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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 effect 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.
You are. You provoked a psycho (threatened his life, really) who in turn became hyper aggressive. The psycho is also responsible, but you absolutely carry part of the blame. This was a predictable result of your actions, and you did nothing to mitigate the harm you knew (or should have known) would occur.
Your position denies agency to the "psycho", and in doing so makes hostage-taking a perfectly reasonable strategy.
No. Both have agency. And the bystanders are correct to blame both the instigator and the culprit.
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