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Notes -
Iran war picks up again
The US said it launched a fresh wave of strikes on over 100 targets in Iran after Tehran struck a ship passing through the Strait of Hormuz, one month after the MOU to end the conflict.
Iran said it closed the waterway until further notice and warned of a severe response to US aggression. And within hours of the US strikes, Iran said they had hit a US base in Jordan, while the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait and Bahrain intercepted missiles and drones from Iran.
And Israel keeps striking southern Lebanon, despite the MOU.
Setting aside the many rounds of
griftstalks, there's something to be said about great power adjacent warfare in 2026. Like Afghanistan and Ukraine, Iran is looking like this distinctive category of forever conflicts. Protracted, managed stalemates where neither side is willing to commit the resources and manpower towards a decisive victory, yet neither is prepared to accept political humiliation by surrendering. In Ukraine, Russia lacks the conventional strength for total conquest, while the West supplies enough aid to prevent collapse but not enough for a full on Ukrainian breakthrough.I actually bought the last round of 'talks'. Now I'm blackpilled, we might be lucky if we get out of this in less than 20 years.
Despite Iran’s pronouncements that the straits are closed, many ships are continuing to cross them. We know that during the last closure the US military escorted many ships through (while maintaining a blockade on Iran itself). Iran it turns out doesn’t have the capability to actually close the straits, just to threaten to do so. Increasingly hollow threats as sanctions, the blockade, war inflation, and US strikes erode their ability to project even a little force.
Now even according to the New York Times, Iranian officials are divided because the Supreme Leader remains absent. Iran is apparently deeply divided on whether to continue the war or not — far from the situation predicted by war critics that Trump’s strikes would simply ensure Iran was united around fighting America until the bitter end.
This isn’t forever war, this is just war. The Iran War has only for a few months, most of that under ceasefire — this is totally historically normal. The Ukrainian War has stalled out but 4 years is also not an exceptional length by the standards of war. The major forever wars of recent years were America’s misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, which were totally different models. Trump doesn’t have NGOs on the ground teaching Iranian clerics to embrace hashtag Black Girl Magic.
Iran won’t last that long. Inflation and sanctions are already crippling their economy and their ability to stay fed.
So.. the Straits of Hormuz are actually open and Iran is just talking shit? There is no threat to shipping, nobody is paying tolls, insurance rates are not being jacked up, oil prices are not being affected, a US military presence is not necessary because the Iranian military no longer exists, and this is all fake news, we can go home and declare victory and ignore anything Iran says about shipping?
That is fantastic news!
I think it's a bit of both. Going by the data here: https://portwatch.imf.org/pages/cb5856222a5b4105adc6ee7e880a1730 the number of cargo ships crossing the straits are still far below pre war, but also significantly above the zero where it was at the start of the war. Iran can still significantly threaten traffic, but they can't shut it down entirely like they claim. The US also has the power to escort individual ships though, but it comes at a great cost. For what it's worth, oil futures are now back down to roughly what they were before the war.
You're going to have to look closer at your source next time. It's data only goes up to the fifth of july.
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The straits are open, but at higher risk than they were before the war. Iran can hit ships, and occasionally does. I don't think anyone's paying tolls except those using the Iran route to pick up Iranian oil, and I'm not sure about them. Not sure about insurance; most of the non-Iran traffic seems to be Gulf-owned ships which are presumably locally insured, though the Greeks still seem to be in there too.
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Frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!
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The problem is that we don’t really know if this is true or not. The Admin has an interest in pretending that this is occurring, both to buffer the economy and sow confusion in Iran.
We also don’t know if this is part of Iran’s negotiation tactic, allowing them to renege on previous promises while blaming it on a rogue faction, like how America can blame things on Israel while also having the ability to stop them at threat of force.
This is not typically the criticism of our previous excursions, but that they cost trillions of dollars and led to many casualties and caused other problems down the road. All the black girl magic in the world likely did not exceed $100mil.
Yes we do. Independent trackers commercial AIS and satellite images show ships crossing the strait. It’s not as many as before the war and it’s not zero. These are not unfalsifiable claims, a lot of this stuff is verifiable and public.
Moreover, who would these lies be intended to confuse? The Iranians? If Iran cannot even tell when ships are crossing the straits, then they do not have control over the straits. So even if we accept your premise as true, it’s not looking good for Iranian power.
The ships we see going through are for Iran-allied countries, eg China. I don’t think the US military would be escorting ships carrying oil for China.
Is anyone keeping track anywhere? Is there a graph? Does it say anywhere which ships get through every day and who they work for? Did you check this yourself?
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The US has a blockade on. Ships are not passing through without American power. Your alternative explanation that we have to disbelieve everything coming out of America and accept Iran’s explanations instead is totally unconvincing.
https://x.com/CENTCOM/status/2059310640037269628?lang=en
It’s Iran and CENTCOM vs Trump admin. But Trump Admin is pretty much always lying. So why would you trust the Admin on this? Ships destined for China may be passing through without escort as part of an American-Chinese deal. Do you really think America would blockade things destined for China? How do you think China would reply to that?
CENTCOM five hours ago affirming that Iran does not control the strait:
https://x.com/centcom/status/2076278945993888116?s=46
Here is CENTCOM validating my earlier claim:
https://x.com/centcom/status/2075325424591044956?s=46
What you have posted is cherry-picked from a day when the US military was not actively safeguarding ships and used that as proof that they never did at all. (Which in fact that tweet in tacitly confirms as a real operation.)
The "earlier claim" tweet was written right after the MOU ended (june 17th to July 8th). Your OP assertion is "we know that during the last closure the US military escorted many ships through". The "since early May" in the CENTCOM tweet may be doing a lot of work here: do they mean that, technically speaking, between early May and until June 8th there were escorted ships, all of which occurred during the MOU phase? If they mean, as the phrase suggests (versus what it technically includes), that there were ships passing through in early May, this would go against CENTCOM’s May 26 post:
I mean, at least one of their posts must be misleading. They are correcting the claim that America is escorting ships (on May 26) with “project freedom has not resumed”. But project freedom stopped on May 5th. So this tweet suggests that from the 5th to at least the 26th, there were no escorted ships.
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Oil futures algo bots, of course.
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I'm gonna go ahead and maintain my stance against a hundred million dollars spent on black girl magic.
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This is an incredible shitshow and, yes, seemingly the standard for modern wars. I've said before that the MOU is a sign of the US accepting the failure of Epic Fury and military defeat and cutting losses (contra my initial expectations; tbh that was impressive, if anything – Russia also miscalculated, but can't even cut losses). But well, nothing (except self-respect and reason, perhaps) could prevent the US from retroactively revoking this acceptance and just relaunching the war. Opening the Strait by force is going to be as hard as before, the oil supply crunch won't get any better, interceptors and standoff munitions didn't magically regenerate in the meantime, but it didn't become any easier for Iran either. Will the Regime finally Collapse under the pressure? Doubt. Will it accept less favorable terms of peace, now that American resolve is reaffirmed? More plausible but I think their payoff matrix is unchanged (they need to secure and fund post-war military deterrence in the presence of Israel, they can't trust the US or Israel), and that dominates their analysis. Will we see escalation, maybe even ground operation? Seems remote…
I suspect one big factor of why Trump feels like he can afford this (and why he doubted that enough to authorize the MOU before) is that the oil demand is proving to be sustainably low, and that's mostly due to China sharply dropping their oil imports and thus not competing for a volume to the tune of 5.5-6 millions of barrels per day, roughly 2 Japans' worth, vastly more than what they were getting from Iran and Venezuela combined. For all of Trump's gratitude, this is not charity from his "friend" Xi, of course. The best analysis of what's happening that I've seen is here, in short:
They may also be releasing their SPRs, but that's not clear, nor is the volume of this buffer; I've seen numbers from 1.2 to 2 billion barrels. Combined with domestic production of ≈4.3mbd and some 6.4mbd of remaining imports, they can presumably keep this up for years. Their strategic objective is removing oil import dependence anyway (much to the chargin of Malacca blockade enthusiasts). There may be backchannel verbal agreements too. So Trump can assume that there won't be a sudden spike to $150+ per barrel, gas pump voter outrage and other externalities of the closed Strait.
Another factor is that there's a planetary bull run driven by AI and upstream HPC hardware supply chain, where oil-importing Asians are all winning massively, the US is getting huge capital inflows, and that's papering over bad war news. American dominance in AI, demonstrated with Claude Fable release drama, is also being rapidly converted to diplomatic leverage over the squeezed NATO allies.
So if Trump's thinking is dominated by things like midterms, he might just figure it's better not to be a loser.
Still, energy inflation is really bad, already 15.8% year-on-year in OECD. The war will continue to function as a tax on global growth, worse for some (Europe) than others, for the foreseeable future.
A few months ago war critics told me that America lost so badly it would accept whatever terms that the Iranians offered. Now that that hasn’t happened, they say that the US lost so badly it must have changed its mind about surrendering.
The rest of your post in fact makes a case I was arguing months ago: that the global supply chain was more resilient than critics supposed and that Iran’s leverage over the strait was not that great.
The much more plausible explanation, which I have not had to alter over the past few months, which looks better and better with age, is this: America decisively crippled Iran’s nuclear capabilities and Military Industrial Complex; Iran has been badly weakened, maybe fatally; Iran does not control the straits and cannot chase America out of the straits; America is in a dominant position. Iran will never toll the straits, they will never acquire nuclear weapons, their military strikes will become increasingly ineffective, their country will suffer from inflation and sanctions, they have no trump card to play, and the only question left is how badly they will surrender.
The US accepted an MOU that people swore amounted to total victory for Iran. Then [B]Iran[/B] through its actions demonstrated it didn't think the MOU was total victory. Iran still thinks it can get unconditional surrender -- the US goes away, Iran tolls the straits, Iranian proxies attack Israel and Israel just takes it, and Iran gets back to the job of building a nuke for Tel Aviv. The US does not appear to be interested in this deal, but neither is it interested in invading Iran. So we've got this dynamic stalemate. Iran can't keep the straits closed, but the US can't keep them 100% safe either. Every time Iran attacks shipped, they get bombed more.
Iran can still win, though. They can simply outlast Trump, and then President AOC or Al-Sayed gives them everything they want. This does assume Trump doesn't decide to do a decisive attack, or if he tries Congress and the courts stop them.
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I think the US is going to "lose" this war, because ultimately Trump is better off losing than winning. The consequences of a US victory are either a US-led occupation of Iran, or a Houthis-on-the-Hormuz failed state under circumstances where it is obviously Trump's fault. Both of these are worse, in US domestic political terms, than declaring victory and going home (even if the declaration of victory is non-credible outside the MAGA filter bubble). If Trump's economic team were competent enough to impose export controls on US crude oil in a way which limited the impact on pump prices, then making Iran Iran's neighbours' problem is the obviously correct America First policy.
Iran, even with nukes and intermediate-range ballistic missiles, is a threat to America's no-longer-needed proxies in the Middle East, not to America.
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My position was that America lost badly enough in the first round that they wouldn’t be able to afford to leave it at that. I had been expecting this resumption for some time.
Your prediction was the set of every possible outcome? Congratulations on your predictive powers
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That's exactly what had happened, though. The US accepted and signed very unflattering terms. You don't get to change history by having a temper tantrum. All you attest to is that the US is even less trustworthy than was commonly believed, and Trump is basically not the kind of creature capable of representing a state with a consistent policy and commitments, but just a dude doing whatever. As I've said 2 weeks ago:
This seems as true as it was then.
The point I'm making is that the global supply chain's resilience, which your war is dependent upon, is subsidized by the PRC, and the US had no reason to assume this goodwill at the start.
Ok? What was even the point of the MOU then, in your opinion?
Did they sign unflattering terms or did they agree to things they would never have to act on because Iran, Israel, or the US would promptly renege?
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America killed Iran’s leadership and bombed their factories, which means Iran won. Because they control the straits of Hormuz, which allows them to cripple global trade, although that hasn’t happened because of the Chinese, who support Iran. It’s all very simple. The Americans lost so humiliatingly that they signed an embarrassing surrender deal, which proves they lost, even though they aren’t following it right now, which also proves they lost. It’s all very simple. The important point is that Donald Trump is evil, but he lost because he’s stupid, but he’s also too evil to care, but he’s also too stupid to know he lost, but he also refuses to accept that he lost because he’s so evil. It’s a very simple explanation. If the US starts to appear as though it’s winning, it’s actually a separate second war that bears no relation to the first war. Who can really say. Iran might not have a navy or Air Force or nukes, their leaders were all killed and now the IRGC is divided about how to proceed, they can’t control the straits and they are under tremendous economic strain, but when you think about it they refuse to surrender and isn’t that the same as winning?
At the time I pointed out that America wouldn’t pay Iran any money unless they cooperated, and now what’s happened? Does it feel like Iran is in control? Does it look like Iran is in control?
We've been over this. Yes, killing people and bombing shit does not constitute a strategic victory, although your culture might be too unrefined to grasp such a sophisticated post-Bronze Age notion. Read the community note here, for example.
You really try to sneer, but it's clear you're mad.
That's not the only point, but it's a simple and true explanation, consistent with all of Donald Trump's actions over his entire career, from big to small, from wars to his pathetic whiny entitlement; and the reason you're mad is that you don't want to recognize what loyalty to this creature says about yourself. Trump provides you with vicarious fulfillment of fantasies about bullying and revenge, so you're invested in overlooking his missteps.
It's interesting, Shakes, that you regress to this reduced vocabulary and simplistic sentences, essentially triumphalist grunts, when you get excited and angry. Like here:
It's… Trumpian. Strongest planes. Winning bigly. Killed their leaders. Have you noticed? Or is it affected?
“You mad, bro? You mad bro?” Too bad I was kind of looking forward to arguing again. Until next time!
You flinch away from self-reflection, which is in character, of course.
Guy who can’t face the inconsistency of his predictions telling me to self-reflect
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I still predict boots on the ground eventually. Trump does not have the temperament or neural plasticity to change course.
I doubt it. He values American lives. Causing collapse of Iran is more plausible. Depopulated country has no resources to pursue nuclear program.
I think there’s a small chance he uses nuclear weapons.
No need to use nuclear weapons. Just need to change tactics. He has access to some of the best twisted mentats of the CIA - they could devise a way to wage the war in such a way that to break the spirit and maximize sectarian strife.
A tactic of announcing targets and delivering on them every day - like today we kill Revolutionary Guard personnel, tomorrow we set fires to oil wells, next day power plants. Tell in advance where they will be but choose such locations that whatever forces Iran could scramble couldn't get there in time. And hit them if they try.
Your goals moves from military victory to creating a total feeling of helplessness. Take the tactics pimps use to break the girls and scale them to country size.
Iran is too big to invade - but this also means it is too big to secure.
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