You guys don't understand, he's playing chess /s
And he has all the cards. The best cards.
He should have played Minesweeper.
Trump playing Quantum Multidimensional Parcheesi.
This wasn't a mistake, this was done on purpose.
Just like disbanding the anti-terror counterintel group right before bombing a school for little girls.
Yeah after reading this I'm honestly wondering how much oil futures he has invested in. Like, what can the Federal Trade Commission do if the President buys oil commodities then starts a war to drive the price up in order to make a billion dollars?
I guess this was done to drop the sanctions on the oil his buddy vlad owns. Krasnov is a good tool for vlad. Cha-ching!!
This guy is always stepping on rakes. Every decision he makes is stupid, choosing the wrong course consistently. It's remarkable
Unless he's working for our enemies.
And whatever he does always somehow ends up helping Russia.
They were struggling with gas prices being low and sanctions.
Now he removed sanctions and blocked any other source of oil.
The problem is that he is so incompetent that Occam's Razor dictates that's most likely the reason. Watching legacy news is like gaslighting yourself because they hold so much water for him and paint him as an idiot savant. He spits out a bunch of random BS and they imbue it with meaning.
Occam‘s razor: misinterpreted to provide plausible deniability for criminals since 1547.
I’m not saying he’s a Russian asset, but he certainly tends to act like one would act if one were a Russian asset.
Funny how him "being an idiot" and it "just being his incompetence" is also about the only way he can get off scot free after having done what he has done. Every other possibility can be prosecuted, except the ones where people argue he didn't have intent.
When in doubt, just take the Mussolini route.
I mean yes it raises gas prices which will help Russia on the one hand but for their war in Ukraine that may not be as big a help as having Iran still standing and putting political pressure on NATO assets as well as being a weapons manufacturing hub that Ukraine couldn't easily infiltrate and bomb.
Russia is already producing Shahed drones themselves.
While they may produce most of the components for the drones Iran probably kept some production parts homegrown to ensure Russia pays their licensing fees. That doesn't mean Russia can't make their entirely homegrown production line from beginning to end but that would take time when most of the production line was set up on Iran and they could purchase those components for their production run. Even if that isn't a factor in a shooting war you probably want the maximum production of weapons needed to continue shooting.
I think assuming they operate their economy like the US does has a high probability of leading to committing grave errors
I'm not saying they do, but to assume that Iran transferred all data on how to produce a Shahed drone without some kind of ensurance that they will keep getting paid out in some form and not just forgotten the moment being friends with Iran is inconvenient for Russia is a graver error to commit. They may not be being paid in money but before this current bombing campaign I'm sure Russia was transferring the minimum they could get away with to Iran without hampering their own technologly transfer for the drones. All dictatorial governments (call them small coalition governments for more accuracy for this discussion as all brands of autocracy have their own rules but rely on a small group of people to run the government with loyalty to the ruler being paramount) have a corruption issue, be it Russia with their crony Oligarchy or Iran who has a specific group of people who handle the money for the country and can never be legally prosecuted for money disappearing from the government coffers. If we can know for sure that both of those governments have corruption issues we can also surmise that pocketing as much money as they can is going to be a part of their governments standard operating procedure and to avoid being robbed if they have a licensing agreement they will have physical impedements to avoid the licensing infringement, and they are not the only people to do this the F-35 for all exports except for 1 have a similar scheme in place.
You seem to be under the mistaken impression that Trump wants this blockade and war to end. If that were the case, why would he have started it? The fact that we are stuck here is entirely the point. Do you REALLY think its an accident that the fourth largest producer of oil in the world accidentally started a war that simultaneously raised the price of oil AND blockaded the top three oil producers on earth?
Immediately after directing a military incursion toppling the leadership in Venezuela; which sits on massive oil reserves which coincidentally, are of the variety American oil companies are equipped to refine.
The goal is to put the US in disarray so that he can declare it's too dangerous to have elections this November.
Not going to happen.
We held elections during the War of 1812, the Civil War and WW2.
Operation Epstein Fury isn't shit compared to those.
Yeah, and we've had peaceful transfers of power up until this one fucking guy...
Newsflash:
The United States is one of the largest oil exporters on earth. They have exactly ZERO interest in reducing the price of oil.
How are people not understanding that THIS is the exact intended outcome here?
The United States is also the world's biggest market for trade. All trade depends on oil for transport and energy, directly or indirectly. Oil profits will be high but every other industry will suffer. The balance of winners and losers will be what's known as a recession.
The US imports raw oil and exports refined oil. The US has great interest in keeping raw oil prices low. This isn't 5d chess, our leaders are genuinely incompetent.
And then factor in Venezuela….
Yeah it doesn’t take a conspiracy theorist to see what’s happening.
It's another pump-and-dump.
My bad.
Trump-and-dump.
Some context from the end of the article:
But Matthew Buckley, a former U.S. Naval aviator who spent considerable time serving in the Middle East region in the 1990s, told The Independent that the U.S. air campaign against Iran is likely executing long-held plans that would negate the need for the minesweepers by eliminating Iran’s ability to lay mines.
“When I was flying combat sorties off to Abraham Lincoln in the mid 90s, you know, we were doing operation Southern Watch no fly zone missions over Iraq. And guess what we were doing during our downtime? We were strike planning Iran ... and one of my big strikes that I had planned was against an Iranian mine facility deep in the middle of Iran,” he said.
He added that the Avenger-class ships would not necessarily be readily available to clear any mines that might be laid because they’re “not built for a dynamic environment.”
“Obviously the LCS does have its issues, but it does have a lot of weapons on board, and it is more designed for actual combat and littoral ... mine sweeping,” he said.
The mine sweepers in question are four decommissioned wood and fiberglass vessels from the Desert Storm era whose capabilities are being replaced by littoral (giggity) combat ships.
It’s hard for me to believe that this operation wouldn’t include priority strikes on sea mine facilities. Just the specter of mines in the strait is enough to make shipping insurance infeasible. If Iran is successfully mining, what happened? Was this war so hastily planned that this was overlooked? If the strait is so vital to shipping, you’d think they would want every minesweeper available.
If the US military (who are acutely aware of Trump’s openly hostile disrespect towards service members by the way) are actually listening to Trump’s logistical advice, he’s going to run them into the ground faster than his Vegas casinos.
Was this war so hastily planned that this was overlooked?
Planned isn't the term that I think should be applied to what the US is doing. Iran has been planning how to make an attack on their land as painful for the world as possible for a long time. They know their military can't compete, so they utilize strategy to make an outsized impact. There is no "mine facility" to bomb, they have thousands of mines in decentralized storage. All of this, including Iran's plans to make this painful, is public information that the US military had access to.
The unfortunate reality is the civilian leadership in charge of planning this are fucking idiots. Pete Hegseth, Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner, and Donald Trump are fucking morons. They know jack shit about any of this but are running our foreign policy.
The Trump Admin is doing the bidding of Israel here, hands down, as influenced by Israel's assets within the US government, such as certain members of Congress, who have plainly stated as much. Israel doesn't care about oil prices, they care about destroying Iran and an ancillary goal: As we speak, Israel has displaced almost a million people in Lebanon and is clearly about to annex Lebanese land. This is a footnote in the news because of Trump's actions in Iran, but would have garnered international condemnation otherwise.
The unfortunate reality is the civilian leadership in charge of planning this are fucking idiots. Pete Hegseth, Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner, and Donald Trump are fucking morons. They know jack shit about any of this but are running our foreign policy.
They're wholesome entertainment for Putin.
You think America, one of the largest oil producers in the world, really cares all that much that Saudi Arabia and Iraq can't get their oil out? You realize they are making money on this, right? The US has no interest in opening the straight. Why do you think they started a war to close it?
Not all oil and its child products are created equal.
There are serious knock on effects occurring right now that we won't see the impact of for a month or two as companies burn through their inventory
Machine oils/lubricants, aviation fuels and of course fuel. Not to mention LNG, fertilisers and other petrochemical feedstock.
and its child products
Don't get the "president" and his cronies too excited, now...
I did not realize that! Given how sensitive America voters are to gas prices, I guess they’re relying on voter suppression.
Who exactly does benefit from closing the strait other than Iran?
The two largest oil producers outside of the gulf: The United States of America and Russia.
What I read today is that Iran deployed twelve mines. Twelve.
Presumably the US was striking their missile launches, and a couple more than twelve were launched... it's consistent with all that that their ability to lay mines is heavily degraded.
Only takes one to sink a ship with billions in cargo. They're not risking their ships on "just a few".
Because of course they are
Ship shipping ship shipping ships.
Haha, Philly might be the one place on Earth that is more hostile to Trump than Iran....
Is there a lot of minesweeping work to be done in Philadelphia?
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