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Iran So Far Away: 2026

After Diaper Boy's TACO on bombing power stations Brent Crude fell to the mid-$90s, but tonight with the 101st airborne on the way in overnight trading it has been rising nearly monotonically and just topped $103.

Time for him to place another bet and then make a statement. But he has no real way out of his tar baby war.

Most recent U.S. wars are dumb and expensive, but they are under the control of the American government, which can choose to withdraw, or not. But this one is not. Iran can choose to open the Strait of Hormuz, or not. The American military tactic of parking its aircraft carriers 20 miles from a nation and blowing the hell out of them, which worked for decades, has been neutralized by cheap missiles and drones.

On a strategic level, there’s a looming supply chain crisis imposed by Iran on the rest of the world. As an example, hospitals are starting to ration scans because there’s little helium to spare, China is restricting exports of plastics, and airlines are cutting flights as jet fuel screams higher. We can expect a lot more downstream consequences.

These supply chain shocks mean our global order is being disrupted. There’s a lot of nonsense about what that order is, a lot of anti-American rhetoric or pro-American jingoism, but the truth is, it is based on oligarchy rather than any particular nation-state. Global elites buy and sell dollar denominated assets mediated by U.S. banks, they expect U.S. soldiers to keep the flow of oil running, and the U.S. middle class gets their jobs outsourced in return for cheap goods. This system is centered in the U.S., but it’s not American, it’s run for a global oligarchy. During Covid, for instance, the U.S. government actually tried to allow poor countries to get access to vaccine technology, but German, Swiss, and British pharmaceutical giants, and furtive South African elites, blocked it.

This situation allows for oligarchs all over the world to make a lot of mistakes, like a rich kid constantly indulged by his parents after he wrecks yet another car. The U.S. can spend 20% of our economy on useless health care bureaucracies, bomb whoever, allow predatory gambling everywhere, but as long as the impact doesn’t touch the global elites, they are fine with it. Other nations have their own white elephants - the Saudis recently canceled their $1 trillion desert city project named The Line, and Europeans live in an ossified bureaucratic state that can’t do anything.

There are some bad countries who refuse to play in this game of Western oligarchy - China, North Korea, Russia, and so forth. That doesn’t make them virtuous, but they are less invested in our system. That’s why Iran was so frustrating to Western oligarchs, they have oil, geopolitical leverage, and yet they are spoiling it for everyone with their weird unwillingness to live in a Davos-mediated world.

But now Trump has gone and tried to blow up Iran, and in doing so, sacrificed this entire framework. The U.S. has been revealed as a paper tiger, unable to defend luxury resorts like Dubai where the investors and influencers live. Global oligarchs invested in this order have also been discredited, as fuel shortages hit everywhere from Sri Lanka to the Slovenia to Thailand.

And the basic deal, which is U.S. soldiers keep the oil flowing, has been broken. There’s a lot of chatter about how Trump should end the war, his strategy, and so forth, but the truth is that he cannot end the war by himself. It is not up to him. And it is not up to the rest of the world either, which is also angry with Iran for closing the Strait. There are outside possibilities; Iran may capitulate, the Iranian public may overthrow its regime, the Iranian government may decide it wants a cease fire for its own internal purposes. But the point is that it is not up to America, or any other set of nation-states.

A war that America started but cannot end even as pain gets inflicted on the investor class, and supply chains everywhere, is something no one has seen in our lifetimes.
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Kepler said:
After Diaper Boy's TACO on bombing power stations Brent Crude fell to the mid-$90s, but tonight with the 101st airborne on the way in overnight trading it has been rising nearly monotonically and just topped $103.

Time for him to place another bet and then make a statement. But he has no real way out of his tar baby war.
Click to expand...
Oh there's a real way out of this war, but nuking Tehran might be a bridge too far for the elites.
 
If Thiel and Musk are what pass for elites now they are even more delusional than Dump. They obviously do not have a clue about anything outside their narrow fields of expertise.

Nobody wanted WW1, either.
 
30-40% of energy infrastructure in the Gulf has been destroyed, and European leaders say it will take decades to rebuild them. Qatar has lost one-fifth of its capacity and other countries report similar numbers because of Iranian counterattacks. Their answer is thousands of new green energy projects and government subsidies directly to people to encourage them to buy renewables, like electric cars (not Tesla, obviously). Our answer is to give the Pentagon anywhere from $200B to $1 trillion more to blow stuff up and cancel any green energy projects in favor of more drilling, coal and higher prices for everything.
 
I just realized I genuinely do not know if we could win if we have to get in close. We have been riding technological superiority, specifically air superiority, my entire life.

We got in close in Vietnam and got outworked, outwitted, and outlasted. I see no reason the same would not happen in Iran. The way to beat the US in a war is (1) don't give up and (2) don't have Russia bearing down on your flank.
 
Downstream economic effects of The Excursion.

Chemicals, fertilizer and packaging: QatarEnergy has said Iranian attacks on the world’s largest liquefied natural gas export plant at Ras Laffan and another plant in Mesaieed, both in Qatar, forced the company to stop producing LNG and associated products on March 2. Two days later, the company declared that it could not fulfill its contracts due to extreme external pressures that would require many years to recover from. The affected products included urea, polymers and methanol, used to make fertilizer, plastics, detergents, packaging and other consumer goods. Reduced production and closed transit routes are also affecting supplies of aluminum and helium produced in the Gulf countries.

Factory slowdowns abroad: When shipping slows and energy costs rise, factories abroad face higher operating costs. As a result they ration production, diverting energy supplies to producing a narrow range of high-value products that can absorb these costs. Diversions of shipment traffic and fewer transportation routes lead to delivery delays. Economic research shows that shipping-cost increases also raise import prices, producer costs and consumer inflation.


Air cargo and delivery delays: Early in the conflict, several countries, including Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates, closed their airspace to all traffic. Later advisories warned of risks to planes over neighboring countries as well, except for limited corridors. Those closures affected 20% of global air cargo capacity, raising the risk of delays for higher-value cargo such as medicines, aircraft components and electronics.
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tldr:

(1) energy inflation amplifies the cost of everything
(2) delays cascade, all the supply chains kink like a traffic accident; once the accident is cleared you still have traffic effects for considerably longer than the time of the initial delay
(3) the destruction of industrial capacity means production is not elastic -- rebooting does nothing if the machine got blown up
 
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Kepler said:
I just realized I genuinely do not know if we could win if we have to get in close. We have been riding technological superiority, specifically air superiority, my entire life.

We got in close in Vietnam and got outworked, outwitted, and outlasted. I see no reason the same would not happen in Iran. The way to beat the US in a war is (1) don't give up and (2) don't have Russia bearing down on your flank.
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Did the U.S. ever really give Vietnam the full on effort and level of commitment as it did for say WW II? Similarly in Korea?
 
Kepler said:

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Tell me you know who that actor is, and why they had him say that line.

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Slap Shot said:
Did the U.S. ever really give Vietnam the full on effort and level of commitment as it did for say WW II? Similarly in Korea?
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War was never formally declared, and half the country didn't support our entanglement there, so it's safe to say - no. We likely could have won at a much greater cost of life on both sides, but all the commies ever had to do was outlast the American public's tolerance of an ongoing stalemate of questionable legality.
 
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- YouTube

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- YouTube

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.
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- YouTube

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.
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- YouTube

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.
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