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Iran declares Strait of Hormuz completely open to commercial ships during Israel- Lebanon ceasefire, but US naval blockade stays in place
Still no significant movement on the maritime trackers. Ships are still grouped at the anchorages on both sides of the Strait. But Trump says Iran is working with the US to remove them. If Trump offers sanctions reliefs and ends the US blockade (which I doubt) in exchange for giving up their nuclear program and ceasing support for proxies against Israel, maybe this war could end quickly and we can return to pre-war status quo by the end of the year.
This is as close to a win-win situation as we can get. For Israel, there's a weaker defeated Iran in the region without means to develop nuclear weapons quickly, and for Iran, they get to survive and have access to sustenance funds. Trump can also claim some victory points for his base.
All of this is of course assuming Trump is being truthful and wants to end the war that he started. There's so much we don't understand or know behind the scenes.
Seems that Iran has closed the strait again, because the US blocked their ships.
To be honest, seems fair. A blockade is an act of war. A ceasefire where one side blocks economic activity while the other does not seems unbalanced. If Trump or Iran had merely blocked weapon systems from passing through the strait, that would be different.
No one ever said this before when anyone did this against ships flagged by or en route to neutral countries.
People are making up a bunch of new rules just to help Iran out.
Also fails to note that the blockade came about after Iran failed to open the strait as agreed as part of the ceasefire. It's conflict theory all the way down, and for many, siding with the IRGC is preferable to siding with Trump.
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'Again' implies that they had stopped closing the strait to regional traffic.
Aside from some high-visibility propoganda passages, the open commercial data of, say, Iraqi trade does not show any such unblocking.
Why NaN, I wasn't expecting a defense of the Trump's blockade from you of all people. Normally I'd have expected a pithy 'but Trump said the strait was open!' to deny the Iranian role in blocking the economic activity they weren't letting pass.
The strait wasn't closed until Iran had multiple leaders assassinated. Now we could say that the original blockade by the US is fine, but maintaining the blockade during a ceasefire while Iran says they'll lift their closure puts the onus on the US again.
You're right here but totally ignoring the point which is that after the war started iranian announcements have claimed the strait to be open countless times and it never has been. Since iran's initial attacks on shipping, the strait has not been open for even a minute.
So Iran's announcement of "reclosing" the strait seems especially empty given it wasn't open in the first place.
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Iran seems to be dealing with some amount of infighting or at least utter confusion and disorganization internally. There's a funny recording of an Indian ship which got approval from the iranian authorities to cross getting shot up by another iranian boat.
Looking the other events, two dozen ships approached the strait, almost certainly under guidance from iran, only to be turned back right away.
Given all the other nonsense that's been posted on twitter and ships not moving at all, there must have been some indication on the ground by iranian authorities that the ships should go. They they all got sent back right afterwards.
The important thing, of course, is to realize this is all on the US, and Trump lied when he said the strait was open.
Trump said that a zillion times and the ships didn't move an inch. I'm highly confident that the iranians said something to make them move.
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From what I get this basically seems to have been mutual bluff calling and Iran keeps winning it. The Trump admin tried to pull away from ending Israel's war in Lebanon during the ceasefire so Iran just kept the strait closed and Trump finally pulled Bibi in line. Now Trump is saying the blockade will continue so Iran is going "nope, strait still closed then till you lift it" and yep, it still seems to be mostly closed.
Maybe but Iran giving up their enriched uranium doesn't seem to be happening anytime soon. Even going out to the end of the year, the US obtaining it (any quantity) by any means is still <50%. Weirdly enough agree to surrender is higher at 70% by end of the year but that seems to be because it's agree to surrender (again, any amount), rather than actually surrendering it as it says with "An agreement by Iran to surrender its enriched uranium stockpile as a precondition of a more comprehensive peace process or deal will qualify, even if the agreement is not finalized or part of a formalized peace deal"" so it doesn't have to actually happen. So even something like "10% of uranium for sanctions relief" and then they never give the 10% could count.
Iran is hurt more by the strait being blockade than the U.S. is by it being closed. The question is can Trump home out politically.
Lol, you seem very optimistic (from US perspective) about the amount of hurt Iran can withstand.
Obviously the war so far has hurt Iran far more than the US. It does not matter jackshit. Those who support the the regime mostly believe in their religion, I imagine. The Ayatollah is certainly aware that a continuation of the war will likely cause the deaths of further family members of him.
As a model of Iran, consider Gaza. Both the IRGC and Hamas are militant Shiite extremists. Israel did a lot worse than some economic blockades after the Oct-7 atrocities. They killed Hamas members, turned most of the buildings in Gaza to rubble, starved the population, and so forth. At the moment Hamas seems quiet, but they have very much not gotten rid of it. Even if regime-supporting Iranians are less fatalistic than Hamas, I do not have a good reason to assume that they are less willing to take on hardships than Ukraine.
The idea that the IRGC -- which has just withstood a bombing to the tune of a few dozen billion dollars -- might buckle under a few months of economic hardship seems implausible. "Due to sanctions, I can't buy my kids a new Xbox" is not sufficient argument when you feel your way of life is on the line. Nor will the kids of the IRGC starve.
acoup on the topic. The gist is that locals care a lot more about a war which might destroy their polity than the people in far-away, much stronger nations.
If the median US voter believed that the survival of their way of life was at stake, I am sure that they could withstand the economic hardships of Hormuz being closed indefinitely. But they have enough of a grasp on reality to know that this is not the case. They were skeptical about the war form the beginning, and will not gladly suffer higher gas prices for some dubious geopolitical goal half a world away.
Hamas is Sunni
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lol? Really?
Maybe the IRGC are all true believers or maybe some of them are motivated by pecuniary concerns. You seem very certain of one. I’m less certain.
Nothing Iran has done thus far indicates that they care about making money compared to their Wadiya-like anti-Israel and anti-Western views.
Iran has been under attack or occupation since 1941. Their neighbouring countries of Iraq and Afghanistan were under occupation recently. Iran realizes that they need to inflict a price on countries that attack Iran as that is the best way to prevent future attacks. Iran does not want another war next year and another bombing campaign after that. Instead they are making fighting a war against Iran as costly as possible.
Only for very idiosyncratic definitions of "under attack" and "occupied".
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Epistemic status: Twitter, so buyer beware, but it seems that at least one IRGC radio broadcast has been referred to Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi as an "idiot" and defying his announcement that the strait is opened. I've seen reports that Iranian television (which I do not watch) has criticized him as well.
Aha, well, surely Abbas Araghchi is a moderate? Within the ranks of "Iranian regime officials," maybe, but he was a member of the IRGC during the Iran-Iraq War and participated in the revolution against the Shah. As far as I can tell he's not exactly a secular squish.
Obviously I am very open to the idea that there's some sort of good cop-bad cop routine being enacted here (to say nothing of Twitter just being wrong) but so far there seems to be some directional evidence that the economic sanctions are causing rifts within the ranks of the regime.
Again, I don't blame anyone for a "wait-and-see" approach, I think this is a relatively low-quality information environment so far. But if the Iranians are already fighting over whether or not the "close the strait, make the US feel the pain" strategy is worth keeping up, what does it say about the economic situation of Iran?
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How hurt is the Iranian leadership and army though? Being a dictatorship, Iran is a lot less vulnerable to the will of the people. So Trump is gambling that Americans will allow the war to continue despite an increased cost of living, while Iran only needs to worry if the people are dying in the streets.
Destroy all powerplants and they will be hurt.
And that's worth all the civilians who will die without access to electricity to you?
Yes of course. I don't wan't innocent Iranian civilians to die for no reason, but I care about them about as much as I care about ants.
The same way I and most normies don't care about millions of gazans dead either. I have far more important things to worry about, like video games and anime and convincing my waifu to let me buy more power tools and guns.
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Most of the constituent people in the dictatorship want relative stability and less threat of being spontaneously blown up so they can funnel money to their Coachella-bound children. Actual pitched war is very stressful
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Depends on if they can keep the paychecks going.
And if the paychecks can pay for anything
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How are we quantifying harm here? I haven't seen much reason to believe the blockade is that devastating to Iran. I'm also not sure that the US will even stick to a blockade for very long given that we lowered sanctions on Iranian oil because the admin couldn't handle prices going up even more than they already have.
We've also seen with Russia and Cuba that they let ships through because they're afraid of starting things. Will the US shoot down a Chinese ship if it won't shoot down Russian ones?
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Polymarket numbers aren't really indicative of anything until that 5 minutes before an official release where all the liquidity is suddenly gooooone. Even if you had solid fairs for this kinda stuff the insane level of adverse selection makes it impractical to trade. The Prediction market thing makes a lot more sense for regularly occurring phenomena like sports betting
More accurate the closer things get is true, but they still seem to be pretty accurate at least a few months yet. I don't know if there's been any analysis of longer term prediction accuracy, but short/mid term seems to be fine. The insider trading makes a lot of personal money, but I'm not sure it's ever been enough to meaningfully change the odds. Maybe something goes from 70% to 90% or whatever.
Like consider how even the 580 million in oil futures traded recently is apparently a small fraction of the trillion+ that gets traded each day. At least this is what I get from double checking with ChatGPT "Total notional trading volume is often in the hundreds of billions of dollars per day In active periods, it can exceed $1 trillion+ daily".
Maybe it's more accurate on those but again, still seems pretty accurate on other things as well. The basic idea at least that people are throwing up their money into a wisdom of the crowds and anyone who thinks they know better can go bet against it holds true does it not?
The Trump admin insider traders do love to wait for the last minute but unless they've got it institutionalized and are taking turns or something, and for some reason Iranian insiders wouldn't do their own insider trading, there should be people who try to come in even earlier and eventually cause a race to the bottom on how early you have to insider trade.
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What is becoming clear is that Aragchi is running his own op making calls to foreign officials while having no idea of what’s going on, Ghalibaf is trying to bridge him and the IRGC while keeping his head, and the actual commanders are deciding that the strait is closed and they determine who passes while feeding sometimes contradictory information to the IRIB and occasionally the other competing news agencies who each have their own contacts.
There is no central command and so there can be no negotiation. Nothing in the US position changed overnight but “Iran” decided the strait was open, then closed, then open. What actually happened is that the people negotiating weren’t the people with the guns, and while the IRGC’s aims aligned with a ceasefire since even at reduced firing rates munitions likely got tight around a month in, they’re happy to keep threatening ship traffic. It’s not like the foreign minister is going to stop them.
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The straight is closed again
This war isn't ending any time soon. This is going to drag on and on with some limited traffic through. Israel and the US aren't used to having constraints on their behaviour and Iran isn't going to accept the US not sticking to its deals.
Iran has been two weeks from a bomb for 30 years and this hasn't changed as the deep underground bunkers that were annihilated last year according to the Zionists aren't more annihilated now. American troops have been kicked out of Syria and Iraq. The fifth fleet can't sail to its main base in the region and the most loyal American proxy states like UAE and Bahrain are under huge financial strain.
Meanwhile, the straight of Hormuz has become Iran's Suez canal.
What can he claim more than being Netanyahu's lap dog?
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The Strait is not open
And the claims of enriched uranium about to be given up have been rebuffed too.
He is trying to repeat it so much that low information voters will end up thinking some progress was made even though in the end it wasn't. This will be similar to how Americans thought Iraq was related to 9/11. It will be interesting to see the polling on what people think happened to the uranium a year after the war compared to what actually happened.
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I gotta say, Im really fucking disappointed in Trump for this. Alienating his base and attacking his own supporters, and then starting a insane war for what seems like no particularly good reason. And to top it all off, the blockade? Why? Seriously?
Its one thing to not like the Iranian government. Fine. But going all out and attacking them in the way he has been doing is really goofy, and is making many on the right utterly regret their vote, and making blue tribe go "I told you so".
The only thing I can hope for is that the public has a short memory and that this all comes under control during midterms. But chances are looking quite slim that that happens....
The blockade is the first good idea that Trump has had the entire war. It accomplishes the same strategic objective as capturing Kharg Island, can be maintained indefinitely, and is low-risk. Makes you wonder what the hell they were thinking for the first six weeks.
"You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else."
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Comments like this confuse me.
It's not like Trump is some unknown man in a smoky room, he talks all the time. His administration has stated the reasons why. You can believe them or not but they are out there. You can even go beyond the public statements and make some inferences.
If you don't know what the stated reasons are.....try and address that first? It's not hard.
Furthermore it's pretty much impossible to know if the stated reasons are true/accurate or not without access to classified intelligence.
It's entirely possible that 100/100 presidents would have done this. It's entirely possible that 1/100 would have done this.
Anything is possible.
It is possible that aliens have landed in Greenland and any US president would therefore invade in 2026.
It is possible that an oracle has told Trump that America is doomed unless a majority of voters end up believing he is crazy.
It is possible that the Moon has turned into cheese since the last time we checked on it.
For a good Bayesian, anything is possible, but not everything is plausible. We have data how previous US administrations have dealt with Iran, and as you point out, we have Trump's public statements. Perhaps talking about regime change was a 3d chess move and he knew very well that killing the Ayatollah would not destabilize the regime, but had other reasons to do so.
Nor should we fetishize classified intelligence. Classified intelligence rarely changes the big strategic picture. Someone making an effort to follow a war from publicly available sources will generally get the gist of what is going on. Sure, once a century she might be completely blindsided by the US nuking Hiroshima, but most of the time the ministers and generals will have an information advantage of just a few weeks. Intelligence seems more useful in a tactical frame "we can kill the Ayatollah on that date" than on an strategic scale. If the US had military intelligence so great that they could avoid blunders, GWB would have invaded neither Iraq or Afghanistan.
Furthermore, your hypothetical big intelligence revelation would have to be something which involves Iran (so the Iranians likely know) and also known to the US (otherwise they could not have acted on it). It seems unlikely that it would be in the interest of neither party to tell the world about it. As a counterexample, when NATO intelligence had reason to believe that Putin would attack Ukraine, they made their concerns public.
Personally, I think that Trump's behavior can be adequately explained by his personality traits. We all remember the tweets how he predicted that Obama would attack Iran to boost his popularity. Of course, Obama did no such thing, but this is adequately explained by Obama in 2015 having at least 20 IQ points on Trump in 2026 (plus a staff of technocrats instead of brown-nosers) and thus knowing that would turn into a fiasco.
This ignores (at least in the case of Afghanistan) the necessity of invasion.
Which is likely what happened here. To me it seems likely if not obvious that some of the governmental claims are correct in a way that makes invasion necessary and appropriate.
Many people disagree. That's fine.
What bothers me is the posters who don't seem to have any idea what the claims and circumstances are, either out of genuine ignorance or for need of rhetorical flourish. This is the first time in years I've felt mainstream media reporting is more reliable and informative than this forum and it's gross.
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The blockade is cutting off an extremely important source of revenue and may be causing cracks within the Iranian government, with the foreign minister saying Iran's blockade is lifted and the IRGC issuing a contradictory statement a few hours later.
Whenever the Trump administration pulls stunts like this, it's often claimed to be incompetence of the worst sort, but in keeping with my general tendency to try to analyze actors as rational, let me steelman their actions: it seems possible to me that Iran is doing a good-cop bad-cop routine and/or decided to close the strait again once they realized the US intended to maintain the blockade.
Nevertheless the possibility that Iran's different factions are making different calls could indicate that the government is fracturing internally, which on balance is likely good news for the US (if that is what is happening). Either the IRGC purges the moderates, which would generate a more hardline Iran (bad news for the US) but would likely also weaken the IRGC's legitimacy and narrow the power base of the Iranian government (good news for the US) or the IRGC gets purged by moderates (great news for basically everyone) or Iran continues to issue contradictory statements and shoot at friendly (or at least neutral) shipping, which will begin to turn previously neutral third parties against Iran and make them look like the mad dogs the US government is portraying them as.
Obviously there are certain downsides to the blockade, and it's not over until it's over. But on balance I am much happier with the blockade than I am the proposed "bridge and power plant day," for humanitarian reasons if for nothing else.
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As someone who thinks the war is unwise and that the Trump administration seems incapable of competently executing its policies, the blockade makes sense. When Iran closes the Strait, it still lets it own oil out and thus has a strong financial lifeline. The US needs to prevent in order to create leverage, especially because a peace in which Iran tolls the Strait is clearly a massive loss for the US. Even if one cedes, or believes, as I do, that the war was a bad mistake by Trump, the blockade was the only move left.
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