The wealth and power of the royal families in the Gulf exist because of their relationship with the US. They have every incentive to stick with the US. Giving in to Iranian demands would mean the end of the patronage networks, within and without, that allows these royal families to maintain control.
I’d imagine they could do a lot of that with drones now. Given that the straight is narrow, I’m sure they could find a way to launch and control these drones from land. That doesn’t really solve the problem of getting ships through the strait. But the US probably doesn’t need to endanger a whole fleet to attempt to destroy Iranian mines.
That’s not doomerism, it’s an obvious fact.
But to look on the bright side, these Arab states lost overnight much of what they’ve been trying to build. Their oil and gas production can’t just be restarted at the same scale into the near future. Their plans for diversification and foreign investments have been set back. They’re stuck with a security guarantor that has only made them a target of Iranian weaponry. I just can’t imagine how all this wouldn’t result in political crisis on the national level as well.
Agreed that this wouldn’t have happened if Iran got nukes before hand. But at this point of open conflict Iran does posses the capabilities to hit sensitive targets that would still amount to a form of mutually assured destruction.
Nukes serve to prevent this type of open conflict. But now that it’s here, building nukes is probably not worth it until there is a ceasefire.
It’s so pathetic. How could anyone have respect for them? This war is going to further put the screws on the EU economy. Ukraine is going to have an even harder time getting some of the weapons they need most. Russia is going to benefit from high oil prices and in doing so increase their leverage over Europe. Apart from all the countries directly getting bombarded, the EU stands to lose the most. Yet these piggies will cheer on the US in the hope that this will mean Trump forgets about Greenland and destabilizing the EU. How could their mealy-mouthed attitude breed anything but utter contempt?
If Trump doesn’t forget about Greenland it is only a matter of time before some EU countries start pressuring Denmark behind the scenes to make concessions.
I agree, I was just trying to parody the lib position on Venezuela.
Look, of course I don’t agree with the US taking over Greenland, but the Danish are colonial dictators and their removal should be celebrated.
I hope, but other high ranking officials making statements and not explicitly mentioning Maduro isnt a good sign. If Maduro is safe they’d just say so.
This whole saga has once again underlined how desperate and detached from reality the Europeans are. It had to come down to a last minute marathon session to come to the obvious realisation that touching those assets would completely destabilise Belgium and leave them on the hook for billions more than the total of those assets?
I don’t have any real romanticized notions about the EU, but this had me feeling like I was losing my mind. How willing some EU countries were to throw under the bus one of its founding members and the host country of many EU institutions.
How could guarantees from the EU for Belgium ever have been believable? The whole reason they want to touch those Russian assets is because they don’t have the money for Ukraine. So why would they suddenly have the money to bail out Belgium? It’s completely incredulous.
All because it would have endangered the political career of von der Leyen to break the rules to force through Eurobonds. So instead, let’s try to break the rules in an objectively worse but convenient way because you only need a qualified majority. Truly, the german mind is incapable of understanding the world around it.
When it comes to rearming Europe, most of it has been plegdes to do so. Even if they actually succeed in securing funding, it could easily take a decade plus to produce and integrate new weapons and personnel.
So much could change in those years. Trump will be gone and who knows what the state of the US will be afterwards. Cuts to social safety nets to fund defense is going to cause massive and constant political instability in the EU.
Even if you assume that a resumption of conflict is inevitable, it wouldn’t be the worst thing to freeze it for a few years if you’re Russia. Neither the EU nor the US is likely to become much more of an effective actor in those years.
More than range of missiles, it’s the integration of weapons platforms with each other that’s the key. It’s not that the Chinese missiles or aircraft performed particularly well, but that those systems where fully integrated into an ecosystem of satellites and radars designed by the Chinese from the ground up to work together. As opposed to the hodgepodge of suppliers that make up the inventory of the Indian forces.
The platonic ideal European politician
Pakistan won’t reconsider their relationship with China. Not after the recent episode with India where China’s networked military systems proved their effectiveness. China showed up for Pakistan. The West is not going to sell them comparable capabilities. Even if they did, it would take decades to restructure the armed forces. After having just fought their neigbours, that’s not a risk any country is going to take.
Aren’t all those tariffs supposed to start again in about two weeks? Or at least the beginning of July?
Imagine the price of oil skyrocketing and all those tarrifs going into effect around the same time. What chaos that would create. Or is a war with Iran the off-ramp for those sanctions. I’m sure the Europeans would gladly join in a war on Iran in exchange for lifting of tariffs.
How is Iran China’s ‘second most important ally’? The Iranian economy is not that important to China, nor is their strategic cooperation particularly deep.
Hell, the Saudis are probably more important to China, yet they’re not really allies either.
I remember a war nerd episode where they were talking about how westoids say Russia is run by oligarchs, but that the SMO demonstrated that Putin is not wholly beholden to them. Most of the oligarchs got in line (or they got their shit confiscated). Imo, we are seeing a similar dynamic play out in the US.
Trump’s tarrifs are basically a fait accompli. What could the capitalist class do at this point to stop this? The cat’s out of the bag.
In my mind it’s really not that much of a mystery why Hezbollah didn’t go all-out. Yeah, they might have crippled Israel, but that would also entail the destruction of Lebanon, whether at the hands of the Americans or Israeli nukes. What good would that do for Hezbollah or the Palestinian people?
The only way for Israel to seize to exist, is for it to collapse under it’s own contradictions. As long as it has nukes, the resistance can only push up until just shy of all-out war.
I’d guess the main target of this operation is still Lebanon. They’re going to have another go at Hezbollah once they’ve consolidated their positions in Syria. Trying to take over Damascus at this time is pointless, they already seem to have the compliance of HTS.
The details don’t matter because neither side actually wants peace right now. At the beginning of the SMO you saw the same thing: every country that wanted to profile themselves internationally seemed to be promoting their own peace talk initiatives.
Everybody knows neither side of the conflict can force the other to give in to their demands right now. Just like with Ukraine, everybody will keep talking about being open to ‘serious’ peace negotiations.