2/ As much as I don't like the current administration (and Israel leadership), there is absolutely no way the assumptions this article makes about them are false.

There is no way the US/Israel didn't calculate that:

- the straight would be closed

- a new leader may represent similar idiologies of the past leader.

Everything that has happened so far (in regards to Iran attacking neighbors) has been extremely predictable. There is just no way these weren't calculated in.

At its core, the problem is a militarized, propaganda-driven state masquareding itself as a necessary guarantor of global order, while its sole objective is nothing more than letting no other nation threaten its supremacy. And much of the world continuing to accept that narrative either because of lack of alternatives or out of necessity.

The blog you reference has inaccuracies. Drones are generally not shot by THAAD is a glaring one. It's very much not 2-3 million dollars to $50k. Helicopter gunships shoot down drones with bullets these days is very common and there are other economic means of bringing them down.

Most of the heavy lifting in suppressing these attacks is done by other drones patrolling the skies and attacking anything that tries to fire. Those also don't use extremely expensive munitions.

"Iran produces approximately 500 of these drones per day and holds a stockpile estimated at around 80,000 units.". Both these are false today. I'd also question if they were true when Iran was attacked. These figures don't pass the smell test and either way any stockpile is an instant target.

Everyone seems to be an expert today.

It's obviously not great that the Hormuz straits are more or less closed. We've seen in Yemen that a ragtag force can be massively attacked and still manage to fire at ships on a much larger body of water. That said we didn't really see if they can sustain it for months under heavy attack which is a possible premise here.

There are some pipelines bypassing the straits but their capacity is much smaller. It's also about 20% of the world supply so definitely other suppliers can make up for some of the loss at a cost.

I'm not an expert. But the current oil price reflects what the experts think best. And that price is still below what it was for about half of 2022. And fluctuating. What will matter is the price over months.

A shame because it seems to have interesting points, but was too wordy and LLMified to keep attention. Stop telling me what it's not every other sentence, and just say what you mean. I wish folks would just use their own words.

  Japan, an island nation with virtually no natural resources of its own, depends on it for a staggering 75% of its oil. Japan’s Prime Minister has warned plainly that if the Strait closes, the entire Japanese economy will collapse within eight to nine months. Not slow down. Not a contract. Collapse.

It also seems like if we're to game theory this, we'd need to plot out the full escalation capacity of the USA, which the author is failing to do here. I don't like the idea of doing that because the thought is sickening, but it's necessary to consider the entire decision tree to make a remotely rational model.

In retrospect I guess game theory is used kind of rhetorically here. If you consider what's written through that lens, it's very poorly developed and doesn't make sense. Maybe this is a thing, though? Am I misunderstanding what the author means by game theory here?

I do think the asymmetry of war costs are a serious problem for the USA, and the less they're willing to escalate or otherwise mitigate this, the more serious that problem becomes. If I were to make a statement like the author did about the war, I'd frame it more like "this is going to be insanely fucking risky and expensive for the USA", but certainly not that they'll lose.

edit: Listening to the Professor Jiang analysis and I understand why game theory was referenced now. He seems much more thorough and analytical so far.

edit again: he claims Dubai will probably go bankrupt in one scenario. This seems exceedingly unlikely, but he doesn't explain why it could be true

The US and Israel can claim that they've caused the IRGC sufficient damage to set them back a decade or more.

Iran will declare that they've fought off a superpower with minimal real losses, and they can say that despite the best efforts at interference, they chose and kept their preferred leader alive.

Closure was something I had known was a risk with any conflict with Iran after learning about the Tanker War in some politics class in college, and following the various threats over the past 15 years or so. It seemed like something that should have had tons of coverage as soon as I heard the US had attacked Iran, and I wanted to know what was actually going on with it...yet all of the mainstream press seemed to skirt around it until oil prices finally spiked on Sunday, even though traffic through the strait had fallen off a cliff a week beforehand.

CBC does it too. https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/livestory/iran-israel-us-war-d...

Though I will say CBC's seems to not include as many individual strike and counterstrike posts as others.

Figuring out what takes its place is a hard problem that no one seems to have cracked. I don't know if its replacement will be very profitable, but we all lose out when media isn't working. Having a shared reality is fundamental for a healthy society.

Maybe Le Monde give the right balance?

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/

The dependence, of literally almost everything, on the continuous flow of oil from few parts of the world has been an obvious point of strangulation for longer than I've been alive.

I mean, I understand that it's so entrenched that politics is owned by it, but, hell, it's been, what a week and a bit, and already Australian media is trying to talk down panic about petrol shortages.

The blind leading the blind.