No. of Recommendations: 10
Yes, it is. For one thing we used our carriers as offensive weapons, reducing the people and production and munitions the Iranians were freely giving out to the Houthis. That's all gone now.
No more sitting back, playing defense as the last hapless administration had us doing.
How is that all gone now? You think we're now not going to have a carrier group in that region?
Who claimed they did? No one. China used Iran to tie up western assets in the Gulf and to secure its energy flank. Both are donezo now.
Not at all true. Iran didn't provide any military security to China's energy flank, and there's no reason we would have any fewer western assets in the Gulf going forward than we have historically. Iran provided economic security to China's energy flank by being an enthusiastic supplier of crude oil to China - and that's not going to change one whit.
Their value to China is energy + the PITA factor in the Gulf. That's gone now.
Again, nothing's gone.
They are still immensely valuable to China for energy, because we haven't changed the regime - so Iran is still going to be a major supplier of energy to China. They'll be an even more secure supplier going forward, actually, because they're going to have to lean heavily on China for access to capital and materials to rebuild - which will force them to open up even more of their energy infrastructure to Chinese investments. Nothing has changed for China's energy security except to the better.
The PITA factor in the Gulf is also unchanged - if it doesn't get worse (though, again, I don't think it really benefited China as much as it caused them problems with their other Gulf energy suppliers). We're not going to stop paying attention to the Gulf, because (again) the single largest country in the Gulf is still going to be run by a hostile authoritarian dictatorship aligned against the West. It's still the largest country in the Gulf. It's still the fourth largest economy in the Gulf. Once the bombs start falling, they'll start rebuilding their military capacity. Just as they did after we ostensibly obliterated their nuclear program, and just as they did with their ballistic missile production after Israel bombed all of those facilities, all back in June - yet here we are, barely eight months later, and apparently Iran had rebuilt that quickly into being a major threat again.
So if we don't change the regime, they're not going to stop being a PITA. Since we're almost certainly not going to change the regime, we don't get any benefit from them not being a PITA going forward.
This funny. They're producing more coal than ever and armies/Navies don't run on solar panels.
Reduce, not eliminate. The smaller your economy's GDP dependency on oil, the less vulnerable you are to oil shocks. Same for coal. Self-sufficiency, and all that. So they've taken measures to increase the proportion of their economy's energy mix that comes from renewables (which aren't imported) so that they are more resilient against efforts to use energy as a weapon against them. Not immune - just more resilient. China's smart enough to realize that if you're a major energy importer, adding renewables to your energy mix is very beneficial to your energy security.
