Iran Super Thread- Merged

[brihard]

He could also point the finger at Israel, with certain incredibly unhelpful comments that have been made.

Israeli official spurns call for truce: ‘All of Lebanon must burn’​

Yeah… Netenyahu’s between an increasingly hard rock and an increasingly hard place. Some of the other Israeli leadership are really not helping.

This.

U.S. is around 25% of its SPR capacity and burning more to keep gas prices low at home. The SPR floor is variously reported to be 10-20% of max holdings (~850MBBL IIRC), so the U.S. is approaching a formative moment soon regarding its reserve.

Mm hm. It’s not like a pint of beer or a box of cereal where empty is just empty. Storage, pipes, and refining equipment need a lot of stock moving through pipes to maintain safe operating pressures, refining processes, etc etc. my understanding is the system does not lend itself to much stop and start. Functionally empty comes well before physically empty.

 

[Colin Parkinson]

Not to mention the salt caverns they use to store the oil might become unstable.

 

[brihard]

Not to mention the salt caverns they use to store the oil might become unstable.

Both sides face potential infrastructure problems, yes. It may well come down to which side is more resilient to the economic and societal pain, and is willing to take the punches longer. The dynamics in play there will be very, very different between a somewhat fractured democracy facing elections in five months, and an autocracy willing to do a bit of murder-death-kill when the population gets uppity.

If it’s a question of oil trade chicken, my money is reluctantly on Iran.

 

[Colin Parkinson]

I get why you place your bets with Iran. One of our struggles in the west is understanding authoritarian regimes. We don't get their internal power struggles, or the fact that they lie to themselves routinely. These regimes snap and fall apart without warning in our view, when the facades can no longer be maintained. I think the regime was suffering far more than we know and this deal was their lifeline. However many inside it, think they can maintain the status quo or even humiliate the west further. In their view the west is weak and soft, and they are not wrong to a point. WWII shows what happens when the west resolves itself to win at all costs. Getting us there or even close is a mammoth task however.

 

[Altair]

I get why you place your bets with Iran. One of our struggles in the west is understanding authoritarian regimes. We don't get their internal power struggles, or the fact that they lie to themselves routinely. These regimes snap and fall apart without warning in our view, when the facades can no longer be maintained. I think the regime was suffering far more than we know and this deal was their lifeline. However many inside it, think they can maintain the status quo or even humiliate the west further. In their view the west is weak and soft, and they are not wrong to a point. WWII shows what happens when the west resolves itself to win at all costs. Getting us there or even close is a mammoth task however.

WW two is a great example of the west.

Name the western democracies that joined the war without being attacked or defending an ally that got attacked?

If the Third Reich had just kept to themselves and not invaded their neighbours, nobody in Europe was going to war to stop them, regardless of the atrocities.

So if Iran had attacked America directly, and caused significant enough damage or death the american public and NATO would have gone through a wall to crush them.

But an offensive war of choice? I'm trying to think of a war in the past 150 years that a western democracy (israel isnt a western democracy) galvanized their population into thinking it was good thing. Spanish American war? Maybe? Even then you had the Maine...

The point is, dictatorships have figured the west out. They can do whatever yhey please within their borders, up until they actually attack anyone people in democracies just dont care.