The noose is tightening around the neck of Iran’s rump regime. Pay no attention to the Trump Distortion Effect that is bending much of war reporting into a critique of President Donald Trump. That’s wish-casting from lefties in legacy media. America is dominating this conflict. The United States will prevail.
The Strait of Hormuz is closed to every country in the world. Iran has proposed reopening it as a sort of watery version of the New Jersey and Ohio turnpikes — except the tolls would be exorbitant, and there is no alternative route for tankers and super freighters.
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Such a scheme would be a major break with long-standing international law of the seas and the tradition of freedom of navigation. Such a radical departure from centuries of practice would set off a scramble at every narrow point on the world’s connected waters.
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It’s not going to happen. It’s a fantasy of the rump regime in Tehran.
The strait may, however, stay closed long enough to inflict severe economic damage on the world economy, but the world is never, ever going to agree to “water highway robbery” by the remnants of the Iranian regime.
While the strait remains closed, Iran is itself blockaded from all international shipping, inbound or outbound. It’s a COVID-era shutdown of one country less the internet connectivity that allowed the world to limp through the pandemic. It’s a crisis for the junta atop the smoldering remains of the leadership pyramid in Iran.
Our allies in the Gulf are suffering great economic losses but their regimes are not at risk of collapse as Iran’s is. As we saw in December and January, the Iranian people want the regime that came to power 47 years ago to be gone. Now they are willing to endure bombardment to see it exiled.
Those killers and thieves in the junta have nowhere to go, however, and it’s possible their stolen fortunes cannot travel with them even if they were eyeing a bolt for the border. When someone in the regime ordered attacks on the banking hubs of the region in the Emirates and Qatar, they may not have been thinking very far ahead. The “getaway stash” may not be so easily accessed as always assumed by the remaining high-ranking officials of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
China and Russia may still be options as bolt-holes, but the former cannot be happy with the Guard given their oil needs and the latter may have used up its space available for fallen dictators, especially given the reservations made by “elites” in the teetering Cuban government.
So, how long can the rump of the regime hold their people down while trying to keep even minimum supplies of groceries and gasoline distributed across the country? The country’s internet is still quashed by the junta, and there is a semblance of a press office at Iran’s foreign ministry denouncing “American piracy” as the U.S. Navy methodically collects that portion of the “Ghost Fleet” or “Dark Fleet” of tankers carrying sanctioned Iranian oil. Three such tankers were intercepted far away from Iranian ports last week. No doubt more are on the map waiting for the right moment for the helicopters to hover and the Marines or SEALs to rappel down and take the controls.
Wilkins Micawber of Charles Dickens’ novel David Copperfield uttered the basics of financial planning that have stood the test of time since the book appeared in 1850: “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty-pound ought and six, result misery.”
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Iran is failing the Micawber test. It’s presumably still paying all of the Guard, its affiliated security forces, and the Artesh (the regular military). But that can’t go on much longer without income from oil exports coming in, and none is. Every business that depended in whole or in part on the internet functioning has also been gashed. The housing market lost about 10% of its inflation-adjusted value in the year before the bombs began falling.
Iran is a country rich in natural resources and an educated population. But its regime is a group of religious lunatics who may not understand the basics of a national economy. They can hide in their bunkers for only so long. Eventually, the bodyguards figure out that at least Mossad pays in hard currency and that is when it gets very, very dangerous for the fourth string “in charge” of the crumbling pyramid of power inside Iran.
