Dean
Flairless
Variously accused of being a hilarious insufferable reactionary post-modernist fascist neo-conservative neo-liberal conservative classical liberal critical theorist Nazi Zionist imperialist hypernationalist warmongering isolationist Jewish-Polish-Slavic-Anglo race-traitor masculine-feminine bitch-man idiosyncratic party-line Fox News boomer. No one yet has guessed a scholar, or multiple people. Add to our list of pejoratives today!
User ID: 430
Dean
Flairless
18hr ago
It comes with a various distinctions, some by the nature of the initial seizure, some by the nature of the redevelopment package that we do not know, and then some by virtue of who is paying the cost of the money.
For example- frozen funds already belonged to someone's ledger when they were frozen, and depending on the nature of a ledger that person may be expecting them back. If, say, the funds frozen were part of an IRGC slush account, then there's a non-trivial chance that the IRGC will expect to get it back, and pull strings accordingly in Iran. While the IRGC certainly has a large hand in the civilian economy, it is not what is generally considered a healthy hand, and so this would be part of a reconstruction fund less likely to be for reconstruction and more for economically dead investments (be they arms or just patronage-graft).
Second, but also well beyond the ability of current facts to be clear on, the construct of a 'redevelopment fund' can imply restrictions on how certain money is used. An example of the concept here is what the US did with Venezuela oil proceeds after this January's intervention. The money went into bank accounts for use by the Venezuelan government, but only for uses approved by the US government, which in turn was very inclined to let Venezuelan oil money buy things from the US, but less inclined to approve purchases of weapons from Iran. While it is true that money is fungible, Iran's economy isn't in a state where $300 billion is behind the cushion to be swapped in, so a $300 billion fund is not the same as freeing up $300 billion in the rest of the budget, especially if/when the rest of the budget serves strategic goals like economic autarky such that no matter what is bought with the fund, you'd still have a political requirement to maintain domestic production anyway.
Third, there are currency strength (and convertibility) implications depending on whose money is being involved, though this gets back into the nature of a fund (and the frozen assets). While the frozen assets themselves aren't liable to be in the nigh-useless Iranian rials, the point here is that whatever they are stored in would be compared against the US dollar. The US dollar is and remains the worlds reserve currency, and while Iran really wishes it were not so Iran would also, all other things being equal, prefer something like the US dollar to, say, reclaimed Russian rubles, which would be purchasing only from the relatively inflationary Russian market.
Fourth, there is a considerable difference to the countries releasing frozen assets to releasing assets rather than a direct transfer- namely, how it works from their treasury balance and budget purpose. Generally, frozen assets are not held by the holding state in a way that provides the same monetary utility as money in an expenditure account. This is why the Europeans were garnering attention with the proposed war loan to Ukraine backed by Russian frozen assets- that was an atypical use, because frozen assets are frozen to the state holding them too. But because this isn't on the balance sheet, there's no particular expenditure with releasing the assets either. Congress doesn't need to write an authorization of $300 billion against the US treasury, and the US government doesn't need to assume $300 billion in new debt, that would be incurred if it were a direct transfer.
There are more that could be made, but then again I suppose someone could also insist they're distinctions without a difference / cope / etc. To me, the more relevant part of the rumored reparations / redevelopment fund is that the rumor was based on an aspiration, not a confirmation, and that aspiration in turn was deliberately using language that would resonate with the Iranian hardliner claims that war termination would require reparations as well as sanctions relief. The Iranians have held these to be distinct things, even if someone in the western audience doesn't view it as important, and so the potential conflation in the form of a redevelopment fund could be a way of trying to frame / sell the deal to the Iranian domestic (hardline) audience.
Which, in turn, begs the question as to why, since a glorious-victory-on-all-fronts deal wouldn't need to conflate categorically distinct things. To me that suggests- though hardly proves- there are policy concessions that the Iranian 'leakers' suspect the hardliners will find far less palatable, and this messaging piece is trying to get ahead of that (among other things).
Most things worth targeting that were reportedly hit, as in that the Iranians made pubic boasts about, were more or less static targets. There are only so many ammo depots, supply sheds, airfield buildings, and so on. And given that the American decision to go to war was reportedly done a couple of months before the war, most things were going to be where not only where they had been a few months prior, but years or decades prior. Iran has presumably been working it's intelligence assets for as long, as opposed to starting from scratch.
There is also a point that one of the major changes of the last 25 years in the world is the rise of high-fidelity commercial satellite imagery. It's not exactly a great power capacity today, and while I doubt anyone will know relative amounts, there was at least media coverage of allegations of Chinese commercial imagery going to Iran.
One higher-profile Iranian success was that doesn't seem to have necessarily been supported by Russian intel, for example, was the US AWACs destroyed on the ground by a combined UAV and missile attack. That was a very expensive aircraft and is legitimately a strategic win... but using UAVs is a poor weapon choice for catching one on the ground given the time-distance delays. Holding back on firing the ballistic missiles to attack the target until the UAVs arrive is a good indicator that the Iranians didn't know the target was on the ground, because that would have been the exact sort of target to justify ballistic missiles alone for speed's sake.
Just to be clear, I'm not saying nothing relevant came from Russia. It's just that you may have a stronger opinion of the amount / value / impact than has so far been may be warranted, as opposed to Russian intelligence support serving a supporting / confirming sort of what the Iranians already had. This wouldn't even be an unreasonable conclusion to take from publicly available information. There are a lot of interests to a lot of players to play up the impact of Russian assistance- and not just for the Russians or even Iranians- as part of the information environment conflict.
Dean
Flairless
1d ago
Which, interestingly, was probably one of the under-recognized dynamics of Iran that the war changed. Iran was in the middle of a multi-decade effort to develop power projection capabilities, from blue water naval elements to drone carrier concepts. It sank, and the US sank it so quickly I've gotten the sense people felt it didn't matter, but there's a difference between nascant and insignificant.
Iran hadn't gotten any sort of reputation as a naval power because there wasn't exactly a 'opportunity' to test the emerging capability, but it was a capability that was progressing and could have, hypothetically, had things like an Iranian naval detachment inconveniently escorting Iranian tankers to China during a US-Taiwan scenario and any attempted US blockade. Among other more direct things in regional proxy or not-so-proxy conflicts with Israel.
If Iran does revert back to a North Korea model of minimal power projection capability for the next decade or three, still just limited to drones or missiles from its own territory or proxies, that would be a non-trivial divergence to what Iran was trying to move towards. It's not the sort of difference most people would notice / acknowledge / credit, because there's no real weight to an alternative not seen, but such is the nature of growth trajectories denied.
Dean
Flairless
1d ago
Nightmare? Aren't you editorializing a little bit? It's usually bad epistemology to cite your own spin as evidence.
It's a common pejorative for some of the more hyperbolic war coverage of the anti-US sort. Nightmare for oil markets, nightmare for Trump's election prospects, etc. It's a verbal tic of a particular sort of position, sort of like people who went straight to 'quagmire' to describe the conflict, or 'invasion' to describe the air raid campaign.
Basically the Iran conflict counterpart to the 'Put is DONE' meme variants in the Ukraine war, and about as well thought out.
For those interested, I'd recommend the William Spaniel (the Lines of Map guy) video posted today reviewing what we know, don't, and some other context.
One of the points he's made is that a lot of the current reporting of the moment is basically circular reporting of of some Iranian... 'claims' is too strong, since some aren't even claims of what is in the deal, but more like aspirations for future negotiation that implicitly confirm they aren't in the deal. He made a plausible case that some of the Iranian early release is to shape the information environment, though whether it's intended for the international environment (to frame things as a victory without caveat) or an internal audience (trying to sell the deal to hardliners) isn't something he takes a position on.
As for the rising critiques that the end-of-the-war deal is just Obama's deal but worse, I will just note that no one has ever presented evidence claiming that Obama's deal entailed significant destruction of the Iranian defense-industrial base.
Dean
Flairless
1d ago
'Helped' is a bit of a catch-all. Most US and Gulf military assets hit were on bases that have been in the region for decades.
Dean
Flairless
5d ago
Does anyone else feel like we're heading for a good old-fashioned, 2008-tier, financial crash? I recall people bringing up the possibility ever since Covid bucks started rolling out, but even though we were due for one, and even though the money printer was going brrrrr, the crash has so far failed to materialize.
Of that nature? Not really, since the financial crisis was mechanically distinct. A big economic doldrums? Sure, but then I would have thought most people had that priced in even before the Trump tariffs last year, let alone the Strait of Hormuz closure this year. What did people think the western demographic trends implied for global economics?
We're in the start of the broader first world demographic retirement wave, where many Western (and 'western' Asian) countries aren't just older on average, but the generation than makes it older is starting to retire and leave the work force. For example, here was the demographic pyramid of Germany in 2023.. The retirement age in Germany is 67. That disproportionately wide bar that was 60-64 three years ago is now 63-67 now. They are starting to transition out of the work force, taking their accumulated expertise and economic inputs with them and turning into retirees instead who draw more from the public purse. That next ten years will be even larger cohorts of the demographic-industrial base. Germany is not unique.
The implications of demographic age-out have never been optimistic. Fewer workers contributing to taxable economic growth, higher expenditures for the welfare state dominating public spending that could otherwise go to economic investments, loss a large amounts of highly-trained and experienced knowledge to be replaced by less experienced younger demographics who have often suffered from youth unemployment dynamics due to worker protections benefiting the now-retiring or policies to import specialists from abroad. I wouldn't go so far to say inherently recessionary, but if you remove part of the foundations of your economic growth, you are going to have less economic growth, which was the longer-term impact of the great recession in many places.
And this was before various macroeconomic disruptions and trade flow changes that have ended the neoliberal consensus. COVID 19 alone was enough that many countries were already relooking supply chains that had prioritized cost-efficiency over reliability. Well, that change was and is going to lead to slower economic growth. The Trump tariffs were part of an effort to fundamentally reshape the global economic system by reducing the role of the US as consumer of last resort for other country's exports, and it is still shaking out as the European Union gears up for a trade war with China as it doesn't want to absorb all the redirected Chinese exports that the US used to import. The US-Iran War has led to the eyebrow-raising twin blockades of the US blocking Iranian exports that mostly went to China, and Iran blockading everything else which mostly goes to also China (and also other asian countries). The consequence is global energy prices raising for everyone, but not raising the same for everyone, with the biggest cost-increases headed for the energy-import-dependent manufacturing-export countries, epecially when national stockpiles currently being released dry up.
And even this is before other, easily foreseeable, major macro-economic disruptions that could happen in the future. The Russia-Ukraine War has progressed beyond pushing Russian oil onto the black market as expanding Ukrainian long-range strike capabilities decrease what Russia can push onto the sea at all. A PRC invasion of Taiwan is liable to destroy the high-end chip economy for a decade, and that's before the PRC and US target eachother. The European Union could have significant structural crisis in the next few years if Euroskeptic parties on the rise in France and Germany take over in one or both. Expanded naval trade piracy / 'taxation' at various Eurasian maritime chokepoints, mass migration destabilizations... heck, even (or especially) AI, which may not be a net-negative, is going to lead a lot of economic disruption and/or ruin in its wake.
The global economy was already going to have to undergo uncomfortable economic dislocations of where growth occurred just from demographic age-out. It just so happened to be occuring concurrently with the transition away from the post-cold-war global neoliberal order, which prioritized cost-minimization over other considerations. The de-prioritization of cost-minimization was always going to further complicate global finances. There just so happen to be another half dozen economic asteroid events approaching as well, for various reasons.
The issue in China is that they aren't committing to serving with maximum efficiency. They've functionally assumed a family support network that increasingly no longer exists. The lack of not just grandchildren, but nieces and nephews, has reduced the de-facto healthcare for the elderly that previously stayed off the public ledger.
Well, those expenses don't go away just because the nieces and nephews did, and population support ratio is going to feel- and cause- a lot of political heart burn and elderly care scandals. And if there's one thing the CCP isn't particularly known for, it's maximum efficiency in reactive policies to public scandals. Political will makes it easier for spigot spending, which is rarely as efficient as planed spending from the start.
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