Probably because China gets a lot of their oil from Iran. Which is a problem (for them) with the US blockade. A little bit of hurt to go around for everyone until this mess is resolved.

On that note, seems that Iran is about 10ish days away from turning off their oil pipes. If that happens, it’ll either cost too much to turn back on or it won’t turn on due to irreparable damage. Not gonna pretend to be an expert in all this, but if the above is true, there’s a chance this is over soon enough with a deal in favor of the US

Iran will ride this out longer than the will of the American people to ride this out.

The difference between sitting on your couch and dropping bombs thousands of miles away. Versus. Having 2 countries drop bombs on your country, kill your leadership, threaten to annihilate you and your infrastructure while in the same breath encouraging you to “uprise.” Iranians are Iranians first. Their hatred of the Ayatollah leadership is far less than their hatred of being bombed and threatened by the United States and Israel.



Good luck trying to ride this out with the Persian empire. They have far more patience than the typical American voter.

There will be pressure from the Chinese. Iranians are not isolationist like they would like to appear.

Reports are they are moving to pinch off money supply for payroll.

What are Americans actually riding out? The Backstreet Boys were just in the news for breaking records in Vegas.

Not to sure if very many entertainment acts in Iran are setting profitability records right now.

Americans were promised “low prices” and for some reason actually believed said promise, despite zero details on how to achieve said “low prices”. Prices continued to slowly rise, as they were guaranteed to do no matter who was in charge. Now they are increasing FAST because of what has happened. Americans care about prices. The higher the prices the more ornery they get. As a matter of fact it’s kind of all they care about. “It’s the economy stupid”

I reckon gas has to hit $8 or so before we really start to see major pull backs. Still a long way from that. But the optics of seeing $4 or $5 gas when it was $3 a year ago aren't great and will start to erode spending.

People driving efficient vehicles aren't taking much of a hit. A 50 mpg hybrid it's about $30/month more assuming 15k miles. A 15 mpg truck more like $100/month.

To your credit, so far it seems this has had almost no effect on consumer spending. Hopefully they keep buying airline tickets.

Likely if not assured.

38b with zip to show for what’s going to take at least a year to regenerate in trade business. All that under orders of an overlord riding high on empty promises of no new wars. Leaving us but one thing to do now.

Iran has “shut-in expertise” and has handled this before without permanent field damage in most cases. The patience of the IRGC far exceeds the patience of everyday Americans who were already stretched pre-war. The IRGC are well aware of:

• $200 oil impact
• US Bond market fragility
• Nov Midterms

Gas prices are approaching $5
Diesel $6
jet A headed to the moon and has several airlines on life support
Pentagon estimates 6 MONTHS to clear the Hormuz

if the Pentagon’s estimate is true deep global recession becomes the base case scenario with a global depression a concerningly high probability

We should book mark this post and come back to it in a year. Similar doom and gloom was said regarding the tariffs. Is it possible? Sure. I think it’s unlikely though

The US aviation companies folding is Great. Vans, Sonex, now Waco, many others...We see similar things happening in a lot of industries. To some extent, the natural cycle of things, but to a large extent, tariffs ignore how inter-connected business is in the world. What we've seen so far is making "favorites" for large companies that can afford to lobby the administration to cut or remove their tariffs. Meanwhile, it crunches the little guys and virtually nowhere does it "bring back" manufacturing.

The only reason the most dire predictions about tariffs didn't come true, is because the actual tariffs implemented were drastically less than those announced on "Liberation Day" (and now we're at 15 percent). If the tariffs initially announced at 50 -- 100 pct had been implemented as promised, we would be looking at a very different economy right now. But it's impossible to prove a negative...

Very possibly. Zealots are like that. The last Japanese soldier didn’t surrender until 29 years after the war was officially ended. He surrendered only after the Japanese government found his previous commander and flew him to the Philippines with written orders to formally relieve him of duty and return to Japan in retirement.

Yep. The whole “island-hopping “ campaign was about blockading Japanese troops on islands in the Pacific so the Marines didn’t die rooting out zealots. Reasonable people would have seen they were losing and surrendered to avoid bloodshed. But the Japanese out waited the Americans and eventually the American President had enough - and there went Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

You have to include the projected casualties in an invasion of the Japanese mainland in the nuke decision…it wasn’t just a “I’m tired of this” moment. The war in the pacific was beyond brutal for all involved. Just saying.

Oh, clearly. The use of the nukes was to avoid the “boots on the ground” option, at least until an unconditional surrender was signed by the senior leadership. Lowest estimate on an assault on the Japanese home islands was a quarter million US dead. Upper estimate was 4 million. that was from a total US population of only 138 million.

If the Iranians are betting it can’t happen again, they are misreading history. The US is THE ONLY nation to have ever used nukes in anger. They would be fools to assume it can NEVER happen again.

Sometimes you need to remind even sociopaths that they aren’t necessarily the only sociopaths in the world.

In a Foreign Affairs essay where the author discusses effective and ineffective use of economic chokepoints he briefly discusses tariffs. (By and large ineffective)
In it he uses our largest trading partner, Canada, to illustrate his point. Due to the harm that high tariffs caused for US industry, by end of December 2025 the Canadian tariff rate was 3.5%. Essentially unchanged from December 2024.

On April 7th Trump tweeted a threat to destroy the Persian nation with nuclear weapons. (".....never to be brought back again")
And yes, it appears that he came to that point simply due to impatience. (He had grown frustrstrated with them not surrendering and our economy was being harmed)

It isn't the summer of '45. We are not in a total war situation with Iran.(although Iran has been put in a situation where they are in a total war circumstance with the USA)
We know what using them entails.

Assuming the use could be limited to Iran only, (not a certainty) after the collapse of the Iranian government from the use of nukes, then what?
How would the humanitarian crisis be addressed?
How would the refugee crisis be addressed?
How would the USA survive the fallout of joining the ranks of history's greatest criminals?
How would the world avoid devolving to Hobbesian chaos and fractured disaster?
Only complete "f.. .ing morons" think that today a nuke can be used and it will be just a 'one off, that's it' event.

I hope someday we find out what occurred on April 7th.
And then put structures in place to control any phsycopaths with access to such power.

The true believers of the doomsday scenario should be buying a fleet of Priuses and motorcycles to flip and turn a tidy profit in a couple of months.

In the real world, Prius sales are absolutely tanking right now. (Loosing market share to the hybrid Camry and other hybrids)

I dunno.

It's all performative. There wasn't a word about any of this when the Obama administration was bombing the Libyans into the stone age, or when there was total collapse in that country, resulting in open-air slave markets.

All dominant faith scriptures condemn suicidal acts. Shaheed is the Muslim phrase for martyr. Martyrs, like chaplain authorized justification for soldiers killing stacks of enemy in battle, are exempt from Islamic guilt. Who’s the moron if you think cornered extremists can’t or won’t use atomic arrows? Israel for one, isn’t going to take that chance. Self preservation over moral misgivings every time.

Could Libya control 20% of oil transport?

Yes it was an "All Hands on Deck Total War". Hard for us to even understand how Americans felt about it. To say nothing of our allies, who were also all hands on deck, but with their cities bombed to rubble.

Perfectly justified to use nukes to save even one US life and one US dollar. But it also saved years and presumably north of 1 million Japanese lives too. Also... nobody at the time really understood the longer-term side-effects from the use of such weapons so you have to look at it in the context of just a very large Boom. Not sure it would have mattered if they had known, but you can't blame them for hypotheticals.

No, it is not “justified to use nukes” on population “to save even one US life or one US dollar. UFB.

It’s hard to understand the scale of death at that point in the war. After Okinawa, what would you have suggested the course of action be? The conventional tactic would have been a mainland invasion with up to a million dead.

Here’s a great video detailing the fallen of WW2. Worth the watch: The Fallen of WW2

I think the use of a nuke(s) against Japan to save 1m US lives in WWII was almost certainly justified, but that's not what he said. RTFP.

That's a highly inefficient way to play the Crisis. Much easier investments to make with far more asymmetric upside:

• Ultra Deepwater Drillships
• Gulf of America and West Africa Oil Producers (Shipping routes avoid conflict areas)
• US land based Oil and Gas Services businesses (especially the ones where you can write off depreciation against W2 income)
• GOA area Natural Gas Producers(LNG exports)
• Uranium producers
• Thermal Coal Miners
• US based Fertilizer and Chemicals Producers
• LR and MR product tankers(US
• Gold Miners (when bond market breaks)

You think that would be more profitable than a few pipeline projects to push oil across the desert.

Seems like Saudi and UAE have feasible infrastructure to expand pipeline routes.

Don't quote me out of context.

In the context of 1945, after everything the US had been through and everything they were about to go through to get to unconditional surrender. Again, to them, it was just a big bomb, there was no quasi-religious anti-nuclear cult aspect at the time. Killed fewer people than fire-bombing in Tokyo.

Today it would be clearly illegal and non-proportional to use nukes in response to a much smaller conventional attack, in addition to whatever philosophical concerns you might have.

But worth pointing out that a mass-casualty event on the scale of 9/11 actually did cross the line, a nuclear response would have been legal, assuming you could identify and target the guilty party. Not that international "legal" even matters at that point, US policy is deliberately strategically ambiguous. You do not have to wait until somebody nukes you first.

The context of 1945 was an estimate of a million US casualties by conventional means not "to save even one US life or one US dollar." Thus, my response. I am glad you now seem to agree it "would be clearly illegal and non-proportional" today.

The thing about oil is just when you invest in long term projects prices tend to come crashing down. Lots of booms and busts along the way.

Stop gaslighting.

At the time, they probably would have used the bomb to prevent even very minimal further loss of life and treasure, perfectly understandable after all they had been through.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki would be just fine today. It's a little weird because of the timing, the obvious justification would have been Pearl Harbor and related attacks in the Pacific. But they didn't have the bomb yet so the whole thing dragged out for years. We attempted to get Japan to surrender once we did have the bomb, they declined, so we did a demonstration, rinse wash, repeat and then they came around. Pretty good restrain actually, that they just did one demonstration to start.

Nuking someone because their suicide bomber detonated a vest in a shopping mall would be non-proportional.

The scale of 9/11 was in the ballpark for justification, if somebody actually wanted to go there and you could identify a culprit to target. Most administrations would probably not.

Also I retract my comment about "legality". "Legal" is irrelevant wrt to nuclear weapons, if it gets to that point we're way beyond the nuances of what UN delegates might chatter about at a cocktail party, or what anybody else thinks.

Plus any pipeline and associated pump stations etc are easy targets.
Not to mention the terminals themselves.
Reference Ukraine and Russia's facilities.
"Raining oil" after Ukrainian drone attacks.

No, 'they' would not have used nukes for minimal loss of life or treasure.

Not even close if it involved nuking general population.

There's some threshold where they would have agonized over the use, even back then. We could come up with countless hypothetical scenarios and argue all day as to what they would have decided, but I'm not wasting energy on alternate history fantasies.


As I said, "culprits to target". But since 9/11 was 100% an attack against civilians, it actually would be proportional to nuke an equivalent number of enemy civilians, if that's what you wanted to (to say nothing of military targets). There's nothing magical about nuclear weapons that make them any more or less proportional than any other weapon. Yes, we can target and "dial-a-yield" to achieve specific end results.

It would be a good idea to consider fallout effects on nearby allies or neutrals, if any.

What is an "enemy civilian"?

So, Saudis?

That was the problem with 9/11, hard to pin down the guilty parties. The Saudi regime most certainly did not participate, approve, etc. Some Saudi nationals, including royal family, did (the Saudis actually cleaned their own house in those cases). Bearing in mind that there are thousands of royal family members, many of which have too much time and money on their hands.


But the discussion was about a hypothetical 9/11 scale event perpetrated by a nation-state.

The civilians wouldn’t have been Saudis, those were the terrorist. They were expelled from Saudi Arabia. The enemy civilians would be the people who offer the terrorist safe harbor.

It’s not confusing unless you want it to be.

https://i.ibb.co/qLrB47ZN/image.png

Weird, I don't see Iraq or Afghanistan on that list.

Civilians associated with a national entity which conducted a WMD attack against US civilians. Could be a nation-state, or even someone like hamas. Basically if you don't want to get nuked, better not let your government conduct WMD attacks against major nuclear powers (whatever you have to do to prevent that).

Worth noting that a WMD attack *might* be something like a mass cyber attack, ie shut down the economy, power, water utilities, and vital supply delivery. We do not have a no first use policy (not that those are worth the paper they're printed on anyway).

Enemy civilians? Not necessarily.