Of course. That's why U.S. oil production kept climbing throughout the entirety of the Obama Administration (going from five million bpd in early 2009 to nine million bpd by early 2017), and through the Biden Administration as well (eleven million bpd in early 2021 up to thirteen million bpd by 2025). Democratic politics on that issue hamstrung them and gave them a "worst of both worlds" problem. The environmental base wanted oil production to fall, but the bulk of the party knew that increasing production was "good strategery" from a security and economic perspective. So both Administrations ended up with a policy that pleased no one - adopting rules that mostly allowed "drill baby drill" to continue with minimal interference, while trying to publicly pretend that they were doing stuff to stop the increase in extraction. So the Greens were pissed off because we kept increasing drilling, but they got no credit for increasing energy security (and caught a ton of flack from their opponents) because they had to publicly act like it wasn't happening.

No. Energy production increased in spite of Barack Obama, as he and later Joe Biden would take action to restrict access to public lands and threw up all sorts of roadblocks. Remember the Keystone Pipeline? Fracking took off on private land.

We were talking about the uselessness of our Iranian venture in doing anything material to reduce China's dominance, and indeed how it looks like we're having the actual opposite outcome. Right now, all signs point to the Iranian regime continuing on after the war - still producing as much energy for China as before, but even more reliant on them than previously.

China has been the lead partner for years in Iran, so I'm not sure what point you're attempting to make here. And they've just watched their client get blown to smithereens and haven't done anything to stop it. Other than issue a strongly worded statement from a minor official.

The West will still have to maintain roughly the same level of military assets - and focus - on the region because Iran will still be one of the largest countries in the Gulf by every dimension and will still be hostile to us. Etc.

We will not need the same resource profile in the Gulf. We have degraded the Iranians to a point where the IDF can handle with augmentation from the US.

As 1pg (I think?) has pointed out several times, China has been adroit in not interrupting the U.S. while we're making a mistake. We're wasting tens of billions of dollars in military equipment just to kill the Iranian leadership without taking any concrete steps to replace them with anyone that wouldn't be an ally of China (unless you consider Trump's insistence on social media that he be consulted in the next leader's selection as "concrete steps").

Much like with Venezuela, you've issued a series of assumptions absent context and visibility and are assuming them to be fact. That's your prerogative.

You don't know what we're doing or not doing with respect to replacing anyone. You don't know what the aims of the Kurdish invasion force is.