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Oil hits $100 a barrel despite deal to release record amount of reserves

71 points by tartoran 8mo ago

npn 8mo ago
it's not like they found anyway to open the Hormuz strait, why should the price be lower. one again the world suffers thank to US stupidity.
measurablefunc 8mo ago
That's because oil tankers are going up in flames: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTzdxq0trb0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTzdxq0trb0
msy 8mo ago
This theory of how the US loses in Iran is looking increasingly likely: https://kasperbenjamin.substack.com/p/why-the-us-will-lose-to-iran https://kasperbenjamin.substack.com/p/why-the-us-will-lose-t... It's going to be incredibly difficult to stop Iran being able to kneecap both the global economy and in particular the gulf states, who are going to be motivated to put maximum pressure on the US to sue for peace. Incredible hubris and a lobotomised diplomatic and intelligence infrastructure in the name of ideological purity, quite the combination.
- liuliu 8mo ago
  Not really. The U.S. can send in the ground force to restore the trade around the Gulf. The BUT is obvious in this case tho.
  - solid_fuel 8mo ago
    That's not a reasonable option, it's a bear-trap. Once troops are on the ground it will be another decades-long slog, and one that ends like Afghanistan at best. At worst, this looks like America's version of Ukraine.
    - YZF 8mo ago
      I can argue both sides but under the assumption (which I think is true) that 80%-90% of Iranians want to remove the regime there's some possibility of success. That said there's also the possibility of screwing things up completely and getting the entire population to fight you as an invader. One thing for sure, it's not going to look like Russia invading Ukraine. The Iranians don't have the resolve or the support or the capabilities that Ukraine had and has. It will look more like Iraq in terms of the ability of the military to put up any resistance. The problem with "boots on the ground" isn't that it can't succeed. The problem is it has zero support from the American public. People feel about this a lot more strongly than the other topics dividing the public.
      - orwin 8mo ago
        Iranian polls show that 20-25% Iranians living in Iran support the IRGC, but due to how the questions were formulated, you can't know who would support a regime change. Polls after the 12 day bombing campaign in 2025 showed that 60% disapproved the bombing. That means you probably have at least a 40% base of support for active overthroing, growing, to change the regime, which is larger than the current supporters. Maybe you could have done something with it. Wait until the previous Komenei died of his cancer instead of martyring him, and wait for the new nomination and the protests that would follow to strike (decapitation of the morality police, species to open the prisons, etc). The way it was done just feels like the US wanted chaos and death, not meaningful change.
  - _heimdall 8mo ago
    Trump, the neo-cons, and much of the Republican party might as well hang up their hats if they put boots on the ground (beyond special forces which is often ignored for some reason). The US will be bogged down for years at a minimum if we entered Iran on the ground, or we would lose quickly and tuck tail. This isn't a fight to be won in a conventional war, the administration put every chip they had on a gamble that regime change was possible with air superiority alone. I don't know of any historical example of that working, but I guess we'll see what happens.
    - YZF 8mo ago
      Everyone says there's no historical examples but there is no exact parallel either. I wouldn't argue based on historical precedence here. The challenge is that regime is large and armed and they can hide and weather the storm. They'll hide in hospitals, and mosques, and schools and amongst civilians. Getting them and disrupting their organization to a point where a popular revolt can take over seems ... lessay hard. What needs to happen is that some parts of the military, who are a bit less fanatic, switches sides. The probability of that is very hard to gauge. There are stories of some defecting but hard to know if it's true or not.
      - _heimdall 8mo ago
        Historical precedent is important with regards to predictability. We have no idea if simply bombing them to hell will be enough for regime change, while we do know that there is some lower bound of military involvement on the ground that would have likely success with that goal. Personally I don't see how an air campaign alone can lead to any regime change we'd actually want to see. We are all being told the Iranian public is a cohesive unit with a strong majority wanting to go back to 1978, I don't buy it. The only likely outcomes I see, if the regime is changed at all, is a military coup with even worse people coming in, a very bloody civil war, or a faction in the country we never hear about taking over quickly by promising the world to the public. For the last one, I'd expect that to be a group more akin to the Nazis than some group that actually means well for Iranians.
      - orwin 8mo ago
  - robertjpayne 8mo ago
    The ground deployment to the mountains on Iran's side of the strait will have to be absolutely insane to actually eliminate the threat (if it's even possible to) of Iran launching drones or suicide boats at tankers.
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- morkalork 8mo ago
  That's a lot of words for describing "attempting MAD doctrine with conventional weapons". Hell, we even got to see a "first strike decapitation countered by autonomous cells with pre-written second strike directives" scenario play out.
- itake 8mo ago
  1/ When authors use AI for editing, it reduces their credibility. 2/ As much as I don't like the current administration (and Israel leadership), there is absolutely no way the assumptions this article makes about them are false. There is no way the US/Israel didn't calculate that: - the straight would be closed - a new leader may represent similar idiologies of the past leader. Everything that has happened so far (in regards to Iran attacking neighbors) has been extremely predictable. There is just no way these weren't calculated in.
  - davidw 8mo ago
    > There is no way the US Eppur si muove. These folks are not our best and brightest. https://www.wsj.com/finance/u-s-plan-to-unblock-strait-of-hormuz-collides-with-realities-of-global-insurance-feec54c6?mod=WSJ_home_mediumtopper_pos_3 https://www.wsj.com/finance/u-s-plan-to-unblock-strait-of-ho...
  - robertjpayne 8mo ago
    Maybe the US military commanders, generals and Pentagon knew this but the civilian leadership at the top chose to completely ignore it and can't really articulate a plan or what the plan ever was.
    - itake 8mo ago
      This conflict was a long time coming: Trump claimed Biden or Obama will start a war in Iran and that is why they are weak presidents. Trump sees himself as a peacemaker (flying in to negotiate deals with TH and KH, negotiating Ukraine war, etc). I think there is more going on to cause Trump drastically change his self-image. I don't think this is a Trump administration driven decision.
      - orwin 8mo ago
        All reports are saying the US generals were against this. And a UD senator (Graham I think) just admitted he lobbied trump for the war, comparing him to Roosevelt, and coached Netanyahou on how to lobby trump. Just look at the article: https://www.thedailybeast.com/senator-lindsey-graham-brags-about-how-he-manipulated-trump-79-into-war-with-iran/ https://www.thedailybeast.com/senator-lindsey-graham-brags-a...
- jiggawatts 8mo ago
  Normally what happens in these scenarios is that both sides declare victory and go home to lick their wounds. The US and Israel can claim that they've caused the IRGC sufficient damage to set them back a decade or more. Iran will declare that they've fought off a superpower with minimal real losses. They can also claim that -- despite intense foreign interference -- they got to choose and keep their preferred leader, alive. For now.
  - robertjpayne 8mo ago
    Normally yes, but without regime change the Iranian leadership will have even more resolve than ever to continue weapons programs (nuclear or not) and prepare retaliation for the inevitable next round of bombing… There is no winning here for anyone.
    - jiggawatts 8mo ago
      I'm not claiming either side is actually winning, I'm merely predicting that they'll both claim to have won. On the topic of the weapons program: The Israeli approach is to regularly "mow the lawn" to keep their regional opponents perpetually behind. Iran's nuclear weapons and ICBM programmes have almost certainly been damaged, perhaps enough to delay them for half a decade or more. Then it'll be time to mow the lawn again, or hope that by then a more moderate leadership can sign an agreement with a new US president that's a bit more trustworthy than the current one.
- steve_adams_86 8mo ago
  This is written a bit like the US dollar depends solely on the price of oil, which isn't true. It also seems like if we're to game theory this, we'd need to plot out the full escalation capacity of the USA, which the author is failing to do here. I don't like the idea of doing that because the thought is sickening, but it's necessary to consider the entire decision tree to make a remotely rational model. In retrospect I guess game theory is used kind of rhetorically here. If you consider what's written through that lens, it's very poorly developed and doesn't make sense. Maybe this is a thing, though? Am I misunderstanding what the author means by game theory here? I do think the asymmetry of war costs are a serious problem for the USA, and the less they're willing to escalate or otherwise mitigate this, the more serious that problem becomes. If I were to make a statement like the author did about the war, I'd frame it more like "this is going to be insanely fucking risky and expensive for the USA", but certainly not that they'll lose. edit: Listening to the Professor Jiang analysis and I understand why game theory was referenced now. He seems much more thorough and analytical so far. edit again: he claims Dubai will probably go bankrupt in one scenario. This seems exceedingly unlikely, but he doesn't explain why it could be true
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- silisili 8mo ago
  Whatever points this author was trying to make were completely obliterated by the LLM it was run through or used to generate it. A shame because it seems to have interesting points, but was too wordy and LLMified to keep attention. Stop telling me what it's not every other sentence, and just say what you mean. I wish folks would just use their own words.
- tinyhouse 8mo ago
  Israel and the US completely control their airspace and Iran's entire navy got demolished. I think the US prefers not to got too far as they prefer to keep the negotiation talks open. According to reports they asked Israel not to target energy for example.
  - onlypassingthru 8mo ago
    > Israel and the US completely control their airspace Maybe the soldiers sending shaheds and missiles hitting other countries every day haven't gotten the memo? Did somebody forget to put a cover sheet on it?
- shubhamjain 8mo ago
  You might expect events like this to fundamentally change the global order or bring some sanity to U.S. policymaking. But nothing is going to change. It will be chaotic few years, but soon enough, everything will be conveniently forgotten. Iranian/Syrian/Afganian threat will reappear, the war-mongers and Israel-lobby will once more push for pre-emptive strikes, assassinations of leaders or generals. Rinse and repeat. At its core, the problem is a militarized, propaganda-driven state masquareding itself as a necessary guarantor of global order, while its sole objective is nothing more than letting no other nation threaten its supremacy. And much of the world continuing to accept that narrative either because of lack of alternatives or out of necessity.
  - YZF 8mo ago
    The core of the problem is that the US stepped back under Obama from being the guarantor of global order. The world needs policing and deterrence is the sad reality otherwise everything goes to hell. Why did Russia attack Ukraine? Why is China threatening to attack Taiwan? Without the US (and the west more generally) Russia would retake half of Europe and China would have taken Taiwan. If you think there would be world peace you are so very much mistaken (speaking of propaganda). If you goal is to speak Russian and Chinese and live in those sorts of regimes then that's very much aligned with the US and the West just stepping back and not using force ever.
    - tpm 8mo ago
      > The core of the problem is that the US stepped back under Obama from being the guarantor of global order. That is not the core of the problem. We can go a bit further: - Obama was a reaction to overstepping under Bush. As a 'guarantor of global order' the US created a lot of disorder with Iraq and Afganistan. That is actually more in line with what historically the US understands under 'the global order': the US does what it wants to do and calls it the global order. - also the relative standing of the US since the end of the 90s is falling, because of the rise of other countries. That was widely expected and forecasted. What was also expected is that empires on their way out don't act rationally, because there is ample historical precendent to that. And so here we are.
- YZF 8mo ago
  Wars are hard to predict and the economy is hard to predict. There's easy money in the making for those who are sure the oil price is going to continue way up. The blog you reference has inaccuracies. Drones are generally not shot by THAAD is a glaring one. It's very much not 2-3 million dollars to $50k. Helicopter gunships shoot down drones with bullets these days is very common and there are other economic means of bringing them down. Most of the heavy lifting in suppressing these attacks is done by other drones patrolling the skies and attacking anything that tries to fire. Those also don't use extremely expensive munitions. "Iran produces approximately 500 of these drones per day and holds a stockpile estimated at around 80,000 units.". Both these are false today. I'd also question if they were true when Iran was attacked. These figures don't pass the smell test and either way any stockpile is an instant target. Everyone seems to be an expert today. It's obviously not great that the Hormuz straits are more or less closed. We've seen in Yemen that a ragtag force can be massively attacked and still manage to fire at ships on a much larger body of water. That said we didn't really see if they can sustain it for months under heavy attack which is a possible premise here. There are some pipelines bypassing the straits but their capacity is much smaller. It's also about 20% of the world supply so definitely other suppliers can make up for some of the loss at a cost. I'm not an expert. But the current oil price reflects what the experts think best. And that price is still below what it was for about half of 2022. And fluctuating. What will matter is the price over months.
  - msy 8mo ago
    Absolutely agree there's both some dubious suppositions and hand-waving there. The real question is I suspect how much pressure the GCC can withstand and how much pressure they can apply to Trump directly given business ties etc. If they lose a serious chunk of desalination capacity for example the situation becomes dire extremely quickly. For Dubai simply not having a decent supply of fresh food would alone be an economic catastrophe, every day this drags on is doing reputational damage that'll take years to fully recover from long after the hotel facades are patched up.
  - mrtksn 8mo ago
    > The blog you reference has inaccuracies. Drones are generally not shot by THAAD is a glaring one It's obvious that the author doesn't mean THAAD but Patriot, which are indeed used against drones. You can tell that by the missle cost the author mentions, which is 1/10th of the THAAD missle. As the argument is a cost effectiveness argument the logic holds, just replace THAAD with Patriot. Even though Ukraine offered their cost effective solution, they have a war to fight so any serious capacity increase will probably take months if not years and these things are not static and are quickly shaped on the battlefield so the Gulf states and Israel and USA will need to develop talent that is on the battlefield, like Russia and Ukraine did.
- 3eb7988a1663 8mo ago
  Japan, an island nation with virtually no natural resources of its own, depends on it for a staggering 75% of its oil. Japan’s Prime Minister has warned plainly that if the Strait closes, the entire Japanese economy will collapse within eight to nine months. Not slow down. Not a contract. Collapse. I am failing to an article about this, but that is absolutely incredible if true.
notepad0x90 8mo ago
https://polymarket.com/event/will-crude-oil-cl-hit-by-end-of-march https://polymarket.com/event/will-crude-oil-cl-hit-by-end-of... I wonder how prediction markets are affecting all this.
- YZF 8mo ago
  In the sense that someone is manipulating the real world to make money in the prediction markets? Otherwise it's just like options.
  - notepad0x90 8mo ago
    No, in the sense that he people who set oil prices and government policy alike can trade in those prediction markets. I'm all for the markets, very democratic and libertarian (not that I'm one), but policy makers, executives and other people from whom a conflict of interest by a prediction market translates into disaster for real people should be restricted from participating in these markets.
    - YZF 8mo ago
      OK. So I think your answer is actually a yes? In this case however you can pretty much do the same thing with other financial instruments like future contract on oil. Either way, I agree decision makers shouldn't be allowed to trade (and I think are forbidden in most countries).
      - notepad0x90 8mo ago
        You can do the same with proper financial instruments, but there are insider trading laws that prevent those people with insider knowledge from profiting, but these markets have no such restrictions.
        YZF 8mo ago
        Are you sure insider trading laws do not apply? I'd be surprised.
_heimdall 8mo ago
The stat has been raised frequently of late that 20% of the world's oil floes through the Straight. My understanding is that its 20% of total oil, but that around half of all oil production is used domestically where it is produced and never enters global markets. Unless I missed something when fact checking that, Iran is capable cutting off 40% of all purchasable oil.
- perfmode 8mo ago
  75% of Japan’s oil. 60% of India’s oil. 40% of China’s oil. is what i’ve heard.
- AnthonyMouse 8mo ago
  There are several issues with that math. To begin with, it assumes that oil currently used domestically isn't on the market, but what do you expect oil producers to do if foreign buyers make a higher bid for the "domestic" oil? Or to put it another way, there's a reason the market price goes up by essentially the same amount in the oil-producing countries as everywhere else. Then it assumes that oil that currently goes through the Strait has to. Oil can also leave the middle east by going west, e.g. to Europe. You might think that doesn't help India or China, but it's still a global commodity with a global price. India and China could then buy oil from Russia, Kazakhstan or whatever other country that Europe had been buying from and now isn't because they're getting more oil from the middle east. Does this still raise the price? Yes it does, because there is a reason they were doing it the other way previously -- doing something else will have higher transportation costs. But does it mean 20% of global oil supplies will be cut off? Not really, it mostly means you'll have to increase the average distance it gets transported and pay a few percent more to cover the higher transportation costs.
  - roryirvine 8mo ago
    Much of that domestic consumption is used in the process of extraction and refining, so actually isn't on the market as such. My understanding is that GP is correct to say that the 20% figure rather understates the potential impact of a prolonged shutdown of the Strait. Pipeline capacity to the west is pretty limited. The connection via Syria is affected by the war aftermath, the Iraq/Turkey route is already at capacity, and the Saudi connection to the Red Sea is vulnerable to resumption of Houthi attacks. There's some connectivity via Oman, but that's largely natural gas rather than oil.
Waterluvian 8mo ago
I think it’s wild to me just how much my mainstream news doesn’t feel like it’s covering some of what’s really going on. I have to go to YouTube to see that Iran is successfully fighting back in many ways including hitting oil tankers and depots. Not that I’m claiming the CBC and such are doing something sinister here. Just that I no-longer get the full story vibe I recall getting back in previous U.S. wars.
- davidw 8mo ago
  Corporate media in this moment is... not great. Figuring out what takes its place is a hard problem that no one seems to have cracked. I don't know if its replacement will be very profitable, but we all lose out when media isn't working. Having a shared reality is fundamental for a healthy society.
  - colechristensen 8mo ago
    News organizations need to not be part of larger corporations and a nontrivial amount of their funding needs to be some kind of endowment. Media mergers need to just be illegal, Disney/Viacomm/TimeWarner (god I don't even know what the big ones are any more) need to be broken up. "we don't want to make the administration mad so our merger will be let through" is just absurd.
  - archagon 8mo ago
    Bellingcat is a good one to follow.
- yyyk 8mo ago
  "fighting back" == blowing 3rd party civilian installations.
  - YZF 8mo ago
    They randomly shoot in all directions but they also managed to hit some things (e.g. the US installation in Kuwait and a US radar) that are probably actual legit targets. But yes, hotels, apartment buildings, (civilian) airports, container ships etc. are high on the list of things hit.
ggm 8mo ago
Price moves have hysteresis. The risk element in moving Oil hasn't gone, and the companies are looking to recover lost income in the month(s) and so whilst there is supply, there aren't necessarily boats in convenient places, or complete freedoms to walk off contracts. Give it 30 days, things might have changed.
nchcss76 8mo ago
I feel this is good. It will push economies towards more alternatives(nuclear/solar/wind etc), increase electrification of transport/cooking. Amazon saw India induction stove sales jump 30x after LPG supply hit issues. There is no real reason to be importing expensive gas for cooking, when the induction stove are just much more efficient and cheaper. This is one way to change existing habits that people find uncomfortable letting go off.
- deleted 8mo ago
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- Steltek 8mo ago
  That only works when there's time to adapt. This is like the insane tariff rollercoaster. There was no time to plan or adapt. It was a black swan event and wrecked everything for no appreciable benefit.
keyle 8mo ago
The irony of drill, baby drill, and removing the environmental restrictions, encouraging the sale of petrol cars... And then causing the prices to be jacked up. 2026 I swear..., I'm expected a post on top of HN any day about "i've written all code by hand this month, here is what i learnt".
fulafel 8mo ago
This is worrying about trivialities. We need to be rapidly phasing out fossils usage to mitigate the climate catastrophe. Which of course requires a much much smaller supply of oil. There should be ~ $250/barrel cost added to the market price to account for externalities (barrel of oil releases 0.43 tons of co2 and avg social cost of carbon from https://arxiv.org/html/2402.09125v3 https://arxiv.org/html/2402.09125v3 is $500+/ton)
- BLKNSLVR 8mo ago
  I've found it mind boggling for at least a decade (since solar panels started being a relatively normal consumer addition to the home) that a transition to electric and away from fossil fuels hasn't been an, essentially, national security priority for all countries other than those that produce oil. The dependence, of literally almost everything, on the continuous flow of oil from few parts of the world has been an obvious point of strangulation for longer than I've been alive. I mean, I understand that it's so entrenched that politics is owned by it, but, hell, it's been, what a week and a bit, and already Australian media is trying to talk down panic about petrol shortages. The blind leading the blind.
  - fulafel 8mo ago
    Yes indeed. And of course mitigating the climate catastrophe should be much more entrenched, there's vastly more voters whose lives will be impacted by it than by fortunes of the oil business.
  - belorn 8mo ago
    Look at who advocated to define natural gas as green in EU. The political block that has done the majority of advocating against fossil fuel industries were also the same block that advocate to maintain existing fossil fuel in the power grid. Those same parties are also the one advocating the need to maintain and expand thermal power stations in order to enable more renewable energy, and a increase in energy transmission between nations in order to address the intermittence problem of renewables. The other block in contrast are advocating in favor of fossil fuel industries, but are mixed (some in favor, some against) in regard to thermal power stations, and primarily promotes nuclear for the grid. They are also those that usually bring up national security and energy independence, with reduce dependencies on energy trading to maintain the grid. That block voted against the decision to define natural gas as green. So the political state in EU is that one block promotes fossil fuel in the grid, and the other promotes it in the industries and transportation. We need to be rapidly phasing out fossils usage to mitigate the climate catastrophe, but no side is really willing to give up on what those fossil fuels enable, and that is despite the now many years of wars that have major impact on economy and security.
Animats 8mo ago
Saw a Chevron station in Silicon Valley today with a price above $7/gallon. That's not typical, but it's real.
siliconc0w 8mo ago
It's going higher, there is no viable TACO here and they can keep the strait shut indefinitely. Plus the longer it goes, the harder it is to bring back up production or refining capacity.

71 points by tartoran 8mo ago

npn 8mo ago

it's not like they found anyway to open the Hormuz strait, why should the price be lower. one again the world suffers thank to US stupidity.

measurablefunc 8mo ago

That's because oil tankers are going up in flames: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTzdxq0trb0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTzdxq0trb0

msy 8mo ago

This theory of how the US loses in Iran is looking increasingly likely: https://kasperbenjamin.substack.com/p/why-the-us-will-lose-to-iran https://kasperbenjamin.substack.com/p/why-the-us-will-lose-t... It's going to be incredibly difficult to stop Iran being able to kneecap both the global economy and in particular the gulf states, who are going to be motivated to put maximum pressure on the US to sue for peace. Incredible hubris and a lobotomised diplomatic and intelligence infrastructure in the name of ideological purity, quite the combination.

liuliu 8mo ago
Not really. The U.S. can send in the ground force to restore the trade around the Gulf. The BUT is obvious in this case tho.
- solid_fuel 8mo ago
  That's not a reasonable option, it's a bear-trap. Once troops are on the ground it will be another decades-long slog, and one that ends like Afghanistan at best. At worst, this looks like America's version of Ukraine.
  - YZF 8mo ago
    I can argue both sides but under the assumption (which I think is true) that 80%-90% of Iranians want to remove the regime there's some possibility of success. That said there's also the possibility of screwing things up completely and getting the entire population to fight you as an invader. One thing for sure, it's not going to look like Russia invading Ukraine. The Iranians don't have the resolve or the support or the capabilities that Ukraine had and has. It will look more like Iraq in terms of the ability of the military to put up any resistance. The problem with "boots on the ground" isn't that it can't succeed. The problem is it has zero support from the American public. People feel about this a lot more strongly than the other topics dividing the public.
    - orwin 8mo ago
      Iranian polls show that 20-25% Iranians living in Iran support the IRGC, but due to how the questions were formulated, you can't know who would support a regime change. Polls after the 12 day bombing campaign in 2025 showed that 60% disapproved the bombing. That means you probably have at least a 40% base of support for active overthroing, growing, to change the regime, which is larger than the current supporters. Maybe you could have done something with it. Wait until the previous Komenei died of his cancer instead of martyring him, and wait for the new nomination and the protests that would follow to strike (decapitation of the morality police, species to open the prisons, etc). The way it was done just feels like the US wanted chaos and death, not meaningful change.
- _heimdall 8mo ago
  Trump, the neo-cons, and much of the Republican party might as well hang up their hats if they put boots on the ground (beyond special forces which is often ignored for some reason). The US will be bogged down for years at a minimum if we entered Iran on the ground, or we would lose quickly and tuck tail. This isn't a fight to be won in a conventional war, the administration put every chip they had on a gamble that regime change was possible with air superiority alone. I don't know of any historical example of that working, but I guess we'll see what happens.
  - YZF 8mo ago
    Everyone says there's no historical examples but there is no exact parallel either. I wouldn't argue based on historical precedence here. The challenge is that regime is large and armed and they can hide and weather the storm. They'll hide in hospitals, and mosques, and schools and amongst civilians. Getting them and disrupting their organization to a point where a popular revolt can take over seems ... lessay hard. What needs to happen is that some parts of the military, who are a bit less fanatic, switches sides. The probability of that is very hard to gauge. There are stories of some defecting but hard to know if it's true or not.
    - _heimdall 8mo ago
      Historical precedent is important with regards to predictability. We have no idea if simply bombing them to hell will be enough for regime change, while we do know that there is some lower bound of military involvement on the ground that would have likely success with that goal. Personally I don't see how an air campaign alone can lead to any regime change we'd actually want to see. We are all being told the Iranian public is a cohesive unit with a strong majority wanting to go back to 1978, I don't buy it. The only likely outcomes I see, if the regime is changed at all, is a military coup with even worse people coming in, a very bloody civil war, or a faction in the country we never hear about taking over quickly by promising the world to the public. For the last one, I'd expect that to be a group more akin to the Nazis than some group that actually means well for Iranians.
    - orwin 8mo ago
- robertjpayne 8mo ago
  The ground deployment to the mountains on Iran's side of the strait will have to be absolutely insane to actually eliminate the threat (if it's even possible to) of Iran launching drones or suicide boats at tankers.
deleted 8mo ago
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morkalork 8mo ago
That's a lot of words for describing "attempting MAD doctrine with conventional weapons". Hell, we even got to see a "first strike decapitation countered by autonomous cells with pre-written second strike directives" scenario play out.
itake 8mo ago
1/ When authors use AI for editing, it reduces their credibility. 2/ As much as I don't like the current administration (and Israel leadership), there is absolutely no way the assumptions this article makes about them are false. There is no way the US/Israel didn't calculate that: - the straight would be closed - a new leader may represent similar idiologies of the past leader. Everything that has happened so far (in regards to Iran attacking neighbors) has been extremely predictable. There is just no way these weren't calculated in.
- davidw 8mo ago
  > There is no way the US Eppur si muove. These folks are not our best and brightest. https://www.wsj.com/finance/u-s-plan-to-unblock-strait-of-hormuz-collides-with-realities-of-global-insurance-feec54c6?mod=WSJ_home_mediumtopper_pos_3 https://www.wsj.com/finance/u-s-plan-to-unblock-strait-of-ho...
- robertjpayne 8mo ago
  Maybe the US military commanders, generals and Pentagon knew this but the civilian leadership at the top chose to completely ignore it and can't really articulate a plan or what the plan ever was.
  - itake 8mo ago
    This conflict was a long time coming: Trump claimed Biden or Obama will start a war in Iran and that is why they are weak presidents. Trump sees himself as a peacemaker (flying in to negotiate deals with TH and KH, negotiating Ukraine war, etc). I think there is more going on to cause Trump drastically change his self-image. I don't think this is a Trump administration driven decision.
    - orwin 8mo ago
      All reports are saying the US generals were against this. And a UD senator (Graham I think) just admitted he lobbied trump for the war, comparing him to Roosevelt, and coached Netanyahou on how to lobby trump. Just look at the article: https://www.thedailybeast.com/senator-lindsey-graham-brags-about-how-he-manipulated-trump-79-into-war-with-iran/ https://www.thedailybeast.com/senator-lindsey-graham-brags-a...
jiggawatts 8mo ago
Normally what happens in these scenarios is that both sides declare victory and go home to lick their wounds. The US and Israel can claim that they've caused the IRGC sufficient damage to set them back a decade or more. Iran will declare that they've fought off a superpower with minimal real losses. They can also claim that -- despite intense foreign interference -- they got to choose and keep their preferred leader, alive. For now.
- robertjpayne 8mo ago
  Normally yes, but without regime change the Iranian leadership will have even more resolve than ever to continue weapons programs (nuclear or not) and prepare retaliation for the inevitable next round of bombing… There is no winning here for anyone.
  - jiggawatts 8mo ago
    I'm not claiming either side is actually winning, I'm merely predicting that they'll both claim to have won. On the topic of the weapons program: The Israeli approach is to regularly "mow the lawn" to keep their regional opponents perpetually behind. Iran's nuclear weapons and ICBM programmes have almost certainly been damaged, perhaps enough to delay them for half a decade or more. Then it'll be time to mow the lawn again, or hope that by then a more moderate leadership can sign an agreement with a new US president that's a bit more trustworthy than the current one.
steve_adams_86 8mo ago
This is written a bit like the US dollar depends solely on the price of oil, which isn't true. It also seems like if we're to game theory this, we'd need to plot out the full escalation capacity of the USA, which the author is failing to do here. I don't like the idea of doing that because the thought is sickening, but it's necessary to consider the entire decision tree to make a remotely rational model. In retrospect I guess game theory is used kind of rhetorically here. If you consider what's written through that lens, it's very poorly developed and doesn't make sense. Maybe this is a thing, though? Am I misunderstanding what the author means by game theory here? I do think the asymmetry of war costs are a serious problem for the USA, and the less they're willing to escalate or otherwise mitigate this, the more serious that problem becomes. If I were to make a statement like the author did about the war, I'd frame it more like "this is going to be insanely fucking risky and expensive for the USA", but certainly not that they'll lose. edit: Listening to the Professor Jiang analysis and I understand why game theory was referenced now. He seems much more thorough and analytical so far. edit again: he claims Dubai will probably go bankrupt in one scenario. This seems exceedingly unlikely, but he doesn't explain why it could be true
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silisili 8mo ago
Whatever points this author was trying to make were completely obliterated by the LLM it was run through or used to generate it. A shame because it seems to have interesting points, but was too wordy and LLMified to keep attention. Stop telling me what it's not every other sentence, and just say what you mean. I wish folks would just use their own words.
tinyhouse 8mo ago
Israel and the US completely control their airspace and Iran's entire navy got demolished. I think the US prefers not to got too far as they prefer to keep the negotiation talks open. According to reports they asked Israel not to target energy for example.
- onlypassingthru 8mo ago
  > Israel and the US completely control their airspace Maybe the soldiers sending shaheds and missiles hitting other countries every day haven't gotten the memo? Did somebody forget to put a cover sheet on it?
shubhamjain 8mo ago
You might expect events like this to fundamentally change the global order or bring some sanity to U.S. policymaking. But nothing is going to change. It will be chaotic few years, but soon enough, everything will be conveniently forgotten. Iranian/Syrian/Afganian threat will reappear, the war-mongers and Israel-lobby will once more push for pre-emptive strikes, assassinations of leaders or generals. Rinse and repeat. At its core, the problem is a militarized, propaganda-driven state masquareding itself as a necessary guarantor of global order, while its sole objective is nothing more than letting no other nation threaten its supremacy. And much of the world continuing to accept that narrative either because of lack of alternatives or out of necessity.
- YZF 8mo ago
  The core of the problem is that the US stepped back under Obama from being the guarantor of global order. The world needs policing and deterrence is the sad reality otherwise everything goes to hell. Why did Russia attack Ukraine? Why is China threatening to attack Taiwan? Without the US (and the west more generally) Russia would retake half of Europe and China would have taken Taiwan. If you think there would be world peace you are so very much mistaken (speaking of propaganda). If you goal is to speak Russian and Chinese and live in those sorts of regimes then that's very much aligned with the US and the West just stepping back and not using force ever.
  - tpm 8mo ago
    > The core of the problem is that the US stepped back under Obama from being the guarantor of global order. That is not the core of the problem. We can go a bit further: - Obama was a reaction to overstepping under Bush. As a 'guarantor of global order' the US created a lot of disorder with Iraq and Afganistan. That is actually more in line with what historically the US understands under 'the global order': the US does what it wants to do and calls it the global order. - also the relative standing of the US since the end of the 90s is falling, because of the rise of other countries. That was widely expected and forecasted. What was also expected is that empires on their way out don't act rationally, because there is ample historical precendent to that. And so here we are.
YZF 8mo ago
Wars are hard to predict and the economy is hard to predict. There's easy money in the making for those who are sure the oil price is going to continue way up. The blog you reference has inaccuracies. Drones are generally not shot by THAAD is a glaring one. It's very much not 2-3 million dollars to $50k. Helicopter gunships shoot down drones with bullets these days is very common and there are other economic means of bringing them down. Most of the heavy lifting in suppressing these attacks is done by other drones patrolling the skies and attacking anything that tries to fire. Those also don't use extremely expensive munitions. "Iran produces approximately 500 of these drones per day and holds a stockpile estimated at around 80,000 units.". Both these are false today. I'd also question if they were true when Iran was attacked. These figures don't pass the smell test and either way any stockpile is an instant target. Everyone seems to be an expert today. It's obviously not great that the Hormuz straits are more or less closed. We've seen in Yemen that a ragtag force can be massively attacked and still manage to fire at ships on a much larger body of water. That said we didn't really see if they can sustain it for months under heavy attack which is a possible premise here. There are some pipelines bypassing the straits but their capacity is much smaller. It's also about 20% of the world supply so definitely other suppliers can make up for some of the loss at a cost. I'm not an expert. But the current oil price reflects what the experts think best. And that price is still below what it was for about half of 2022. And fluctuating. What will matter is the price over months.
- msy 8mo ago
  Absolutely agree there's both some dubious suppositions and hand-waving there. The real question is I suspect how much pressure the GCC can withstand and how much pressure they can apply to Trump directly given business ties etc. If they lose a serious chunk of desalination capacity for example the situation becomes dire extremely quickly. For Dubai simply not having a decent supply of fresh food would alone be an economic catastrophe, every day this drags on is doing reputational damage that'll take years to fully recover from long after the hotel facades are patched up.
- mrtksn 8mo ago
  > The blog you reference has inaccuracies. Drones are generally not shot by THAAD is a glaring one It's obvious that the author doesn't mean THAAD but Patriot, which are indeed used against drones. You can tell that by the missle cost the author mentions, which is 1/10th of the THAAD missle. As the argument is a cost effectiveness argument the logic holds, just replace THAAD with Patriot. Even though Ukraine offered their cost effective solution, they have a war to fight so any serious capacity increase will probably take months if not years and these things are not static and are quickly shaped on the battlefield so the Gulf states and Israel and USA will need to develop talent that is on the battlefield, like Russia and Ukraine did.
3eb7988a1663 8mo ago
Japan, an island nation with virtually no natural resources of its own, depends on it for a staggering 75% of its oil. Japan’s Prime Minister has warned plainly that if the Strait closes, the entire Japanese economy will collapse within eight to nine months. Not slow down. Not a contract. Collapse. I am failing to an article about this, but that is absolutely incredible if true.

notepad0x90 8mo ago

https://polymarket.com/event/will-crude-oil-cl-hit-by-end-of-march https://polymarket.com/event/will-crude-oil-cl-hit-by-end-of... I wonder how prediction markets are affecting all this.

YZF 8mo ago
In the sense that someone is manipulating the real world to make money in the prediction markets? Otherwise it's just like options.
- notepad0x90 8mo ago
  No, in the sense that he people who set oil prices and government policy alike can trade in those prediction markets. I'm all for the markets, very democratic and libertarian (not that I'm one), but policy makers, executives and other people from whom a conflict of interest by a prediction market translates into disaster for real people should be restricted from participating in these markets.
  - YZF 8mo ago
    OK. So I think your answer is actually a yes? In this case however you can pretty much do the same thing with other financial instruments like future contract on oil. Either way, I agree decision makers shouldn't be allowed to trade (and I think are forbidden in most countries).
    - notepad0x90 8mo ago
      You can do the same with proper financial instruments, but there are insider trading laws that prevent those people with insider knowledge from profiting, but these markets have no such restrictions.
      - YZF 8mo ago
        Are you sure insider trading laws do not apply? I'd be surprised.

_heimdall 8mo ago

The stat has been raised frequently of late that 20% of the world's oil floes through the Straight. My understanding is that its 20% of total oil, but that around half of all oil production is used domestically where it is produced and never enters global markets. Unless I missed something when fact checking that, Iran is capable cutting off 40% of all purchasable oil.

perfmode 8mo ago
75% of Japan’s oil. 60% of India’s oil. 40% of China’s oil. is what i’ve heard.
AnthonyMouse 8mo ago
There are several issues with that math. To begin with, it assumes that oil currently used domestically isn't on the market, but what do you expect oil producers to do if foreign buyers make a higher bid for the "domestic" oil? Or to put it another way, there's a reason the market price goes up by essentially the same amount in the oil-producing countries as everywhere else. Then it assumes that oil that currently goes through the Strait has to. Oil can also leave the middle east by going west, e.g. to Europe. You might think that doesn't help India or China, but it's still a global commodity with a global price. India and China could then buy oil from Russia, Kazakhstan or whatever other country that Europe had been buying from and now isn't because they're getting more oil from the middle east. Does this still raise the price? Yes it does, because there is a reason they were doing it the other way previously -- doing something else will have higher transportation costs. But does it mean 20% of global oil supplies will be cut off? Not really, it mostly means you'll have to increase the average distance it gets transported and pay a few percent more to cover the higher transportation costs.
- roryirvine 8mo ago
  Much of that domestic consumption is used in the process of extraction and refining, so actually isn't on the market as such. My understanding is that GP is correct to say that the 20% figure rather understates the potential impact of a prolonged shutdown of the Strait. Pipeline capacity to the west is pretty limited. The connection via Syria is affected by the war aftermath, the Iraq/Turkey route is already at capacity, and the Saudi connection to the Red Sea is vulnerable to resumption of Houthi attacks. There's some connectivity via Oman, but that's largely natural gas rather than oil.

Waterluvian 8mo ago

I think it’s wild to me just how much my mainstream news doesn’t feel like it’s covering some of what’s really going on. I have to go to YouTube to see that Iran is successfully fighting back in many ways including hitting oil tankers and depots. Not that I’m claiming the CBC and such are doing something sinister here. Just that I no-longer get the full story vibe I recall getting back in previous U.S. wars.

davidw 8mo ago
Corporate media in this moment is... not great. Figuring out what takes its place is a hard problem that no one seems to have cracked. I don't know if its replacement will be very profitable, but we all lose out when media isn't working. Having a shared reality is fundamental for a healthy society.
- colechristensen 8mo ago
  News organizations need to not be part of larger corporations and a nontrivial amount of their funding needs to be some kind of endowment. Media mergers need to just be illegal, Disney/Viacomm/TimeWarner (god I don't even know what the big ones are any more) need to be broken up. "we don't want to make the administration mad so our merger will be let through" is just absurd.
- archagon 8mo ago
  Bellingcat is a good one to follow.
yyyk 8mo ago
"fighting back" == blowing 3rd party civilian installations.
- YZF 8mo ago
  They randomly shoot in all directions but they also managed to hit some things (e.g. the US installation in Kuwait and a US radar) that are probably actual legit targets. But yes, hotels, apartment buildings, (civilian) airports, container ships etc. are high on the list of things hit.

ggm 8mo ago

Price moves have hysteresis. The risk element in moving Oil hasn't gone, and the companies are looking to recover lost income in the month(s) and so whilst there is supply, there aren't necessarily boats in convenient places, or complete freedoms to walk off contracts. Give it 30 days, things might have changed.

nchcss76 8mo ago

I feel this is good. It will push economies towards more alternatives(nuclear/solar/wind etc), increase electrification of transport/cooking. Amazon saw India induction stove sales jump 30x after LPG supply hit issues. There is no real reason to be importing expensive gas for cooking, when the induction stove are just much more efficient and cheaper. This is one way to change existing habits that people find uncomfortable letting go off.

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Steltek 8mo ago
That only works when there's time to adapt. This is like the insane tariff rollercoaster. There was no time to plan or adapt. It was a black swan event and wrecked everything for no appreciable benefit.

keyle 8mo ago

The irony of drill, baby drill, and removing the environmental restrictions, encouraging the sale of petrol cars... And then causing the prices to be jacked up. 2026 I swear..., I'm expected a post on top of HN any day about "i've written all code by hand this month, here is what i learnt".

fulafel 8mo ago

This is worrying about trivialities. We need to be rapidly phasing out fossils usage to mitigate the climate catastrophe. Which of course requires a much much smaller supply of oil. There should be ~ $250/barrel cost added to the market price to account for externalities (barrel of oil releases 0.43 tons of co2 and avg social cost of carbon from https://arxiv.org/html/2402.09125v3 https://arxiv.org/html/2402.09125v3 is $500+/ton)

BLKNSLVR 8mo ago
I've found it mind boggling for at least a decade (since solar panels started being a relatively normal consumer addition to the home) that a transition to electric and away from fossil fuels hasn't been an, essentially, national security priority for all countries other than those that produce oil. The dependence, of literally almost everything, on the continuous flow of oil from few parts of the world has been an obvious point of strangulation for longer than I've been alive. I mean, I understand that it's so entrenched that politics is owned by it, but, hell, it's been, what a week and a bit, and already Australian media is trying to talk down panic about petrol shortages. The blind leading the blind.
- fulafel 8mo ago
  Yes indeed. And of course mitigating the climate catastrophe should be much more entrenched, there's vastly more voters whose lives will be impacted by it than by fortunes of the oil business.
- belorn 8mo ago
  Look at who advocated to define natural gas as green in EU. The political block that has done the majority of advocating against fossil fuel industries were also the same block that advocate to maintain existing fossil fuel in the power grid. Those same parties are also the one advocating the need to maintain and expand thermal power stations in order to enable more renewable energy, and a increase in energy transmission between nations in order to address the intermittence problem of renewables. The other block in contrast are advocating in favor of fossil fuel industries, but are mixed (some in favor, some against) in regard to thermal power stations, and primarily promotes nuclear for the grid. They are also those that usually bring up national security and energy independence, with reduce dependencies on energy trading to maintain the grid. That block voted against the decision to define natural gas as green. So the political state in EU is that one block promotes fossil fuel in the grid, and the other promotes it in the industries and transportation. We need to be rapidly phasing out fossils usage to mitigate the climate catastrophe, but no side is really willing to give up on what those fossil fuels enable, and that is despite the now many years of wars that have major impact on economy and security.

Animats 8mo ago

Saw a Chevron station in Silicon Valley today with a price above $7/gallon. That's not typical, but it's real.

siliconc0w 8mo ago

It's going higher, there is no viable TACO here and they can keep the strait shut indefinitely. Plus the longer it goes, the harder it is to bring back up production or refining capacity.