given and he has infinite political capital to spend any way he chooses and every other president was a moron for not doing it first. Obviously America has abused/misused their authority many times, but this is really the most humiliating in how quickly it unfolded and how very foreseeable the outcome was. We had a solid deal 12 years ago and instead we now have a mess and it's entirely due to one man's hubris.