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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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...
- 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?
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.
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.
In what way does that benefit Russia?
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.
"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.
Good thing the Qataris have no influence over the American president /s
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.
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.
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
Yep, now if IR survives, I see no reason for them not to double down on even longer range missiles. Like, why not?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Even if you don't blow up a nuclear plant, it seems like cutting the power from one would be relatively easy.
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.
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.
- 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".
https://theaviationist.com/2026/03/06/typhoon-spotted-rocket...`
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.
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.
