Does lifting sanctions on a country that you’re at war with the smart thing to do? Literally helps to fund their enemy.
It is not a zero sum game. Letting the oil through, and thereby preventing the world market from a total tail spin, probably helps the US more than it helps Iran. So is on the surface surprising, but surprisingly rational on second look.
I’m pretty sure he thinks allies of the US are beta males that follow the US alpha male…
Vance said Trump was “America’s Hitler”. Before Vance realized that he could get power by supporting Trump.
You seem to be using “he thinks” in the sense “Vance genuinely believes”. I am not convinced Vance believes anything, his actions look like pure opportunism.
All the pollsters were pretty close to each other. If you posit fabricated polls, then you are saying that every single pollster in the US is completely compromised. That is just tinfoil hat, in the uncool way.
Asia is $60/bbl higher.
Asia get their oil through the Hormuz straight. Of course their oil price is higher.
There probably isn’t oil tankers enough in the world to equalize the supply between the US and Asia. Hence you should not expect the price to be perfectly equalized between the US and Asia.
We have tons of untapped oil fields
But that is likely irrelevant for the timescale of this conflict, right? Surely the lead time for bringing new oil fields online is measured in years.
Oil prices are pretty global. If you look at the prices for European oil (Brent crude) and US oil (West Texas Intermediate), then they are $14 apart. Which is not nothing, but WTI is still up by 63% from pre-war. That is still going to hurt the US economy, a lot.
Also, in the US the oil price windfall is privatized, while the oil price pain is socialized. So the US will still feel almost the full pain.
It is not just at the pump. The whole supply chain depends on oil. Industrial processes, plastics, fertilizer.
The price rise at the pump is often masked by taxes. The percentage jump for industry will be larger.
But isn’t lifting sanctions on Iranian oil actually the smart thing to do? Get all the oil to market, to ameliorate the supply shock. Even though it looks horrible from a PR angle.
It truly should be a learning experience. But I genuinely don’t think Republicans in the US are capable of learning anything, especially not something as narratively inconvenient as this.
Why not? 77 million people voted for Trump. And before you cry “election fraud”, the pre election polls measured similar numbers.
It’s so ironic then that Biden was so criticized for the consequences of Trump’s agreements with the Taliban 💀
Trump was responsible for the vast majority of bad outcomes, yup. And the media did not reflect that.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediaite :
The New York Times has described the site as “a blog that chronicles the gossipy media world”
So not the most credible source you could imagine. But on the other hand, Wikipedia doesn’t list any examples of Mediaite being fake news. And in this case, Mediaite is just summarizing a CBS article - the CBS article should obviously have just been linked instead.
In any case, it seems to me that Trump has two options: 1) Give consessions to Iran to save the global oil market or 2) ground invasion. Since I can’t imagine Trump surrendering, no matter how game theory rational it would be, I am expecting ground operations.
Going by Trump’s actions in first term, the “no wars” thing was the rare promise that was actually pretty believable.
Trump first term didn’t start new big wars, and withdrew from e.g. Afghanistan (in a bullshit way, but still). Based on past actions, and yes because Trump promised it, I believed that Trump would be isolationist in his second term.
But the oil price shock is going to hurt Trump electorally, and normal people’s wallets, way worse than the Epstein files. So in a sense it is silly to say that the distraction is “working”.
selfishness
The wild thing is that thing would be so much better, if they were just capable of being rationally selfish. Like, don’t elect a blatantly corrupt selfish billionaire to be President. Instead elect people who don’t want tax cuts for the 1%.
Sometimes, like your comment, I wonder if “conservative” is used as a synonym for “stupid”.
Yes their airspace and US military bases are used for offensive attacks on Iran.
Source?
That is absolutely a legal target for Russia too. I
Not according to international law, as I understand it.
That stance makes absolutely no sense. If a nation is invading you the military bases belonging to that nation are valid legal targets.
Well yes and not - but that is how international law works. As an analogy, Russia is not attacking tanks heading through the EU to Ukraine, before they pass the border into Ukraine.
There has to be a consensus of what constitutes a legal target. Or the whole world would be anarchy.
You surely need a lot of oil tankers to sail oil across the Pacific Ocean - because each voyage takes so long. And there needs to be export oil terminals in the US towards Asia, which I assume there isn’t currently, because Asia was supplied by the Middle East.
So a priory doesn’t seem too surprising to me, that there is a price spread.