No. of Recommendations: 13
Whoa. So Drill, baby, Drill *is* a good strategery. Who knew.
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.
But that's rather beside the point. 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 gets to step in front of Russia as their main patron, gets to become their lifeline for economic development, and gets to have even more of an investment stake in the country - because they're still going to be driven by hostility to the West. Their ability to project traditional security power in the region will be diminished in the short term by our destruction of their military equipment, but that hurts Russia and not China - because China doesn't have any security interests in the Black Sea or Eastern Med, and doesn't much care about conventional Western military power projection there. 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.
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").
