President Donald Trump told Al Jazeera on Wednesday, August 26th that we are on the brink of “achieving a very great victory” in Iran. But that does not appear to be true. In fact, we have entered a great stalemate.
We’ve gone for 28 days without major attacks in the Iran War. We’ve lost more than we think. But have we won anything?
The two big prizes in this war are Iran’s nuclear bomb-making capability and the Strait of Hormuz. As you know, one fifth of the world’s oil flowed through the Strait of Hormuz before February 28th, when we and Israel attacked Iran to stop its nuclear weapons program. Before that attack, 130 ships a day were clearing the Hormuz Strait. 21.6 million barrels of oil every day. 900,000 barrels every hour. 250 barrels every second. Today that number has gone from 130 ships a day down to fifteen.
Donald Trump says that we control the Strait of Hormuz. We don’t. Iran claims it controls the Strait of Hormuz. And it declares something stronger. That God, Allah, has given the Strait to Iran to own in perpetuity. Until the end of time.
But Iran doesn’t control the Strait of Hormuz either.
Both sides may claim Hormuz, but the fact is that the strait is no longer 25% of the world’s seaborne oil distribution system. No one owns Hormuz because the Strait is deadlocked, frozen, incapacitated.
Other nations are trying to find other ways of getting oil from the countries that produce it to the countries that need it. Saudi Arabia, for example, is using its East-West pipeline to the Red Sea, where it loads tankers with oil destined for the rest of the world. Most notably headed to China and India.
But even the Red Sea is threatened by Iran. Iran’s proxies, the Houthis, are located on the northeastern coast of the Red Sea and have more than enough anti-ship missiles to reduce the flow of Saudi oil to a trickle.
But the real decider of whether this war will end in a big victory is, as you might guess, China. On the week of August 17th, Scott Bessent, the Treasury Secretary of the USA, spread the word that on Monday August 24th, he would launch an economic D-Day.
What he actually announced was silly, unworkable and an opening that the Chinese could use to show the world that they are now the great peacemaker, not the USA. That China could define the terms of the peace, and, in defining those terms, could take a giant step toward leadership of the world economic order. The world order the United States has led for 80 years.
Slowly but surely, one micro-step at a time, Beijing is turning that vast global economic infrastructure into a world order under the control of China.
Scott Bessent, speaking on behalf of the Trump administration, said that all of the countries on the earth are ordered to stop trading with Iran and must help the United States seal Iran off in a bubble, a bubble in which Iran’s government of Ayatollahs and Supreme Leaders would shrivel and die.
But the Chinese foreign ministry proclaimed that China “firmly opposes illegal unilateral sanctions that have no basis in international law and are not authorized by the UN Security Council.” In other words, Beijing has declared that America’s demands are illegitimate, and China will not obey them.
America, the Chinese foreign ministry said, had no right to dictate Beijing’s relationships to other sovereign nations. In other words, the Chinese used the fact that American leadership is fickle and imperious against us.
From now on, China implied, it would dictate the rules. Not Scott Bessent, but China. When Xi Jinping visits the USA on September 24th, he is very likely to take advantage of the trip to subtly drive this point home.
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About the author: Howard Bloom of the Howard Bloom Institute has been called the Einstein, Newton, Darwin, and Freud of the 21st century by Britain’s Channel 4 TV. Bloom’s new book is The Case of the Sexual Cosmos: Everything You Know About Nature is Wrong. Says Harvard’s Ellen Langer of The Case of the Sexual Cosmos, Bloom “argues that we are not savaging the earth as some would have it, but instead are growing the cosmos. A fascinating read.” One of Bloom’s eight previous books–Global Brain—was the subject of a symposium thrown by the Office of the Secretary of Defense including representatives from the State Department, the Energy Department, DARPA, IBM, and MIT. Bloom’s work has been published in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, Psychology Today, and the Scientific American. Not to mention in scientific journals like Biosystems, New Ideas in Psychology, and PhysicaPlus. He has appeared on Saudi and Iranian TV over forty times. Says Joseph Chilton Pearce, author of Evolution’s End and The Crack in the Cosmic Egg, “I have finished Howard Bloom’s [first two] books, The Lucifer Principle and Global Brain, in that order, and am seriously awed, near overwhelmed by the magnitude of what he has done. I never expected to see, in any form, from any sector, such an accomplishment. I doubt there is a stronger intellect than Bloom’s on the planet.” For more, see http://howardbloom.net or http://howardbloom.institute
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References
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