Strait Outta Competence
My knowledge of the oil industry comes primarily from watching episodes of Landman, but I know enough to realize that Iran is trying to turn the battles in the Gulf into an oil and energy war. But you’d have to be sort of a dipstick not to have war-planned for this eventuality. Iran can’t directly fight militaries like the US and Israel, so they’re targeting the world’s pocketbook and issuing related threats. “In response to the Iranian threats, commercial shipping has come to a standstill in the Gulf, oil prices have spiked, and the Trump administration has scrambled to find ways to tamp down an economic crisis that has triggered higher gasoline prices for Americans. The episode is emblematic of how much Mr. Trump and his advisers misjudged how Iran would respond to a conflict that the government in Tehran sees as an existential threat.” NYT (Gift Article): How Trump and His Advisers Miscalculated Iran’s Response to War. The bigger question is whether, inside the White House, they calculated at all. They’re definitely calculating now. Well, with certain limitations. “Inside the administration, some officials are growing pessimistic about the lack of a clear strategy to finish the war. But they have been careful not to express that directly to the president, who has repeatedly declared that the military operation is a complete success.”
+ “The lesson that the Trump administration seemed to learn from the failed planning for postwar Iraq is that planning isn’t worth the effort at all.” Franklin Foer in The Atlantic (Gift Article): The Obvious Is Taking Its Revenge on Trump.
+ WSJ (Gift Article): Iran’s Control of Hormuz Means It’s Exporting More Oil Today Than Before the War.
+ “It would be reckless to predict precisely where this conflict is headed. But it no longer seems reckless to say that this war is going to be a mess: if not just a military mess, or a diplomatic mess, then at least an economic mess. The vast majority of headlines in the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg are about the price of crude oil. But the deeper story is about everything crude becomes, everything that moves alongside it, and everything that depends on the narrow maritime chokepoint at the mouth of the Persian Gulf.” Derek Thompson: This isn’t just about the price of oil. It’s about everything oil becomes.
+ There’s no doubt that an already weakened Iran has been seriously damaged by the aerial bombardment. But it’s hard to say whether that achieves the goals of the Trump administration because those goals have never been made clear. The same is not true for Israel. And Bibi’s steadfast vision that includes regime change vs Trump’s wavering goals could be the battle that ultimately determines how this war evolves — and what things look like for the Iranian people when it’s over. WSJ (Gift Article): Trump Says the Iran War Is Nearly Won but Israel Has Other Ideas. How will it all play out? Maybe I’ll let Billy Bob Thornton as Tommy Norris in Landman answer that one: “Wish in one hand, shit in the other, see which one fills up first.”
