US- and Greek-owned tankers ablaze after Iran claims 'underwater drone' strike (lloydslist.com)

This admin does TACO all the time. A likely scenario is Iran causes economic problems, Trump chickens out and withdraws while simultaneously declaring absolute victory. Any lingering problems he blames on Rubio and hegseth.

> Ukraine has been using these drones so it’s entirely possible Iran has this tech too.

Ukraine has been defending against these drones for past 4 years!

EDIT: nevermind, we are talking about sea babies, not shaheds - different kind of drones.

Why would it be outside of Iran capabilities? They are the ones who provided Russia with Shahed drones.

We didn’t prepare for the most obvious responses - closure of hormuz (we are now saying we will have ships in place by end of month to escort tankers, nor filled the SPR at low prices and now have less ready to release) and drones (scrambling to purchase anti-drone tech from Ukraine).

Technology can change things but people that profit today from something will oppose a change.

Case in point: switching from oil to renewables - which can lower dependency to external actors a lot as solar panels and windmills have life span of years, so even if the producers suddenly refuses to sell more, one has some time to find an alternative - was done slower than it could have because of "discussions".

Since 20 years I almost feel the discussion "climate change or not" is fueled by people that want dependency on oil, such that we don't talk about the issue of a couple of big producer points of failure (USA, Russia, Gulf countries). Not sure if oil companies are smart enough to finance green groups (to which I agree generally but is besides the point), such that the public discourse stays in a conflict area (climate) rather than a simple one (independence), but if they are that would be meta-evil.

Geopolitics are an entirely optional game of course that just amounts to trading seats of who gets entitled to be owner of some thing that one can hardly even say is ownable outside the legal definition. Seems to me there is no actual reason why the middle east has to look like the middle east and not midwest USA. Israel arming itself should be seen as just as absurd as say the city of Cleveland arming itself due to Detroit.

Kind of interesting how we have some areas of the world where there are no geopolitics and people live in peace and don't see any differences between the people they come across in the grocery store. And other places in the world where those vary same cultures in that midwestern grocery store might now be picking up arms against eachother.

And also kind of interesting how no one cares to highlight this cognitive dissonance we have, how an israeli and a persian can live as neighbors in the US, but in the middle east they are water and oil.

Are they?

We have so much stuff that we just throw things away if a tiny piece of it gets tarnished / broken.

The US's population density is pretty low and we have a ton of land not in cities that's very sparsely populated.

Like it largely seems that geopolitics of now is about creating scarcity.

> increasingly scarce, or increasingly valuable.

Neither of which is actually true for oil. We're still finding oil reserves faster than we deplete them, major users such as China are rapidly decarbonizing, and the price was relatively low before the war.

But the people in power thought it was true, which is all that matters.

No actually. There's no real "resource" justification here.

This is directly caused by technology. Morons have helped the worst possible people build surveillance and coordination and propaganda networks and are all confused pikachu about that going exactly the way you should have expected it to go.

Technology was also bypassing the "resource" problem at warp speed. Solar panels are the energy future, and thanks to China being actually good at strategic planning, solar can be deployed and utilized far faster than any other energy innovation. With the sheer abundance possible through bulk solar, water scarcity is an engineering issue, about manufacturing enough plumbing and membranes to desalinate whatever you need.

We are fighting an 80s oil war because people voted for an 80s TV personality to run our country after he was known to rape kids, brag about Mein Kampf (even though everyone knows he doesn't read for fun), and attempt to invalidate the 2020 election.

Israel saw a clear opening to wildly advance their imperialist ambitions and because Donald Trump is so damn stupid we have jumped in to this absurdist situation because Donald Trump wanted to be seen shooting first, because he thinks that looks "Strong".

I am not delusional about those power-hungry people, but I somehow thought that with better access to information, society would have been able to better regulate them.

Maybe in hindsight, "flooding the zone" will be considered a much bigger threat than it is today. Most of what's going on in the last 12 months have happened in plain sight and would have never worked 30 years ago. Today, it just flies, attention span be damned.

There is no crisis in the US that results in canceled elections

The US held elections during the Civil War.

There is no crisis that would create a situation where elections "cannot be held".

That is to say, if the current admin attempts to suspend elections, the legality of that and the magnitude of the reaction will be the same, crisis or no.

I really think this gives them too much credit.

They keep making the same mistake: underestimating that your adversary gets a vote, whether it's Iran, trade partners, colleges, Colbert, the Kennedy Center's audience, or Minneapolis.

> Why worry about how the midterms, if you can create a situation where elections cannot be held at all...?

But they claimed "flawless victory".

Both things cannot be true at the same time.

The only way you could do something like would be to "appoint" someone as the presidential candidate in a two party system without holding a primary

I heard a theory that since someone told Trump that Ukraine wouldn't hold elections until after the war, he thought America had the same law.

> If the goal was to hurt China / BRICS and kneecap Iran it seems on point.

While also hurting Europe, South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, and many more. Very on point...

It will hurt everyone, Americans included, oil is a global market, fertilisers are a global market, those are basic inputs for probably every single thing produced in the world.

So now all of us around the globe have to pay the price for American Imperialism, compounded by the complete shattering of the USA's soft power as an ally, this will only create more animosity against the USA from all sides. Very on point.

But the USA oil industry can make a buck until everything buckles, or perhaps the USA admin will introduce price controls like in the 1970s, that worked very well too.

> in 2 strokes seriously hurt Chinese oil imports.

USA, Europe, and many other countries depend on China for manufacturing. I doubt that this is going to solve inflation.

But it will fill the pockets of a few people in oil rich countries that can still export.

> They also secured oil imports from Venezuela while at the same time in 2 strokes seriously hurt Chinese oil imports.

This 'Venezuelan oil' is a pipe dream for the moment. It will take a significant amount of years to get anywhere near completed.

Oil markets are global, you cannot hike prices for China while enjoying cheap oil yourself.

Venezuela has reserves. Relative to the gulf it doesn't produce any meaningful amount of oil from those reserves.

Just because the US won’t literally run out of oil doesn’t mean the economy (or populace) will be unaffected by a supply crunch. As everyone in the country can already see when they go to fill up their tank.

“If the goal was the hurt China…”

You are mistaken to assume there was a goal. Trump has admitted he did this because he was told that Iran were about to attack the U.S. not because of any strategic goal.

https://youtube.com/shorts/YlkcOjSQVJk

They don’t need Venezuela look up Guyana next door its the new oil country in the region

The 'issue' here is that China has good relations with Iran and in talks to guarantee safe passage for their ships, like they had previously with respect to attacks off Yemen by the Iran-backed Houthis.

China is still moving tankers through the strait, Iran has no quarrel with them.

Not so awful as it may seem. It would be even more awful if election cycle had no influence over decision to wage one more war. "Democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time".

Biden held back arms support for Ukraine on dubious "we don't wanna test Russia's red line" grounds, gave unlimited support a wannabe despot's (Netanyahu's) wars of aggression even as he tried to backstab democracy in the US, arguably also enabling him to start the current situation in Iran, failed to prosecute an attempt to overturn the US election, and stayed in the presidential race for too long when his body and mind was in visible decline.

We wouldn't be having a discussion about the US having a king if Biden's administration was actually competent at doing its job.

Bothsides-ism is such a plague. While I don't agree with everything you said, I feel like the pandemic response doesn't get enough credit. Everyone hated how the Biden admin responded in the moment, but looking back the US really came out ahead compared to almost everyone else

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Including starting with murdering 100+ kids based on stale intelligence, according to the NY times.

It doesn't matter how good the military is if the political leadership is incompetent and the strategic objectives are incoherent. You'd think that after Vietnam, Iraq 2, and Afghanistan this lesson would have been learned, but apparently not.

You're replying to someone who gets their political analysis from Twitter. Hilarious is the best case.

It's delusion.

> That piece of technological advance has gone mostly under the radar (!) so far

The Ukraine would like to have a word.

What defense is there against something like this? AFAIK only a few US aircraft carriers are equipped with anti torpedo torpedoes, and one of those sitting in the straight would be pretty vulnerable.

Of course that could be the entire idea.

The navigable part of the Strait of Hormuz is only 15-ish miles wide, maybe less. There is no way the US can convoy screen anything without significant loss in sailors and ships.

The WW2 convoy situation was far easier to escort (but still quite dangerous obviously) because:

1. The Atlantic is a much bigger place, even considering common routes and chokepoints.

2. U-Boats had to surface frequently, making them extremely vulnerable to Allied air cover.

3. U-Boats had to be within visual range to strike convoys, versus the drone and missile world we live in now.

Yes. I think the biggest issues though are:

- We likely don't have the assets to move the amount traffic that needs to get through

- We probably can't protect them perfectly (we don't have maritime supremacy) so ships will still take damage and that will stop the convoys pretty quickly

I suspect the escort ships would be fine though. They can defend themselves.

So if we did start them, they wouldn't continue for long until the economic pain was pretty massive and the cost of loosing ships was worth it.

The US shouldnt be starting wars with countries, and bombing civilians, at all.

It would be cheaper just to build an oil pipeline around it than to cover insurance and risk through that Strait. It would do well to just forget the Strait exists, our conflict has taken it out of commission for the indefinite future.

> The US should be running destroyer screens for convoys a la WW2 today,

That's harder than bombing schools, goat herders or kidnapping the leader of the most corrupt country in the world, are you sure they can still pull it off, I'm starting to think even they know they cannot anymore.

After seeing the latest white house CoD style propaganda videos and Pete "Kafir" Hegseth speeches it's clear the people in charge completely lost it

> In After the Empire, written in 2001, Todd claimed that the reason for America’s “theatrical micromilitarism” was to prove that it was still an indispensable power in a post-USSR world. In his latest work, however, he revises this thesis, arguing that it would imply attributing rational intentions to Washington.13 The American liberal oligarchy is not driven by any clear project.

https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2024/11/how-the-west-was-...

Why is starting so much slower than stopping?

From twitter: the cost of cleaning up the oil spill is much larger than the damage repair on the ship which drives up insurance rates

In the 1970s electric cars were not generally available and solar panels were 100 times more expensive than they are now. Today the world has the manufacturing capacity to install nearly a terawatt-peak of solar panels per year, at low cost, and millions of electric cars are shipping every quarter:

https://open-ev-charts.org/#global:electric-sales:quarter

It won't change rapidly in the US, because the current administration opposes renewables at every turn and keeps low cost BEVs out of the US, but most of the world's energy/oil needs are outside the US. This situation will accelerate a global process that was already gaining speed.

Really not sure you can compare solar and wind energy from the 1970s to the highly efficient modern solar and wind solutions of today.

Really.

The insurance companies primarily... secondary the people with bombs that can sink ships attempting to use the waterways.

They were anchored. Slightly different than being docked, even if the overall point remains. The other thing is they were in Iraqi waters

It means if you sail through it, Iran will launch drones and missiles at your ship.

The Iranian military has stated their intention to attack any ship passing through the strait without their permission.

The strait is considered closed when a country not afraid to use its military says ships can't cross.

I'd say the analogy is a closed door.

It's not that it's impossible to go through it, but you have to do something specific in order to do so beyond just trying to go through, or you're going to walk straight into getting a bloodey nose.

But yeah, these ships weren't anywhere near the strait.

By going after the regime I don't mean ground invasion but anything that helps reduce their abilities. Afghanistan would definitely be a bigger problem today if the USA let it play out.

I think you underestimate how much Iranians hate their current regime..

Other countries have been bombed by Iran in this war and none have actively joined the war.