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Notes -
On the other hand, it hurts Russia and China as well.
China is demand starved and this severely limits their competitiveness in European markets since they only do a minority of commercial shipping out of China and that isn't changing soon. This couldn't come at a worse time for them.
Russia does very little of their own shipping and ships going around the cape means that more shipping capacity is going to get bought buy Europeans, especially in big tankers. This risks significantly decreasing the volume of commercially viable russian oil exports (which could be good for Iran I suppose).
Europe obviously hurts from the higher shipping costs.
Egypt faces catastrophy if their Forex dries up and the rest of the Arab world hurts in the sense that it further decrease their ability to affect oil prices and the higher prices go to shippers, not them.
The only ones that unambiguously win in a material sense is the US, which one could suspect is why the response has been so tepid and seemingly inept, if one is conspiratorially minded.
I think it's just that America is administratively paralysed and inept and that this coincidentally hurts everyone but themselves in a material sense but also hurts their prestige and legitimacy as hegemon which I believe is probably more important than any short term economic gains.
I agree. At least one of the reasons you’ve seen the US be very limited in its response so far is that going full World Police now just allows everyone else in the region to abrogate their responsibilities and blame all violence on America. They want China to get upset with Iran, and are willing to drag things out to get it.
Even Egypt isn’t publicly condemning the Houthis yet, and China hasn’t said anything. Ironically, Israel’s a possible winner if this drags out, especially now the overland route between Saudi and Egypt (via Israel) is gaining steam.
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