They only have to seize a handful to stop shipping because that makes the risk of shipping too great.
War with...Iran?
- Thread starter Technarch
- Start date
Feel like we’ve entered into the Trump will ignore this entire war and hope it goes away stage.
Under the War Powers Resolution, he is coming up on the 60 days limit at which point he needs to wind down military actions. He can ignore it, of course, but it also gives him an excuse to walk away and blame Congress as the reason why he can't continue.
You're forgetting about a variable here. Netanyahu.
Trump having an out to blame Congress doesn't get him out of this quagmire because Netanyahu will keep the belligerence alive and fresh to keep it going, and as long as Netanyahu is doing that, the US will oblige being drone fodder for him.
Then he gets to blame Netanyahu. So long as he can shift the blame to Congress (for not authorizing an extension), Netanyahu (for extending the conflict), and JD Vance (for not getting a ceasefire agreement), what does he care? In his mind, he is blameless. It's everyone else's fault for failing him.
I can see the resolution passing with the bare minimum of yes votes only because the alternative is the biggest geopolitical loss the US has ever seen. Losing the Strait to Iran would be our Suez Canal moment. I know some of us would relish that stain on Trump's watch but I'm not sure any of us really want to live with it's very real consequences for the entire world.
So I can see Congress holding it's nose and voting to extend war powers, if only because there's more at stake here than rubbing Trump's face in the dirt. If anything the Democrats will probably benefit from having this still going into the mid-terms. After all, why interrupt your enemy while he's making a mistake?
It’s like literally everything ever - he’s lost interest.
Trump orders Navy to ‘shoot and kill any boat’ laying mines in Hormuz Strait
So....what were they doing before?
Clearly he's just trying to look like he's doing something, anything. Iran is slow-walking negotiations because ultimately they know time is on their side as the Strait remains bottled up. Trump either has to play their game or drastically escalate (and even then, no guarantee ships will start transiting until there's assurances they can make the voyage safely).
Meanwhile worldwide oil reserves continue to slowly run out...
So....what were they doing before?
Clearly he's just trying to look like he's doing something, anything. Iran is slow-walking negotiations because ultimately they know time is on their side as the Strait remains bottled up. Trump either has to play their game or drastically escalate (and even then, no guarantee ships will start transiting until there's assurances they can make the voyage safely).
Meanwhile worldwide oil reserves continue to slowly run out...
Immunodominance
Smack-Fu Master, in training
Our brave commander in chief has ordered the supremely ethical Secretary of War to interdict vessels containing Iranian oil.
Not anywhere near the Strait of Hormuz, of course. Better to do it in the Indian Ocean.
How long the Iranians will wait before calling upon (Houthi) Ansar Allah to close the Bab al-Mandab Strait is anyone's guess.
If that happens, the other principal route for Saudi oil is blocked and we (the world) are completely screwed. Above and beyond how screwed we already are, that is.
Luckily, we've got a steady hand on the wheel here, so at least our priorities are clear and we won't be concerned about incidental distractions.
Not anywhere near the Strait of Hormuz, of course. Better to do it in the Indian Ocean.
How long the Iranians will wait before calling upon (Houthi) Ansar Allah to close the Bab al-Mandab Strait is anyone's guess.
If that happens, the other principal route for Saudi oil is blocked and we (the world) are completely screwed. Above and beyond how screwed we already are, that is.
Luckily, we've got a steady hand on the wheel here, so at least our priorities are clear and we won't be concerned about incidental distractions.
That has likely already happened. The Suez crisis wasn't something that "damaged" Britain and France's ability to impose their geopolitical will, it was the moment where the illusion that they still could fell away.
It has been demonstrated that the US cannot impose its geopolitical will with its military, in a way much less ambiguous than all the other times it has charged in smashed stuff up and flounced off again.
"Losing the Strait to Iran"? What does this even mean? The U.S. never had control of the Strait. It was just never in anyone's interest for the nation that did have de facto control to impede the traffic in any way. Until, y'know, some stable geniuses decided to change the calculus.
The consequence will simply be somewhat more expensive petroleum products (along with other products that regularly transit the Strait) and more money in Iran's coffers. This isn't what any sane person would have wanted, but at this point it's inevitable. Spending more lives and treasure on this quagmire is just sunk cost fallacy.
As @GloatingSwine mentioned above, walking away from the conflict and giving Iran carte blanche to impose tolls on the Strait is enough to crack the illusion of the US having an unstoppable military. It may already be over but I'm not sure Congress will want to be accused of being the ones that did it. The one thing Democrats and Republicans will have in common in regards to this conflict is they will want Trump to own it entirely. Pulling the rug out by not authorizing extension of war powers is just the thing Trump will need to pin the whole thing on Congress.
"I was this close to winning over Iran but then those idiots in Congress pulled the funding!" ~Trump, in a few weeks.
No, entering into the conflict in the first place was what cracked the illusion about the US military. The illusion is not about it being "unstoppable", the illusion is about it being a tool to enforce geopolitical will.
The US military cannot force Iran to do what Trump wants no matter how many more billions get spent trying.
This is why ascendant empires prefer to use soft power, because if you test your hard power and it doesn't work everyone saw that happen and you can't recapture the image it had before.
"Oh no! Republicans will blame us for their troubles if we try to fix this!" - Democratic leadership
Someone should explain to them that the Republicans are going to blame them for everything no matter what they do?
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Well what is really at stake though? Congress not extending war powers means the President did something that Congress thinks was poorly considered. What it does is weakens the President's power to wage ill considered and unnecessary wars, and that is unequivocally GOOD for America and the world.
And if it goes on longer and the US still doesn't win by some standard that will be judged by the rest of the world and not by US, that's worse though, isn't it? If they approve it, then it's the US given unlimited authority and time and the support of Congress couldn't win is worse than the President couldn't win it in 60 days without a Declaration of War from Congress.
But I get that not everybody in Congress is looking at this clearly.
The quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan weren't enough to shatter the illusions? Hardly.
The US, as an imperialist, retains its core competency. It can level another country and it has proven its air superiority, even against drones. Unlike, say Russia. And unlike those
, this will only increase the demand for American weapons.I see very little about the geopolitical calculus has changed, except that the death force of US and Israel have even more experience in destruction.
Oh, our European friends are getting f*cked. Trump can just leave the Strait blockade for months. What can Europe do? Nothing. What if there's no heat winter in Europe?
Someone needs to figure out an alternative to this world order, and fast.
Denying a war powers resolution would be an extreme unforced error by the US. Like how we got here or not (emphasis on not) we're (and I speak, as a non-American, in a global sense.. since this affects everyone) in it now.
All denying a resolution would do is give Iran even more leverage, making the resulting deal ending the war worse for us all.
All denying a resolution would do is give Iran even more leverage, making the resulting deal ending the war worse for us all.
Normalized international relations with Iran and isolation, ostracization of capricious, belligerent rogue states like the U.S. & Israel is not a worse outcome than before for everyone not American or Israeli.
From a perspective outside the USA, the days of belief in "the US having an unstoppable military" ended decades ago. Vietnam, Afghanistan, the list goes on. This is just another example of how intelligent countries use soft power, something Trump has thrown out the window.
Those wars cost the American public nearly nothing at a personal level, just like the other post-WWII constabulary wars of choice. If one's only contact with an event is watching it on the news, that may as well be none at all. Spectators feel their little feelings then change the channel. (Many vets etc forget their peers and communities are a tiny portion of Americans.)
US casualties over time were small even in the Korean and Viet Nam constabulary missions which is why those were so swiftly forgotten by the general public who can afford to blithely ignore "forever wars" as they do natural disasters and overseas wars between groups not their own. Notice how swiftly concern over Gaza is fading (outside of genuine stakeholder groups).
I love how we’ve just accepted the opportunity cost that could have been used on basically anything to make our lives better as “no cost.”
This country has a diseased mind.
We forget crisis and calamity easily. The 1918 flu killed millions in every town and city in the world and yet it was over and forgotten by 1920.
Daily reminders like "Today in history" columns are full of earthquakes, famines, massacres, as well as feel good stories, the feel good items are what we remember, not the quake in Italy that killed thousands of people in 1915, just as one example.
[snip]
The US, as an imperialist, retains its core competency. It can level another country and it has proven its air superiority, even against drones. Unlike, say Russia. And unlike those
On the contrary, this middle-eastern missadventure is actively reducing demand for American weapons, because the USA has been diverting systems already built for other countries to cover its losses.
Ironically, a lot of those foreign sales were the result of Russo-Ukraine war, where US systems like Patriot and HiMARS got huge sales boosts from their public success.
It's been really good for sales of non-US produced weapons though...
I think it did more damage that the US has shown itself unreliable, and even talked about how systems and weapons could be disabled or degraded by the US after sale.
And of course, it logically follows, if the EU is going to massively increase defense spending, putting that money into EU companies is better than just financing US industry.
But yes, it does look like there is less appetite for US weapons and materiel, for many reasons. Which is probably ultimately a good thing for everyone. A huge “defense” industry isn’t a good thing, when it exists in a country where political influence is for sale. :-/
No. The success bits in Iraq and Afghanistan were fast and flashy and the subsequent failure to mould either nation in the image of the USA, as the Neoconservatives in the Bush admin that launched into them were sure must happen as it had proven itself the only true form of a nation by winning the Cold War, was long slow and boring.
It's the myth of "winning the war but losing the peace" instead of viewing them as whole enterprises because war is politics by other means (drink!).
Honestly Afghanistan and Iraq should have put the notion of invading nations as a viable policy option to the bed.
You can win the invasion, you can't win the occupation.
I think Ukraine and Iran should put the notion of winning limited wars against big or medium sized countries to bed too. In a world of cheap mass produced drones that can be produced decentrally and can't really be fend off you can't break a nation's military anymore like you could in the 90s.
Look at Russia and Ukraine. They couldn't pull of the invasion and now we are in year five of this mess and the conflict is turning into a daily waves of drones flying back and forth over the border inflicting economic pain on both country with literally no end in sight.
There is no winning in any of these conflicts. You can't win by invading the enemy, you can't win by bombing the enemy, maybe you should just talk to the enemy and find a way to live with him instead.
I hope China and the US take that lesson to heart.
You can win the invasion, you can't win the occupation.
I think Ukraine and Iran should put the notion of winning limited wars against big or medium sized countries to bed too. In a world of cheap mass produced drones that can be produced decentrally and can't really be fend off you can't break a nation's military anymore like you could in the 90s.
Look at Russia and Ukraine. They couldn't pull of the invasion and now we are in year five of this mess and the conflict is turning into a daily waves of drones flying back and forth over the border inflicting economic pain on both country with literally no end in sight.
There is no winning in any of these conflicts. You can't win by invading the enemy, you can't win by bombing the enemy, maybe you should just talk to the enemy and find a way to live with him instead.
I hope China and the US take that lesson to heart.
chateauarusi
Ars Centurion
I really wish the consequences were limited to more expensive petroleum products as well as other proucts that pass through the Strait. But, then, who needs fertilizer anyway? Certianly not 70 percent of American farmers. Not to mention farmers elsewhere in the world. It's not like a fertilizer shortage is likely to lead to crop failures and famine... Right?
That said, fertilizer shortages seem likely to be an already sunk cost so... Life's going to suck for a while, especially if you live a somewhat marginal life.
Not to mention the threats to allies and the support contracts necessary to keep those weapons operational. I strongly suspect that, very shortly, the American MIC is going to learn that nobody wants to buy from them because the American government is viewed as an unreliable partner. Yes, F-35s are very nice planes, shame that you can't use them because you annoyed the President-King.
I think it's slightly more nuanced than that. The US military has spent decades and trillions of dollars training and preparing for exactly what they're doing now: blowing shit up on the far side of the planet on short notice without risking too many deaths of their own service members. Important parts of it are broken - like, say, maintaining ships, and forgetting that sometimes opponents can shoot back (airbases don't get stealth coatings), but on the back of that time and money investment, they're still (1) pretty damn good at it - almost certainly better at it than any other military. Iran can't stop those planes and cruise missiles flying overhead, and I'm not sure any other country could either.
What seems to be entirely missing - and, as you say, has been for a long time - is the recognition that this isn't the same thing as winning a war. I'm honestly fed up of listing all the wars since pilots started chucking grenades out of their cockpits where airpower has failed to live up to the idea that it could achieve victory just by itself: there is at most one (controversial and debated to this dayl) success in a literal century of unambiguous failures.
Until Trump, US presidents have done two things "right" about these wars of choice:
- They offered some kind of political goal that motivated war rather than other forms of diplomacy. Those figleaves could be wafer thin, to mix a metaphor, but even Bush II went to the effort of faking up a bunch of intelligence about WMDs
- They picked wars of choice that, if not won quickly, could "safely" be dragged out for some other president to quietly admit defeat without risking catastrophic consequences (although JFK and Reagan were both really close to crossing that line).
Iraq and Afghanistan turned into seeping wounds that bled blood and treasure for decades, but they weren't really costing America very much (let us say naught of the successive crises that the resulting waves of refugees have triggered in Europe and the middle East: from the perspective of the USA, Somebody Else's Problem).
The problem with Iran is not that the American military is more or less toothless than it used to be, but that it has the ability to fight back in a variety of ways in which the US military has no, or limited, response. UAVs are part of that, but the biggest part is the Strait.
War for fun and profit has been a losing prospect pretty much since not long after the start of the industrial revolution: the trio of the Crimean war, US civil war, and Franco-Prussian war really drove it home. Off the top of my head, the only war since then that has been a net positive for a participant was the second world war, in that it systematically crushed every single industrial competitor to the USA while "merely" being severely uncomfortable to them. As with the airpower-winning-wars debate, that's a pretty slender evidence base on which to base a new policy of the war paying for itself!
(1) It remains to be seen if they will still be capable of it next time: arsenals that took decades to fill are emptying in weeks. The performance is likely to be less impressive if "next time" happens before cruise missile and interceptor stocks can be rebuilt. Maybe the USA has a Lloyd-George in waiting, but it doesn't exactly look likely today.
To me the core difference is that in the past, the US could entirely destroy a country's military to the point the country was completely unable to retaliate in any way.
All the planes, SAMs, tanks, ships,... were destroyed so there was no way for the opposing party to really stay in the fight.
Now, the US has expended a ludicrous amount of ordinance on Iran and Iran can keep chugging drones till the heat death of the universe and as such stay in the fight in a very relevant way.
If you project that to some hypothetical China/US conflict, I think you can clearly see the almost inevitable result of such a conflict where all the fancy missiles and bombs have been expended for no real, tangible, geopolitical impact and then what? China and the US start building long range drones by the tens of thousands a day to happily chug at each other for the next hundred years?
This reminds me of a novel, Ghost Fleet, in which the US goes to war with China. In the opening moves, the US F-35's are suddenly rendered useless by some sort of virus implanted in microchips (made in China, natch) used in the planes.
The difference being that China never advertises this threat to its potential adversaries in advance, whereas the US openly threatens its customers (and allies).
Yes, the current administration has worked really hard to make "ITAR Free" almost as valuable a sticker on the marketing material as "Combat Proven".
So now you have Germany talking about domestic production of medium-range ballistic missiles (in conjunction with France), and students of history looking even more nervous...
Considering how much of the US economy runs on rent extraction these days, be very careful what you wish for here.
The solution David Lloyd-George arrived at was the Munitions Act of 1915, which, quite frankly, was a rather disgraceful episode where-in the government turned to defacto forced labor in the munitions sector, heavily curtailing the right of employees working in 'controlled establishments' to strike, to access to the court system -- or even to seek employment elsewhere.
Then, when the pressure had become too great, Britain again threw those that had served the country during the war under the bus: Under the Munitions Act previously male-only professions were also oppened to women, something the country rolled back with the Restoration of the Pre-War Practices Act of 1919. It had little choice here, because unrest over this curtailment had grown to such a degree that the government had to act swiftly and decisively, leaving little to no time required for the work to keep the good (letting women remain in their job) while discarding the bad (defacto coerced labor). A situation the government had placed itself in precisely because it had acted with reckless heavy-handedness and kept it long beyond the immediate need and justification, and did not attempt reconcilation: While the act may have been necessary in 1915, as early as 1916 the act was kept around not due to necessity but due to convenience.
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The US is now exploring ways to punish NATO countries for not signing up to join the US in sticking their hand in a running wood chipper
Nato says 'no provision' to expel members after report US could seek to suspend Spain
Nato says 'no provision' to expel members after report US could seek to suspend Spain
I guess the US really doesn't want to keep those European bases...
Some in Washington think the US is NATO, with other members being at best adjuncts who dance to their beat. Trump started grumblings over the alliance in his first term—which many shrugged off hoping the issues would subside with Trump’s exit. Once he was given a second bite at the apple, it became apparent that NATO seriously needs a Plan B for a post-US reality.
Bringing up the Falklands is absurd. The USA under Reagan gave no support to the UK in 1982 when Argentina invaded.
But Milei, the current President of Argentina, is a favourite among parts of the Maga movement. Kind of like Orban.