No. of Recommendations: 18
What's the point of sanctions? To enable the world's #2 economy to be able to buy cheap oil?
No - the point of sanctions is to punish the sanctioned country. For example, we imposed sanctions on Venezuela because the regime suppress democracy and refused to honor elections, was grossly corrupt, and completely ignored the rule of law. It's not based on the price of oil. We can decide that we no longer care about any of those things (which are still largely the same), of course. But that's just us giving up on what we wanted to achieve with the sanctions, not some kind of brilliant strategic maneuver.
Okay. Guess the world loves the status quo.
It's not a question of "loves" or not. Oil is a globally traded fungible commodity, for the most part. It's not going to "shift to the U.S." unless underlying and long-term market fundamentals cause that to happen. The status quo will remain unless those underlying market and geopolitical economic forces change. Fracking caused global energy markets to have a material long-term shift towards the U.S. - Trump's military excursion will not.
Isn't that more true of us than Xi?
No
Why not? We're the one that brought our equipment into the fight, and Iran was able to get around it in attacking both our Gulf allies and our own military installations. Meanwhile, Iran was mostly doing that with home-built military stuff. They're not using Xi's best and shiniest new hardware, since China largely hasn't been supplying Iran with completed military equipment over the last many years. Materials, parts and financial support to be sure - but not actual systems.
Okay, sure.
Yes, sure. Iran's government survived a full attack by the U.S. They were able to leverage their geographic advantage over the strait to prevent the U.S. from reopening it. They've been able to strike our military bases and the infrastructure of our allies, despite the deployment of defensive anti-projectile systems. Their ability to do that, and our inability to stop them, has allowed them to drive the U.S. to a ceasefire/negotiating posture rather than just forcing them with military strikes to do what we want. It's been almost two months, and we haven't yet been able to force them to do any of the things we want them to do: give up their nukes forever, give up their support for terror proxies forever, no longer have ballistic missiles, etc. All while damaging all of our allies across the global with high energy prices brought on by our decision to launch this war.
Yeah - China's got to be pretty delighted by how this has played out, no matter what the endgame ends up being in Iran.
