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Comment by GeoPolAlt | Hacker News Reader

I think this war will be the moment that historians mark as the death of Pax Americana. The US failed to change the Iranian regime, failed to open the strait, and now a previously international waterway will be tolled in a currency other than the dollar.

I wish it need not have happened in my time

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This war will be to the US what the Suez Crisis was to the United Kingdom.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suez_Crisis

TIL about one more time Israel was invading it's neighbors..

You should focus on the part where Egypt blockaded the Suez and Straits of Tiran, which is what actually caused the war.

That's far too hyperbolic. Abject failures don't lead to state or power collapse. Look at how many wars the Romans lost, and far more catastrophically too.

From the article: "The crisis strengthened Nasser's standing and led to international humiliation for the British—with historians arguing that it signified the end of its role as a superpower—as well as the French amid the Cold War."

It then has seven different citations after it.

I was talking about the USA...

I’d say there is a credible case for saying the vote for 2nd round of trump was the turning point. By that point is was already pretty well established that he isn’t fit yet that’s what the public wanted.

The democrats deserve a fair share of the blame for that just for their having created and maintained the two-party duopoly along with the Republicans. At the very least its not the voters fault if the only viable alternative to the Republicans is constantly rigging (or in this case straight-up bypassing) their own primaries to put corrupt party insiders at the forefront.

Sure, everyone deserves some share of the blame, but it's like 10% for the Ds and 90% Rs. We can't keep talking like it's 50/50, that's how people become completely disenchanted with politics and don't even bother to vote.

The root cause is the first-past-the-post voting system that ensures a two-party system.

But for the party with the most responsibility for blowing it all up I'd like to nominate Rupert Murdoch. Most visibly with Fox News, but really his entire media empire

> The root cause is the first-past-the-post voting system that ensures a two-party system.

Hear, hear.

I'm rooting for the fast uptake of STV across the US.

Yet another reminder that we need approval voting, or even STAR voting, for single-winner elections. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhO6jfHPFQU https://www.equal.vote/approval https://www.equal.vote/beyond_rcv_zine

You forgot that now Iran will become a nuclear state.

An American Iranian expert which studied this region for 20 years predicted that Iran will do a nuclear test in September, ahead of the mid-term elections. We'll see.

For all intents and purposes, they have been a nuclear state for 30 years.

TBF, Iran is saying an exorbitant price right now, but in reality they will need to balance their price with demand to bring in the maximum possible revenue. The toll may work out in the long run.

I think the price can only increase. There is not much competition for Hormuz. If it is exorbitant now, it can only be more expensive later on. The demand for oil is not going to go down drastically for quite a few years.

If there was another route, the oil would have found the way.

In time pipelines can be made, no? 2 million per ship already gives a lot of room for exorbitant infrastructure projects to break even in the medium term

Pipelines take years, even decades, at least here in Canada. You'd be surprised at how many billions of dollars and person-years of labour you need to get the thing turned on.

Five years at 2mil per ship will make Iran rich.

pipelines, railway, etc.

had the US had any real plan to empower the Gulf states against Iran there would already be backup routes

Pipelines are incredibly vulnerable to being taken offline by an inexpensive long-range strike. You can't just put them in the middle of a war zone, especially when we (the US) have targeted that same type of infrastructure first.

sure, as the oil wells and the pumping stations and everything not underground, but right now there's not even an option to try. (also loss of a pipe section compared to the loss of a tanker is much better economically, easy to replace, not to mention that there's no loss of life, so ultimately it can bear more risk even if there's an active conflict.)

Pipelines are usually buried under the ground. Pumping statins could be protected by short range SAM systems. An undegraund pipeline can be destroyed by a heavy glide bomd (not an option for Iran) but should be relatively safe from shahed drones. Iran's ballistic rockets are not precise enough to hit a pipeline wihtout spending multiple rockets (in which case it would be cheaper to repair the pipeline than to produce all these rockets).

None of those have near the capacity to replace what was flowing through the Straight and will not replace the Straight for a long time. That's the whole problem.

If there were viable alternatives to the Straight, the US would have attacked Iran decades ago. Every US administration has had people in the wings desperate to "Fix" the Iran situation, but only Trump was stupid enough to try it.

Meanwhile, the actual production is meaningfully damaged, and for at least a couple years.

This is an energy crisis.

There are already pipelines in the region.

The problem is the fee has nothing material to do with the straight itself. There are no maintenance costs for the open sea. Coordination is also not a big concern, you can tell because previously ships were able to pass without incident and coordinate among themselves.

Actually, this is extortion. Meaning that it is done under threat of violence. Worse yet, the US military may end up enforcing this, and collecting on a share of the fees.

It won't take very long for Iran to recoup the damages. After that, why keep the fees going? Because it's free money, that's why.

The strange this is, if the US and Iran can partner on this, that would lead to a weird peace, because they both stand to benefit, meanwhile countries that depend on the straight (Korea, Japan, etc.) have to pay the bill.

> extortion

not really; you would have to pay to run an oil pipeline through another country's territory even if that country wasn't bearing the cost of maintaining the oil pipeline

the strait isn't international waters -- it's part of Iran and Oman's territorial waters

For land pipelines thiere no eqauvalent of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea according to which both Oman and Iran should allow free passage of ships. And "normal" path lies on Oman's waters which dones't stop Iran from attacking ships there. The strait toll is a pure racketeering.

What does the UN convention says about killing civilians and destroying civilian infrastructure?

I think any such pretenses were abandoned right off the start.

You make it sound that there are only two sides in this story.

Spain, Argentina, Kenya, Indonesia, Kuwait and countless other countries haven't bombed any civilian infrastructure either and yet they will be affected by the aggressive posture around international maritime traffic.

Are you expecting that Iran will not apply the fee to ships that sell oil Malesia or South Africa?

For the Iranian perspective it doesn't matter.

Their only defense against being bombed was using their geopolitical position to its advantage. Their own civilian infrastructure was bombed by the US-Israel axis, with the support of the Gulf states.

I fully expect Iran to apply fees on every ship going through, and they should.

Spain, Argentina, Kenya, Indonesia and countless other countries are paying for the aggressive and reckless actions of the US-Israel axis.

That's the situation of the country where I live btw. I don't blame Iran for using the weapons at their disposal for survival, I blame the rogue states that attacked Iran and forced their hand. Let's not forget that Iran could have done it at any time in the past decades, and showed restraint in doing so, even with all the sanctions and Israeli aggression.

The UNCLOS, you say? Guess which two countries haven't signed/ratified it: US and Israel.

So yeah, I don't see Iran paying much attention to the UNCLOS.

I don't think this count as open sea. The rule is 12 miles from the coast (12 nautical miles btw, i don't know what it is in freedom units). i'm pretty sure the strait is narrower than that at the place where the toll is paid (if you count both side, i.e less than 24 miles Between Oman's peninsula i forgot the name of, and Hormuz/Qeshm islands).

So basically, Iran say "here, you have to pass through our or Oman's waters, we will let you, but please pay a toll for the derangement, that we will share with Oman."

> There are no maintenance costs for the open sea.

There are massive maintenance costs for the open sea with how we utilize it. Maritime security and policing, navigational infrastructure, weather reporting, radio repeaters, international bureaucracy, etc.

Global maritime trade is extremely costly. It's simply hidden behind opaque public spending on things you don't think about. In all likelihood it's a sunk cost that would ballpark around a few hundred billion dollars annually, invisible money spent just to keep things running at the scale and reliability that they do.

Now the maritime traffic passing through the Strait of Hormuz may only partially overlap with this spending, but people greatly overestimate just how "cheap" maritime activity actually is.

Very Large Crude Carriers carry ~2 million barrels of oil. Ultra Large Crude Carriers double that. If oil went down to $50/Bbl, that $2 million fee amounts to a ~2% tax per ship, given their cargo capacity. It's not particularly exorbitant, especially given that the entire reason they proposed this toll was to fund their rebuilding efforts (Americans and Israelis did a lot of damage that's been under-reported and ignored)

This conflict has been an interesting case of watching mass hysteria interact with propaganda in the newform, rapid pace of media that exists in the internet age. The amount of wild conjecture, speculation, misinformation is the most extreme I've ever seen it, eclipsing even the 6 months of nonsense that was spurred on by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

If that’s right, 2% indeed doesn’t sound bad. Especially since it’s supposed to be split with Oman.

The 2% is the camel's nose. They are establishing that they tax the Strait traffic and there is no longer freedom of navigation. Once it is a done deal, the deal will be altered...

AFAIK they only let two ships pass before closing it again due to Israeli strikes on Lebanon, so in effect the strait is still closed and likely to remain so.

I read Lebanon wasn’t part of the deal, so…

Where did you read this?

Who were they quoting?

Trump promised the most crypto-friendly US administration ever, but this is probably not what Republicans had in mind.

The toll is not going to happen. Iran has plenty of demands regarding the ceasefire and will get almost none of them.

No air war has changed a regime. The US government knows this. Trump knows this and never had regime change as an objective. Why are you saying that regime change was an objective, and how do you think it was going to happen in an air war when no air war has caused a regime change before?

Trump was talking about the protests there and that the US would help them. And we kept killing Iranian leadership lol.

Why are you taking what the Trump admin says at face value, anyways? Are you still a fool after all these years? This is like "fool me a 10,000th time" by now haaha

What he says matches to reality: that regime change isn't possible with an air war. Thus even if you don't listen to him, we know from prior experience that regime change is highly improbable. Every person educated about these things knows that.

The contemplated (and moved!) ground troops for weeks lol.

If troops get deployed, it will no longer be an air war. Part of keeping it an air war is to achieve the original objectives, and getting Iran to think that troops are coming is a way to increase the probability of achieving those objectives. If you don't know how war, or game theory, works, why are you commenting on it?

i do understand, but the issue here is that the war was not sold or explained to us at home. which is equally important to a successful war.

Little correction: Trump has a different objective every second day, and at some point there was (also) regime change on the menu. Might come again, I don't know.

> Trump knows this

This statement is very rarely true.

No air war has ever tried to change a regime. The fact of the matter is, we don't know what will happen next. There could very well be a civil war.

I can't believe that the toll will actually be paid - it would turn Iran into an INSANELY wealthy superpower and easily give them the funds to hugely increase their availability to fund groups like hezbollah etc.

I read that it could add up to $80 billion/year, at most.

According to Wikipedia their current budget is roughly 40bn usd, so it would triple their budget.

This fascination with ignoring that everyone in this disaster is the 'bad guy' (yeah including the US) is very bizarre.

I think it’s weird that you imply that it is because the American regime failed to change the Iranian regime. They (lead by Israel or not) illegally invaded a country.

It’s just Pax for those parts of the world that America and its allies are not invading (and other non-allied examples like Russia invading Ukraine).

But a typical top-comment about how America Did a Bad Thing Which Ruined The Good American-lead Times.

> It’s just Pax for those parts of the world that America and its allies are not invading

Aren't you making the very point you purport to refute? What's so different about this than Rome circa 50 BC? They even invaded Persia!

I think the Very Point or Principle is garbage in general.

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