This article has a lot of good info but leans left without ever recognizing the real threat that started this war, and that is a Nuclear Iran. That cannot be allowed, and I don’t think our media is giving justice to what Trump has done and will do to finish the job. Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon.
The media, for some reason, wants to ignore the consequences of a nuclear Iran, and most likely that has to do with TDS. They can’t give Trump credit for anything without first degrading what he did. It seems like the media has a cancer, an incurable cancer of woke combined with TDS, which ends up with fake news. The real issue is the media because they do not recognize they are sick with this disease and double down when told.
It is time for a clean sweep of our media to bring in real independent journalists willing to research and report on both sides of the aisle. At least that is a dream. All IMO.
https://www.thefp.com/p/two-clocks-iran-oil-election-congress-energy
“There are two numbers that matter when it comes to the war with Iran: 20 million, and 138.
Twenty million barrels per day is the commonly accepted figure for the average prewar flow of oil out of the Strait of Hormuz. The more America’s military and some brave commercial seamen can get daily flows to approximate this number, the longer the economic clock for global energy markets can run. This creates time for the Trump administration to apply pressure to Iran via the blockade and other measures.
But 138 is the number of days until the next U.S. Congress is seated: January 3, 2027. Barring a borderline miraculous turn of events for the Republican Party, Democrats look very likely to control the House—and they have a long shot at the Senate. Many surviving Republicans will attribute their drubbing at least in part to the war in Iran. So while military efforts in the strait can extend the economic clock and buy time to push Iran’s economy to the brink, the political clock ticks as well.
Beyond the ticking of these two clocks, much else of what you hear has been insignificant noise. The talk of diplomacy and the now-expired MOU has ultimately led nowhere, which was predictable (and predicted!). Trump’s repeated threats of massive escalation have come to nothing—and he has thankfully eased back on them in recent days. Economic warfare is the name of the game for now.
Such political tolerance as there is for this approach would evaporate in the face of $5 gas and imploding energy markets. One of the most surprising facts of the war so far is that these dramatic scenarios have not come to pass. How is this possible? The administration’s rhetorical attention to the markets has played some role. So have global energy reserves—though those are, literally, diminishing assets. Credit is also due in part to efforts to circumvent the strait through other routes, especially the pipeline that cuts across Saudi Arabia to a terminus at Yanbu on the Red Sea—though the Houthis in Yemen, in partnership with Iran, are making their own trouble in that neighborhood.
But the most significant factor appears to be that, quietly and with the deliberate avoidance of fanfare, U.S. Central Command has been smuggling oil through the strait at night in large quantities. Bloomberg’s Javier Blas adopted a literary tone in describing the “whispers” about the goings-on in the Strait: “tales of tankers crossing the strait at night; of convoys under attack despite American protection; of daring ship-to-ship transfers on the ocean waves, far away from prying eyes. From time to time, Iran hits a tanker; some of those attacks get reported, many don’t.”
Secretary of Energy Chris Wright claims that these efforts are so successful that “almost 9 million barrels a day” make it out of the Persian Gulf by ship—apparently mostly through a shuttle service operating under U.S. military protection, followed by transfers at sea to vessels waiting off the coast of Oman. Add another “5–7 million barrels per day” making it out of the Gulf states through alternate routes, and you end up with “approximately 15 million barrels per day,” according to Secretary Wright. That’s not bad, all things considered—recently, in slower years, 15 million barrels per day was about the daily average.
But is it true? Wright’s assertions met with widespread criticism that he was, at best, putting a highly optimistic spin on the situation. It doesn’t help that, pressed for specifics, or for operational color on how the escort operations are working, neither the administration nor the military will share any details. But there is increasing acceptance that the efforts are at least real, and there is no real response beyond generalized skepticism to the administration’s claim that because they are hiding their efforts—through deactivating ship transponders and various efforts to avoid being photographed by commercial satellites, among other means—the world therefore can’t see them.
Finally, there is the fact before our eyes that crude prices, while not cheap, are hovering in the ~$80 per barrel range—far less than you might expect than if the strait were genuinely closed or nearly closed. Prices for refined products present a more complicated picture. Gasoline prices are high but not catastrophic—$4 per gallon in the United States is a political problem, not an outright disaster, and far from the most expensive it has been this century when adjusted for inflation—but jet fuel and diesel are comparatively more elevated. Reduced output from damaged Gulf refineries seems to be in part to blame, but some Russian refineries have also recently been casualties of war, among other factors affecting the market worldwide.
In other words: While energy isn’t cheap by any measure, economic catastrophe seems to be postponed, for now. This is bad for Tehran, which finds itself in the position of having fired its equivalent of a nuclear weapon by shutting down the Strait of Hormuz only to see the other side still fighting. It knows it needs to regain the initiative in the short run, even as it prepares for new rounds of high-intensity combat in the future. Perhaps the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) will redouble its efforts in the strait, looking to reverse the trends there directly. Perhaps it will “go on offense” elsewhere, by directing operations via proxy, or through limited military aggressions against its neighbors. Direct attacks would be madness when evaluated in purely military terms, but Tehran knows that the Trump administration, its big talk about Iran’s military capabilities having been destroyed, has exposed itself to public ridicule each time Iran successfully lands some kind of blow. For democracies waging war, appearing to lose can be just as damaging as actually losing—some readers will be old enough to remember the Tet Offensive.
American defeat, defined as abandoning the region to the mercy of Iran, would be catastrophic for the administration, for the country, and for the world. But this war wasn’t popular from the start. Why would it have been, when essentially no effort was made to prepare the American people for it? Why would it become popular, when concerns about the current stalemate are met with various forms, some quite belligerent, of “trust me”?
Just as when an embittered Congress ensured the fall of South Vietnam in 1975, the next Congress will not be constrained by geopolitical reality as it seeks political retaliation against an administration Democrats hold in complete contempt. Maybe a Republican Senate will hold the line. Maybe not.
The next few months will be the decisive period. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has spoken of enhanced “economic fury” targeting Iran: If there is a way to cut off the cash available to pay rank-and-file IRGC salaries, now is the time to do it. The same goes for covert operations targeting the power of the regime’s new leadership—hard men who will not be moved by the generalized suffering of the Iranian people. The clocks are ticking.”