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Of all the stupid things Iran has done, this is perhaps the stupidest.
I've heard of no end of third worldists talking out of their asses, gloating about a petroyuan and the imminent fall of American hegemony. To those people, I say: how the hell can a sea mine collect a toll? At least drones and ballistic missiles can be aimed. How does this help the Iranians, who themselves use the strait to commerce their own oil? Any hope of Chinese or European arbitration in the dispute is gone now.
Stupid with respect to what? Of all the criticisms against American hegemony I've seen (and I'm not a big fan of it either), I've 'never' heard the statement you just made from "people talking out of their asses." At any rate, it wasn't Iran that was calling for a ceasefire most recently, it was the US. The media blackout in both countries is in effective and all sides are claiming everything is going well. But from the glimpses of Ritter, Mearsheminer, Wilkerson, Baud, Marandi, MacGregor, Diesen, etc. (people with fairly close connections to things on the ground) it's Israel who's the one really getting it's ass kicked and the US making itself out to be more the fool.
Nothing will create a global multilateral coalition faster than Iran indiscriminately making the strait of Hormuz impassible. You might as well declare war on the entirety of the modern economy. No, the world won't go along with a global depression just to spite the Americans and Israelis. Not even China. Not even Russia. Iran is diplomatically isolated in formal and informal terms and no one is joining them in their last, suicidal gambit. And if all of those intellectuals you've linked don't recognize the fact they're stupid - and wrong.
You would think. But they did, and the global response was "fuck you, US, for doing this". Then Europe backed off a little and sent a strongly worded statement asking the strait to be reopened and nothing more.
Why would you think that, and why should the global response be anything else? I get the "American hyper-agency syndrome" argument when it comes to the war in Ukraine, but it wears a little thin when we're talking about easily predictable retaliation in a war you started.
I shoot at you. In retaliation, you throw a grenade into a crowd. I knew you had the grenade... who is responsible for the grenade damage?
In other words, yes, this is still American hyper-agency syndrome.
If you shoot at me from far outside my reach, and the only people I can reach to hit back are some of your friends who happen to be very economically important to you, then yeah, you're the one responsible for your friends getting hit. Your crying about them being attacked is roughly equivalent to hypothetical Iranian crying that you parked your forces out of range, or are using stealth tech.
It is worth pointing out that in case the "friends" are also holding the gun, helping you reload the gun and hosting a bunch of your employees who help aim and fire the gun.
No, they were not. That's kinda the point; Iran fired at those who were and those who were not.
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