I’m preparing a longer post on Iran but while I do so I wanted to blurt out one reaction. Protecting the flow of oil is not a legitimate casus belli. If it were, every attack anywhere would be one. The supply chains of American companies go everywhere. We should not go to war to protect supply chains.
War must always be a last resort. There are plenty of alternatives left. We could drive less. We could produce more oil. We could buy electric vehicles. Going to war to keep the price of a gallon of gasoline $2.50 rather than going to $5.00 is not just cause.
In order for military action to be effective, you need to destroy their defensive and offensive capabilities, but once they are vulnerable, you might not get the results you want.
Economic actions are similar, and again, you never know what you will get.
Oil prices are already heading down as the Saudis leak they can restore the damage in a couple of weeks.
The ball is in Iran’s court now. If the Saudis restore the oil or the US increases production; this bid to create leverage against the sanctions failed. Do they escalate or come to the table?
Further escalation by Iran could be very risky… for Iran.
You forgot the best long-term solution to oil shortages, global warming and loss of flora and fauna throughout the world: penalize breeding instead of subsidizing it.
It is worth remembering that in the Vietnamese War, the South Vietnamese government was our ally. It fielded an army of over 1 million men; it controlled all the cities and almost all the towns; during the day it controlled the countryside. We put 550,000 men in country, of which 60,000 were combat troops. We had absolute air and naval supremacy. Our population was many times that of North Viet Nam, and our economy was infinitely larger. We built almost everything we used ourselves, in the US.
We lost.
James Kirby: The surest way to drive down human reproductive rates is to allow them to increase their wealth. The Romans learned this millennia ago, when the senatorial class had to start adopting children wholesale to prevent their family lines from going extinct due to lack of heirs. We’re seeing it now in Japan, Russia, Western Europe and North America north of the Mexican border.
Now there’s a very strong argument that wealth growth disproportionately drives environmental destruction. If that is the case, you should be all in for tight border control, since the flood of migrants trying to get into the USA aren’t coming for the weather but a better (i.e. wealthier) life. That was the argument behind the El Paso killer’s attack, the migrants by coming here would inevitably acquire a larger carbon footprint than if they’d stayed in their birth countries.
I’m not sure I want to refight the Vietnam War in this comments thread. There’s a difference of opinion about that. One view is that the war was lost when it started. The other is that we won the war and lost the peace, i.e. when we stopped funding the South Vietnamese that’s when we lost.