The (Next) Persian Gulf War begins.

I just read this.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/17/worl ... iance.html

If Iran follows though on the threat to enrich Uranium to 20% "reactor fuel" then they are 90% of the way to having bomb grade Uranium.

You can verify with that Seperative Work Unit calculator that I posted up thread.

TFLYTSNBN wrote:I just read this.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/17/worl ... iance.html

If Iran follows though on the threat to enrich Uranium to 20% "reactor fuel" then they are 90% of the way to having bomb grade Uranium.

You can verify with that Seperative Work Unit calculator that I posted up thread.

I somehow doubt you read it very carefully, or with any intent to understand it.

Let me summarize.

[1]Iran has been honoring the terms of the nuclear deal.
[2]The US trashed the deal and has been doing everything it can to sabotage it
[3]Iran is now saying if the US keeps screwing up the deal, then the deal will be off

So yeah, IF Trump keeps sabotaging the nuclear deal then Iran COULD be back on the path towards nuclear weapons capability. The path Obama got them OFF of before Trump fucked it all up for no other reason than that he couldn't stand it being Obama's deal that did it..

gcomeau wrote:

TFLYTSNBN wrote:I just read this.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/17/worl ... iance.html

If Iran follows though on the threat to enrich Uranium to 20% "reactor fuel" then they are 90% of the way to having bomb grade Uranium.

You can verify with that Seperative Work Unit calculator that I posted up thread.

I somehow doubt you read it very carefully, or with any intent to understand it.

Let me summarize.

[1]Iran has been honoring the terms of the nuclear deal.
[2]The US trashed the deal and has been doing everything it can to sabotage it
[3]Iran is now saying if the US keeps screwing up the deal, then the deal will be off

So yeah, IF Trump keeps sabotaging the nuclear deal then Iran COULD be back on the path towards nuclear weapons capability. The path Obama got them OFF of before Trump fucked it all up for no other reason than that he couldn't stand it being Obama's deal that did it..

Have you ever read the deal?

At best, the deal delays Iran from having nuclear weapons for 15 years.

However; the deal has so many loopholes that by even the most optimistic estimates Iran could breakout to obtain nuclear weapons in less than a year. Obama allowed last minute the exemptions that reduced this breakout time to months.

The worst aspect of the deal was allowing Iran to keep a stockpile of Uranium that was enriched to 20% if they fabricated it into fuel plates. As I posted above, this medium enriched Uranium can be enriched to bomb grade Uranium so fast that it would make your head spin faster than a centrifuge. Is this the Uranium that Iran is now processing with its centrifuges?

The Iran nuclear deal needs to be evaluated in context of Iran's ballistic missile program. Given Iran's refusal to abide by other agreements that restrict development of missiles, the nuclear deal is worse than useless.

President Trump is operating on the reasonable belief that Iran is more economically and politically vulnerable now than it will be in the future. More importantly, Iran will become better capable ofemploying nuclear weapons in the future. It might be possible to denuclearize Iran now but not in the future when Iran is stronger economically and has better capability to employ nuclear wwapons.

But ofcourse Europeans are not only to stupid to understant any of this they are quite willing to aid and abet WMD prolifferation with the expectation that the United States will spend its blood and treasure to restrain nuclear armed states.

I just received this newsletter from Peter Zeihan. I doubt that he would object to me passing it on as signup is free and it might inspire youto buy his books.




global view
Visit the archives to re-read and share

The American Retreat, Part I: Oil
I’m going to do something I loathe and quote something I read on Twitter June 24. In a pair of posts U.S. President Donald Trump asserted:




Diction and statistical issues aside, these tweets comprise the 92 most important words used by anyone in the past three decades. Trump just made clear the days of America protecting global shipping – particularly of oil shipping in the Middle East – are over.

There is an easy argument to be made that the United States’ shale revolution will make the United States a net exporter of crude oil in the current calendar year, but to understand just how critical that is for the Americans we must first pick apart just how horrible that is for everyone else.

Let’s talk importance:

In the pre-Order world if you couldn’t obtain fossil fuels yourself, first coal and later oil, you failed to industrialize. Your manufacturing would at most be a step above cottage industries, so no mass education and no consumer goods (aka peasantry and mass poverty). Lack of fuel condemned you to having an at-best rudimentary transport system meaning your cities were very small, only able to exist in regions that could grow their own food (aka high living costs and low quality of life).

The handful of locations that could secure fossil fuels – either by producing it locally or by seizing it from others – could advance into something we today recognize to broadly mean “civilization,” which includes among other things homes that don’t leak and gadgets and full bellies.

This all changed in the late 1940s. After World War II the Americans created a global Order – a mix of security and trade guarantees which they used as a bribe to induce others to join their side in the Cold War against the Soviet Union. With global security now a thing, oil could be shipped safely and at volume without military escort, meaning that countries that didn’t have a military capable of escorting could now access fossil fuels. BAM! Civilization goes global.

Remove the Order, remove global oil markets, and civilization itself goes into screaming reverse in any location that lacks either the ability to produce oil locally, or the ability to venture forth and secure someone else’s.


Oil Rig and Wind Turbines
Let’s talk vulnerability:

Crude tankers are huge. A modern supertanker can shuttle around oil weighing more than four Nimitz-class aircraft carriers. They are so big expressly because of the Order.

Pre-Order, merchant shipping used small, fast vessels because they needed to be able to scatter and hopefully outrun predators whether those predators wore eyepatches or naval uniforms. The Order ended such predation under the watchful eye of the U.S. Navy. Instead of commercial advantage coming as a result of speed and distributed risk, it instead came from efficiencies and economies of scale. Ships evolved to became slower to save on fuel costs, and bigger to get more bang for the buck. Today’s oil tankers are the slowest and biggest of them all and are nearly 50 times the size of some of the biggest cargo ships of the WWII era.

A similar logic holds with ports: size generates economies of scale. In addition, as ships have gotten larger, ports had to expand to match – a city with a small dock simply cannot handle a ship that is longer than the Empire State building is tall. Bigger, slower ships forced fewer, larger ports. Disrupt anything within the system and the damage quickly becomes extreme.

Between oil’s criticality to and ubiquitousness in modern life, oil is by far the most commonly traded product on Earth comprising some 18% of all maritime shipping traffic (by volume). About a third of all waterborne crude and product shipments originate in the Persian Gulf.

Let’s talk stickiness:

There are no shortages of politicians out there who agitate for relocating manufacturing capacity to their countries, provinces or cities. Making a speech is one thing, but actually building industrial plant and infrastructure is another. It costs billions and takes years for large industrial shifts, and even then there is no guarantee that a new industrial park will prove economically viable.

But at least manufacturing can be relocated. Commodity production cannot. Either you have it or you don’t, and the Persian Gulf has the greatest concentrations and volumes of easily-produced conventional crude oil on the planet. It can never not matter.

There’s also the impossibility of substitution.

Simply put, greentech isn’t ready. Most advances in greentech have to do with electricity generation, and since so few countries burn oil for electricity greentech’s impact upon oil markets has been negligible. As a rule greentech is shit for transport. High cost combined with insufficient energy density makes electric cars little more than a niche sector for early adopters, with Tesla’s recent sales figures crash indicating that market may already be saturated.

Even if the medium for most modern batteries – lithium – was sufficiently energy-dense to provide a viable long-term improvement in capacity (it isn’t), the stuff still needs to be mined and processed and fabricated into battery assemblies. Each step along the value-chain is so energy- and transport-intensive that very little of it can even be attempted without fossil-fuel-based energy for processing and transport across the world. As counterintuitive as it sounds, we need more carbon-heavy fuels to get to a lighter-carbon world. And that means coal and oil. A lot of oil.


There’s also the issue of lifespan. Most vehicles put on the roads since 1990 have a long lifespan to the point that even if every passenger vehicle sold from now on was an EV, we’d not see an end to oil in passenger transport for another two decades. Even then, even if every passenger vehicle and light truck were an EV right now, that would only make a dent in global oil demand. About 2/5ths of oil is used for transporting people and heating. The rest is much more difficult to do away with. Another 1/3rd is used for air transport, industry, and other modes that require far more range or power than electric engines can manage. And another 1/5th isn’t going anywhere ever, as it is what makes petrochemicals as varied as paints, plastics and pesticides possible.

(None of which means greentech won’t eventually solve the petroleum problem, but all of which means technology needs another couple decades to give it a go – and even that assumes the capital and educational structures around the world which have made the Digital Revolution possible hold steady at their current historical highs.)

Let’s talk protection:

At the end of World War II every nation of consequence aside from the United Kingdom had lost its navy. The United States in essence inherited the global ocean. America’s creation of the Order gave everyone aside from the Soviets a vested economic interest in not floating a new one. Fast forward to today and the American Navy is over ten times as powerful as the combined blue water fleets of every other country combined. Putting that force disconnect at the service of the global commons is what makes the Order work, and what makes global energy shipments and markets possible.

The world’s second- through sixth-most powerful navies in terms of long-range power projection are (roughly in order) Japan, the United Kingdom, France, China, and Russia. Of these only Russia need not sail forth for oil, as it has plenty of its own. France and the United Kingdom can secure what they need from the North Sea and North and West Africa. China has only 30 combat-capable surface ships of size that can effectively operate over 1000 miles from shore; unfortunately (for the Chinese) Southern China is a cool 5800 or so miles distant from the Persian Gulf. Only India – keeper of the world’s seventh-strongest navy – is even remotely proximate.

End result? Today’s oil markets comprise the greatest concentration of risk in the most critical economic sector at the most vulnerable part of the global system and no one can do anything about it if the Americans leave.

And that’s just the beginning.


By the way, for more on oil’s role in a world without American strategic oversight, I’m happy to refer you to my 2016 book, The Absent Superpower: the Shale Revolution and a World Without America.


BOOK PETER FOR YOUR NEXT EVENT
BUY A SIGNED COPY OF THE ABSENT SUPERPOWER
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Just saw this.

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/ ... east-64671


Interesting analysis.
Misses a major point. A Persian Gulf war screws China and may be Japan, Korea and India, but not the US. We do not import significantly from the ME.
A Persian Gulf war that the US stays out of enhances US economic competitiveness.

It appears that my above prognestationd aside, Iran is about to get fuarked.

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/ ... iran-64981

If these assets are employed against Iran, the motivation will be more to screw China thsn to screw Iran. China gets 90% of its oil from the Persian Gulf.

This is an interesting development.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news ... t-dictator

I think that Gabbard is misinterpreting Trump's Tweet and over reacting somewhat, but she makes a valid point. The US has fought two major wars in the Middle East, first to defend Saudi Arabia and eject Iraq from Kuwait, then to try to defuse the nascent Iraq nuclear weapons program and transform Iraq into a civilized County. We eliminated the prospect of Iraq getting WMD but the effort to export democracy failed. It also allowed Iran to dominate the majority Shia regions of Iraq.

Trump understands better than almost everyone that because the US is now energy independent, we no longer have a vital interest in the Middle East. Any wars we wage are purely wars of choice.

The US also needs to be somewhat reticent about escalating conflicts without consulting regional allies. I believe that Trump called of the strike in retaliation for the shoot down of the drone in deference to Saudi Arabia which would be the target of retaliation.

Now that Iran has massively escalated the conflict, Trump is reevaluating what the US interest in the region really is. I suspect that the US response will be punative followed by withddawal from the ME unless the Saudis get their shit together.

TFLYTSNBN wrote:This is an interesting development.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news ... t-dictator

I think that Gabbard is misinterpreting Trump's Tweet and over reacting somewhat, but she makes a valid point. The US has fought two major wars in the Middle East, first to defend Saudi Arabia and eject Iraq from Kuwait, then to try to defuse the nascent Iraq nuclear weapons program and transform Iraq into a civilized County. We eliminated the prospect of Iraq getting WMD but the effort to export democracy failed. It also allowed Iran to dominate the majority Shia regions of Iraq.

Trump understands better than almost everyone that because the US is now energy independent, we no longer have a vital interest in the Middle East. Any wars we wage are purely wars of choice.

The US also needs to be somewhat reticent about escalating conflicts without consulting regional allies. I believe that Trump called of the strike in retaliation for the shoot down of the drone in deference to Saudi Arabia which would be the target of retaliation.

Now that Iran has massively escalated the conflict, Trump is reevaluating what the US interest in the region really is. I suspect that the US response will be punative followed by withddawal from the ME unless the Saudis get their shit together.

Every time you attribute supposed deep thought and insight to Trump on any issue at all, let alone the complexities of middle east geo-politics, it's good for a laugh.

Trump saw an opportunity to thump his chest and act tough and took it because he thinks it makes him look strong. And if he launches a strike on Iran it will be for the same reason (and also because he thinks being in a war means he gets re-elected)

That is the full depth of his thinking on the issue. As is obvious to anyone who actually pays attention to the ragingly insecure, stunningly ignorant, amazingly lazy, bullying narcissist he is.

It's why Mattis ran for the hills, and half the senior Natsec staff is "actings".

gcomeau wrote:

That is the full depth of his thinking on the issue. As is obvious to anyone who actually pays attention to the ragingly insecure, stunningly ignorant, amazingly lazy, bullying narcissist he is.

...You know, this is basically what could be said about Khrushev. Who was bombastic, ignorant, chest-thumping, though-acting, ect., ect., ect. In comparison with quiet, cautious and VERY intelligent Stalin, Khrushev looked almost as barbaric as Trump looks in comparison to Obama (lets put aside the matter that Obama have at most 10% of Stalin's intellect and less than 0,01% of Stalin's willpower and determination)...

But could you claim that Khrushev was an overall bad leader? No. Because while he was not as clever as Stalin or Molotov, Khrushev was actually quite cunning, have a surprisingly deep insight on international relations, and - most importantly - he wasn't afraid of raising the stakes, if the situation demands that. In 1950s, he successfully bluffed the USA into believing that USSR have much more jet bombers ("the bombers gap") and then much more ICBM ("the missile gap") that USA. Using bluff, carefully-prepared propaganda and good ol' chutzpah, he build for USSR much better international position than ever before.

So... if somebody act silly, it may be exactly because he wanted to act silly. Especially in politic.

Dilandu wrote:So... if somebody act silly, it may be exactly because he wanted to act silly. Especially in politic.

Sure, you *couuld* make an argument Trump's idiocy is all some kind of cunning act. If of course you ignored his entire life.

The primary focus of Trump's existence for decades has been self promotion and his "brand". He has always had a desperate sniveling need to convince everyone he was smarter and stronger and faster and wiser and richer and more knowledgeable than he really is. He's that kid you knew in grade school who was constantly trying to convince everyone he had a black belt in karate when he could barely tie his own shoes without tripping over his own feet (but wasn't allowed to get in any fights because he would totally kill someone but trust him, he's totally a black belt)

Only that kid never grew up. He just got, bigger.

His need to be seen as better than he actually is consumes him.

He's not playing stupid as some act he decided to put on for politics. Or for business negotiations. His whole life has centered around desperately trying to convince people he is not stupid.

He is an idiot. An absolute moron with one single sort of kind of talent. And that is convincing other idiots that he is in fact not an idiot.