No. of Recommendations: 10
So in other words they'd rather pretend the Iranians weren't developing a nuclear weapon, would rather look the other way at their ballistic missile programs, and just pray the Mullahs wouldn't wake up one day and hold their oil supply hostage.
No. They'd rather engage in the sort of measures that might actually restrain those activities, rather than launching a shooting war. Just because the status quo ante was bad doesn't make Trump's response to that prior condition smart, or effective. And it doesn't mean that other countries (and past Presidents) who were smart enough to realize that invading Iran isn't going to make things better were "pretending that Iran wasn't developing a nuclear weapon," rather than (correctly) deciding that invading Iran posed a real risk of imposing massive costs.
Well right now they're not importing or exporting much of anything. That's the problem with their talk about locking the strait up. That was always their Nuclear Option. Problem is, once you deploy your nuke you have nothing left (just like the mullahs right now). We flipped the script on them by saying "If the world can't have stuff through the straits, then neither can you".
I think that's inaccurate. The difference between the Strait and a Nuke is that you can re-open the Strait. So it still gives you leverage, even though you've closed it - because you still have something your opponent wants. If you drop a nuke on them, you can't "undrop" the nuke and bring the target back unharmed. You no longer have any leverage. But if you've closed the strait, that closure is ongoing, so they have the ability to re-open it.
Imposing our own blockade isn't flipping the script on them - we still suffer all the damage that we were suffering before, with physical crude prices for immediate delivery hitting $140-150 per barrel and wildly diverging from futures prices. Plus the fertilizer and natgas and other products that Iran isn't really in the business of exporting, but which are held up. It certainly puts Iran in a worse posture than if the strait were closed to everyone but them, of course. Again, not sure that's going to change the dynamic all that much. But then again, Trump has tweeted that Iran has informed him that they're in a state of collapse...so maybe it's working? Trump wouldn't just say something like that if the Iranians hadn't actually taken the trouble to inform him that they were in a state of collapse, after all.
