Political capital + diplomatic reputation + military reputation + strategic reputation.. and cash.
What would other countries do? If the US's military might is powerless to control Iran, what chance would any other country have here?
Trump's weakness in giving up the illusion of US power certainly would be a disaster for the US, and world trade, but broader implications seem unlikely.
It's a problem pretty much only for the US. The US has been humiliated, embarrassed, and made incredibly weak by showing it can neither protect its allies or its core interests, and that it can not project power despite spending massive amounts of money using its fancy weapons that are supposed to be the best and most expensive in the world.
Further, its shown the world that letting the US keep a strategic base in your country is actually a huge problem for the country, and not a benefit at all.
The US had global alliances that made it very strong, its in the process of destroying all that and isolating itself in order to become weaker and poorer.
Nobody else around the world is hurt much by tariffs on the Strait. Just the US due to its massive own-goal by wasting military power on an undefined goal, with vague aspirations it could never achieve with the resources devoted to it, without convincing the US people that ant war was necessary. It put Iranian leadership on death ground without any alternative except to use all their weapons, seemingly completely unaware of decades of US wargaming about the Strait.
It's hard to overstate how much of a disaster this is for the US on every possible angle.
Iranians will not benefit much, however they will benefit from sanction relief for sure. I know some of them has to pass through congress and that's virtually impossible considering the Israeli influence in the US government, but I'm hopeful that TRUMP is at least forced to remove _some_ of them.
Economical sanctions always hurt the ordinary citizens and hardly the government.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S017626802...
Believe it or not, Gallup used to conduct surveys in Iran up until 2023. For the question of "Is it a good or bad time to find a job" you can see a clear spike from 2017 to 2018 following the abrupt resumption of sanctions. It went from 68% to 92% of people saying it's a bad time to find a job
https://news.gallup.com/poll/611210/iran-votes-lukewarm-lead...
What US ships?
> Charging a toll is illegal under international law, but some fees are allowed for services. It is not clear what services Iran would provide, but there were no fees charged before the war.
2. Fujairah is within drone and missile range of a lot of remaining Iranian strike capability.
3. Fujairah is not really equipped with a large amount of high precision, reliable, expensive, slow to procure and replace air defense systems.
4. Fujairah has already been struck repeatedly since this conflict kicked off.
5. The oil pipeline capacity from the 'west' side of the UAE to Fujairah is nowhere near enough to meet demand, even if the port and oil terminal were considered totally safe by ship owners and cargo owners, which it isn't.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habshan%E2%80%93Fujairah_oil_p...
But it obviously wasn't designed to carry all the oil going through the Strait.
Do you think people are dumb? Obviously beneficial and easy actions that no one has taken rarely exist in the real world. You're basically suggesting the people actually there who have a better view than you are profoundly stupid.
Before all of this, Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz was a theory that was never tested. Traffic passed freely. But a war was forced upon them by the US and Israel so if any of these countries (or anyone else for that matter) is unhappy at the outcome, you know where to point the finger.
One irony in all this is that the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea would guarantee free transit passage through territorial waters like the Strait of Hormuz. Iran isn't a signatory. The ironic part is that the United States isn't either.
I wonder what happened to the Iranian buddies? So many HN accounts whose Iranian friends were all supposedly celebrating the US-Israeli bombings of their country of origin. Are they still cheering?
Folks, this is what happens when you lose a war. You have to pay the bad guys to win the war in a more comfortable way for you.
Iran knows this is a protection racket. They don't care. What're we gonna do about it? Bomb them again?
Narrowest width:
- Strait of Hormuz (33 km)
- Bab-el-Mandeb (26 km)
- Strait of Gibraltar (13 km)
- Strait of Malacca (2.8 km)
- Bosphorus (700 m)
- Suez Canal (205 m) <- Ever Given
- Panama Canal (55 m)
For example. Are the bombs throw over Iran, cancelling the monsoon rains in several states of India?
> "After an encouraging start to the SW monsoon season, India is now witnessing a prolonged pause in its advance, raising concerns over rainfall deficits, soaring temperatures and water shortages in some states. (source: Bussiness Standard)"
https://www.business-standard.com/india-news/monsoon-in-indi...
Also: "(Without rains) The stock of drinking water in the State of Goa can last about one month".
It seems that all those clouds are being pushed directly offshore to release into the ocean.
More seriously, I looked at the article you linked. It talks about lots if complex climate stuff that I don’t understand. I don’t think it mentions bombs as a cause. Or the war. Please show your receipts.
Not your fault. The biosphere is a extremely complex system. We pay researchers for spending their lives studying the details of the whole picture at a fine grain level so we can react on time, lets go ...
[error 404: Scientist not found. Data deleted. DOGE was here]
Hum, though luck, the best expert advice can't work when everybody is anti-science. Maybe nobody will be able to prove this pretty obvious effect before the damage. A hint: hot air goes up, like insurance costs will.
War is one way of forcing political will on another. The US military executed nearly flawlessly yet US leadership doesn't want to pay the cost of defeating Iran by force.
Why even have this military if anything that affects the market makes the US cower in fear?
The American doctrine might be to kill the enemy before you are in their view. But the enemy gets a vote. This is no longer something the US can rely on, even against clever enough middle powers.
It's just true that the assumptions that underpinned the current American force composition and strategy are breaking down. That's why the war went much worse than most mainstream analysts expected.
1. The US Navy is designed for the Cold WAr. It's often called a "deep blue" Navy because it's designed to operate in the open ocean in deep water. Also, it's designed to operate in colder climates like the North Atlantic and the North Sea. The Persian Gulf is none of those things. It's shallow, warm and narrow. The warm part also matters. It increases wear on ships, it's harder to keep them habitable, you get faster biofouling and so on;
2. Geography just isn't a friend here. The navigable part of the Strait of Hormuz at its narrowest is about 6 miles wide. You'll hear claims about it being 2 miles wide. That's incorrect. There are 2 mile wide navigation channels, one in each direction, and they're separated by a ~2 mile wide buffer; and
3. Another clue here was the continued use of so-called "stand off" weapons [1]. Rather than using gravity bombs, missiles continued to be fired from ships and planes. That's inefficient because you lose weight for the munition part to fuel. So you only ever do this if you can't safely use gravity bombs. Therefore, one can conclude that the military could protect air or water assets. Water assets can't be protected mainly from drones. There was a lot of talk about mines and that is a threat but the same drones that essentially destroyed Gulf military bases could overwhelm the defenses of an aircraft carrier battle group too. Plus there's drone boats. But the way aircraft were used also demonstrated a lack of air supremacy.
I'm no expert, but the attack range of the carrier flight wing is 4-500 miles
Did they? They
- Started the war off by (to all appearances accidentally) bombing a girls elementary school
- Had an aircraft carrier spontaneously catch fire via laundry - forcing it to go for repairs mid war
- Lost a bunch of very expensive aircraft, and some (though not very many per airframe) soldiers with them
- Proved that the F-35s stealth capabilities aren't quite what they were hyped up to be by having one hit by a guided missile
And on the strategic objectives front (where, to be fair, they were given impossible tasks)
- Killed the person they were hoping to install as the new head of state
- Didn't manage to destroy Iran's missile launch capability
- Didn't manage to secure the straight of hormuz
- Didn't manage to defend their own bases against missile attacks, instead fleeing to hotels
* USA (or Israel really) started this war on their own terms at a time of their choosing. But they werent prepared at all.
* Incredibly valuable things like THAAD radars (like $1B per unit) were taken out by $1000 drones.. We've all seen the war in Ukraine, we all know Iran makes Shahed drones. US seemed to be completely unprepared for this.
* US was using $1M pac 3 patriot missiles to shoot down $1000 drones, utterly failing the shot exchange problem. Also US has run down its stockpiles of many missiles to 50% or less. It will take 3 or 4 years to return many items to acceptable levels, and wont be able sell any either, leaving customers seeking alternatives.
* Clear miscoordination and lack of clarity between US and allies. Like no-one really knew what was happening or why, leading to stuff like the ghost of Kuwait.
Classic trump regieme action. No-one competent in the room. Just impulsively doing random shit each day with no strategy or understanding.
The US military exhibited numerous flaws. To cover numerous flaws not yet covered by other replies:
* Required the deployment of assets beyond their useful operational capability (which caused the aircraft carrier to catch fire).
* Demonstrated that their targeting list is not only based on outdated information, but failed to update that information when informed it was outdated (which led to the bombing of the elementary school).
* Failed to anticipate literally the one military contingency everyone expected Iran to do--close the strait. Hell, even after it was clear that was happened and everyone was screaming "what are you going to do about it?" the answer was, shockingly "absolutely nothing."
* Failed to adequately secure supply lines to ensure that military units in the area have sufficient food. This is literally logistics 101 stuff.
* Defined operational success criteria not based on results achieved but on effort spent--in other words, how many bombs you launched rather than whether or not the targets you wanted destroyed were destroyed.
* Definitely several C2 issues we're not entirely privy to, given the midair collision that cost a tanker, and the loss of an AWACS unit.
The strategic issues are even more myriad, but since strategy is supposed to be largely a civilian, not military, decision, it's not really the military's fault. Except I will note that a lot of civilians in this field do come from ex-military background, and there does seem to be a major recurring problem that CENTCOM is producing a lot of people with really bad strategic judgement that is partially responsible for this debacle in the first place. Really to the point that we should consider blackballing everyone from CENTCOM from ever having a military or civilian defense job of importance ever again.
Us military has had active demonstrations of the importance of advanced drone munitions FOR TEN YEARS NOW and completely dropped the ball.
It is clear that an organizational level the US military does not have infantry level short and medium-range drone capability like Ukraine does, and more importantly, like all of our enemies do.
It's not just a matter of the US military needing to do a bunch a weapons designs. Procurement politics can't close the drone capability gap.
Because the fundamental capability is cheap and flexible, whereas the entire Pentagon weapons procurement is big, expensive and inflexible
The US Marines are now functionally ineffective. The US cannot execute a marine invasion in the current military capabilities, not without taking publicly untenable losses
The US Navy still has deep water capability and can still exert strategic influence, but at a tactical level, which is in near shore/littoral arenas, they are now useless, and the political procurement process to make weapons to make them relevant again is the same problem. The infantry level one does, but it's even bigger and has even more organizational resistance
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/19/us/politics/iran-israel-u...
> Mr. Ahmadinejad was injured on the war’s first day by an Israeli strike at his home in Tehran that had been designed to free him from house arrest, the American officials and an associate of Mr. Ahmadinejad said. He survived the strike, they said, but after the near miss he became disillusioned with the regime change plan.
War is politics by other means (Clausewitz).
And how much do you think that cost would be? What are we at now? $139B to $1T in long term costs baked in so far.
First of all the chain of those cowering in fear begins with the the actors around ship transit , meaning the owners but also the seamen , they don't want to cross if there is a > 5% chance of being hit . And the seamen are actually being forced to accept such risk, they signed up for something else entirely, their risk preference would be around 0.0% because these days nobody dies at sea anymore.
Without Hormuz the world runs out of oil and that is a much bigger problem than just stock market going down
With the mines and drones and asymmetric warfare you'd need to conquer the entirety of Iran alley by alley and mountain by mountain to secure the strait for a risk tolerance in line with the aforementioned 5%
This war was lost when the U.S. wasn't ready to intervene during the week of popular uprise against the regime, had the intervention happened back then , maybe it could have been possible to overthrow the Ayatollah system and reinstall the Shah (who btw was no Saint either)
John Mearsheimer has called this right from the first day, he said that Iran 'holds all the cards' and he's been right on everything down to a T (no pun intended) [0]
It has been an acrobatic adventure in the Middle East with lots of expenses and very little human losses to follow the 'Greater Israel' ambition of Israel and Bibi. But we must not forget that we killed their Supreme Leader and Religious Leader all wrapped in one , they will not let this slide and with the asymmetric war and warfare this Administration has exposed itself to potentially another 9/11 that would at that point force a ground war with lots of victims.
2014 - Claimed Putin had no interest in annexing large parts of Ukraine, conquering it, or pursuing regime change
Feb 2022 - Putin had “no intention of invading Ukraine” in the sense of large-scale conquest (days before the invasion)
June 2022 - “There is no evidence in the public record that Putin was contemplating, much less intending to put an end to Ukraine as an independent state… Putin was not interested in making Ukraine a part of Russia… the Russians pursued a limited aims strategy”
Repeated claim (2014–2022): Putin is a rational actor who understands the costs and would not pursue maximalist territorial or imperial goals in Ukraine
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_program_of_Iran#Main_f...
Revisit Oak Ridge, Tennessee why are the Chinese dusting off old technology from America and running with it?
One thing this administration is not known for is taking accountability and admitting they made a massive error. No, it'll be someone else's fault so we'll move on to whoever the next bogeyman is. And it can't be China because the US just objectively lost a war with Iran. You think we're going to win a war with China? No. What we really need is a tune-up fight. A bit like how Reagan invaded Grenada two days after the Beiruit bombing that ultimately led to US withdrawal from Lebanon.
This was basically soothing our hurt feelings by using the US miltiary, the largest in the world, to invade a Sandals resort.
Can the system run if those above ground areas are destroyed? Of course hypothetically they can be defended. Just like hypothetically a few drones should not be able to shut the world's most powerful navy out of the strait.
In reality we know the real answer lies in an admission of your answer. The best defense is electing governments which will not wantonly engage in armed conflicts.
What would Australia do if Iran attacked their embassy? They would kick them out, denying Iran an embassy in Australia. When it comes to this stuff, a tit for tat strategy is generally the common tactic. If you attack peaceful trade ships, then your own trade ships is valid target for retaliation. If you start to threaten ships with ransoms, other nations will do the same.
Invading Iran is a complete different subject compared to boarding trading ships well outside the border of Iran. Historically, a Letter of marque was a very cheap way to manage countries which did not respect your own ships. Some laws are still in the law books regarding how to deal with prize ships, which illustrate how close we are to the time where peaceful traversal of waters was not a given.
One of the biggest trade partner for Iran is China. Will China pay the toll? Will Iran attack their ships? Will China retaliate if they do? If China do not need to pay the toll, which other countries would then be willing to one-sided pay for access to the strait?
This is exactly what Trump tried. The US was boarding Iranian ships thousands of kilometers away. In the end the US still backed down and agreed to an Iranian toll in the MoU.
Iranian ships have been getting boarded for extremely flimsy reasons for over ten years now. That forced them to adapt to it in such a way that they are now far more resilient to it than the rest of the world is.
It has echoes of LBJ and later Nixon trying to control a massive conflict from thousands of miles a way, based mostly on vibes.
I think they had much more intelligence and competence back then, even if they were wrong. Now it's stupidity and incompetence on top of being wrong.
For all of Iran's supposed mastery of drone warfare, do note that the damage those drones have done to the US military is... essentially nil. No ships have been sunk; no aircraft have been lost. There have been some lives lost due to a drone attack on a facility troops were staying area, but at first read, I'm going to chalk that up more to the US military generally not planning for Iran to respond at all to a bombing raid rather than drones per se being particularly effective. Where the drones have been effective have been as a form of precision bombing--exactly the same kind of missions the US military has achieved with its regular air forces, albeit at a considerably greater distance from its homeland than any drone-based force has been able to achieve.
I think many people are way too quick to point to drone warfare as the obvious future of warfare, without considering the environment in which wars operate and how it might play out differently for different combatants. The US has a general assumption of complete and total air superiority in its conflicts--and the last time it didn't have that was over 70 years ago--and the number of countries that can meaningfully contest US air superiority is unknown but very few. The lessons of the Russo-Ukrainian War--a conflict where neither side has air superiority--are thus somewhat limited for a US conflict against most of its enemies. (Although I do agree that the US military is too sanguine about not learning from the Russo-Ukrainian War).
Overall, the drones were militarily a bunch of mosquito's. None of the US allies 'enjoyed' having civilian targets hit by the Iranian drones, but the military impact was minor at best.
Unless you want to put boots on the ground, you send missiles and drop bombs.
The Iranian drones would have been a lot more of a problem if they were harassing ground troops on the way to Tehran.
(does the US need counter drone systems? yes, absolutely. is air superiority dead? not at all)
To summarize in rough numbers:
* 2x the population (today)
* 3x the land area (today, but also probably back then)
* 7x the relative wealth (compared to Iraq-2002, using US GDP across time as a shared baseline)
I'm sure the US military has a much better statistical analysis... and I'm also sure it was ignored by the commander-in-chief.
the only people who have grave concerns over Iran are the ones who have monetary incentive to do so, or ethnical tribalism reason
The capability of the IRGC and Iranian regime to hide small to medium sized drone and missile launch equipment within civilian infrastructure (nevermind caves, bunkers, etc) within range of the strait exceeds the capability of the US forces to destroy or remove it.
As long as major shipping companies believe that the Iranians retain enough drone and missile capacity to hold the straight under threat, they're not going to sail through it.
The only possible way would be an extremely bloody and manpower intensive ground operation to hunt it down at the boots on the ground level.
America knew how to do this once. Berlin is still in a sense occupied by American troops in that we still have bases there, and through NATO subsidize their defense and way of life.
You simply can't kill your way out of political conflicts into perpetuity, unless you truly plan on annihilating everyone. That is part of what makes the alcoholic running the DoD so galling. His thesis on places like Fallujah is essentially there wasn't enough bloodshed. Americans would be vacationing in Baghdad if only there had been more violence.
Pretty much what I said in Jan/Feb of this year when the major, bloody nationwide protests of Iranians (est. 15,000 to 40,000 death toll killed by their own "government") kicked off domestically in Iran. Specifically, that the worst possible people were running the executive branch and DoD at this moment in history and that they would rush headlong into something foolish.
I'm in Berlin for the weekend right now and enjoying my "NATO subsidized way of life".
Can you point me in the right direction where in Berlin i can find those American occupation troops? Seemed to have missed them so far. Would like to take some pictures with them.
And the drones/missile have much more range than 300km. The Shahed-136 drone have a 2000+km range, which is significantly more than the combat radius of carrierborne fighters, even if you add reasonable amounts of refuelling.
The problem in the end isn't that it was impossible to strike every possible hiding site without causing massive casualities. It just wasn't possible. The US failed to durably damage Iranian installations. The backup plan was to exploit air supremacy to interdict whatever was coming in and out of those installations - that also failed. This was an operational failure of US military doctrine, that is unrelated to the tolerance of casualties. It is simply that US military planners overestimated their abilities and made assumptions they couldn't cash. It wasn't a case of casualty avoidance or whatever.
It's also questionable whether a ground invasion of Iran would be feasible to begin with. The Operational Art of War has a great series on the logistics of such an operation, it would be extremely difficult and would most likely require the US to send the troops... through the Strait of Hormuz to begin with.
Obviously this operation was a massive waste.
Iran is a big country ~100 million people. Aircraft carriers can launch planes to disable specific targets. They cant take out an entire country. They could have been more useful if the US was waging total war against Iran, but it isn't/wasnt.
The world is deglobalizing, and while drones may not exert Blue water power projection, they now dominate littoral power projection.
Marine invasions may be impossible in drone combat without drone superiority, and right now, Joan superiority is not a thing that I think exists between two fully drone enabled armies
And note the US army is not a fully drone enabled army.
I suppose they may be grateful to have an enemy uniting their people. Though it's not like they lost control of the opposition, even if they've had to kill a few thousand at a time.
They lost old hardware and aging leaders (some were already dying). Now, replaced with fresh and energetic leadership and pipeline for modern tech.
Not an issue for those promoted into their places!
There is still a moderate faction in Iran that the IRGC needs an excuse to execute.
Assume the leadership of both Iran and the US are kleptocrats who both have motivations to have oil prices high and people dependent on them and it all makes a lot more sense.
The Iranian people, that's a different story.
America bringing destruction and failing to bring freedom from their current tyranny has doubtfully bought us many more friends in Iran.
I recall Reza Pahlavi on Fox News engaging in the delusion that the current administration cared about the Iranian people. Where is he now?
This isn't a matter of an opinion or your cute reply, it's a basic fact. Look up American troops stationed in Germany. Ask yourself why European leaders are constantly falling over themselves to placate an American president they clearly despise. For someone who made it to Berlin you sound profoundly ignorant, I mean why don't you ask the Germans you are spending time with (if you make it out the front door) and see if any of them would feel more safe if the United States unilaterally withdrew from NATO. I mean it would be the most tiring conversation ever but whoever is spending time with you has surely already priced that in.
There are also 185k German Soldiers in Germany right now.
The reason the EU leaders placate the US President is that it worked getting past his first presidency and we are all part of the rollercoaster ride that is his second coming.
The US would never pull unilaterally from NATO, they just lost massive projection power into the middle east by losing the Iran war and Ramstein Air Base is strategically the most important asset the US has in Europe.
Even if it did happen NATO is still able to beat Russia, the biggest threat in the region without the US. UKs nuclear subs can kill 80% of the Russian population on their own as Russia has highly concentrated population centers and launching nukes right of their coast line, which is extremely long and impossible to fully protect wouldn't allow them to launch counter measures on time. Mutual destruction assured usually means both sides have no interest to pull each other into a all-in conflict.
Also stay feisty, refreshing.
I didn't agree with "most Americans" part. This kind of rhetoric is false and is used to whitewash and launder war crimes and escape responsibility, for example for murdering 160 Iranian school girls in in Minab.
there are many ways to phrase a question and make it seem like very low stakes, while it causes actual human lives on the other end of the globe
Too bad the Pan America highway or a Pan-American Railway is but a dream the Chinese probably will get that high speed rail all the way to Europe once Russia and the Ukraine stop fighting, I might add if it wasn’t for the war. There’s a good possibility. It would already be done by now.
America been droning and murdering people around the globe with impunity, for example Cambodia bombing which literally put Pol Pot and Khmer Rouge in power and led to genocide. The list of US war crimes is simply too big and I have zero tolerance for whitewashing or excusing this behavior