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It's not a big threat to the US. The US is a net oil exporter, has the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and, if absolutely necessary, Trump could make up with Canad

• reliabilityguy 8mo ago
  > has the demonstrated ability to strike well beyond its borders. Yep, now if IR survives, I see no reason for them not to double down on even longer range missiles. Like, why not?
  • UltraSane 8mo ago
    Eventually the world will get so fed up with them they WILL invade.
• bpodgursky 8mo ago
  Frankly this whole thing is worth it if it scares Taiwan and Japan into building new nuclear capacity. Taiwan has been suicidally turning off nuclear generation for a decade despite it being the last country on earth that wants to rely on naval imports of essential goods.
  • foota 8mo ago
    Could it be because nuclear is highly centralized? I would expect that something like solar/wind power would be better for decentralization (in a war). Even if you don't blow up a nuclear plant, it seems like cutting the power from one would be relatively easy.
    • bpodgursky 8mo ago
      Russia has refrained from hitting Ukraine's nuclear plants directly, and Ukraine has more or less kept them connected to the grid (albeit with nonstop repair efforts). Transformer substations are more vulnerable targets but it's hard to be decentralized enough to not have those.
• dylan604 8mo ago
  > It's not a big threat to the US. The US is a net oil exporter, The thing is that the US exported oil is sweet crude, and our own refineries are not made for that type of oil. So for the petroleum products used within the US need the heavy oil that is imported. So if the world goes tits up so that the US can only use the oil it produces, it would take time before the US could refine it. >Trump could make up with Canada I'm sorry, did this suddenly become a comedy?
  • idiotsecant 8mo ago
    That's not at all the case. We have refineries that can handle everything from sweet to sour to Canadian tar sands
    • vel0city 8mo ago
      That and it's way easier to go from retooling from sour to sweet than reverse, way easier to go from heavy to light than reverse, etc. Not suggesting it's just a flip a switch kind of change, but it's usually a net reduction in complexity in refining for both of those changes.
    • dylan604 8mo ago
      That goes against every thing I've ever read or heard. I'm no oil man, nor play one on TV, but I only know what information I've come across in reading or hearing in radio/tv. Maybe my googlefu is lacking, but a quick search still suggests this is the answer.
  • hollerith 8mo ago
    >So for the petroleum products used within the US need the heavy oil that is imported. Is that really true? I've heard experts say that sweet crude is easy to refine. I've always thought that the reason US refiners bother with sour crude is that they're better at refining it than non-US refiners are, so they make a little more money that way.
    • dylan604 8mo ago
• testing22321 8mo ago
  > Trump could make up with Canada so those oil imports restart. Like hell he could. - every Canadian
  • hedora 8mo ago
    Hey Canadians, can you permanently dismantle some pipelines? Unlike our fearless orange leader, I live on earth, and global warming's becoming quite a big issue over here. Also, the sooner we're forced off oil, the sooner these dumb wars stop.
    • dylan604 8mo ago
      Don't the Canadian pipelines just go to the gulf for exporting and not used in the US? In other words, what would turning them off do except hurt their bottom line?
• westcoalst 8mo ago
  [dead]
• idiotsecant 8mo ago
  The threat to the US is China feeling like they need to act. The loss of Persian gulf oil is an existential threat to the Chinese economy. This could end very, very bad.
  • 01100011 8mo ago
    Nah. So far we haven't hit Iran's oil export infrastructure. If China makes a serious move we blow it up. We can also close the straight ourselves and claim it's for protection.
    • klooney 8mo ago
      https://understandingwar.org/research/middle-east/iran-update-evening-special-report-march-7-2026/ https://understandingwar.org/research/middle-east/iran-updat... They've started bombing the oil in infrastructure
      • 01100011 8mo ago
        I ain't reading all that, but if you're referring to the strike on the oil storage facility in Tehran, AFAICT that's not for export. It's local consumption. We haven't, to my knowledge, hit oil exports yet.
        • disgruntledphd2 8mo ago
          Fair enough, but if the local supplies are disrupted, export oil will be repurposed for local supply, to avoid issues with the regime.
          • 01100011 8mo ago
            I don't think oil works like that. Infra takes a long time to reroute, especially in war time. Exports are nearly all of Iran's economy. They can't turn it off or they starve.
  • dylan604 8mo ago
• kev009 8mo ago
  Conceivably, the 50 tankers per day could move in batches with the protection of a Destroyer. It's hard to imagine a credible surface or subsea threat with current fleet presence so it's basically a question of missile defense. Some constellation of vessels can indefinitely secure the zone if any powers that be with a suitable Navy desire it, and there are at least a few that have plausible capabilities.
  • mkoubaa 8mo ago
    [flagged]
    • Dylan16807 8mo ago
      Okay. Would you like to say which parts are the wrong parts?
      • hedora 8mo ago
        Drones. It costs a lot more to block one than to build one, and Trump's already blaming Biden because the US is running low on the top tier interceptors. Congressional testimony suggests the current stockpile will last weeks. After that, they'll fall back on ones that are less accurate, and that will let some attacks through. The destroyer doesn't help much in that scenario, in the same way it's not going to stop mosquitoes from biting the oil tanker's crew. You could use it to transport a large number of interceptor drones behind an armored hull, I guess. But, in scenarios where you need to worry about strikes taking out stored interceptor drones on the tankers, then the tankers are already swiss cheese.
    • nozzlegear 8mo ago
      It'd be more helpful if you could explain for the class why you disagree with their comment, rather than disparage it with nothing of your own to offer.
    • jibal 8mo ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
• mkoubaa 8mo ago
  What genre of cope is this?
• tejohnso 8mo ago
  > Trump could make up with Canada so those oil imports restart. Sounds like Trump hubris. Probably just what he'd expect. And then he'd accuse Canada of "behaving terribly" if things didn't go his way, and he'd reach for his tariff paddle.
  • verdverm 8mo ago
    Fortunately, his handy paddle is no longer available (the one where he can make changes on whims, eg. when a commercial upsets him). He still has other options, they require process and need to be specific, setting aside the short term tariffs levied after his tantrum tariffs were rebuked by SCOTUS.
• whatever1 8mo ago
  Iran has nobody in charge to lead any sort of negotiations or to order stand down. Now it really is guerrilla war. The type that never ends.
  • rayiner 8mo ago
    Guerrilla war requires people at the grass roots to care. Is that true in Iran? Venezuela seems to have quieted down already.
    • ncallaway 8mo ago
      The IRGC is 125k-150k people. Many of them are pot committed to the current government, because the IRGC has done... unforgivable things that a new government would be likely to punish. Venezuela is also run by the same security apparatus and government as it was before. We didn't attempt to turn over the entire government.
      • rasz 8mo ago
        >The IRGC is 125k-150k people. Takes Ukrainians 4 months to kill that amount. What you are saying winning is quite doable.
        • anabab 8mo ago
          thats in a scenario with soldiers pushing into no mans land under permanent drone control. Israel demonstrates much lower stats when enemy hides underground. I would imagine having no boots on the ground will lower the numbers further.
        • ncallaway 8mo ago
          You... simply cannot take the numbers from one war and blindly apply them to a totally different one. The comparison isn't apt for a number of reasons. First, Russians are generally on the offensive, which means pushing into Ukrainian controlled territory. Often, they are pushing into defensive lines that have had years of fortification. Second, there are a lot more Russians in Ukraine. To kill 125k people, you have to find 125k people. It's a lot easier to find a Russian in Ukraine that it will be to find an IRGC soldier in Iran if there's an invasion and guerilla operations in response. In Iraq after the conventional military phase, the US killed ~26k insurgents over the course of a decade (and also captured ~120k). Iran is bigger than Iraq, has far more people than Iraq, and has much bigger logistical burdens for an invasion. I could believe that the US Military is quite capable of running some small scale targeted operations within Iran successfully. We can probably pull off operations to do things like attempt to seize and secure uranium stockpiles if we know where they are (though such an operation could also go catastrophically badly, too). I think the US Military could invade Iran and topple the regime, but it would be an enormous lift, and I think there's almost no chance we would have the political will to sustain the costs and casualties that a total invasion would entail.
• beached_whale 8mo ago
  I don't think the oil exports from Canada ever stopped. If anything, they have grown.
• mikrl 8mo ago
  > unlike all other US wars since Korea, the US can't end this war by pulling out From what I read in Kissinger’s Diplomacy, Vietnam was also a war they couldn’t just pull out of if they wanted to. The public wanted deescalation, but the Americans under Nixon had to escalate the war to get enough of an advantage to pull out without it being a bloodbath. Hence part of Nixon’s infamy: he defied public opinion and escalated an unpopular war, precisely to end it more cleanly.
  • roenxi 8mo ago
    That sounds kinda stupid. These days when someone says something ridiculous but pro-war it generally turns out they are just lying through their teeth and just not being honest about their motivations (eg, getting kickbacks or they're worried about tactical political issues). It seems more than likely that when Kissinger writes that we're reading someone being dishonest. In addition, I'm struggling with the idea that Kissinger of all people cared enough about what happened to Vietnamese people for it to affect policy. He was the sort who would have no difficulty at all allowing bloodbaths to happen if he thought that was advantageous. His wiki page suggests, in fact, that he did do exactly that a few times.
    • mikrl 8mo ago
      It’s not pro or anti war, it’s realpolitik. Neither Nixon nor Kissinger wanted to be in Vietnam, but again, if they evacuated in 1969 it would have been a bloodbath of American soldiers I think is the point you missed. The communists had a decisive advantage until the Americans escalated the war to a ceasefire then pulled out in the mid 1970s.
      • roenxi 8mo ago
        Did he claim war was peace and slavery was freedom on the way through? When I say that sounds incredible, I mean that in the sense it is difficult to link it with credibility. That argument's conclusion is that keeping troops in an active warzone will prevent them getting injured, and being driven out of a country represents the fruit of erasing the opponent's decisive advantage. With pretzel-logic of that magnitude that anything is possible. There is a much easier conclusion which is Kissinger was making things up because he'd look like a real monster if he honestly said it was just stupid policy.
• tzs 8mo ago
  The US is a net exporter of petroleum (crude oil plus refined products) but from what Google tells me it is still a net importer of crude oil. It also tells me 75% of what goes through Hormuz is crude. Also, domestic crude of mostly light, sweet crude whereas many US refineries are designed to deal with heavy, sour crude. Google is telling me 80% of the crude that goes through Hormuz is heavy, sour crude. Does any of this raise the impact disruptions of Hormuz would have on the US?
  • Qwertious 8mo ago
    >Also, domestic crude of mostly light, sweet crude whereas many US refineries are designed to deal with heavy, sour crude. Google is telling me 80% of the crude that goes through Hormuz is heavy, sour crude. The US has some of the best chemists in the world; light sweet crude is easy to refine but heavy sour crude is hard, so US refineries refining light sweet would be a waste of their talents - better to export it out for newbies to refine and buy the harder-to-refine and therefore cheaper heavy sour crude. But if heavy sour becomes more expensive, then the US will switch to the easymode option in a heartbeat. An increased cost of inputs will always hurt the entire industry, but it won't particularly hurt the US any more than anyone else, and will probably hurt them the least - especially when they have plenty of domestic shale oil that will be financially viable to extract if prices go up.
    • nerdsniper 8mo ago
      > if heavy sour becomes more expensive, then the US will switch to the easymode option in a heartbeat. As someone who used to run those distillation columns, it's way more difficult than that. I haven't seen any facility in the USA re-tool like that in less than 2 years. Usually closer to 5. Not a "heartbeat".
• ncallaway 8mo ago
  > It's not a big threat to the US. The US is a net oil exporter, has the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and, if absolutely necessary, Trump could make up with Canada so those oil imports restart. The SPR is 58% full, so... not empty but also not all the way full. Additionally, even though we're a net oil exporter, we're not insulated from the global oil market rates. Local producers aren't going to sell into America more cheaply than they can sell internationally, so if international rates spike, prices will go up domestically too. If the Straight of Hormuz remains closed for an extended period of time, we'll definitely feel the pinch domestically.
• nradov 8mo ago
  Nah. Very little direct US trade moves past Iran. In a few weeks President Trump will declare the operation a success and end most kinetic strikes, regardless of the actual situation. Then someone else will have to deal with the aftermath.
• dragonwriter 8mo ago
  > It's not a big threat to the US. The US is a net oil exporter The US being a net oil exporter doesn't make the domestic market independent of the global market (especially over the short to intermediate term), for a large variety of reasons. > has the Strategic Petroleum Reserve Which whille partial refilled from the 2022 drawdowns is still at rather low levels by historical standards. > and, if absolutely necessary, Trump could make up with Canada He could try (though I don’t think even that is in his character), that doesn’t mean he would succceed.