Is the U.S. Blockade of Iran a Winning Strategy or a Strategic Gamble?
Regards,
The U.S. blockade must have the Iranian strategists rolling around from laughing too hard.
Iranian’s core strategic advantage lies in its ability to inflict unacceptable economic, industrial and social pain on the collective west through blocking one of the world’s primary sources of critical resources.
But such blockages are not precise, which was a big part of the reason why Iran floated its tolls idea in the first place. That was a compromise to avoid uniting the whole world against them. In reality, the tolls massively weakened Iran’s strategic position because it allowed the continued outflow of oil and gas. Such commodities cannot be controlled or restricted once out in the open market, and even in the brief window the tolls were operating we saw shipments being rerouted before they even reached port.
With its counter blockade, America gifted Iran the full power of its most powerful strategic weapon while also removing the lion share of the costs to Iran of using it, and also upgraded the efficiency of said weapon. Now, not a drop of oil is leaving the Gulf, and the whole world blames America, not Iran for this.
As demand continue to far outstrip supply, and with the west having already cut itself off from Russian sources, it’s actually hilariously likely that the west, Europe in particular, will suffer a massive fuel shortage, with knock on devastating impacts to its real economy as industrial output slows or even outright stops and social unrest skyrockets from fuel shortages, rationing and potentially even food shortages and power outages.
The biggest problem Iran had was that its supply side moves had massive lead times before the effects start to be felt. In the meantime America could cause real damage and pain. The original calculous was that the strategic fight was equivalent to Iran slowly strangling America while America was punching daggers into its guts. The winner was the one who can outlast the other, but the odds were in America’s favour as they could have have months to bomb Iran and do all sorts of irreversible damage to its economy before its own economy started taking serious damage from the oil and gas supply disruption.
The ceasefire and blockade is really the worse of all worlds for America. As it’s stopped it’s strikes while actively helping Iran to make the supply side disruption far more airtight than Iran could have reasonably expected to be able to achieve on its own.
It’s like America stopped stabbing Iran because Iran was needling its hands holding the daggers too hard as they were stabbing Iran in the guys. Demanded that Iran take their hands off its throat, and when Iran refused, pulled a plastic bag over its own head thinking he is somehow also suffocating Iran.
Time is rapidly running out for America, and soon its own allies are going to start begging and demanding an end to the blockade as their own economies start to collapse.
The longer Iran can stretch out the peace talks and the longer the American blockade stays in place, the stronger Iran’s strategic position becomes.
