China benefits here - they import Russian crude oil over land, so their costs won't increase as much as the international market (unless Russia uses the leverage to absorb all the benefit, which I doubt), but more crucially: the alternative to oil fuel is renewables, and China dominates renewables so a spike in demand for solar/batteries will be a godsend for them.
No, they don't. 54% of their oil comes from the middle east. Only 20% comes from Russia.
China does have a healthy oil reserve at the moment, so this may be marginally less bad for them. And yes, their electricity comes from renewables, but like in any other country, all of their logistics run on diesel.
By starting this war, the United States, unsatisfied with flipping the table on bilateral trade with other countries just flipped the table on multipolar international trade. What a time to be alive.
Taiwan, Japan, and Korea, though - totally dependent on imports for oil.
Something that most pundits have missed: unlike all other US wars since Korea, the US can't end this war by pulling out. Iran, unlike all US combat opponents from Vietnam to Venezuela, has the demonstrated ability to strike well beyond its borders. This war isn't over until both sides say it's over.
Yep, now if IR survives, I see no reason for them not to double down on even longer range missiles. Like, why not?
Even if you don't blow up a nuclear plant, it seems like cutting the power from one would be relatively easy.
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?
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.
This link is just one of many that all suggest that the US is just not set up to refine light crude.
Like hell he could.
- every Canadian
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.
They've started bombing the oil in infrastructure
Would you like to say which parts are the wrong parts?
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.
https://theaviationist.com/2026/03/06/typhoon-spotted-rocket...`
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cr5ll27z52do
As the friendly article says, the US military has no idea about how commercial shipping works and how hard it will be convince anybody to transit through an active war zone.
If the tankers are primarily for the benefit of Asia and not the US do you risk bringing additional parties with a grievance into your conflict?
When the action you are talking about is, for anyone other than the US or Israel, signing up to become a co-belligerent with the US & Israel in their war with Iran? Yeah, the realistic options for who might do it are pretty limited.
- the crew - the company - the insurer
The company has an obvious reason to take on some amount of risk to move a vessel through the Straight. However, both the crew and the insurer will be quite risk averse, so the Navy would need to demonstrate a very high success rate in intercepting both missiles and shaheds to convince those two other groups to say "yes".
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.
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.
If someone backstabbed me twice while we were in negotiations, I would not give them 3rd chance for negotiations, US and Israel really f....d their reputation after 2 attacks while in negotiations
So negotiations were not useful at that state anyway.
Negotiations require honest interest from both parties to honor the deal.
I know IAEA was allowed for inspections as agreed, but IAEA started leaking information to Israel and Iran stopped sharing more info with them.
Surprisingly, Israel, the country who didn't allow IAEA at all, while owning nuclear arsenal is attacking another country for "not-complying" with IAEA
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
- The USA eventually declares some arbitrary "victory" condition.
- Iran will be left even poorer, and much less able to defend itself conventionally, but will remain under the same regime. Very likely they give up cooperating with atomic energy inspectors and do what North Korea did to a acquire weapons.
- Israel's ability to dictate US foreign and military policy will be degraded long term. What many commentators do not see is how anti-Israel younger consevatives trend in the US now. It will be decades or before a serious anti-Israel republican candidate will be fielded, but it is inevitable, and even your typical greatest-ally-wall-kissers will have to moderate themselves.
Will be very interesting to see what the mid terms bring. Some on the American right are already talking about voting democrat to protest - MAGA was specifically sold to them as an antidote to necon middle eatern entanglements.
(I'm not claiming that this is a good scenario, just a likely one.)
So you'll have a permanently aggrieved population with nothing to lose saturated with know-how and materials for building missiles and drones who will just keep taking pot shots at ships and possibly commercial airliners. They don't have to "close" the straight - just make it hazardous enough that it becomes permanently very risky to sail through there. They can go dormant for 3 months and then send 30 drones at a single ship.
I'm not sure who in the strategic planning decided that no system of government for 90 million people was a good idea, but it seems quite insane to me.
They just accidentally killed them all.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/03/world/middleeast/iranian-...
onecommentman•3h ago
But an absolutely absurd title. There is no citation in the article to anyone, much less “they all said”, who said a Hormuz closure would be brief. And I’d expect “brief” to be defined in somewhere in the article, and it isn’t. Expect better from Lloyd’s. Are they this sloppy in their underwriting? This topic doesn’t need click-bait, it’s important enough.
This blockade scenario had been identified and studied for several decades by major industrial powers, and contingency plans and stockpiling has been part and parcel of industrial planning by those powers. It’s orders of magnitude less globally impactful than any scenarios involving nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles in that “comic opera/snuff film” the world calls the Middle East.
kdheiwns•1h ago
01100011•52m ago
Petrochemicals are a big part of the world economy. Energy is needed to get workers to work, factories to run, and ships to move.
This could slow goods production on par with covid. Forward looking financial markets which, by and large, failed to predict this will likely overreact as well. If the private credit bubble bursts coincident with market panic we could see a major financial crisis (maybe not GFC, but big).
It's a big price just to cover up the Epstein Files...
mkoubaa•28m ago