Hormuz crisis side effect: a sharp rise in container shipping rates

https://www.lloydslist.com/LL1157327/Hormuz-crisis-side-effect-a-sharp-rise-in-container-shipping-rates

by mooreds • 2 months ago

201 169 2 months ago

mooreds2• 2 months ago

Man, the older I get, the more I think that second and third and fourth order effects are way more important than first order effects.

metalman2• 2 months ago

and therefor you will not be surprised to find out that there has been a very recent dramatic decline in the asking price for empty containers in areas that are primarily devoted to imports, as the empty can is not worth the cost to ship it back.

throwaway85825• 2 months ago

In this case it's because of the time it takes to load the empties because its more profitable to use the time sailing. Some ports have rules now forcing them to take back empties so the yards don't fill up.

marcosdumay2• 2 months ago

We should standardize some "dual-container" format that can be formed out of disassembled containers.

bix6• 2 months ago

Externalities always felt glossed over in economics. So yes this business will ruin the river for everyone but please direct your attention to this chart and look at all that producer surplus!

Imustaskforhelp2• 2 months ago

At a certain point, businesses and the world in general focus way too much on the directly measurable rather than the accountance of the immeasurable (downstream effects)

Although, I am all for a data driven world but somehow it is my opinion that we have ended up with the worse of both as combined with the goodhart's law, this measurable thing just ends up somehow getting manipulated for short term gains over real long term damages.

As is your case in the example, the business will ruin the river for everyone having severe damage both culturally and I think financially as well given downstream effects of all people depending upon that river.

But the business has externalized the losses to the people and the people have externalized the responsibility of the river to the government and the government believes in absolute free capitalism! (or sometimes the businesses give the government some money in the pocket ie. corruption. "Cost of doing business" they said.)

I am not against capitalism itself (that Adam smith proposed) but capitalism in its current form is definitely something... and surely some if not most of us might agree to the fact that system isn't working as intended (well not working if it was intended for us ie.)

dfc• 2 months ago

One of my favorite readings from undergrad and grad school was "The Problem of Social Costs" by R. Coase. I'm sorry you think externalities are glossed over by economics, but Im excited to tell you that this is certainly not the case. Coase won the Nobel Prize in economics in large part for his work on externalities. They don't hand out Nobel prizes for glossed over topics. It's definitely worth a read of you wish economics paid more attention to externalities:

https://www.law.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/file/coase-...

BurningFrog• 2 months ago

This is a bit like the critique of physics that they ignore friction.

It turns out that for many purposes friction and externalities are small enough that they can be ignored for most purposes.

Physicists and Economists are very aware of the tradeoffs.

daedrdev• 2 months ago

Econ 101 often ignores side effects, but I don’t think economist has a whole ignore side effects. That’s like one of their main topics of study.

dgellow8• 2 months ago

Decision makers ignore externalities. Economists definitely not, it’s pretty much what their field of study is about

graeme• 2 months ago

Economics talks about externalities constantly, but nobody listens to them because people hate thinking about externalities.

marcosdumay2• 2 months ago

Complex systems are dominated by feedback curves, but people insist on analyzing them by the forward transmission curves.

The separation between the cause and the effects are way less important than their polarity. High-order effects tend to be smaller, but they are also way more numerous, so things can cancel out or end-up resolved on either way.

jrave• 2 months ago

i think this is a fascinating comment that highlights how tactical successes may turn to dust in the medium and long term - and also how the intention behind an action may often not be relevant to practical effects at all, since transitive consequences override the primary outcome (if it was even well calculated in the first place).

since this would be very meaningful for my understanding and reasoning about many social fields such as business or politics, i‘d like to know whether you have source material that supports the premise? is this a grounded concept or more of an ad hoc observation

tracerbulletx• 2 months ago

I mean a move that will get you checkmated in one is bad, but there are a lot less of those than there are moves that will get you checkmated in 4 that are just as bad of an outcome for you.

state_less• 2 months ago

I think you're over analyzing to some degree. The distribution and median outcome (1st through N order) was always negative for the course of action this administration has taken. The proponents try to sell people on the notion that this could all turn out great, which is way out on one end of the tail (e.g let's say 1% chance for sake of argument) for this action, and here we sit right around a median realized outcome for this kind of an intervention. I'd bundle all the N order effects up, then look how an aerial bombardment operation affects the liklihood of outcomes like the straight of hormuz being closed and/or controlled by iran, or iran surrendering the nuclear material and raising the white flag, etc...

You could probably do some simulations to see this was almost always going to be a losing strategy. Detailing the N order effects is good accounting, but the picture likely gets murkier the more you try to extrapolate N+1.

munk-a7• 2 months ago

It appears that right now the administration is fighting desperately to achieve an international state like the one had under the prior nuclear deal with Iran... the one Trump tore up because it had Obama's name on it.

It's all petty BS and I really do hope the electorate gets it together.

bawolff5• 2 months ago

Doing this analysis kind of requires knowing the probability of various events occuring. If we knew that, then world politics would be very different.

Like its easy to say in retrospect something is obvious, but it rarely is at the outset.

dmurray• 2 months ago

I was going to reply to this post with "surely shipping prices going up is a first order effect", but it's wrong. The real first order effect is the thousands of Iranian civilians (and fine, the hundreds of Iranian servicemen and the tens of American killers and their allies) whose families won't see them again.

23hartr• 2 months ago

Since the U.S. knew that Iran was 100% going to close Hormuz since Jimmy Carter, who also refrained from taking Kharg island precisely for that reason, the second order effects appear to be desired.

Otherwise they'd impeach Trump by now. Even if they make a 2 month ceasefire deal now, it will start again after that.

drnick14• 2 months ago

The U.S. should form a coalition with the neighboring countries and "finish the job" once and for all. Negotiations with Iran will always amount to kicking the can down the road.

wat10000• 2 months ago

From the point of view of the people who would actually do it, the most important effect of impeaching Trump would be a messy political fight and likely losing reelection in November. The most important effect of not impeaching him is they get to stay in office. Everything else is unimportant by comparison.

basisword• 2 months ago

The rest of the world suffering the stupidity of average the American voter.

viccis• 2 months ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullwhip_effect

They absolutely are

lazystar3• 2 months ago

same here. gas is $6 in seattle; every business uses gas, explains the extreme cost of living. i'm going broke working for AWS.

walrus014• 2 months ago

I'm also seeing a vast array of smug comments from Seattle and Portland area personal electric car owners who don't realize that $7/gallon diesel affects Everything they purchase. My message to the smug EV owners is: Go hang out by the loading docks for your local grocery store for a full business day and tell me how many all-electric semi tractor/trailer trucks you see delivering product.

pibaker• 2 months ago

i'm going broke working for AWS.

I don't want to pretend gas isn't getting expensive but let's be real, Amazon pays almost 200k for entry level positions in Seattle. If you earn that much and still feel you are going broke, then you are not short on money. You are short on common sense spending and budgeting skills.

https://www.levels.fyi/companies/amazon/salaries/software-en...

jmyeet4• 2 months ago

The hallmark of anti-intellectualism is to insist something is far simpler than they've been told, dismantle it and then find out why it was the way it was.

If you're an engineer, you've experienced something similar. You come across some code and scratch your head thinking "why did they do it like this?", spend half a day getting rid of it and then find out why it was the way it was.

There are people who understand all these complex systems. We just insist on silencing them, even firing them and then listening to the dumbest people on the planet.

You see this in startups too, even very large ones. I've now spent years watching people in crypto discover why exactly the financial system works like it does while spewing banalities about "disruption". Sometimes new thinking can be good but more often than not it's somewhere between ignorance and a scam, particularly when so much money is involved.

Another classic example: orbital data centers.

It doesn't have to be that way. The Chinese Communist Party is, despite the name, technocratic [1]. Xi Jinping's undergraduate degree is in chemical engineering.

[1] https://issues.org/perspective-the-benefits-of-technocracy-i...

cyanydeez• 2 months ago

ok, but is electing trump a 1st order or 4th order effect

e40• 2 months ago

Unintended consequences are indeed a bitch.

ambientenv• 2 months ago

Nate Hagens [1] often talks about a wider-boundary view and nth-order effects. I find it both informative and enlightening as well as thought-provoking.

[1] https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/frankly-original/141-...

robinsoncrusue• 2 months ago

Tired of winning, can't take it anymore.

shevy-java2• 2 months ago

Trump flip-flops numerous times per day. I am beginning to think that "The Art of the Deal" was also always fake - he is unable to make a deal. Everyone sees this now.

CamperBob2• 2 months ago

Of course it was fake. It was ghostwritten (again, of course it was), and the ghostwriter is wracked with remorse. [1]

The idea that a chump who bankrupted a casino could outmaneuver the country that invented the term "checkmate" was always profoundly stupid... so of course, Trump's supporters lapped it up like antifreeze.

1: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tony-schwartz-trumps-ghostwrite...

galaxyLogic2• 2 months ago

It was always the Art of the BS, part of which is always to try to hide the fact that it is BS. But people fall for it and his minions often at least initially benefit from the same BS.

Just because somebody tells us they are not lying does not mean they are not. But some people believe it because it makes them feel great again.

Imustaskforhelp2• 2 months ago

I am beginning to think that "The Art of the Deal" was also always fake

To me, the interesting part is that people used to believe it in the first place. Anything that I heard of the guy and his agenda 2025 or whatever it was called had some really weird points which America (and for what its worth, the world, who didn't have any say in the American election but is dragged into it as the prices of my gas station rise)

Was it the silos of internet in an ever-polarizing nation that created the perfect conditions for a trump-esque person to take political power?

I should read more American history but Reagan seems like a similar guy but the only difference seems to be the short-term vs long-term consequences in the damage of Reagan's trickle-onomics (note that Trump's damage is pretty irreparable as well)

Traubenfuchs• 2 months ago

Trumps art of the deal is trying to forcefully create win-lose deals instead of win-win or win-neutral deals, which, not very surprisingly, leads to other sides then going for the lose-lose deal.

tty4562• 2 months ago

You mean you once believed he was good at making deals or was that sarcasm?

ziml77• 2 months ago

If you knew anyone that worked on the other ends of those deals, you'd know that it was always a load of trash. He basically relied on people caving to threats. That tactic only works if the other side believes the threat is credible and that they actually have something to lose.

bawolff5• 2 months ago

The art of the deal always seemed to be, (1) create a situation unfavourable to your opponent. (2) exploit their temporary weakness to force a coercive one sided deal.

Trump seems to be able to do that well enough in the normal business world. The thing is when it comes to countries its harder to get them to roll over because if a dictator looks too weak its off with their head. If you give a dictator the choice of ruling over an impovrished country or dying in a coup, they are going to choose the former. On top of that its hard to make international coercive deals stick. In the normal business world, you can sue if someone reneges. When it comes to countries, what are you going to do? Whine to the UN? Good luck with that. Countries can stick with deals when it suits them and forget about them when it no longer does. At worse that may not make countries want to make deals in the future, but if it was a coercive deal that doesnt matter much.

meroes• 2 months ago

Anyone tried to buy paint recently?

$611 for 2x 5 gallon buckets just to do my garage.

tclancy• 2 months ago

God bless the Trump administration. Sounds like that’s a bunch of my summer task list checked off as No Longer Viable.

xienze• 2 months ago

Dunno, it depends on what brand that is. $60 per gallon sounds about where Sherwin Williams paint has been for a while.

rozap• 2 months ago

I spent $111 for two quarts

toasty2282• 2 months ago

You just discovered why your gdp is so high... American prices make no fucking sense to me, some of your double car garages are more expensive than a full high end house in central Europe

drnick14• 2 months ago

People just make a lot more money in America. A decent job these days starts at $200k. That's fresh out of college or shortly after. Obviously not everyone makes that much, but it's not unusual at all in tech.

shevy-java2• 2 months ago

Can't someone take all possessions of Trump, Hegseth etc... and redistribute this to middle and lower class folks? I fail to see why I have to pay for increasing prices due to the actions of those guys. This is literally a racketeering scheme for milking us via increase of prices. A few get very rich, just as Smedley Butler pointed out many decades ago - even he would be shocked at the level of milking going on here.

bdangubic2• 2 months ago

vote

lukan• 2 months ago

I believe democracy is about a bit more than voting what is presented to you.

konart• 2 months ago

You are asking for your own Lenin.

selimthegrim• 2 months ago

Wasn’t Steve Bannon too?

mullingitover2• 2 months ago

Not to get all fatalistic, but: What’s the point in getting revenge on these people in particular? The voters have made it clear that there’s about eight years at most, typically less, before they’ll rally behind some new grifters and need to repeat the complete set of coursework from scratch.

As the saying goes: “The voters know what they want, and they deserve to get it good and hard”

watwut2• 2 months ago

One contributing reason politics became this bad is that politicians were rewarded for exactly this behavior. By gentlements agreement there was no accountability and no punishment - and no sex impeachment with bad faith performative pretense you care dont count.

That is why. Because if you dont "take revenge" things will get worst. Because not taking revenge made conservatives know the strategy works.

krapp2• 2 months ago

We all have to pay for the actions of these guys because they were voted into power. Americans had the opportunity to avoid this but decided they wanted more of it, and now they're getting it. Elections have consequences.

amelius3• 2 months ago

Honestly, The Internet created this.

galaxyLogic2• 2 months ago

Another part of the new price of oil and Trump's tariffs earlier is that they are a regressive tax. Poor people have to pay more in terms of percentage of their income now.

Trump often said "Tariffs is the most beautiful word". I think he said that because he thought his followers were too stupid to realize that he was transferring tax-burden from the rich to the middle-class and poor. That's why he thought they were "beautiful". They enabled him to gaslight people.

American people are not stupid but many of us have to work hard so there's not a lot spare time nor energy to try understand what is actually happening. Fox News is misleading us purposefully playing emotional tricks on patriotic Americanss.

Now import-companies should get back the tariffs they paid. But does it mean they will lower their prices? Probably not.

toasty2282• 2 months ago

The next time they'll elect Vance or some other dipshit. It's idiocracy in real life, and nothing surprising given the American education system... ~25% of functionaly illiterate voters

As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron

munk-a7• 2 months ago

I genuinely think it's necessary to bankrupt the Trump family. If the family (and especially Trump himself) exits office with all the wealth he's stolen then it sets a clear example to Bezos, Musk, Gates or any other wealthy individual to buy the presidency so they can loot the coffers to multiply their wealth.

America as an organization needs to stand up and get retributive with robbing government coffers or it'll just breed even more kleptocracy.

kshacker• 2 months ago

They go bankrupt, they get a 10B dollar tax deduction :)

b65e8bee43c2ed0• 2 months ago

The net worth of Donald Trump, the 45th and 47th president of the United States, is not publicly known. For decades, Forbes has assessed his wealth, currently estimating it at $6.5 billion as of February 2026.[1][2]

6,500,000,000 / (350,000,000 * 0.99) = $18.76

don't spend it all in one place, champ!

bakies• 2 months ago

I'll frame the check for it's symbolism

CrzyLngPwd• 2 months ago

A predictable FAFO event due to US global aggression, forced on the world by Israel and putting America last, as usual.

jmyeet4• 2 months ago

The funny thing is that we don't need to speculate about many of the effects of this because it's already happened but nobody really paid attention to it. I am talking about the Trump 2020 OPEC deal.

First, some context. OPEC/OPEC+ generally set their production to meet demand and to keep oil prices stable. That means they aim for a floor and ceiling on oil prices. Every 3 months they meet and try and anticipate demand. Produce too much and the price is too low. This hurts revenue. Produce not enough and it creates political instabilities, both locally and abroad. It would in particular hurt security guarantees with the US that go back to FDR and King Faisal making an oil-for-security deal in 1945. Now, that doens't mean OPEC members can't and don't cheat. They can and do. But it is generally successful [1].

In January-February 2020 we had the start of the pandemic. A lot of people weren't paying attention or thought it could be contained. That was over by March 2020 and much of the world went into lockdown. A lot of travel just stopped. This had an immediate effect on the oil market. Nobody was buying. Nobody had places to store excess oil. Russia and Saudi Arabia got into an oil price war. And the futures price briefly went negative [2]. This technically was an extreme contango market [3].

So what did the Trump administration do? Well, in my estimation, they panicked. They feared this would be devastating to US oil producers. So then-president Trump went to MBS and cajoled him into getting OPEC to massively cut oil production [4][5]. How much? Initially by 9.7 million barrels per day and then going down over the next 2 years to 6.3 million. That's roughly 10% of global crude oil output.

When I say "panicked", because of the OPEC meetings every 3 months, this would've happened anyway. OPEC would've cut production. The market would've stabilized. Instead, Trump locked OPEC into a 2 year cut and essentially gave them permission to drive up oil prices. And that's exactly what happened. This deal maps pretty much exactly to the pandemic inflation spike.

And nobody talks about it. Republicans were keen to blame Biden. Democrats chose to blame "greedy" oil companies even though no amount of US production could replace what OPEC had cut. Biden even went to Riyadh to beg MBS to increase production and he refused [6]. And nobody talks about any of it.

That was 10%. The Hormuz closure is 15-20% and also impacts natural gas, helium, fertilizer and a bunch of other things not impacted by the OPEC deal. Oil is being kept at a futures price of ~$100/barrel by record withdrawals from strategic reserves. By early July, those strategic reserves will be empty and there'll be no way to inject oil back into the market other than reopening the Strait. And that will lag weeks because oil container ships move as fast as bicycles.

So think back to the pandemic. Shipping containers 6x'ed. Gas prices went way up. It impacted jet fuel and sea freight. All of that is coming in the next month or two and there's honestly little we can do about it now. If the Strait reopened today, these second and third order effects are already baked in.

This is now a structural repricing event and we're going to see crude oil and gas prices near current levels probably for years.

Oh and oil CEOs are starting to warn about the coming energy shock [7][8] so buckle up.

[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/1369/crude-oil-price-history-cha...

[2] https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/IN/PDF/IN1135...

[3] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/contango.asp

[4] https://www.reuters.com/article/economy/special-report-trump...

[5] https://www.reuters.com/article/world/trump-touts-great-saud...

[6] https://www.congress.gov/117/meeting/house/114185/documents/...

[7] https://www.thestreet.com/investing/stocks/chevron-ceo-drops...

[8] https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/energy/articles/exxon-warn...

mullingitover2• 2 months ago

And that will lag weeks because oil container ships move as fast as bicycles.

IIRC there’s also major long-term supply destruction happening, because wells have to be capped around the Persian Gulf since the tanks are full.

3eb7988a16632• 2 months ago

Resuming production is also going to take years. Every bit of oil storage inside the Strait is at maximum capacity. All of the wells have had to stop producing because there is nowhere for the oil to go. When wells stop, it can take a long time to ramp up the production to previous levels -assuming it can ever again resume its prior peak output. Additionally, several key bits of infrastructure (trains, refineries) have been damaged and cannot be easily repaired.

reducesuffering• 2 months ago

By early July, those strategic reserves will be empty

The US SPR is at 365m barrels and has a max withdrawal rate of 4m bpd. Currently they’re withdrawing 9m/week. There is 0 chance reserves are gone by July, just incredibly incorrect.

thisisit• 2 months ago

War insurance rates for shipping has also gone up: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/29/business/strait-hormuz-sh...

dzonga• 2 months ago

people don't realize how cheap shipping via containers had become.

& this increased commerce all around the globe.

but destroyed due to bad propaganda.

seanieb• 2 months ago

There’s probably going to be a famine or famines due to lack of, and expense, of fertilizer resulting in less food for the developing world.

dgellow8• 2 months ago

Add to that the USAID shutdown and other impacts to humanitarian relief caused by the DOGE team. It’s all coming together for a really nightmarish time for developing countries

munk-a7• 2 months ago

I'm not certain how recently you were in the grocery store but it's getting pretty serious in developed countries as well - not famine levels, for sure, but meat prices in Canada are going crazy right now and we're just feeling the first wave of the supply shocks - this will get a lot worse before it gets better.

iugtmkbdfil834• 2 months ago

Despite being positioned in a way that should shield from the more immediate impacts, I keep wondering if that would actually happen at this point. Most parties seem to try hard to avoid the actual conflict and while not escalating further won't save this year's crops, it shouldn't mean that people will automatically die. It may mean, however, that people will not be able to eat what they want, which, in turn, would mean shortages.

edit; grammar and syntax for clarity

munk-a7• 2 months ago

It really does seem like this war of choice was[1] an absolutely boneheaded idea. It's the kind of thing (and specifically, the lack of consequences or measures to prevent it from being repeated in Cuba or Greenland) that highlights how broken American politics are right now.

1. Not even in retrospect - intelligence agencies knew this was a significant risk and I'd bet your average person on the streets would have come to the realization that it was a bad idea if they thought about it for like a week.

amelius3• 2 months ago

We're talking about 4D chess here /s

jmyeet4• 2 months ago

Closure of the Strait of Hormuz is one of the most modeled events in military circles. There are probably thousands of military exercises on it, intelligence estimates, strategic papers and so on. Up until this war, it was unknown if Iran could keep the Strait closed against direct US military pressure. Well, now we know.

There doesn't appear to be a single serious person in the US military, intelligence community or policy support organizations who thought this was a good idea. It was purely political. The administration seems to have listened solely to and relied entirely upon Benjamin Netanyahu and Mossad. Israel has been trying to get this war with every president since Reagan [1] and they've all said "hell no". Until this one.

What's more interesting is that it's been clear what a disaster this almost immediately so we've had ~2 months where it was clear that the US has militarily lost and a negotiated settlement was the only outcome. This would mean the end of economic sanctions and, for anti-Iran hawks in the US and Israel, a spectacularly worse deal than the JCPOA that got torn up. Yet the administration seems more willing to let the world ban than split with Israel.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/JC56Ltg5zDE

mooreds2• 2 months ago

Yeah.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahlH32Lprto is a video from Peter Zeihan covering that exact topic.

tty4562• 2 months ago

Trump couldn't care less

Pxtl• 2 months ago

Peter Zeihan was saying the same about the Russian invasion of Ukraine when that started, since Russia and Ukraine export fertilizer precursors... If there were famines they didn't make the news (but they might not regardless).

disgruntledphd2• 2 months ago

There's been massive food inflation since the Ukraine war. The petrol protests are starting in Africa and Asia. Like, this isn't headline news but it exists.

ck2• 2 months ago

click on YTD on this graph

* https://en.macromicro.me/charts/94482/imf-strait-of-hormuz-n...

(screenshot https://images2.imgbox.com/cd/73/yMf1mwKy_o.png )

every 1 single day = another 1 week of misery for the world

100 ships per day now single digits sometimes zero

90 days = 90 weeks

except it's going to be still like this in SIX MONTHS if not all the way through January 2029

wait until Cuba happens some Friday night too

ergocoder• 2 months ago

The most surprising thing is that the whole world somehow has built dependency on Hormuz which has been known for decades that it is controlled by Iran, an adversarial actor to the west.

Nobody ever thinks of, you know, building redundancy for Hormuz?

dgellow8• 2 months ago

Nobody ever thinks of, you know, building redundancy for Hormuz?

When you have questions like that in mind, the answer is pretty much always „yes, that’s a well known topic of discussion in that field“

You can see alternatives that exist here: https://hormuzstraitmonitor.com/alternative-routes/

(Really neat website, I think it was shared on HN a few months ago?)

There is a lot of other proposed routes but it’s actually pretty hard to create them in that region, lots of actors with their own interests and not the best history of collaboration. And Iran would definitely be against it given it reduces their influence

3eb7988a16632• 2 months ago

Pipelines are also easily targeted, should an adversary wish to destroy one. There is no way to protect hundreds of miles of static infrastructure.

bawolff5• 2 months ago

They actually have. I think both Saudi Arabia and UAE have built pipelines to bypass the strait.

Not to mention USA investing heavily in fraking to counter balance the middle east...

bawolff5• 2 months ago

Calling increased shipping costs due to rising fuel prices a "side effect" of an oil crisis, seems odd to me. Isn't that the expected main effect?

chrisbrandow• 2 months ago

I’d hardly consider this a side effect. Decreasing traffic in one path within a network of exchange has the direct effect of increasing traffic/demand on alternate paths. Increased demand == increased prices.

walrus014• 2 months ago

There were numerous simulations/war games run by the US and other militaries going back 20, 25, 30 years that basically came to the conclusion that:

a) If Iran was attacked with sufficient severity they would take the step to close the straight of Hormuz

b) Iran was developing or already had small-boat, mine laying, missile and UAV capacity sufficient to do so

c) Iran was actively working on ways to hide this missile, uav, small boat capacity in the general region of the straight of hormuz in hundreds of small locations (down to the size/scale of a civilian small warehouse or garage), making it impossible to air strike/remove all of this capability with any known certainty without causing absurd levels of civilian casualties

d) The only way to remove the missile, small boat, uav capability would be an extremely large boots on the ground and manpower intensive ground based search to hunt it down. You couldn't be sure you could remove the capability strictly from the air.

vkou4• 2 months ago

e) Invading Iran would not be a thee-week special operation like invading Iraq was.

MengerSponge4• 2 months ago

Counterpoint: it would be a three-week special operation a lot like invading Iraq, in that after minor victories the administration would declare "Mission Accomplished" before burning trillions of dollars and thousands of lives fighting an insurgency.

Hormuz crisis side effect: a sharp rise in container shipping rates

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