U.S. President Donald Trump will give a live speech tonight at 9:00pm ET.
He might announce that:
- the U.S. will retreat from the War on Iran he had launched or
- that U.S. troops have started to invade Iranian territory.
No. 1 seems unlikely as AIPAC, hawkish Republicans and Zionist Democrats are all against a U.S. retreat.
No. 2 seems irrational as any invasion of Iranian territory is destined to end in defeat.
The U.S. has deployed additional A-10 ground fighter airplanes to the Gulf. Deploying these points to a ground operation, probably to seize some islands.
Meanwhile the severity of the global energy crisis the war has caused is starting to get recognize.
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard of the Telgraph is warning (archived) of the even bigger oil shock we need to expect if things escalate from here:
The world has lost over a tenth of its daily oil supply, along with critical volumes of jet fuel, diesel and refined petroleum products. Now prepare for loss of the next tenth, hitting just as all the short-term fixes are exhausted.
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The pro-Iranian Houthis in Yemen have finally joined the Gulf war, opening a second front in the Red Sea and endangering a further 6pc of global oil supply.
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David Fyfe, the chief economist at Argus Media, says prices will reach traumatic levels if the Red Sea now comes under fire and remains closed for weeks.“You can pick any arbitrary number – $200[/bbl], or anything you want – the risk is that we’ll see huge demand destruction, inflation going through the roof and global growth shuddering to a halt. It is a horrible thought,” says Fyfe, who used to run the oil division at the International Energy Agency.
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Every corner of the globe will be hit by Apr 20 or thereabouts. Regional prices will converge via arbitrage and there will then be a planetary oil crisis with very few places left to hide.
The horror this means for us average people – including mass starvation in the global South – seems hard to imagine but will soon become real.
There is pressure on Trump to “do something” about this. The best he could do to lower the consequences of an energy crisis is to retreat from the Middle East.
But to give up control over a major sea lane, one through which much of the blood of the global economy is flowing, means to give up on the U.S. status as a super power and global hegemon. It would be a huge step, a necessary one in the long term, but one that is likely to only be taken after years of war and, like in Vietnam, a deeply punishing defeat.