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Yes, when it comes to people arguing that Iran could militarily (as opposed to politically) defeat the US in a war, I classify those in the unastute or biased category. Or engagement bait. Twitter is mostly made up of engagement bait, as far as I can tell.
Unastute doesn't mean unintelligent. But some people aren't really aware of the enormous difference in military power between the two countries.
What's the mechanism by which winning in Iran would give Trump more power to renegotiate global trade?
It’s like what happened in Venezuela: the more that comes under America’s control, the more leverage America has in negotiating with other countries.
We want to tariff China to avoid them dumping cheap goods and bankrupting our manufacturers, but Europe wants to profit as the middleman mediating Chinese goods, so now we control the supply of oil that feeds Europe and China doesn’t.
We want Asian capital to fuel an American factory build-up so we can wean ourselves off Chinese rare-earth metals, now we control the supply of oil Asia needs.
This is all done out in the open, South Korea planning 8 nuclear power plants in the US, India announcing a $15 Billion steel plant in Iowa, Europe complying with the latest sanctions against Iran. All told Trump is redirecting hundreds of billions of dollars into America’s economy, which is a much more effective use of his time than negotiating with Lisa Murkowski and Mitch McConnell. He’s making good on his campaign to Reindustrialize and he’s using executive power to do it.
This stuff will compound. By acquiring a controlling stake in Venezuelan oil, Trump is making America more powerful in energy than OPEC. So OPEC can either cut deals to supply energy where Trump wants it, or they can suffer outages while Iran festers — America is fine in either outcome, which gives Trump the most leverage. So he can negotiate an expansion of the Abraham Accords, the beginning of a lasting peace in the Middle East, more investment for America, etc.
Let's say hypothetically that that is Trump's strategy. I understand how Venezuela fits into this strategy. I don't understand how Iran does.
I don't imagine that Iran is going to change who they sell their oil to after the war unless there is a regime change, and maybe not even if there is one.
The US can physically prevent Iran from shipping oil out if it wants, but it could have done so before the war as well, if it had wanted to. That doesn't require a full-scale bombing campaign.
And I think there are probably easier and more effective ways for the US to put pressure on the Gulf States than to play some game of "we'll bomb Iran hard enough to make them bomb you but not hard enough to prevent them from blowing up your oil infrastructure sometimes, so you should do what we say".
On another note, I feel bad for Iranian liberals. Part of me wants to say that if Trump was going to start the war at all, he should have had the balls to launch a ground invasion. Now the Iranian liberals are stuck in kind of the worst of both worlds. Their oppressive government is still in charge, and is extra paranoid and incentivized to crush dissent. Plus their country has been getting bombed.
A blockade is an act of war and therefore does become a bombing situation.
We use many of those levers all the time. It wasn’t enough in the case of Iran, which is why we escalated to war.
By and large it’s the Gulf States that asked us not to bomb Iran back into the Stone Age “Bridge and Power Plant Day” style. Iran’s ability to attack oil infrastructure has greatly declined.
(The Houthis are a separate case but they are not currently undergoing an American bombing campaign.)
Now that a few months have passed, I think the most plausible explanation for the war is that Iran was attempting a traditional military buildup before a nuclear buildup. They could import Chinese and Russian manufacturing techniques to scale up missile production, and then make enough bombs to be uncontrollable. Then they could construct a nuke at their leisure because they could hold the Strait hostage. Trump bombed them before this buildup could be completed.
Which is to say, I don’t think the war happened just so Trump can control global oil markets, but that’s clearly a benefit of prosecuting the war now that we’re in one.
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