Houthis 'take control' of key island in global shipping route

I suspect the Chinese won’t be happy with the pipeline and refinery attacks on Saudi Arabia but i also assume that there will still be plenty of Chinese bound oil for the foreseeable future.

Iran can't have a nuclear weapon. It's an intolerable premise and if the price to be paid is global oil catastrophe it's a price well worth paying and America will force the issue as we have. You can deny this or you can accept that other actors have agency in the world and interests and they may take action that negatively affects you indirectly. You can help them, ignore them, fight against them. But we live in a world where other countries and other people will do things and you have to figure out how to best deal with it.

We have seen what happened with North Korea, but at least China and Russia can somewhat keep a lid on it. Which is the minimum they owe the rest of us since they created that problem. Iran's government is ideological in a way that westerners don't really understand (and to some extent Putin is too via his desires regarding Ukraine but the Russian system isn't too alien to our own views - they play tennis and vacation in Europe and all that stuff). Their government is simply not interested in the things that you and I are interested in.

With Iran you add in the pursuit of a nuclear weapon, Iranian continued attacks coordinated in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Israel via Palestine and it's desire to continue to destabilize the region, supporting Russia's war against Ukraine, and helping Russia evade sanctions (never mind domestic repression and murder) and you've really got a problem on your hands that needs solved one way or another if we're going to go the whole peace and stability for the globe route. The primary problem right now is that the rest of the world would rather see the United States take care of this problem (and it's having a tough time but there's a lot of nuance there) then to help because if you are Europe you're somewhat on Iran's side for some god awful reason, if you are Russia, well you work with Iran, if you are the gulf powers you have no power besides your oil, and if you are China you are not going to spend any resources (nor do you have power projection capabilities). So what do we do?

You can sit here yelling until you are blue in the face that this is Trump's war, or he shouldn't have started it (ignoring history) or some nonsense about ancient colonialism (Iran itself is attempting to be a Neo colonial power) or how Israel is so bad or something but Iran's behavior in the region simply cannot continue if you value peace and stability and global trade. Yea whatever Trump isn't a force for that either I get it, but that's not a good argument to make things worse by also letting Iran do crazy shit.

China's stockpiles are dwindling, strategically that's bad for China especially if they want to invade democratic Taiwan. You still need oil to run the military, no amount of batteries are going to power jet fighters or missiles for the foreseeable future. But dwindle they will and eventually China (and others) will be forced to buy oil and it will raise prices. We're all going to have to deal with that eventuality.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine also cut off large amounts of oil and gas supplies via sanctions, and the United States clamping down on both Venezuela and Iran has further restrained oil supplies as the US has also gone after Russian shadow fleet tankers which were adding additional capacity to the market. The EU has done a little bit here too after the US led the way.

Global chokepoints are a problem. Having so much of the world (primarily Asia) rely on oil and gas from the Middle East where you've got these militant groups funding by Iran who can at a whim decide if they don't get some concession that they're going to cut off oil for everyone else is intolerable. Again, say what you want but we as a planet should not be beholden to this kind of behavior.

It wasn't a war we could win. We fought it anyway. Now we're stuck trying to lose in a tolerable way. Which requires more fighting.

At some point the balance will tip and China will take over patronage of the right selection of powers to push us out, which will disentangle western involvement (and make it their problem, of course). But at this stage there really is no hope for genuine stability.

GCC will have to talk to Iran now, there is no reasonable way out of this quagmire other than a regional accommodation with Iran. Talk about a regression but here we are.

- make sure fuel prices increase globally

- The US economy is relatively well-shielded from the fallout by its own fossil fuel sources, local and in colonies like Venezuela.

- export more US fossil fuels, especially to Europe, at inflated prices. US insiders reap the profits.

- further kneecap European competitiveness in energy intensive sectors, steal market share. Oh well, small gift to China here too, but still a net win for the US.

And against, not with, Western Europe?

So being prices down where, in eastern Europe?

I suspect they would sooner curtail production rather then sell at a discount due to route restrictions.

It doesn't matter if in Texas wells are producing it at a penny for barrel, if the global prices are high that oil is going to be sold to Philippinos, Japanese, Italians or South Africans.

So, at the same time, it doesn't matter if some new routes open or close, it doesn't particularly favor one or the other buyer, it's still sold globally on a bid.

This hurts Europe more than Asia.

The UK, France, Italy, Netherlands, Denmark, and others are similarly opposed to the Houthis having conducted airstrikes on the Houthis (eg. 2025) as well as helping target them directly or indirectly.

And a large portion of global shipping is owned by Greek conglomerates - a country that is a close ally of Israel.

Most GCC states also have some form of defense agreement with the UK or France. If those turn out to be meaningless, it reduces their incentive to cut preferential deals with European states.

Additionally, this further enhances Turkiye and Pakistan's hand, as Saudi Arabia has signed defense pacts with both and Pakistan has threatened action against Iran yesterday if further incidents threaten Saudi Arabia. If they were able to dislodge the Houthis without direct European intervention, then it is a massive black stain on the EU's power projection capacity and it's claim that it should be treated as a great power. It also gives Turkiye additional leverage against the EU.

Finally, the Houthis struck the East-West Pipeline [0]. Much of the KSA's oil is in Eastern Saudi Arabia around Dhahran. Most large Asian states like China, India, Japan, and South Korea have continued operations in Iran that allowed them continued passage. European states lack access to GCC oil as a result of Perim island being controlled by the Houthis.

[0] - https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/yemens-houthis-rea...

If they were going to try this it needed to be done months earlier when the protests were raging. Instead the brain trust fumbled the initiative and let the Iranian leadership kill and scourge their local allies into compliance. Then fumbling the decapitation strike coupled with the decades of preparation for a decapitation strike (via redundancy of command) the genius brigade seemed to be unaware of because they fired all the experts, and the total repression of the protesting populace, led to an unusually strong system in Iran. They also almost certainly let racism play a big role in underestimating the Iranians, who are a very technically sophisticated society and have been preparing for this scenario since day one of the revolution.

Everything that’s happened was predictable and predicted, which is why other administrations who were more than happy to topple foreign governments when it suited them to not do so in Iran. MAGA feels like the junior dev that blames the compiler for their own syntax errors.

I believe this war started with a tomahawk missle murdering a school full of children and then the US denying involvement. I very clearly remember it. US attacks Iran unprovoked. First act, murder their children in school. If you wanted to solidify opposition to the US in Iran, I don't think they could have done a more effective job.

Obviously this war has been the US' latest great failure, and at the beckoning of a foreign power which makes it especially catastrophic. If people could focus on this, rather than trying to divide things into teams and then sling mud, they'd have vastly better outcomes come November (and on) than just using it for divisive mudslinging which does nothing but ensure that all elections, regardless of how bad the decisions of a incumbent, or how awful a challenger, will remain these sort of 50/50 coinflips.

One digit each.

Or wait, maybe just flamewar style debates are not so welcome here, so people flag instead have another debate about who is more evil?

Activists decry police murder of protester

Activists decry police "murder" of protester

The first implies that the police murdering the protestor is an established fact. The second makes it clear that it is the activists who used the term "murder" rather than it being a non-contentious fact.

tl;dr: two countries, divided by a common language.

That single quoted phrase was set in the context of other words, and that context defined its meaning. We know this to an extent that almost no one could have imagined since LLMs have become a huge part of the world.

My favorite example of this is how no article in Britain during Corbyn's leadership of the labor party would ever quote an entire sentence that he had said. Thousands of articles, and the quotes were all fragmentary phrases and lone words framed in editorial.

edit: Brits and the BBC especially do this more than most, likely because of their bizarre libel laws (that were once even worse than they are now.)

The next question should be: who benefits?