No. of Recommendations: 3
I mean, that's the point of sanctions, right? To punish the sanctioned country? I'm sure they might have preferred to have a little more market demand, but I'm sure they regarded the economic pain inflicted on Iran as somewhat worth it.
What's the point of sanctions? To enable the world's #2 economy to be able to buy cheap oil?
You've mentioned this a few times, but I genuinely don't understand the logic. We've always had the ability to just give up on sanctioning regimes if we wanted them to be able to sell oil freely - and doing that doesn't really "remake" oil markets, just eliminates the modest "sanction discount" that purchasers received.
I have mentioned this a few times.
What are you talking about? Iran's outperformed expectations.
Only in the eyes of CNN and msnow. To everyone else, they've shown themselves to be rather ordinary.
As for Malacca, that's not really an outcome of this foolish military "excursion." It's certainly good for the U.S., of course - though it's helpful to remember that Indonesia is still balancing the U.S. and China here. It's not going to "have the US Navy all over it" - the MDC doesn't massively shift U.S. naval presence in the region. It's still significant for our ability to monitor that area - we're not getting basis, but we're getting the ability to overfly and surveil that we didn't have before.
We're getting repair facilities and more. Furthermore, the SoM are only 2 miles wide. You don't need the US Navy all over it as you do *under* it which was exactly the deal we signed with the Indonesians.
And global energy markets aren't "shifting to the US."
Okay. Guess the world loves the status quo.
Isn't that more true of us than Xi?
No
The U.S. unable to meet their strategic goals, openly shown to be incapable of opening the strait of Hormuz against a much smaller power, and having Iran be able to penetrate their anti-missile defenses sufficient to hit multiple U.S. bases with home-built technology?
Okay, sure.
