I don't know enough about the current state of naval warfare but I've assumed this is related to the asymmetry that's emerged around protecting capital warships, especially in the scenario of a very narrow strait and a long enemy-controlled coastline. They can shoot relatively low-cost, short-range guided missiles from anywhere along the coast. Even if a warship stops the vast majority of them, only one has to get through to sink a multi-billion dollar ship that takes a decade to replace.

There are now similar asymmetries emerging across war-fighting and even though warships can still be effective (and less vulnerable) in other scenarios, this specific one seems especially bad. The other factor is that most of what ships carry through the straight isn't going directly to the U.S. so the impact on the U.S. is mostly secondary, reducing the risk the U.S. is willing to take. Of course, all this was known beforehand by military strategists which makes this all look even worse for the U.S. administration.

> United States using its military to keep international waters open

Being a little pedantic, as per my knowledge, the Strait of Hormuz is not “international waters”. It’s territorial waters belonging to Iran and Oman. AFAIK, Iran hasn’t ratified UNCLOS either, and claims it is not subject to it.

American navy has blockaded countries all over the world, so it's more true that they closed international waters. Waters were open before America existed. If Americans would actually learn their history they would see that the USA blockade was the reason Japan attacked Pearl Harbour, as the Japanese needed the water to open and thought taking out Pearl Harbour would prevent the US Navy controlling the Pacific. Japan attacked the American base, USA attacked Japanese civilians with nukes.

You're not wrong, except that USA is/was not always literally "keeping waters open" for everyone. The Cuba blockade, which is another form of war and has dire consequences for the population, has been going on for decades: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_embargo_against_...

The power wasn't there in the first place if the administration couldn't defend Hormuz. It's all the same capital and resources that prior administrations had. The actual blunder was exposing that weakness to the world. We could have done nothing and reputation would've carried the idea that we could.

I would amend that to be that everyone thought Iran could close the straight, but now they _know_ they can close the straight.

Ironically the US has never ratified UNCLOS. The American professed interest in maintaining right of passage does not appear to require them to be held to the same standards.

Also the Strait of Hormuz is an international strait not international waters. The entire strait lies within Iranian and Omani waters. Frankly it's a bit absurd to complain that your ships can't transit a country's waters while you bomb them.

> It would be quite stunning Iran defeated the united states in this sense.

> The fact that this outcome is surprising represents a very loud and public failure on the administration's part.

You can't teach stupid!! The coward, sleepy, dementia ridden, pretentious commander-in-chief declared victory over Iran the next day after starting the war.

Seems like piracy is more about the land than the sea. I can't think of any major american military action against piracy aside from actions against somali terrorists. Seems piracy as it was known historically died out as the old historic pirate havens of say Tortuga or Outer Banks went from places of anarchy to places that were controlled by some government in some capacity. And that is exactly where we see the somali piracy today: here is a state that is unable to govern its land mass and thus there is piracy, even with the american navy directly taking action against this piracy. Seemingly this has nothing to do with the american navy at all, even though that is supposedly one of its mandates and it takes actions in the spirit of advancing these anti piracy goals. The fundamentals of why piracy does and doesn't occur don't really change. It seems it comes down to government capacity on land, not from projecting naval power.

the US probably trains the best experts in military history & strategy. At their officer schools like WestPoint & other programs.

problem is when your Commander in Chief is a Idiot In Chief who wants to surround himself with "YES" men.

actual solid pragmatic advice won't be listened to - i.e that Iran is a millennial empire with asymmetrical advantages.

if you have no strategy to counter that asymmetrical strategy - then don't fight the war.

The gamble, which was certainly egged on by Israel, was that two stars aligned and it was high time to strike Iran.

The first star was intense civilian unrest, the months leading up to the strikes was marked by riots and protests.

The second star was the meeting of Iran's top brass in one spot at one time, both of which Israel knew about.

It was almost certainly sold to Trump as a domino event, where the US would blow the head off and the people of Iran would ravage the body. On paper it looks clean, and certainly he was riding on a high after the swift coup in Venezuela.

Of course though, that did not happen, and now he had to go to China to beg under a thin veil for them to pressure Iran to back off. Trump rolled a critical failure on what appeared to be a moderate-low risk attempt.

> but this administration clearly had no idea what they were getting themselves into and did not plan accordingly.

You can reuse this line for most of things this administration has been doing.

The cascade of self-injury and self-sabotage required for the US to end up in this position cannot be understated. It's much easier to defend against an attacker whose first move is to blind and disarm themselves.

It would not be that stunning, given that a much poorer Iranic country decisively defeated the U.S. in a ~20 year war ending only a few years ago.

This spin is such a weird way of thinking about this. Hormuz was open! Hormuz had been open for decades! Iran "closed" it as part of a war that the United States started.

We weren't defeated in a attempt to "keep Hormuz open". Hormuz closed because we we started an entirely unrelated war. And lost. There's a difference!

The Department of Defense is run by a weekend morning show host and the President is a reality TV star. It would be baffling if things were going well.

Side note that the US offered the same plan as Iran. Selling insurance (in USD) to shippers to transit the Strait. They have done $0 in business.

https://www.ft.com/content/eabadd1a-a712-4b44-99bf-bb50eb753...

no idea what they were getting themselves into and did not plan accordingly

That is the modus operandi of this administration.

All tactics, no strategy.

We've been planning interventions in Iran for 40 years and they constantly get revised or updated. Iran is literally one of few countries known for drones, which they based on stolen drone tech from western countries. It's not realistic that we entered this conflict unaware that Iran could harass the strait cheaply.

The problem is that Israel bombed their entire leadership structure and there's seemingly nobody to deal with now. It's fragmented between people who want to make deals, people who can even facilitate any kinds of agreement and the radicals who simply want the world to burn and will throw any human in the way to die for that end.

We can absolutely continue destroying their capacity to do things, but the terrorists do not care about their own people or the world. They will use human shields and continue seeking nuclear weapons. They do not value human life or rules. This is why they can never have a nuclear weapon.

At the same time, showing the vulnerabilities in getting oil from that region means China is now buying more oil in USD and even directly from the US via the Pacific which helps further deter World War 3. In the case that something did still happen as part of a global strategy by China, Iran no longer exists as a lever that can be pulled to expand the chaos of a war with the aim of further diffusing the US military away from the Pacific.

If we wanted to fully end this mess, we would probably have to send the military in on the ground, which nobody wants except Iran. They are extremists in general and willing to die over this nuclear issue.

Barring that, we've largely neutered their capacity to make war and reorganized oil trade further in favor of the US. We will have to wait to see if Iran's leadership structure sorts itself out and they come to the table. Until then, if Iran wants to prevent their neighbors from benefiting from international shipping, Iran can be denied that too. Countries are developing workarounds to rely less on the strait, so the longer Iran sticks with this strategy the weaker it will get over the years.

It's popular to say the US lost this or the US lost that and it's a ridiculous country, but it's usually some kind of political gymnastics or financial judgement as it pertains to cost vs benefit. We always lose fewer soldiers and generally come out of it better than if we hadn't done anything at all. We almost always go into something for many more reasons than are publicly stated. A lot of the benefits of intervening in Iran seem to be paying off right now.

Sometimes doing the right thing is unpopular, but you should still do it.

The plan was ostensibly to distract and insider trade. Winning would be counter productive anyway.

Say what you want but it seems like Iran are the ones playing 4D chess here.

Iran defeated the US the minute trump was sworn in.

In a sense, this is the defeat of the US by bin Laden - it's been a steady slide until the trump cliff since then.

> Much of the post-WW2 American-led world order was founded partially on the United States using its military to keep international waters open.

This completely ignores the MAD era and the Soviets taking over Eastern Europe by force. It also ignores the Korean war stalemate, the Vietnam war loss, as well the most recent Afghan loss.

Post-Soviet disintegration management, the successful integration of Eastern Europe, China, and India into the Western Bloc ways were genuine wins. That's post-1989, not post-ww2 (yes, I realize technically that's post-ww2). So there was not really a world-wide dependency between WW2 and 1989 on the American military. Western Bloc, yes, world-wide no.

The current stalemate is only a surprise to the unaware and folks listening only to American news channels. Before the beginning of the current conflict, even $20 chatgpt provided enough insight to accurately chart the course of the conflict in probabilities. Even without chatgpt, folks keeping track and keeping an eye on real news and past policy decisions and progress were able to predict that Ukraine had a very good chance of stopping Russia in its tracks.

The trouble isn't with the availability of this data, it's hubris. Time and time again. Caesar. Napoleon. Hitler. Korea. Johnson in Vietnam. Soviets in Afghanistan. US in Afghanistan. Ukraine. Iran.

But hubris exists because sometimes it works, and for quite some time. Genghis Khan. Pax Romana. Soviets in Eastern Europe. US in Western Europe. Europeans in the Americas. Russians in Eastern Asia. Europeans in Asia and Africa. Palestine. Tibet.

Why it works, and why it doesn't, is an active research topic. [1]

Analysts paid to predict the future will of course argue this vehemently from their pet PoV. And the decision-makers are too domain-challenged to know whom to believe*. They didn't have chatgpt :-)

[1] https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/phillips-payson-obr...

* Or they just don't care

The plan was for it to stay closed and have the US sell oil.

The US is now exporting more oil than it has in a decade.

Why can none of these supposedly smart people see this plan?

The administration knew this very well. They've been swinging the markets wildly and intentionally several times and they and their buddies have made billions from it.

The US didn't win the Vietnam War and didn't even unambiguously win the Korean War.

What the US did was show it would make life uncomfortable for those who challenged the liberal trade order and politically-and-economically offer benefits for those who embraced this order.

What Trump has done is just attack Iran (during negotiations) with no real counter-offer. Iran has responded by attacking everything in sight because nothing was being offered by the US.

Clearly the result is indeed a serious failure on the part of the Trump administration but it's a failure that seems to come from not even understanding that "Pax Americana" has depended on the carrot and the stick.

Maybe there was another reason for the Iran strikes?

https://www.facebook.com/reel/1448330470095627

Thank you for letting me in!

Sol Roth

PS:

Hope you like the décor. I’m redecorating your thoughts permanently.

This outcome is still favorable for nethyanandu and he used trump and USA as tool.

> this administration clearly had no idea what they were getting themselves into

All of the advisors in the room with Trump (Cheung, Caine, etc.) told him explicitly after the meeting with Netanyahu that attacking Iran was a horrible idea. His military advisors told him that Strait closure was the most obvious consequence.

The root cause here, is that all decisions are being made by a single biological neural network with a really high error rate, which is increasing.

there is only one man who is surprised and he is Orange and Extremely Ignorant

The post-WW2 American-led world order was, at times, a shared world order between the United States and Soviet Union. Free trade, perhaps, was "enforced" by the United States Navy but that was for the benefit of all nations and it seems to me to have been something pretty widely understood.

If the US military fails to keep international waters open, that harms everyone, and everyone more so than the United States. There's this continued misunderstanding that America did this or that, or securing global shipping is for America to do, or what have you. But you can't have your cake and eat it too here. If you accept American hegemony of the seas and the associated benefits, you have to also accept American action in places like Iran. It's a package deal - you get both or neither. There seems to be a misunderstanding about that, I hope it's a little more clear now.

> It would be quite stunning Iran defeated the united states in this sense.

To this second point, the US can just keep the Strait closed. No big deal. It isn't really possible for Iran to forcibly win here because while the US has higher gas prices, we're the #1 oil and gas market and we can stomach the pain much longer less you get complaints from MAGA/far-left anti-American types. Iran would simply watch their entire economy collapse, while Americans are paying a couple bucks more for cheeseburgers and milkshakes.

But the perspective that the US would be defeated is the incorrect one. In fact, what would be defeated here is that very American-led world order. For the US to be defeated here, as so many seem to rejoice at the prospect of, you would also lose American naval power and security, and instead each and every country would have to spend a lot more human capital and treasure to secure their own shipping and trade arrangements, because there would be no America to come help and save the day. No more NATO. No more caring about Taiwan or Ukraine (remember Iran helps Russians kill Ukrainians?) or getting involved in expeditionary affairs. You can not separate these things. Iran happens for the same reason NATO happens. The world will be much more transactional - pay to play and a global American security tax. A scenario like the one in Iran, in which a genocidal dictatorship that is all to happy to steal tribute from weaker nations simply becomes the norm, if not simply more common, and the EU or China or whoever can deal with it.

So I'd say, be careful to join other isolationists and smugly cheer for the US to "lose" to Iran, and in which case you can expect much worse as the US says "forget it" and only seeks to protect its own vital interests without regard to the rest of the world - the Trumpian and far left view which is a marriage of convenience.

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Or is it posible this administration just took a win-win-win position?

1 - US oil and gas companies make money as oil proces rise. The US is the largest producer in the world.

2 - China loses it's major source of oil and gas.

3 - Iran gets neutralized. It may not look like it now, but it will probably end up that way.