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No government have accepted Iranian tolls so far, that is just not going to fly ever. If every country controlling a strait started taking out such tolls that would cause much worse issues than we are seeing currently, nobody will have that.

It's a pressure campaign to get a nuclear deal. NYT reported Iran already offered to open the strait, end hostilities, and negotiate a nuclear deal later, but the US rejected that offer as they want to pressure them into giving up their uranium.

Now Iran is demanding money in exchange for the uranium which is the primary roadblock.

They are doing this because they blockaded Iran.

because Baron trump has a bet on polymarket paying 100:1?

You mean that these mafia style insurances are a joke, but free (as in safe and not taxed) access to the seas is something many wars have been fought over. "Insurance" selling by navies was the norm until WW1 at least.

bc1qxy2kgdytzdonaldjlostiranwartrump

Hah, far more likely that it would be $TRUMP or $PATRIOT shitcoins. Gotta skim somehow.

They are already doing that so it wouldn't change anything.

This is some wacky races shit that boils down to:

1. US fucks up by engaging Iran, Iran closes strait.

2. US fucks up the negotiations and fails to reopen the strait.

3. US decides to try and rescue its initial war goals, through a mutual blockade with Iran, starts sinking the very vessels it demands Iran gives passage to.

Does Mutley get a medal?

Or they'll use a pair of binoculars (or a drone with a camera) to ignore the decoys and shoot at the actual ship...

I think this is incorrect. The point is to show that if Iran does this, then they will not be the only ones that can do it. The last thing that should happen is to reward Iran for rent seeking on the Strait. Others can also seek rent then, and the whole strait gets shut down..which encompassed around 90% of all Iranian oil exports, which in turn was about 90% of their economic exports.

The US is blockading the Iranian coast, not the entirety of the Strait.

The reason the US is blockading is because Iran is only partially blockading it. If Iran wasn't blockading at all then America wouldn't either. But it's pretty clear that "only shops whose countries pay a lot of money to Iran" would help Iran.

Whats weak about doing the smart thing?

I would have never realised that things would have taken such an Onion worthy scatological turn.

s/n/d/6

The bigger issue is the tankers. The US Navy isn't going to be happy patrolling the strait sure, but even if they did they wouldn't be able to protect the tankers enough for it to make sense for tankers to take the risk.

The last time this happened the US opened the strait by accidentally shooting down an Iranian passenger plane after sinking a large chunk of Iranian navy. The Iranians assumed the US shoot the passenger plane down on intentionally as a war crime and assumed the US would was planning to escalate the conflict. This fear deterred further Iranian attacks on tankers.

This isn't going to work this time because the US started the war by performing of the most serious escalations possible, a decapitation strike against top Iranian leadership in a surprise attack using a diplomatic negotiation as cover. The US did this while the strait was open and Iran was considering a peace deal.

Threats of escalation are no longer effective at deterring Iran because Iran now believes the US will take such actions regardless of what Iran does. What does Iranian leadership have to lose by staying the course? Very little. On the other hand if Iranian leadership back down, they loose all their leverage, they look weak internally, they look weak externally and the US might decide to attack them out of the blue again.

This is why decapitation strikes are generally not done. They remove options and they undermine deterrence and paint belligerents into a corner.

Modern US surface warships such as the DDG-52 Arleigh Burke class are pretty survivable. The Iranians (and their Houthi proxies) have made sustained attacks on them and don't seem to have hit anything. And a single hit would be highly unlikely to sink such as vessel: we're not talking about something like the Russian Moskva cruiser that was crewed by drunks and had inoperative defensive systems.

The real problem is that there are too few such vessels to sustain convoy escort operations. Each destroyer can only provide area air defense for a handful of merchant vessels, and they can only stay on station for a few days at a time before they have to cycle out to refuel, rearm, and conduct critical maintenance. Some of the key munitions also appear to running low. And it appears that the other Gulf states are refusing to allow use of their facilities over fears of Iranian retaliation.

Other countries generally aren't really in a position to assist as part of a coalition either. They either don't have sufficiently capable warships at all, or lack the logistics train to sustain them in the Persian Gulf / Gulf of Oman region. After the Cold War a lot of countries like the UK and Germany essentially dismantled their navies so that they now exist only as government jobs programs.

> I don't know enough about the current state of naval warfare but I've assumed this is related to the asymmetry that's emerged around protecting capital warships, especially in the scenario of a very narrow strait and a long enemy-controlled coastline.

It's not the billion-dollar warships that transport oil, it's the much more fragile and unarmed tankers.

Even if the US Navy begins full escort duty, it can't remain on-station forever. What are shippers to do afterwards? One drone strike might cause a tanker to have a very bad day, yet it's extremely difficult to so permanently degrade an entire country that they become incapable of launching sporadic attacks.

Ultimately, the status of the Strait must be settled diplomatically, and the US and Iran are each betting that the other side will blink first.

All of this was well known before the war though. The idea that navy is incredibly vulnerable modern anti-ship defenses has been a major consideration in the Taiwan situation for at least a decade (mostly in relation to the ability of the US navy to even operate in the area in a war). More recently, Ukraine has made a great show of sinking navy ships with cheap unmanned surface vehicles

Back in WWII you could sail your navy up a river and expect positive results. In the 21st century, the idea of attacking an enemy-held strait with navy doesn't work

Cheap drones taking out an AWACS is a great example of this. The US has only 16 of these and it will cost $700 million to replace, and was taken out by a drone that probably cost less than your car.

The US military is also just less powerful than it was at its peak at the end of the Cold War as well.

Still the most powerful navy in the world, but spread increasingly thin (turns out "the whole world" is quite a big place).

This is no longer Reagan's (almost) 600 ship navy, and projecting power halfway round the world is no mean feat when your opponent can lob missiles and drones at you from their back garden

suppose one has N independently developed interception systems (from detection till physical interception attempt), each with an intercept success rate of 90%.

a rudimentary calculation then gives the probability of hitting (not sinking) the ship as 0.1^N per launched missile; so it seems that given enough budget to spend on independently developed missile interception systems allows to drive down the penetration success rate arbitrarily.

Multi-billion sounds like $ 10^10; so assuming an attacker can launch say a million missile attempts then the statistical loss would be 0.1^N * 10^10 * 10^6; so the statistical loss can be driven down arbitrarily say to $ 1 by developing ~ 16 independent interception systems.

16 independently developed intercept systems doesn't sound like unobtainium for a vested nuclear power.

furthermore, the development cost of 16 independent intercept systems can be amortized over many more installations than a single ship, it can be amortized over multiple ships, multiple bases, multiple strategic assets across the globe.

> Even if a warship stops the vast majority of them, only one has to get through to sink a multi-billion dollar ship that takes a decade to replace.

Even worse. They don't need to attack _warships_. They can just attack civilian vessels, especially tanker ships, that don't have any defenses.

A hit on a tanker and the subsequent oil spill would be catastrophic.

> It’s territorial waters belonging to Iran and Oman.

The trick is that it's still an 'international strait', or a segment of water that forms the only connection between two areas of high seas -- in this case the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman. The principle of freedom of navigation establishes that innocent traffic (civilian traffic, and even warships in peacetime) have a right to use the strait to go from one body of international water to the other.

Iran may claim that it doesn't have to abide by that right, but international law is never self-executing. One question to be resolved by this war is whether Iran will ultimately recognize the right to navigation in any settlement (and then choose to abide by said settlement).

If Iran doesn't want to observe the terms of the UNCLOS (regardless of whether they have ratified it or not) then their territorial waters claims revert to the older 3NM limit. They can't have it both ways. Of course, in practice those legalisms don't matter without a means of enforcement.

It's prohibited under international law to attack a sovereign nation, like the US has done to Iran, so the point of Iran closing the Strait in response to this is very much moot.

> Iran hasn’t ratified UNCLOS either, and claims it is not subject to it.

Which isn't unique. Bunch of countries haven't ratified it and aren't legally bound by it but do follow it in spirit. US, Turkey, UAE, Israel etc.

All straits other than the Bosporus (which has some additional rights to Turkey given the proximity to a major city) are international waters for the purposes of free transit, under the Montreux Convention.

No, the Strait is international waters and always have been.

> Waters were open before America existed.

A huge part of the reason sovereign nations built navies was to fight piracy. It’s not really true that waters were open historically.

Nukes were not a response to Pearl Harbor.

The framing in general of “Japan only took military action and the US sank to attacking civilians” is wrong too. Take a look at what Japan did to the Chinese during that time period if you think they were only attacking military targets.

Japan also invaded an Alaskan island. https://prologue.blogs.archives.gov/2010/06/07/the-japanese-...

Why would you post such nonsense given how easy it is these days to determine bullshit? By the time of Pearl Harbor, Japan was formally aligned with Nazi Germany. Japan, Germany, and Italy signed the Tripartite Pact in Sept 1940 creating the Axis alliance. Pearl Harbor happened in Dec 1941, so Japan had been formally tied to Germany for more than a year.

“The American navy closed international waters.” Not in the Pearl Harbor context. Before Pearl Harbor the U.S. was not conducting a naval blockade of Japan that closed international waters. The U.S. cut off Japan from US oil in July 1941. That is not the same thing as the U.S. Navy closing the Pacific.

“The USA blockade was the reason Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.” False. Japan attacked Pearl Harbor because it wanted to neutralize the U.S. Pacific Fleet while Japan seized the "Southern Resource Area”, especially oil-rich East Indies, Malaya and other regions in the pacific. The U.S. oil embargo might have played a small factor, but that wasn't a US-only thing; various countries were increasingly unwilling to sell oil and other resources to Nazi-aligned Japan while they were attempting to conquer China and most of the Southeast Pacific.

"Waters were open before America existed."

The United States formed our Navy because of Islamic Pirate/Slavers causing a lack of open waters.

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

"The Barbary threat led directly to the United States founding the United States Navy in March 1794."

This is factually incorrect. Blockade is not a synonym of embargo. Blockade is generally an act of war, and embargo is not. Dealing with Cuba is certainly a huge PITA for the majority of trading actors because of potential blacklisting in the US, but waters around Cuba are as open as they can be, and you can check marine traffic to make sure that ships arrive to Cuban ports. Even from the US itself (cause there are exceptions from embargo such as food, and medicines).

> The actual blunder was exposing that weakness to the world.

The world already knew.

The real strength of the prior admins was in simply not needing the military force. The 2015 Iran nuclear deal is a relevant example here. It didn't cost the US anything.

> It's all the same capital and resources that prior administrations had.

Is it? Depending on how far back into "prior administrations" you go, the modern US Navy is a shadow of itself.

Not necessarily. It's a matter of risk. How many resources do we want to commit? Are we comfortable putting a large number of troops in Iran? Are we comfortable with major losses as we try to enforce against drones and mines?

It's not that I think any of these things are wise, but this is part of the risk calculus you make when you decide to wage war. It's more like a debate: if you don't have a plan for uncomfortable questions you're a poor debater. The US has the physical means to prevent the closure, but I think it's quite clear that this administration ignored known risks and acted recklessly. And more importantly, apparently had very little contingency planning if things didn't go their way.

The power is there, they just don't want to pay the cost in terms of money, lives, and polling popularity. This was done on the whim of a man-child throwing a tantrum, backed by his deeply racist hatred towards Obama. There was no plan other than his usual bullying tactics. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad we are not investing insane amounts of money and large lives into this, but we absolutely could win this if we wanted to pay the cost.

No one owns anything or has the right to anything.

Everything is either what you hold by force, or have a friend who holds it by force for you.

The original ship channel was in Omani waters, not Iranian. It is entirely unreasonable to consider it reasonable for Iran to mine Omani waters.

> Frankly it's a bit absurd to complain that your ships can't transit a country's waters while you bomb them.

The issue is they block all non-Iranian ships, not just American ships. Basically nobody would have complained if they only blocked American ships.

> somali terrorists

Pirates are many things, maybe even criminals under international law, but terrorists they are certainly not.

I mean that is ignoring the American military experience with Islamic pirates and Islamic slavers.

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

> A lot of the benefits of intervening in Iran seem to be paying off right now

I, umm, disagree fairly wholeheartedly.

Maybe there's some long term <something> that has changed direction slightly as a result, but right now literally everything immediate is worse than it was beforehand.

> We can absolutely continue destroying their capacity to do things, but the terrorists do not care about their own people or the world. They will use human shields and continue seeking nuclear weapons. They do not value human life or rules. This is why they can never have a nuclear weapon.

It's the US and Israel that are the "terrorists" and yet both have nuclear weapons. You literally say yourself that we can "continue destroying their capacity to do things", and like your definition of terrorists, the US/Israel are using us (US citizens) as human shields.

I presume you mean Islamic.

More to the point, Iran has been preparing for war with the US for decades. The US prepared for _this_ war with Iran for a couple of weeks.

> what appeared to be a moderate-low risk attempt.

It looks like it appeared that way to Trump. But you make it sound like it appeared that way to most people. As one of those "most people", I can say that's wrong. The reaction of most people was "WTF is Trump thinking?".

It's been clear he's not the sharpest tool in the shed for a while. But he should be surrounded by very bright people for are able to provide frank and fearless advice. Looks like he fired most of those people, and whats left have been cowered into sycophants.

There's no 4d chess plan here.

Trump thought it would go exactly as Venezuela and has no idea how to fix it. They tried to kill enough of Iran's leadership to get to somebody that would be subservient but it turns out nobody is left alive in Iran that is.

Is it truly 'US Navy securing safe shipping for everyone'? From whom? Where?

When was the last time they actually did that?

> 'because there would be no America to come help and save the day'

No more American meddling would result in much saner and safer world. Wherever they stick their fingers, the instability and wars ensue.

> pay to play and a global American security tax That's the current world.

>If the US military fails to keep international waters open, that harms everyone, and everyone more so than the United States.

Only in the sense that the US has forgotten its a participant in trade. But that seems to be pretty standard at this point.

>There's this continued misunderstanding that America did this or that, or securing global shipping is for America to do, or what have you.

I honestly would be happy if the world implemented the total blockade on the US that it seems to desperately imagine would be the best outcome for its own economy. Like some giant north korea. Seal the US shut and watch its economy explode with amazing mercantilist economic forces.

It would be nice if they hadn't stuck their dick in this particular bee hive. Its not that we collectively expect the US to secure shipping, but that we would be happy if the US didn't take actions seemingly calculated to make life worse for everyone else on the planet.

>So I'd say, be careful to join other isolationists and smugly cheer for the US to "lose" to Iran, and in which case you can expect much worse as the US says "forget it" and only seeks to protect its own vital interests

I am just waiting for the EU\UK\AU to get its shit together and clean up Trumps mess, so we can move to the point where the global order works without the US. The US didn't provide these services just for the fun of it, its largely just a soft power move, to engender the willing support of other nations. We can and will have successful global trade without the USA. And we can and hopefully will just let the empire rot and seethe from behind its own closed borders.

>Iran would simply watch their entire economy collapse, while Americans are paying a couple bucks more for cheeseburgers and milkshakes.

Iran's economy wasn't exactly in the best position before this. I wouldn't underestimate them. At least not again.

>But the perspective that the US would be defeated is the incorrect one

The US losing decades of work on shoring up willing support and soft power is a massive defeat. And it comes off the back of several other similar losses. It used to be the case that a lot of the planet put "America first" but that's becoming an untenable position. Trump has successfully turned worldwide public opinion against the US. Its electoral suicide in a lot of countries to give in to his nonsense. Every ounce of good will towards the US bought since WW2 has been spent.

>No more caring about Taiwan or Ukraine

Not like a lot of this has been going on. Looks like France is supplying 2/3rds of Ukraines intelligence. Actually the reverse is true here. If the US wants to retain some shred of its predominant position, it needs to get stuck in. Otherwise honestly we will just manage without you.

>remember Iran helps Russians kill Ukrainians?

There's been US weapons in basically every war zone going back decades. ISIS loved Humvees. The US is helping Israelis kill a lot of people right now. If Israel doesn't have a plane capable of delivering the US ordnance, the US will step in to provide it. I don't think this is a glass house that any supporter of the US should be throwing rocks in. Heck I think the US bombed those F 14 Tomcats you supplied to Iran in the opening strikes of this war. "But but the arms sales" he cries as he sells arms to war criminals. This is exactly why the US developed soft power, so that it could say that certain arms sales were illegal and have people reliably agree with them. Those credits have been spent. Its crazy to me that you would expect people to treat you with the respect that you have demonstrated you don't deserve.

>you can expect much worse as the US says "forget it" and only seeks to protect its own vital interests without regard to the rest of the world

Literally current US foreign policy. Why warn people that what is currently happening, might happen? Only slight correction is that the US sees Israels interests as its own vital interests, or can be reliably fooled into doing so at everyone else's expense.

1 - A win for the shareholders of U.S. oil companies, close to half of which aren’t even Americans, but not a win for Americans even on a purely financial basis given that they are paying more for gas and food. 2 - China hasn’t lost its source of gas and oil. They have more reserves than the rest of the world put together and can outlast every other country, and they’re still getting shipments. 3 - The exact opposite of reality. Iran’s potential to acquire nuclear weapons was one of their biggest dangers for the rest of the world. But with this the U.S. has given Iran a new actual power that had been conjectured but never realized. Control over 20% of the world’s fuel supply and large percentages of other critical raw materials.

>US oil and gas companies make money as oil proces rise. The US is the largest producer in the world.

Its a win for me laughing at Americans spending more on oil based products.

>China loses it's major source of oil and gas.

Its like 12% of Chinas Oil. China is 90% of Irans oil market. I think people get this around the wrong way.

>Iran gets neutralized. It may not look like it now, but it will probably end up that way.

Why is death and economic destruction a good thing? Like 99.99999% of these effects are worn by iranian citizens, not their government.

Even if this analysis were accurate, I would feel much better if the administration had intentionally gone this route rather than accidentally blundering into it.

People can try to come up with 4D chess explanations for the Trump admin's actions here all they want, but the truth is this is 0D chess.

Just a massive strategic blunder, one for the history books.

Any minor damage to China is tiny compared to the strategic loss America has undergone here

You don’t permanently remove 20% of the worlds oil, 30% of the fertilizer while having a incredibly financialized economy and somehow get on the other side of it healthy and rich.

For one, this would be the end of the Petrodollar and with it the ability to have huge trade deficits siphoning more than 1 trillion in goods and services from the rest of the world in exchange for fancy green paper.

3 - Iran moderates are neutralized, so hardcore fanatics from IRGC take over. Loss for literally everybody.

Otherwise, 1) and 2) are true, Europe is bleeding through the nose with buying US oil and depending on its current antagonist, not smart long term situation that we need to move away asap.

Somebody in US government is making literal billions on shorts and various trade deals just before major announcements keep happening, those are not that hard to see in markets. Current top public bet on this is trumps family and his close coworkers, and their families. If you ever want a witch hunt on traitors and collaborators against US citizens and society, smart up, forget Wall street and just follow those money very directly to culprits.

> Iran has been funding terrorists for decades

Americans not understanding that half of the world says the same thing about them is the funniest shit ever... Propaganda is one hell of a drug

> Iran has been funding terrorists for decades

So is USA.

Replace Iran and IRGC with Israel and IDF and you have a winner - one that is actually in possession of undeclared nuclear arms and refuses to cooperate with the IAEA.

It's the US that has been funding Zionist terrorists for decades. It's wild how the generational divide between those who have been subjected to a lifetime of Zionist propaganda vs those of us who have had access to the truth is completely irreconcilable.

How does it matter that it's traceable? Everyone knows the ships going in and out thanks to AIS. Many of these ships are already either falsely flagged, sanctioned, or just Iranian flagged. And as far as paying in rubles or yuan, this tells me that Iran doesn't think the shipping companies are willing to pay in either or think there's a safe/effective way to accept payment through those currencies.

I'm curious what makes your think these ships are unknown. There are 2 blockades in place and suspicion of mines in the conventional shipping route through Omani controlled waters.

Because people are not going to pay this. The US will block or even seize the ships that pay Iran fees, whether in Bitcoin or other currencies. Iran isn't the only one who can close the strait.

...it's the same picture.

I think the question is about bitcoin mining power and now actual mines

I get where you are coming from, but that assumes .. the old world order. Not to search very far, China told its refineries only last week to ignore those particular sets of US sanctions ( and more importantly, we did not hear anything about it since Trump's visit to China ).

> Bitcoin has been the currency of crime

Like, say, cash, or check, or wires, or any other payment mechanism?

I think it's different because of the message it sends. Using bitcoin to do generic illegal things is an 'offense' to anyone that wants to stop illegal things. But there's already lots of targets to aim for if somebody wants to enforce the law, the method of payment is kindof a small deal. However, in this case using bitcoin is an offense to the other party in the war -- the US. I think the US has a more obvious target, and is more capable to do something about the "problem" than general law-loving-folk are about illegal activity. At the very least, I'd think it breaks the embargo? And the US really has (historically) cared about that.

That's significant messaging though -- we don't have anything to hide, down with the dollar.

I have read many comments that the regime wants to money launder the inflow. Bitcoin would be rather inconvenient for that.

I don’t know stuff but I feel I’ve learned that the Americans can make basic commerce unbelievably painful for whoever they choose through sanctions and disconnection from various financial systems.

I read that as coldfusion and I got some ptsd

No, that doesn't work with Bitcoin, it only works with a fork of Bitcoin that has less than 0.5% of the value of Bitcoin.

Yes, the war is about Israel extreme far right removing an obstacle for their crazy expansionist ideas and about keeping America hegemonic power in the region.

You don't need a truthful reason to have an excuse. Remember the whole Iraq WMD debacle?

Or, for that matter, Ukraine giving up its nuclear capabilities.

Exactly, even with conventional ammunitions they have shown a lot of restraint to avoid a nuclear response from Israel.

Israel doesn't have much in the way of a credible defense against Iranians advanced hypersonic missiles. Iran could create a mess in Israel by obliterating their de-salinization installations. If they were the blood thirsty fanatics propaganda paints them to be, that would be exactly what they would do, even knowing that in that case Israel wouldn't have much choice than making Tehran a giant glass parking lot.

Some idiot tore up the JCPOA, the only thing really preventing Iran from getting nukes. The lesson here is: get nukes

And what has this done to help Iran so far? Trump doesn't care about peoples opinions, US oil is making record profits thanks to the war so there wont be pushback from them, and Trump has 5 more months until midterms that is still plenty of time.

The main thing it resulted in is the Europe led coalition that aims to ensure the strait will never get blocked again, so Iran can never play this card again, that will lose them a lot of political power in the future since this card is now gone.

Were they theirs? Germany has nukes too but they're not theirs, they're from the US. Germany can't say "fuck off" to the ~50k Americans stationed in the country, leave NATO and get to keep the nukes.

They ate getting relatively little sympathy. Why? Because they are pissing everyone off who might have sympathized.

Seriously dumb. And now this mafia-esque blackmail?

> Iran is garnering incredible international sympathy and support.

From who?

My comment about Trump was meant to be sarcastic. Sorry, if that was not obvious...