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Notes -
On the failed peace negotiations and the US blockade of Iranian oil
This started out as a reply to last week's CW post about the Islamabad negotiations having failed, but then I got into the blockade and decided to drag this to the new CW threat instead.
When Trump chickened out of becoming one of the top four genociders of all time by ending Iranian civilization, he called the Iranian ten point plan a "workable basis on which to negotiate". I was a bit surprised by that (call me naive for being surprised by anything out of of the White House), given that this plan was basically the wish-list of Iran,
but then again I am not a "stable genius" master negotiator.Honestly, I thought this was the best outcome the world was going to get. The world gets their dirty energy fix. Iran gets on the order of a dollar a barrel in transit fees, whatever. Perhaps Iran and Israel nuke each other in the next decade, but at this point I can not really bring myself to care -- religious crazies will do as religious crazies do, and the best thing the civilized world can do is to stay the hell out of it.
Presumably, at some point, someone in the White House thought to actually read the ten point proposal, and noticed that it would place Iran in a strictly better strategic position than before the start of Trump's special military operation. I am kind of amazed that they took 21 hours to realize that they had no overlap. I think Vance rejected anything which was not the miracle victory Trump would need not to get slaughtered in the mid-terms, and Iran was unlikely to budge on key issues such as the control of the strait or their nuclear program, whose strategic importance Israel and the US had just made blatantly obvious.
People have been pointing out that the Trump timeline was obviously never meant for production use for a decade, but lately things have been going to shit at an accelerated pace.
Now Trump has apparently announced that the US is going to block the strait of Hormuz. I wonder who could have given them that idea, and expect Trump to announce that the US will start enriching uranium next week and the US will start funding Shia proxies in May.
More seriously, a blockade is an act of war. Arguably, it is not only an act of war against the country being blockaded, but also against any neutral country who wants to peacefully trade with the blockaded country.
Not all blockades are created equally. When Kennedy blocked the peaceful trade of medium-range ballistic missiles between the USSR and Cuba, he could point out that actually this was a rather narrow blockade aimed to interdict a specific strategic weapon.
Iran's blockade is much harder to justify. Saudi oil being sold to Europe or Asia is not of direct military importance for any conflict Iran is currently fighting, their blockade is a weapon aimed at global trade itself. This makes them a rogue state and gives any country which trades oil with the gulf states a legitimate casus belli against Iran: simply send a single tanker under your flag through the strait claiming innocent passage. Either Iran sinks it, in which case you have war, or it does not, in which case you have no blockade.
The problem is that Iran does not exactly care, which is sound strategy given their situation. Blocking the strait is their one way to squeeze the balls of the world economy to exert pressure on the US, of course they are doing it.
Some strategists might notice that the United States find themselves in a slightly different situation than Iran. So far, they have not been considered a rogue nation willing to wreck the global economy to exert pressure on their opponents.
A US blockade of oil tankers bound for Iran would be as little justified as the Iranian blockade, but like the Iranian regime, they would probably get away with it. China is sadly not in the position to champion the free, peaceful trade between nations by sinking a few US aircraft carriers blockading Iran. Everyone can see that trying to end Iran's capability to block Hormuz will be a military mistake, trying to attack the US over their blockade will end just as badly.
Of course, this strategy will also not work very well for the US.
The Iranian blockade works because the median US voter reasonably cares more about the prices of gas than the regime in Tehran. Oil is the lifeblood of the economy, even a modest disruption will wreck the economy to a far greater degree than what a US presidency can survive.
The US blockade will not work because the Iranian regime cares a lot more about who rules in Tehran than their quarterly growth numbers. The US and Israel just spent tens of billions in bombing the shit out of Iran, with the net result of hardening their will to resist (if only someone had warned us!).
The idea that economic constraints might achieve what getting bombed did not seems absurd. Put bluntly, the regime in Tehran can survive a year with Hormuz being closed (especially as there are countries in whose strategic interest it will be to support them, even if they can't buy their oil, in the same manner in which NATO countries support Ukraine). The one on DC can not.
A chess grandmaster often has different objectives he achieves with a single move. Likewise, Trump has an uncanny ability to make strategic blunders which hurt American interests in a lot of different ways.
In the grand scheme of things, Iran does not matter. However, the US is just establishing that they consider broad trade blockades of enemies a legitimate strategy. This seems foolish not just in principle but because there is a country which matters which might be vulnerable to blockades, which is Taiwan.
(So far, China has been the adult in the room, refraining from any special military operation adventures. The CCP might be evil and bend on world domination, but at least they seem competent. Xi Jinping seems to have object permanence and an inclination to stay out of social media, both qualities which I find aesthetically pleasing in world leaders, and as far as avoiding a paperclip maximizer goes, I trust the CCP more than I would trust Altman, Zuckerberg and Musk. Still, looking at this timeline, it seems sadly possible that Xi Jinping might decide to walk in the footsteps of other elderly world leaders and decide to fuck up the world a bit before he exits the stage.)
Purely on capabilities, it does not matter if there is a precedent for a blockade of Taiwan or not. But narratives matter, especially when allies are concerned. Before, China blockading trade to Taiwan would have been an outrage. Now, they can simply point out that just as the US prohibits Chinese oil tanker from approaching Iranian ports on pain of war, China is blockading western container ships approaching Taiwan.
Where in his tweet dies he call for mass murder with intent to eliminate Iranian as an ethnic group? He is clearly using "civilization" as a synonym for the Islamic Republic regime. A clear stretch of the term, but less of a stretch than calling a total regime change, a genocide, as you are, and many in the mass media are implying.
The word “civilization” is never used to refer to just the political faction currently in power. If you google “Chinese civilization”, you will not find anyone using this term as a stand-in for Xi’s current regime. So this would be a brand new use of the term. The content of the tweet also goes against your interpretation as Trump claims there already has been total regime change:
So he can’t just be referring to the regime, as there has been “complete and total regime change”.
Thanks for digging up the actual tweet, I think it speaks for itself. Also, if he meant the Ayatollah regime with civilization, he would not express regret but glee at their removal.
@Poug: I am not claiming that he threatened to murder every last ethnic Iranian. (Doing that with Iran would surpass all historical genocides in scale, I think.) However, the crime of genocide does not require that you kill everyone.
The act of genocide is the intentional destruction of an ethnic group as a distinct culture -- which is damn close in concept space to 'destruction of a civilization'. Outright murder is a typical strategy, but not the only one. Mass sterilization or the forcible transfer of children to other ethnic groups are likewise ways to destroy a group.
However, context matters, and the context does not do Trump any favors here. The 'softer' variants like cultural genocide generally do not work overnight. Nobody could mistake Trump's threat as "we will occupy Iran, outlaw Shia Islam and the speaking of Farsi, force everyone to speak English and eat at McDonald's to destroy any distinction of the Iranian people and turn them into generic Americans" -- not that that would have been acceptable.
The only way Trump could possibly destroy the Iranian civilization overnight would have been to nuke their cities, killing most of their urban population and industrial base, so that the survivors would find themselves in a mixture of Fallout and rural Afghanistan, neither of which qualify as civilization. This would still dwarf the Shoa and the Holodomor in total deaths, even if the Nazis were more meticulous about murdering every last one of their victims.
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