Originally Posted by
Hubcapped
fair enough, i meant with regard to military hardware.
the overall point remains the same. Can we squeeze iran enough without boots on the ground to establish an iads? People here say they will commit jihad with a nuke, why would they not keep the straight closed (as theyve proven they can despite our conventional military superiority) and suffer the lost revenue using cheap drones that we have objectively not been able to counter. You cant have it both ways here.
one plus from all this that a previous poster mentioned is that this may instigate a diversification of traffic that went through there.
Ahh, ok, I see what you are saying about that cost in your earlier post. Fair enough.
The flip side of the quoted argument is, however, that if they are crazy enough to do all that, shutdown the Straight with drones and mines, cutting their own throats while losing $450M/day in illicit oil revenue, a crashing Rial/exonomy, and no oil storage remaining, forcing them to shutdown production (a major blow not easy to reverse as I understand), what makes you think they
only want a nuke for deterrence?
Can people genuinely say there is not a real risk they will use it? Iran is run by radical ideologues. They aren’t in the same category of other rational actors. And in geopolitical terms, even NK is a rational actor.
Part of this is also about countering China over the medium/long term, as an ancillary benefit if not part of the calculus.