Amidst the funeral for Supreme Leader of Iran Ali Khamenei, the Saga of Hormuz has continued taking some interesting turns.
Iran has refused to make any concessions to the US because it knows the treacherous Trump administration has no principles whatsoever when it comes to honoring deals. All the while, the US has resorted to outright begging and making every possible concession to avert the humiliation of accepting a Hormuz with tolls:
WSJ writes:
The U.S. and Oman are looking for ways to break Iran’s insistence on charging tolls for ships to pass through the Strait of Hormuz. Their chief lever in indirect talks was a promise to unfreeze some of the $100 billion in Iranian funds held overseas.
The U.S. diplomats offered a trade-off to Iran, the people said: Relinquish its claim to control the strait and renounce toll payments in exchange for billions of dollars of unfrozen funds.
Europe, on the other hand, is now convinced that bowing to Iranian regional hegemony is the only remaining rational choice as the rest of the world simply lacks cards to play in prying Hormuz away from its rightful proprietors:
As the most striking example of this came Vice President JD Vance’s eye-opening admission two days ago that Trump merely used the MOU as a brief pause to give the world some time to refill its oil stocks and stave off economic collapse, before—it is strongly implied—continuing the unprovoked aggression against Iran as needed.
The frankness is shocking, to say the least:
“So, I think what the president has told us to do is use this MOU to sort of refill the world’s oil economy. To refill some stocks, and then to see where the hand is.”
What most immediately becomes clear is that our previous reporting here was accurate in regard to the true extent of economic danger the US and the world was facing, and how secretly aware Trump was of it all despite his theatrical bravado toward Iran. It’s clear that Trump cried uncle because Iran won this round of Chicken, but as Vance here implies, the threat is not over as Trump believes he can simply wait out an economic stabilization period and then give it another go.
Regarding this, there have been reports that all kinds of “historic-level” mass airlifts from the US toward the Middle East have been ongoing this past week, with many believing they represent US preparations for a ground invasion of some kind. The main trigger for this was the sudden flare-up of military activity in the Baghdad Green Zone which allegedly turned out to be a large-scale American-led anti-Iranian coup, wherein Iraqi forces hunted down pro-Iranian factions and “traitors” to—as some believe—set the stage for something bigger:
No comments:
Post a Comment