The Ukraine would like to have a word.

Of course that could be the entire idea.

- We likely don't have the assets to move the amount traffic that needs to get through

- We probably can't protect them perfectly (we don't have maritime supremacy) so ships will still take damage and that will stop the convoys pretty quickly

I suspect the escort ships would be fine though. They can defend themselves.

So if we did start them, they wouldn't continue for long until the economic pain was pretty massive and the cost of loosing ships was worth it.

That's harder than bombing schools, goat herders or kidnapping the leader of the most corrupt country in the world, are you sure they can still pull it off, I'm starting to think even they know they cannot anymore.

After seeing the latest white house CoD style propaganda videos and Pete "Kafir" Hegseth speeches it's clear the people in charge completely lost it

> In After the Empire, written in 2001, Todd claimed that the reason for America’s “theatrical micromilitarism” was to prove that it was still an indispensable power in a post-USSR world. In his latest work, however, he revises this thesis, arguing that it would imply attributing rational intentions to Washington.13 The American liberal oligarchy is not driven by any clear project.

https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2024/11/how-the-west-was-...

The WW2 convoy situation was far easier to escort (but still quite dangerous obviously) because:

1. The Atlantic is a much bigger place, even considering common routes and chokepoints.

2. U-Boats had to surface frequently, making them extremely vulnerable to Allied air cover.

3. U-Boats had to be within visual range to strike convoys, versus the drone and missile world we live in now.

This 'Venezuelan oil' is a pipe dream for the moment. It will take a significant amount of years to get anywhere near completed.

USA, Europe, and many other countries depend on China for manufacturing. I doubt that this is going to solve inflation.

But it will fill the pockets of a few people in oil rich countries that can still export.

You are mistaken to assume there was a goal. Trump has admitted he did this because he was told that Iran were about to attack the U.S. not because of any strategic goal.

https://youtube.com/shorts/YlkcOjSQVJk

While also hurting Europe, South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, and many more. Very on point...

It will hurt everyone, Americans included, oil is a global market, fertilisers are a global market, those are basic inputs for probably every single thing produced in the world.

So now all of us around the globe have to pay the price for American Imperialism, compounded by the complete shattering of the USA's soft power as an ally, this will only create more animosity against the USA from all sides. Very on point.

But the USA oil industry can make a buck until everything buckles, or perhaps the USA admin will introduce price controls like in the 1970s, that worked very well too.

There is no crisis that would create a situation where elections "cannot be held".

That is to say, if the current admin attempts to suspend elections, the legality of that and the magnitude of the reaction will be the same, crisis or no.

But they claimed "flawless victory".

Both things cannot be true at the same time.

They keep making the same mistake: underestimating that your adversary gets a vote, whether it's Iran, trade partners, colleges, Colbert, the Kennedy Center's audience, or Minneapolis.

It's not that it's impossible to go through it, but you have to do something specific in order to do so beyond just trying to go through, or you're going to walk straight into getting a bloodey nose.

But yeah, these ships weren't anywhere near the strait.

Maybe in hindsight, "flooding the zone" will be considered a much bigger threat than it is today. Most of what's going on in the last 12 months have happened in plain sight and would have never worked 30 years ago. Today, it just flies, attention span be damned.

We have so much stuff that we just throw things away if a tiny piece of it gets tarnished / broken.

The US's population density is pretty low and we have a ton of land not in cities that's very sparsely populated.

Like it largely seems that geopolitics of now is about creating scarcity.

Neither of which is actually true for oil. We're still finding oil reserves faster than we deplete them, major users such as China are rapidly decarbonizing, and the price was relatively low before the war.

But the people in power thought it was true, which is all that matters.

Case in point: switching from oil to renewables - which can lower dependency to external actors a lot as solar panels and windmills have life span of years, so even if the producers suddenly refuses to sell more, one has some time to find an alternative - was done slower than it could have because of "discussions".

Since 20 years I almost feel the discussion "climate change or not" is fueled by people that want dependency on oil, such that we don't talk about the issue of a couple of big producer points of failure (USA, Russia, Gulf countries). Not sure if oil companies are smart enough to finance green groups (to which I agree generally but is besides the point), such that the public discourse stays in a conflict area (climate) rather than a simple one (independence), but if they are that would be meta-evil.

This is directly caused by technology. Morons have helped the worst possible people build surveillance and coordination and propaganda networks and are all confused pikachu about that going exactly the way you should have expected it to go.

Technology was also bypassing the "resource" problem at warp speed. Solar panels are the energy future, and thanks to China being actually good at strategic planning, solar can be deployed and utilized far faster than any other energy innovation. With the sheer abundance possible through bulk solar, water scarcity is an engineering issue, about manufacturing enough plumbing and membranes to desalinate whatever you need.

We are fighting an 80s oil war because people voted for an 80s TV personality to run our country after he was known to rape kids, brag about Mein Kampf (even though everyone knows he doesn't read for fun), and attempt to invalidate the 2020 election.

Israel saw a clear opening to wildly advance their imperialist ambitions and because Donald Trump is so damn stupid we have jumped in to this absurdist situation because Donald Trump wanted to be seen shooting first, because he thinks that looks "Strong".

Really.

https://open-ev-charts.org/#global:electric-sales:quarter

It won't change rapidly in the US, because the current administration opposes renewables at every turn and keeps low cost BEVs out of the US, but most of the world's energy/oil needs are outside the US. This situation will accelerate a global process that was already gaining speed.