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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   25172 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 24, 2026

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Bloomberg: Goldman Says Gulf Oil Flows Two-Thirds of Prewar Level

Oil flows from the Persian Gulf have recovered to around two-thirds of pre-war levels, limiting the Iran war’s impact on global crude prices, according to Goldman Sachs Group Inc.

Total exports of crude and oil products from the region have risen to 15 million to 16 million barrels a day, helped by higher crossings through the Strait of Hormuz, Goldman analysts including Daan Struyven and Yulia Zhestkova Grigsby said in a note. That’s still 7 to 8 million barrels below pre-conflict levels, but well above a trough of 5 million to 6 million barrels a day in March, they said.

A lot of ships are still making the crossing dark with transponders turned off but the trend is clear. Iran’s (supposed) leverage over the strait is basically nullified, oil is passing through despite Iranian proclamations. Independent analysts now agree with what the US government was saying weeks ago, that millions of barrels are passing through the strait under American auspices.

US CENTCOM agrees, putting out this statement that the US has escorted a few thousand ships through the Gulf, carrying through three-quarters of a billion barrels of oil over the past few months.

What changed?

Axios: "That sucker is open": U.S. gains the upper hand in the battle for Hormuz

Zoom in: After the MOU fell apart, the military worked to reopen the strait unilaterally. The effort included several elements:

  • Together with the United Arab Emirates, a U.S. military task force started guiding ships through the southern channel of the strait while giving them air cover and intercepting Iranian drone and cruise missile attacks.

  • A two-week U.S. bombing campaign significantly undercut the IRGC's capacity to attack ships crossing the strait.

  • A mine-sweeping operation involved Navy divers, Navy SEALs, underwater and surface drones, and private contractors to detect and neutralize the mines.

  • A blockade of Iranian ports was restored.

The US has apparently de-mined the Straits of Hormuz, although, interestingly, there don’t seem to have been many mines in the first place!

More than 200 mine-like objects have been swept from the main lane of the strait. U.S. officials say only 11 of them were actual mines and just a few were properly deployed.

It seems as though Iran’s capacities to threaten ship traffic the Strait were severely degraded by US military action, but that Iran was successfully able to convince news reporters and insurance companies that it could target ships.

For instance, Brady Sullivan at CNBC says

As I reported on @CNBC over a month ago, shipowners told me many “mines” we decoys … some were actually just inflated trash bags ostensibly made to seem like Hormuz was swimming with mines.

Meanwhile, Reuters: Pipelines and ports: Iran war spurs Gulf infrastructure investment

DUBAI, Aug 28 (Reuters) - The Iran war's redrawing of the global trade map is forcing Gulf nations to retool their investment play book, ploughing capital into infrastructure, from energy pipelines to ports, to weather the fallout from the conflict.

The war has highlighted the Gulf's overreliance on the Strait of Hormuz, previously a chokepoint for 20% of global oil flows ‌but also subject for decades to Iranian threats of disruption.

Not only has Iran lost control over the Straits, but Gulf states are building new pipelines to reroute oil around the Straits so that Iran can never threaten them again.

And how does it look inside Iran?

WSJ: Labor Protests and Panic Buying Signal Growing Pressure in Iran

Iranians rushed to buy fuel and food this week, signaling mounting economic pressure as the Trump administration’s threat to tighten sanctions sparked fears of deeper shortages and pain.

Small demonstrations by labor unions—which had all but disappeared during the war—are popping up across the country. Oil workers, pensioners and teachers have gathered to complain about the declining currency and rising cost of living.

————

Some might remember Trump’s infamous comments on this subject some months ago:

Q. And what's your backup plan?

The President. Excuse?

Q. What's your backup plan if the—there's no deal to open the Strait?

The President. The—you don't need a backup plan. We have—the military is defeated. Their military is gone. They have—you know, we've degraded just about everything. They have very few missiles. They have very little manufacturing capability. We've hit them hard. Our military is amazing——

The Shakes take: Iran will never toll the straits, Iran will never have nuclear weapons, Trump was right about everything, a lot of people who believed Iranian claims are looking very, increasingly, increasingly!, foolish.

This conflict has demonstrated an epistemic weakness in many people, not just in the media, but in supposedly rationalist communities that should know better too.

When you hear two competing claims, and the two claims are far apart, it's a pretty familiar human heuristic to "split the difference". So when CENTCOM is saying they've destroyed Iran's navy and airforce, and Iran is claiming they've blown up a U.S. aircraft carrier, many people will say, "The truth is somewhere in the middle. Sounds like a quagmire".

As anyone who tried to buy a rug in Turkey knows, this heuristic is lazy and exploitable. People make extreme claims to try to move the Overton window, then "settle" for the position they wanted anyway.

We should never be splitting the difference here because Iran is full of shit. Oil is moving through the strait. The United States has crippled Iran's offensive capability. The price of oil remains lowish, and Iran's economy is in shambles. At some point, you have to stop splitting the difference and start giving Iran the "Baghdad Bob" treatment. Any pronouncement from Iran's regime should just be laughed at. We shouldn't be making ANY Bayesian updates based on uncorroborated information from Iran.

In any case, that's why I love financial markets. You have to put your money where your mouth is and develop real epistemic hygiene, instead of just making the mouth noises.

I agree with all of this. I'm no military expert, and I have no idea what's going on in the strait. It seems to be a huge fog of war with everyone saying different things, and ships deliberately hiding their traffic. But I can safely tune out all that noise and just look at the price of oil in the financial markets, and I feel like that tells me a lot more than any political commentator. From that, it's easy to see that the price of oil is elevated, but not too much so. Suggesting that, while things aren't exactly "back to normal," it's also very far from a full blockade on oil.

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