What if the Hormuz closure will not be brief?
lloydslist.com
lloydslist.com
So you'll have a permanently aggrieved population with nothing to lose saturated with know-how and materials for building missiles and drones who will just keep taking pot shots at ships and possibly commercial airliners. They don't have to "close" the straight - just make it hazardous enough that it becomes permanently very risky to sail through there. They can go dormant for 3 months and then send 30 drones at a single ship.
I'm not sure who in the strategic planning decided that no system of government for 90 million people was a good idea, but it seems quite insane to me.
They just accidentally killed them all.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/03/world/middleeast/iranian-...
Probably, Iranians also had several accepted candidates in mind to lead the US, but they didn't attack because they had some opinions about foreign government
We're there already. We've been there. There's nothing symmetrical about this war.
Israel is basically unscathed in this war despite Iran launching barrages of missiles and drones. They were already fighting Israel asymmetrically by supporting Hamas and Hezbollah. They knew they could never fight a fair war against the US and Israel.
It's already asymmetytrical. And it could last as long as the current regime is in power. When the power structure will fall money will stop flowing too.
Huthies in Yemen look undistructable because they are supported (with moneny and weapons) by Iran. Who will bank-roll IRGC fighters when the government will collapse? China in theory culd but they depend on oil so will not contriube to prologed closing of the strait.
And still, also the people pretending to not understand, do know what is going on.
The bazaars / markets were completely closed in January because Iran’s inflation made importing goods impossibly affordable.
While the riots align with US interests, they also align with the interests of lots of Iranian people.
To quote Sahar Delijani: “Imagine what a dictator must do to its own people for them to greet missiles like salvation. Imagine the wound. Imagine the fury. Imagine the streets slick with blood.”"
The US and Israel is no way forced Iran's regime to mass murder their own people. The US/Israel aren't even using the regime mass murdering their own people as the main justification for going to war either way, the nuclear program, ballistic missiles and general security issues are the main justifications they seem to be using. The protests were probably just a trigger event that opened up an opportunity to finally take action against Iran that was likely going to happen in the near future regardless.
> And still, also the people pretending to not understand, do know what is going on.
Most Iranians want the regime gone, not everything is a conspiracy.
It is incredible how you simply cannot understand 2+2=4.
"Most Iranians want the regime gone" - not at all, what they want is to live in better economical conditions, which are so bad not because of their government, but because of yours. And whatever they thought about their, now gone, government, in no way implies they would prefer the Pehlevi, or whatever other US puppet governing them. Even before the war.
Wow, now you're even attempting to justifying Islamic regime internet blackouts.
> who then go and kill policemen and soldiers, what do you think will happen?
So because a few policeman and soldiers go killed you think that justifies firing automatic weapons into crowds of civilian protesters?
> not at all, what they want is to live in better economical conditions, which are so bad not because of their government, but because of yours.
You seem to be entirely unfamiliar with the Islamic regime in Iran if you think they aren't the primary reason the economy is where it is right now.
> And whatever they thought about their, now gone, government, in no way implies they would prefer the Pehlevi, or whatever other US puppet governing them. Even before the war.
With how bad the Islamic regime is at this point I think most would say just about anything is better.
The US then repeated the mistake in Iraq, take a population of 45 million, with most males having military training and a large percentage of the population dependent on government jobs and/or handouts, then remove the government. Who could possibly have predicted what would happen next?
And now they're doing it again in Iran.
Fossil fuel generators are most reliant on them, wind less so, solar barely at all.
And it's true that there is some in them, so it's good to have at least a long-term answer for how we deal with them.
> And it's true that there is some in them, so it's good to have at least a long-term answer for how we deal with them.
It's the old saying about a man and fish and giving vs. teaching.
Solar panels bought now, at least the quality glass-glass kind, doesn't really go bad in a way that makes them depreciate at-all-quickly. If in locations that are not themselves at a premium, so lower yield only matters if maintenance overhead per yield becomes so bad it's cheaper to replace& upgrade, they can be expected to stay there for 30~50 years depending on how fast they'll mechanically fall apart after their warranty expires (which is expected to be the duration until which most stay alive). I'd guess something like an agricultural east/west fence install would stay more towards 50y and get individual modules replaced when they break, as they're easy to get to unlike roof/wall installs and the like where they're hard to get to and given they are very low complexity in mounting system ("fence panel") there's little engineering complexity in retrofitting a plain new future panel of the same physical size and sufficiently similar voltage/current.
The updated estimate shows that the total rare earth oxide (TREO) content in the mapped resources (Indicated and Inferred) has increased from 8.8 million tonnes in 2024 to 15.9 million tonnes in 2026 – an increase of approximately 80 percent. For the first time, parts of the resource are also classified in the Indicated category, reflecting a higher degree of geological confidence
The WSP report further shows that the proportion of neodymium and praseodymium (NdPr) can be increased from approximately 17 to 19 percent of TREO. These REEs are regarded by the European Commission as the most critical raw materials in terms of supply risk and are important in the manufacturing of permanent magnets for EVs, green energy and defence.
There's no mine there yet though, and they haven't yet determined if it's economically viable. So yeah.
[1]: https://kommunikasjon.ntb.no/pressemelding/18817358/rare-ear...
A solar panel has an effective lifetime of 20-30 years. A barrel of oil is literally set on fire.
If China stopped selling solar panels, there wouldnt be any energy crisis, just an inability to install *new* panels.
Same goes for the battery dependencies we have on Chinese imports.
Not a perfect situation of course, but there are some clever things the EU is doing about it. For instance, the recycling requirements is creating a local industry of people who intimately know all the components and construction of Chinese panels and batteries, and these people will be vital in kickstarting the domestic industry if China tries something. It also means that we're getting better and better at recovering rare earth minerals from decommissioned products, and we are building domestic reserves.
They did "pledge" to "limit increases" in coal, but there is a big difference from limiting increases to "moving away from" coal.
As for oil, it is a similar story. Oil use doubled from 2005 to 2025, but they pledged to "slow increases" of oil to something less than the 7% annual increases per year that were the last 10 years average (over the business cycle).
Natural gas has tripled from 3 to 9.3 billion cubic feet per day from 2014 to 2023.
The prescient part was building a pipeline to deliver oil and gas directly from Russia as well as building trade routes through Russia and the central Asian nations that give them a direct route to their energy suppliers (Including Iran, which can supply China without ever going through the straight of Hormuz).
Energy security is very important, and China has invested heavily to build pipelines and trade agreements that keep the oil and gas flowing, and they have moved away from buying Australian coal to increasing their own domestic coal production, reaching 4.8 Billion tons mined and on track to hit 5 Billion tons in the next few years.
Well, no. Coal peaked at 4.9 billion tonnes in 2024.
https://www.iea.org/reports/coal-2024/executive-summary https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-coal-power-drops-in-chi...
> Oil use doubled from 2005 to 2025
yes, and gasoline production is trending down too:
https://www.mysteel.net/news/5109188-china-2025-gasoline-pro...
This is how you get some people predicting drops of coal and natgas. You need to be very careful with recent data esp. from China as it takes time to collect data and you are usually 2 years behind.
But really stop and think - 2026 just started. Data from 2025 is now just coming in, and you are claiming that there was a "peak" in 2024. Even given the natural variability of this stuff across the business cycle, please, please know what you are doing with this stuff.
1. Measure from business cycle peak to business cycle peak
2. Wait until the data is in.
Thank you.
Ah but you yourself didn't, did you:
> They went from using 1.5 billion tons of thermal coal in 2000 to 4.6 Billion tons today and they will reach 4.7 Billion in 2027.
Whatever would 'today' mean and why even mention a very uncertain future estimate. And in any case that 4.7 is lower than the 4.9 from 2024.
- The USA eventually declares some arbitrary "victory" condition.
- Iran will be left even poorer, and much less able to defend itself conventionally, but will remain under the same regime. Very likely they give up cooperating with atomic energy inspectors and do what North Korea did to a acquire weapons.
- Israel's ability to dictate US foreign and military policy will be degraded long term. What many commentators do not see is how anti-Israel younger consevatives trend in the US now. It will be decades or before a serious anti-Israel republican candidate will be fielded, but it is inevitable, and even your typical greatest-ally-wall-kissers will have to moderate themselves.
Will be very interesting to see what the mid terms bring. Some on the American right are already talking about voting democrat to protest - MAGA was specifically sold to them as an antidote to necon middle eatern entanglements.
(I'm not claiming that this is a good scenario, just a likely one.)
... oh dear god this administration is dumb enough to try that, isn't it?
As for a preemptive attack, which I imagine you meant would be nuclear since they're already giving it all they've got with their non-nuclear attacks, it is already clear that Israel and USA don't have a way to stop Iran's faster missiles, and they would have no way to prevent Iran nuking Tel-Aviv and Haifa in return. At that point Israel would cease to exist as a state and as a society. They would never risk that. The entire decades-long war against the middle east by USA and Israel is fought for the benefit of Israel, not for its destruction.
> Furthermore, if Iran declared that it did possess working nuclear weapons that wouldn't be a deterrent: it would trigger an immediate and massive preemptive attack by the USA and Israel.
I've been discussing this under the assumption from your own words that "it did possess working nuclear weapons" ('it' being Iran). If you are now changing this to a massive escalation before they even get it, then that is out of scope for this discussion. I would argue they are already doing that to the extent that they can, as they have to tread carefully since Iran can also destroy all key infrastructure in Israel as well.
'Working nuclear weapons' is a really broad scale so it's tough to extrapolate without knowing if it means "they can send a person with a low yield weapon somewhere and blow it up vs. "they can launch a high yield weapon on a ballistic missile anywhere within 2000km"
Israel generally has fairly solid intelligence in Iran and would almost certainly take whatever action is necessary to prevent Iran from building a Nuke...potentially all the way up to using small tactical nukes in targeted strikes on nuclear facilities if conventional attacks would be insufficient. Any preemptive attack would likely occur before Iran actually were acquire a viable nuclear weapon.
Yet only one country in this comment is named a regime.
Seems like the only options are reaching a deal with whatever the new regime is or occupying the coastal areas.
China benefits here - they import Russian crude oil over land, so their costs won't increase as much as the international market (unless Russia uses the leverage to absorb all the benefit, which I doubt), but more crucially: the alternative to oil fuel is renewables, and China dominates renewables so a spike in demand for solar/batteries will be a godsend for them.
No, they don't. 54% of their oil comes from the middle east. Only 20% comes from Russia.
China does have a healthy oil reserve at the moment, so this may be marginally less bad for them. And yes, their electricity comes from renewables, but like in any other country, all of their logistics run on diesel.
By starting this war, the United States, unsatisfied with flipping the table on bilateral trade with other countries just flipped the table on multipolar international trade. What a time to be alive.
In what way does that benefit Russia?
And China is buying oil on the global market with money just like everyone else. Unless you are advocating for an oil embargo on China in which case congratulations you just started WW3.
Perhaps, but this is ultimately orthogonal to the discussion “is this good or bad for Russia?”
I’m not sure what the intent of your reply is here but I’ve not advocated for violence. Simply pointed out that it’s countering the Russia-China bloc countries.
Every drone Iran has launched at Bahrain and the UAE could have been sold to Russia and used against Ukraine had this war not started.
Good thing the Qataris have no influence over the American president /s
"Just" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.
They could cover some of the costs by running selfie trips to the Wadi Jizz.
One hopes that will be a moot point once the Islamists fall in Iran.
Taiwan, Japan, and Korea, though - totally dependent on imports for oil.
Something that most pundits have missed: unlike all other US wars since Korea, the US can't end this war by pulling out. Iran, unlike all US combat opponents from Vietnam to Venezuela, has the demonstrated ability to strike well beyond its borders. This war isn't over until both sides say it's over.
Yep, now if IR survives, I see no reason for them not to double down on even longer range missiles. Like, why not?
Even if you don't blow up a nuclear plant, it seems like cutting the power from one would be relatively easy.
Transformer substations are more vulnerable targets but it's hard to be decentralized enough to not have those.
The thing is that the US exported oil is sweet crude, and our own refineries are not made for that type of oil. So for the petroleum products used within the US need the heavy oil that is imported. So if the world goes tits up so that the US can only use the oil it produces, it would take time before the US could refine it.
>Trump could make up with Canada
I'm sorry, did this suddenly become a comedy?
Is that really true? I've heard experts say that sweet crude is easy to refine. I've always thought that the reason US refiners bother with sour crude is that they're better at refining it than non-US refiners are, so they make a little more money that way.
This link is just one of many that all suggest that the US is just not set up to refine light crude.
Like hell he could.
- every Canadian
Unlike our fearless orange leader, I live on earth, and global warming's becoming quite a big issue over here.
Also, the sooner we're forced off oil, the sooner these dumb wars stop.
They've started bombing the oil in infrastructure
Diplomats on the China side are worried about the Trump administrations's amateurish approach to diplomacy. "... Trump’s reluctance to delegate, disdain for process and focus on quick wins, banking instead on personal magnetism and his “gut” as summit organising principles. ... “You have a handful of people who have never done this before, putting together what may be the most consequential trip in the president’s administration on a wing and a prayer. The Chinese are beyond worried. They’re apoplectic.” - South China Morning Post.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/07/china/china-us-iran-wang-yi-i...
[2] https://www.scmp.com/topics/2026-trump-xi-summit
[3] https://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/3344769/trump-xi-sum...
[4] https://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/3344769/trump-xi-sum...
https://theaviationist.com/2026/03/06/typhoon-spotted-rocket...`
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cr5ll27z52do
As the friendly article says, the US military has no idea about how commercial shipping works and how hard it will be convince anybody to transit through an active war zone.
If the tankers are primarily for the benefit of Asia and not the US do you risk bringing additional parties with a grievance into your conflict?
When the action you are talking about is, for anyone other than the US or Israel, signing up to become a co-belligerent with the US & Israel in their war with Iran? Yeah, the realistic options for who might do it are pretty limited.
See this comical propaganda clip:
https://youtu.be/GKJHaODzP-0?is=QRf8HkFJ0O4Amx3v
They also have Shaheds.
"A navy, naval force, military maritime fleet, war navy, or maritime force is the branch of a state's armed forces principally designated for naval and amphibious warfare;" --wikipedia
Also, comical is a great description. I was aware that Iran has a speedboat navy, but wtf that video?! How much is AI? The shot with the giant flame throwing rockets flying slower that the speedboats is hilarious. I guess perspective is everything??
What they do still have however, is enough Shaheds to interdict tanker traffic through the straight.
- the crew - the company - the insurer
The company has an obvious reason to take on some amount of risk to move a vessel through the Straight. However, both the crew and the insurer will be quite risk averse, so the Navy would need to demonstrate a very high success rate in intercepting both missiles and shaheds to convince those two other groups to say "yes".
Sounds like Trump hubris. Probably just what he'd expect. And then he'd accuse Canada of "behaving terribly" if things didn't go his way, and he'd reach for his tariff paddle.
Venezuela is also run by the same security apparatus and government as it was before. We didn't attempt to turn over the entire government.
Takes Ukrainians 4 months to kill that amount. What you are saying winning is quite doable.
First, Russians are generally on the offensive, which means pushing into Ukrainian controlled territory.
Often, they are pushing into defensive lines that have had years of fortification.
Second, there are a lot more Russians in Ukraine. To kill 125k people, you have to find 125k people. It's a lot easier to find a Russian in Ukraine that it will be to find an IRGC soldier in Iran if there's an invasion and guerilla operations in response.
In Iraq after the conventional military phase, the US killed ~26k insurgents over the course of a decade (and also captured ~120k).
Iran is bigger than Iraq, has far more people than Iraq, and has much bigger logistical burdens for an invasion.
I could believe that the US Military is quite capable of running some small scale targeted operations within Iran successfully. We can probably pull off operations to do things like attempt to seize and secure uranium stockpiles if we know where they are (though such an operation could also go catastrophically badly, too).
I think the US Military could invade Iran and topple the regime, but it would be an enormous lift, and I think there's almost no chance we would have the political will to sustain the costs and casualties that a total invasion would entail.
MAGA is modern Nazism and Christian Nationalism, it was bread out of the Conservative and Republican party of the 70s, 80s, 90s and 2000s, and has been fully embraced by and has enveloped by both.
Rejecting hate, racism, indoctrination, and cultism is not "experiencing a religious awakening" it's quite the opposite.
Progressives have elevated cultural relativism to a core religious principle. They can’t even articulate why it’s desirable for immigrants to “assimilate,” because in their world view it must be taken as axiomatic that America wouldn’t be substantively less successful if it was culturally more like Guatemala or India.
You could put that in a dictionary as the definition for "cultural relativism." I mean, you just referred to "forced civic integration" like that's a bad thing! That's not Clinton Democrats believed in the 1990s. They believed in the "melting pot," which meant cultural homogenization. More specifically, it meant immigrants adopting Anglo-American culture, like German immigrants.
But progressives rejected the "melting pot," and now think we have a "salad bowl." This fight over the "salad bowl" is completely different than what the fight was about in the 1990s. Bill Clinton wasn't a cultural relativist--he never talked about a "salad bowl" multi-cultural America.
That’s almost exactly what Bill Clinton advocated
> Can we be one America respecting, even celebrating, our differences, but embracing even more what we have in common? …Can we define what it means to be an American …in terms of our primary allegiance to the values America stands for and values we really live by?
> And more than ever, we understand the benefits of our racial, linguistic, and cultural diversity in a global society
> When young people sit side by side with people of many different backgrounds, they do learn something that they can take out into the world. And they will be more effective citizens.
> we must demand responsibility from every American. Our strength as a society depends upon both—upon people taking responsibility for themselves and their families, teaching their children good values, working hard and obeying the law, and giving back to those around us… No responsibility is more fundamental than obeying the law.
Additionally, Clinton may not have used the “salad bowl” metaphor, but frequently used metaphors like “mosaic” and “tapestry woven from different colored threads”.
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/commencement-addre...
It’s a lot harder to find decent evidence on the prevalence of religious belief in Iran, obviously, but I’d be willing to believe anything in the 70-90% range based on the commentary below. (Obviously this source is biased, but they at least cite their references adequately.) Large confidence intervals evince a lack of confidence.
https://muslimskeptic.com/2025/01/29/iranians-atheists/#Stat...
So yeah, it seems reasonable to claim that white Republicans are roughly as religious as Iranians overall.
This probably underestimates religious belief of those aligned with the government, however, since we can’t segment them out by political affiliation and the opposition is likely more secular in proportion.
Obviously Democrats in the 1990s weren’t theocrats. Maybe your point is that it’s not about religious attendance per se that makes for a theocracy, but the content of the religious beliefs?
Which means now Venezuela is still a chavist regime, but not under US embargo anymore. This will improve their economy a great deal, and if the regime doesn't capture all the profits for itself, will also improve the QOL of all Venezuelians, hopefully.
It has little in common with Iran, which is more like the 2003 Iraq war (but, so far, without committing ground troops, but there is no way to maintain that with Trump’s stated goal of “unconditional surrender”; that’s going to require a ground forces occupation at a minimum, and probably a ground forces invasion to acheive it) than it is like the recent intervention in Venezuela.
Even if they are not particular fond of the regime that is in the process of being destroyed, the Iranian people are likely to resist that, just as occurred in Iraq (with the most significant resistance there coming from forces that were opposed to Saddam’s regime and which had been actively suppressed by it while it was in power.)
If someone backstabbed me twice while we were in negotiations, I would not give them 3rd chance for negotiations, US and Israel really f....d their reputation after 2 attacks while in negotiations
"The fact is that we don’t have any positive experience of negotiating with the United States. You know, especially with this administration. We negotiated twice last year and this year, and then in the middle of negotiations, they attacked us," Araghchi said.
https://www.nbcnews.com/world/iran/iran-foreign-minister-int...
To add insult to injury, the US also sent two clowns, Witkoff and Kushner, to negotiate, so it was quite obvious the negotiations would fail.
But here is what we know:
* US acted in bad faith - because it planned attack in around December 2025
* Oman, mediator of negotiations told they were almost there with negotiations and Iran mostly agreed to conditions and boom, next day it got bombed: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/2/28/peace-within-reach-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Comprehensive_Plan_of_Ac...
We'll see if that works or wether another jihadist regime rises from their ashes.
Comes dumbo and rips that off, goes back to "deal making" without any diplomacy, bomb them twice during the negotiation process after ripping off the previous deal.
Seems like the whole new negotiations from Trump's admin was just putting up an act after all... Quite disgusting.
From what I read in Kissinger’s Diplomacy, Vietnam was also a war they couldn’t just pull out of if they wanted to.
The public wanted deescalation, but the Americans under Nixon had to escalate the war to get enough of an advantage to pull out without it being a bloodbath.
Hence part of Nixon’s infamy: he defied public opinion and escalated an unpopular war, precisely to end it more cleanly.
In addition, I'm struggling with the idea that Kissinger of all people cared enough about what happened to Vietnamese people for it to affect policy. He was the sort who would have no difficulty at all allowing bloodbaths to happen if he thought that was advantageous. His wiki page suggests, in fact, that he did do exactly that a few times.
Neither Nixon nor Kissinger wanted to be in Vietnam, but again, if they evacuated in 1969 it would have been a bloodbath of American soldiers I think is the point you missed.
The communists had a decisive advantage until the Americans escalated the war to a ceasefire then pulled out in the mid 1970s.
There is a much easier conclusion which is Kissinger was making things up because he'd look like a real monster if he honestly said it was just stupid policy.
Also, domestic crude of mostly light, sweet crude whereas many US refineries are designed to deal with heavy, sour crude. Google is telling me 80% of the crude that goes through Hormuz is heavy, sour crude.
Does any of this raise the impact disruptions of Hormuz would have on the US?
The US has some of the best chemists in the world; light sweet crude is easy to refine but heavy sour crude is hard, so US refineries refining light sweet would be a waste of their talents - better to export it out for newbies to refine and buy the harder-to-refine and therefore cheaper heavy sour crude. But if heavy sour becomes more expensive, then the US will switch to the easymode option in a heartbeat.
An increased cost of inputs will always hurt the entire industry, but it won't particularly hurt the US any more than anyone else, and will probably hurt them the least - especially when they have plenty of domestic shale oil that will be financially viable to extract if prices go up.
As someone who used to run those distillation columns, it's way more difficult than that. I haven't seen any facility in the USA re-tool like that in less than 2 years. Usually closer to 5. Not a "heartbeat".
The SPR is 58% full, so... not empty but also not all the way full.
Additionally, even though we're a net oil exporter, we're not insulated from the global oil market rates. Local producers aren't going to sell into America more cheaply than they can sell internationally, so if international rates spike, prices will go up domestically too.
If the Straight of Hormuz remains closed for an extended period of time, we'll definitely feel the pinch domestically.
The US being a net oil exporter doesn't make the domestic market independent of the global market (especially over the short to intermediate term), for a large variety of reasons.
> has the Strategic Petroleum Reserve
Which whille partial refilled from the 2022 drawdowns is still at rather low levels by historical standards.
> and, if absolutely necessary, Trump could make up with Canada
He could try (though I don’t think even that is in his character), that doesn’t mean he would succceed.
US itself has huge reserves, and recent move with Venecuela further expands it.
Middle East countries are too blind to see it, they’re being thrown under the bus to hurt Iran.