Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
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Power plants are duel use, so my understanding is that attacking them is legitimate if it is connected to a proportionate military effect. Certainly it's been done in the past, by multiple parties.
For the record, I continue to stand by my stated preference that the Trump administration not carry out a wholesale energy disruption campaign.
Possibly, one could argue that literally any action no matter how severe is proportionate to the long term consequence of shutting down the Hormuz strait.
The consequences are likely incredibly bad for the entire world, and apocalyptic for poorer regions.
My understanding is that Iran has not closed the strait to all countries, though.
It seems to me that they practically have and if they haven't then the blockade is meaningless because oil is fungible.
Right, but they can perhaps impose some inconvenience/cost on most hostile states and avoid imposing that on less hostile states.
It's also an easy way to demonstrate capability - a shot across the bow.
There seems to have been no such attempt thus far and i genuinely struggle to understand how it would work.
It works like saying "we're going to sink any ship from X countries but Y countries are fine" and then trying to sink any ship from X countries that tries to transit the Strait and trying not to sink ships from Y countries.
As long as you can keep an eyeball on the Strait (it's 24 miles at its narrowest point) it should be doable. The best way to do this is probably from the air or underwater, but I am not certain to what degree Iran can accomplish that with their current tech in the face of US operations. However Maersk and the like probably aren't inclined to gamble.
That I understand that but such a blockade would be useless due to the fungibility of oil. That's why I said I failed to understand how it would work.
The blockade is painful because it restricts global supply not because it hinders specific shippers to get through or get to specific customers.
If you let the oil through and the oil is allowed to get to India/china/Pakistan or wherever, global prices will normalise and make the blockade meaningless.
The US gets zero oil from the middle east and they are still hurting currently. Europe gets like 15% of it's oil from the middle east, and they're still hurting.
Btw, I'm not the one downvoting you.
I think you're right about the big picture. I guess what I am suggesting is that the blockade is still annoying for the targeted countries/corporations because it means they will still have to rearrange their imports. And oil is carried by ships that take weeks to reach their destinations, so figuring that out is non-trivial. It probably imposes marginal costs on countries like the UK at the cost of, what, a strongly worded tweet? Maybe firing off a few missiles to show they meant business?
And as a demonstration of capability, that's not nothing. The message you're sending is "look how you're having to scramble now when things are merely annoying! All we did was send a tweet! Imagine what it will be if we actually completely closed the strait." It's trying to send a message that you could increase the pain a lot if you wanted.
Oh, thanks.
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People keep throwing the word "proportionate" around like it's something to be desired.
Was Nuking Japan twice and waging total war against them a "proportionate" response to loosing a few boats and a few thousand people at Pearl Harbor? No of course it wasn't, "proportionality" was never the intent to begin with.
The vast majority of people have a completely wrong conception of what "proportionality" means in international law. The most common belief, which is completely wrong, is that one counts up the amount of damage that Party A did to Party B and say that the amount of damage that Party B then does to Party A must be in some way proportionate.
The part of international law that contains the thing generally referred to as "proportionality" is International Humanitarian Law. You can already get a sense that it has something to do with pain to civilians, who are not, in a sense, "part of the conflict". Indeed, the main treaty provision that is pointed to for this principle is Article 51(5)(b) of Additional Protocol I of the Geneva Convention. It prohibits attacks which:
That is, it acknowledges that there will be military objectives, and that pursuing those military objectives may cause damage to civilians. In some sense, military commanders are supposed to weigh those things. This is not a trivial task, and there aren't clear, objective ways to compare those things, either. But the entire consideration is different in character than how it is considered by most people.
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My understanding is that proportionality has a specific meaning in international law as pertains to armed conflict, although I can't claim to always use that correctly.
It's probably worth noting in your example that Japan actually did quite a lot more than just bomb Pearl Harbor!
Anyway, I don't object to moving vertically up the escalation ladder. I do object to using military force against civilians in a way that is not directly connected to military objectives. For instance, if we are at war with Iran, and we intentionally airstrike a public school and hit civilians, the degree to which that airstrike will be justified under the laws of armed conflict will depend on the nexus to a military objective. If we did it for no reason, then it would be disproportionate. If we did it to kill a single low-ranking Iranian soldier, it would likely still be disproportionate. If we did it to strike a surface-to-air system that was colocated with the school, it would be much more defensible (and also the Iranians might be themselves guilty of a war crime).
My objection to a concentrated campaign against the Iranian power grid is not a principled objection to hitting power facilities, but rather that I think that such a campaign would not degrade the Iranian military forces more efficiently than allocating those weapons elsewhere would. To the extent that hitting Iranian power facilities would degrade the operations of their military forces in ways that could not be more easily achieved by other military means, I have no particular objections. But most high-end weapons systems are going to have generators as either a primary (if mobile) or secondary (if fixed) power source. Thus, as a general rule, I think that a concentrated air campaign against weapons systems and military facilities themselves is a more efficient allocation of resources than hitting centralized power sources.
There is a certain logic to striking purely civilian facilities in Iran because Iran has not respected the civilian-military distinction themselves, and according to old custom, the laws of the civilized do not apply to barbarians (defect against defectors). But I do not think the United States needs to do this to accomplish its goals in the region, and it would undermine our pretensions to moral conduct in war and give future opponents precedential cover to make such attacks against us.
What does it have to do with "proportion"? Hitting a public school with no military purpose behind it is wrong. This is because of how our society and our morals work, not because Iranians didn't hit exactly the same school before. Even if they did, it still would be wrong. If Iranians killed 100 random US civilians, would "proportionate" answer be killing random 100 Iranians civilians? I don't think a lot of people in the US would endorse such notion of "proportionality", neither should they.
If you're saying we should not inflict unnecessary civilian casualties, and if there is a collateral damage, there must be a very good justification of why that was unavoidable - I totally agree. But "proportionate" doesn't sound like a very good term to use in such case.
As for hitting power facilities, that depends on the goals of the campaign. If the goal is to degrade Iran's capacity of making trouble, then destroying its energy system is a reasonable step towards this goal. It's hard to manufacture advanced weaponry - or in fact any weaponry beyond light arms - without a functioning power grid. If, however, the goal is to cause the regime change, then it may be less effective, since people would be disorganized and depressed by the lack of basic necessities, and may not be able to resist the regime troops who probably have generators and other provisions to survive independently. Maybe also specific power plants are important for specific weapons factories or communication facilities and knocking them out will disable some important pieces. That's a tactical question.
Yes, that's what I am saying. Feel free to use a different word - I use it because, as I explained earlier, it's a term of art.
Yes, I agree with this. But (if my priors are correct) the decision to hit power plants instead of weapons factories or communications facilities would be a curious one. I would guess that it would likely be easier to hit Iran's weapons factories and military communications nodes than to take out their power network.
I'm not sure that is inherently the case, of course. If Iran decentralized its arms production facilities and situated them in civilian neighborhoods and dwellings, for instance, bombing power plants would likely be both more efficient and more humane. So I agree with you that the facts of the case really matter, there's not some blanket rule saying you can't hit power plants.
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