The biggest problem in the world right now is a problem of Donald Trump's Americas and Israel zone making that is proving devilishly difficult to solve. Despite a weeksl long punishing air campaign over Iran, where the American and Israeli air forces have enjoyed complete aerial supremacy that has obliterated the majority of Iran's air defenses and missile launch capabilities, that has killed swaths of Iran's most senior leadership, and that has sunk the vast majority of the tonnage in Iran's surface fleet, which have all led to Trump repeatedly claiming victory in this war. The Americans and Israelis are still failing to counter Iran's greatest weapon of all, its ability to shut down the critical straight of Hormuz through which 1if of the entire global supply of oil and liqufied natural gas travel through.
There are in essence two different wars currently being waged by both sides in this conflict that are both equally lopsided. The first war is America and Israel's aerial war being waged against the Islamic Republic that they are winning. While the second war is Iran's separate war against the global economy that the Americans and Israelis are busy losing.
From the very beginning, the Iranian regime knew that they would never be capable of winning a conventional war against the dramatically technologically superior Americans and Israelis. They knew that they would have no easy method of evicting American and Israeli warplanes from their air states. But they also knew that the Americans would have no easy method of eliminating their ability to shut down the straight of Formuz either and by extension no easy method of removing Iran's capability to wreak havoc on the global economy as a pressure point to end both of these wars on their own terms.
The Trump administration evidently catastrophically miscalculated Iran's willingness and ability to actually do this and misjudged just how hard it would be to stop Iran once they did it. And as a result, America is now currently trapped in what is rapidly becoming the biggest foreign policy mistake since at least the Iraq war in 2003. And the war against Iran now seriously risks becoming America's version of Ukraine.
Hormuz is the principal reason why every US president before Trump going back to the Carter administration hesitated to ever actually attack Iranian territory directly. Because despite enormous American superiority in conventional terms over Iran, Iran has always held the cards when it comes to geography. Cards that cannot be countered by technological and aerial supremacy alone.
Iran doesn't need to block the straight of Hormuz in a literal sense. It doesn't even need a navy to enforce a closure of it. All it needs to do is to attack merchant ships sailing through it every now and then with missiles, drones, and mines in order to create an atmosphere of uncertainty, risk, and fear that leads to merchant vessels simply refusing to travel through it altogether or insurance companies simply refusing to ensure them.
At its narrowest point, the straight is only 54 km wide and is flanked on both of its sides by rough mountainous terrain. The sea lanes that flow through the center of the straight that tanker ships transit across are so narrow that there's only space for two of them, one running in each direction that are easy targets for mines, missiles, and drones. Moreover, the seas on either side of the straight for hundreds of kilometers are well within range of Iranian drones like the Shahan 136, which has an operating range of about 1,500 km, of which the Iranians were estimated to have a supply of in the ballpark of around 50,000 before this war began.
Sanking all of Iran's navy, destroying most of its missile launchers, and killing most of its senior leadership. all do not prevent Iran from being able to weaponize its geography and keep the street de facto closed. Something that every single presidential administration has been well aware of.
And every single day it remains closed, it builds up pressure on the global economy and pressure on the Americans to end the war on Iran's own terms. Every single day that the straight remains closed, 1/5if of the global supply of oil and gas that comes collectively from countries like Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, and the UAE effectively remains blocked off from the global market with few exceptions like Saudi Arabia, the UAE's oil pipelines that can divert some of their own supplies. But that's an option that doesn't exist at all for Iraq, Kuwait, Bahrain, or Qatar.
The International Energy Agency has already labeled this situation as the largest oil supply shock ever on record, which has already led to oil prices rising by more than 40% since the war began, and gas prices in Europe rising by more than 70%. As the price of oil and gas rises, the cost of business that companies around the world have to pay for in fuel and power rise along with them, which raises inflation as they inevitably pass those increased base costs on to their consumers. Because of this relationship, the general guideline that many economists subscribe to is that every $10 increase in the price of a barrel of oil eventually results in a rise of.
3 to point4 percentage points to overall inflation. Before the war, oil was hovering at around $60 a barrel. And since it's already risen up to about $100 a barrel since then because of the hormone closure, the inflation rate in America and Europe might eventually climb back to over 4% again.
last seen back in 2023 during the Biden administration. And if the price of oil continues rising even higher, assuming the loss of supply through Hormuz remains in place, inflation rates climbing back to 5% and even 6% are possible if oil hits $140 a barrel, which will be very politically dangerous for Trump and the Republican party to deal with after having ostensibly run on a platform in 2024 that promised to lower prices and keep the country out of foreign wars. If the price of oil manages to climb up to $140 a barrel if the closure remains in place through the end of April, a recent study published by Oxford Economics suggests that the global economy may well tip over into a mild recession.
And even if the strait was opened up immediately, the negative consequences caused to the global economy will last for months afterward. It'll take weeks for the Gulf States to restart their mothball oil and gas production again. While cutter's super massive Ross Leafon LG production site, which alone produces nearly 1if of the global supply of LG, will take between three and 5 years to repair and get back to full production, according to the country's energy ministry after an Iranian missile blew up about 17% of its total capacity, which is equivalent to about 3% of the total global supply.
Once most production is restarted after several weeks, it'll then take several more weeks for most of the world's tanker fleet to actually get back into position in the Gulf again since most of them that were fortunate enough to be outside of the Gulf at the time the war began have already moved on to other markets like the route between North America and China. Then once the crude oil is transported by the tankers to refineries largely across Asia that have similarly been shut down, it'll take weeks more worth of time to get those refineries back up and running again, too. All in all, even after the combat around moose eventually ends, it'll likely take at least four more months for the global oil and gas market to actually return back to any sort of normaly again.
And the longer the straight remains closed, the further out into the future that returned back to normaly becomes and the greater the spectre of global inflation and possible recession becomes. Iran actually has the easier path to victory in this war. All that it must do in order to win is to endure and survive just long enough for the pressure it is putting on the global economy through Vermu to become unbearable.
While America and Israel have to either topple its government, destroy its military capabilities to the extent that it can no longer threaten Hormuz, or put boots down on the ground to secure Hormuz in a ground campaign. After massive American and Israeli air strikes have pummeled the country for more than a month now, the Islamic Republic's regime still remains intact and if anything has only grown even more hardline than it was before. Before the launching of the war, the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Ham was nearing 87 years old and was known to be in ill health.
It was possible that after his looming and natural death, the regime may have shifted toward a more consiliatory and pragmatic posture aimed at improving their economic conditions and their own long-term survival. But now by having killed the supreme leader violently through a missile strike and forcing their leadership transition to take place under the enormous pressure of this war, the regime quickly coalesed behind the old supreme leader son Moahan, who by all accounts is an even more hardline figure than his father was, who is very close ties to the country's IRGC, its hardline ideological military wing, with American and Israeli forces having now killed his father, his mother, mother, his wife, and his son, and reportedly injuring him personally since the war began. He inevitably will not be in any kind of a mood to negotiate while he still remains in power.
The Americans and Israelis apparently went into this war believing that they could rapidly overthrow the Iranian regime through overwhelming air power alone before they could actually manage to block Hormuz. a miscalculation that is increasingly echoing Russia's belief they had in 2022 that they could similarly rapidly overthrow the Ukrainian government in only 3 days worth of intense military operations. And like the war in Ukraine has become, the war in Iran is rapidly devolving into a war of attrition between which side can outlast the other longer.
It is obvious at this point that air power alone will not compel the Iranian regime into collapse. Nor will it fully degrade Iran's capability to keep Hormuz closed. Bombs cannot alter geography.
And while the war is resulting in significant destruction of Iran's military capabilities, it is also sapping America's military strength from other critical theaters. America does not have unlimited weapons of all kinds of times. According to a recent analysis that was conducted by the Payne Institute of Public Policy in Colorado, the US military used up more than 11,000 munitions of different types in just the first 16 days of the war on Iran.
More than at any other Western military campaign since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Among these have been more than 850 Tomahawk cruise missiles. Each one costing nearly $4 million.
That's more than $3 billion just in tomahawk cruise missiles burned through in weeks to potentially represent about a quarter of America's entire stockpile of tomahawks that existed before the start of the war. Even worse, the defense department originally budgeted on acquiring just 57 new tomahawks across 2026. More than 140 Patriot interceptor missiles and 150 THAAD interceptor missiles were also fired by US forces in the opening days of the war with inventories that were already known to be running low.
The Defense Department has not received any additional deliveries of THAD interceptors in years since 2023. They weren't expecting any more in 2026 and they were only expecting to receive another 39 of them for next year in 2027. While they also already used up about a quarter of their THA stock piles in 2025, protecting Israel from missile strikes during the 12-day war in June.
Replacing all of these expended munitions will take years and tens of billions of dollars to accomplish. While the US Navy is increasingly beginning to run on literal fumes, the Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier that was deployed to the theater to conduct these attacks has been continually at sea on deployment now for more than 280 days after it was previously deployed to Venezuela in order to carry out the Maduro operation and was then almost immediately redeployed to the Middle East.
By the middle of this month in April, it'll surpass the record for the longest continuous carrier deployment since the Vietnam War. And the stress on it is already mounting. In March, a fire broke out on the carrier that burned the beds for more than 600 sailors on board, and crew fatigue is becoming apparent.
The Defense Department has already requested additional funding of $200 billion from Congress to continue fighting this war and to replenish its used up munition stock piles. But there's no guarantee the Congress will approve of such a mammoth request that will pile on even further to the ballooning national debt. Continuing the air war in Iran is only going to continue burning up increasingly precious assets than many in the top US military brass would rather husband away for potential conflict with China in the Western Pacific.
There will increasingly be fewer and fewer actually important targets to hit and they will do nothing to help the US win the separate war that Iran is waging on the global economy. They will not remove the Iranian regime and they will not eliminate Iran's geographic ability to keep shutting down the straight of Hormuz. Iran knows all of this and that's why they'll continue demanding favorable terms to end the war so long as they can keep Hormos shut.
All of this leaves Trump and America in a very very difficult position. Now Trump basically only has three equally unpalatable options now. He can negotiate while Iran holds the leverage over the straight of Hormuz, which means that Iran will demand favorable terms that will make the war look like a defeat for America.
He can do nothing and watch the global economy continue getting worse, which he will be blamed for. Even declaring the war over with Iran still blocking the straight over Muz will make it appear like he's doing nothing as the global economy continues worsening. Or he can attempt to double down on this gamble and attempt to remove Iran's leverage by forcing open the straight of Hormos through an escalatory ground campaign which seems increasingly likely as the option that's actually going to happen.
Launching a fullscale ground invasion into Iran is an unbelievably unattractive option. The country is shielded by towering mountain rages along its frontiers like the Zongross and the Albors and the high plateau running between them that have defended Iran against foreign invasions for thousands of years. Take the example and precedent of America's last full-scale invasion of another country, the 2003 invasion of neighboring Iraq.
That campaign involved about 300,000 US soldiers for the initial ground invasion and then required a peak of about 160,000 soldiers to actually occupy the country. Geographically speaking, Iraq was nearly 14th the size of Iran and had less than a third of Iran's modern population. If you simply adjusted the numbers of troops required for Iraq to Iran's current size and population, you would likely need an invasion force of more than 1 million soldiers and an occupation force of at least 560,000 soldiers, comparable to the peak size of US forces in Vietnam in 1968.
In order to launch a ground campaign in Iran aimed at removing the regime, Trump would have to commit America to at least a Vietnam level conflict that would inevitably lead to a return of the draft again. So that's almost certainly off of the table for now. What is almost certainly being put on the table, at least for now, however, is a limited ground campaign to try and remove Iran's ability to keep the straight of Hormuz closed or to acquire additional leverage outside of Hormuz.
actually removing Iran's ability to threaten Hormos will be a daunting and significant military challenge that will fall just short of a full-scale invasion. Iran's coastline across the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman is long and rugged and stretches for more than 2400 km, about the same distance as New York City is from Houston. It is full of caves, bunkers, tunnels, and coes that house Iranian military assets like drones and mines that can be deployed to keep the straight shut.
The US and Israel have been attempting to blow up all of these sites through air power, but fully eliminating them will require an actual on the ground presence. Iran controls multiple smaller islands within and around the strait that enable it to sustain its pressure. And Iran doesn't even really need to control any of its own coastline in order to continue applying that pressure.
It just needs to keep up the atmosphere of fear and risk in the straight. Meaning that even if they lost their coastline, they could just keep firing any of their thousands of drones into the straight from even hundreds of kilometers away from deep within their interior. Fully crushing Iran's capability to weaponize the strait would require absolute maritime and likely ground dominance all across southern Iran and all of the islands Iran controls within and around the strait and advanced air defense systems put into place to block any incoming drones coming in from the interior.
Therefore, Trump may commit to lesser operations first to try and crack Iran's resolve without committing all the way to cracking open Hormuz itself. One option that's potentially on the table is to try and capture Iran's supply of highlyenriched urania that they developed before the 12-day war last year. If successful, this would give Trump the ability to claim some kind of a victory in the war by firmly eliminating Iran's ability to develop a nuclear weapon in the short term since it would mean that they would have to start the enrichment process all over again.
But even this operation would be very challenging. Iran is believed to have around 400 kg worth of this highlyenriched uranium currently stored in tunnels deep below their nuclear research site in Isvahan, hundreds of kilome deep within the Iranian interior. This uranium is currently in its gases form that'll be very difficult to move.
And it's uncertain how the American forces might be expected to gain access to it since the tunnels leading to it were buried by the bunker buster bombs the Americans dropped on them last year. The US would have to send a special forces raid deep in a hostile territory just to even get there. And unlike the Venezuela operation that captured Maduro, they would have to travel far far longer and further through hostile territory.
they wouldn't have the same element of surprise either since the Iranians are almost certainly expecting this. Thus, this option is very, very risky and even if it was successful, it would do nothing to stop's ability to just keep blocking Hormuz, which means it probably wouldn't end the war despite the risk. The more discussed option is for the Americans to try and seize Car Island instead, a small island just off southwestern Iran whose oil infrastructure handles more than 90% of Iran's crude oil exports.
And because Iran isn't shooting at their own tanker ships, their own oil trade through Hormuz has remained largely unrestricted thus far into the war. In theory, seizing control over Car Island would be an easier operation than attempting to seize Iran's highlyenriched uranium supply. It's on the periphery of Iran's borders, so would not require launching an operation hundreds of kilometers deep in a hostile territory.
It's relatively nearby to already existing US military bases just across the Gulf in Kuwait that can be used as staging grounds for amphibious and airborne assaults, and seizing it is almost certainly well within the capability of the US military. Trump would likely want to see Car Island seized in order to take control of virtually all of Iran's oil export capacity, which funds around 40% of the Iranian government's budget, and to then use that control as a bargaining chip to pressure Iran into ending its blockade of Hormuz. The possible deal would be to return Car Island's control back to Iran in exchange for Iran, opening Hormuz back up or surrendering on other terms that Trump could then present as at least some kind of a victory.
The problem is that that's probably just not how this is actually all going to go down. The battle for Car Island is not going to be like the operation to seize Maduro. The US military is going to be fighting to seize and control territory on the ground and casualties potentially even significant casualties are possible.
Car Island is within range of Iranian artillery from the mainland and well within range of Iran's kamicazi drones from just about anywhere in the country. While the battle for the island's control has a high chance of wrecking the island's oil infrastructure, the Trump has so far resisted attacking precisely out of the fear that damaging it will cause global oil prices to spiral even further out of control. The Americans would almost certainly be capable of seizing it.
But the operation has a high probability of damaging or destroying the island's oil infrastructure, raising oil prices higher, and could possibly result in high casualties. It's not even clear that taking the island at all is remotely prudent or even logical from a strategic perspective. The Trump administration has been so alarmed by the blockage of oil out of Formuz that Iran has caused that they've even lifted US sanctions on some Iranian oil in order to guarantee that Iran's oil supply can still actually make it out to global markets in order to assuage some of the lost supply from other Persian Gulf states, which of course is directly helping to fund's ability to just continue blocking the street.
Taking Car Island and severing Iran's oil from the market completely would then, of course, remove all of it from the global market, which would just make the price of oil even worse and exacerbate Trump's original dilemma. Even worse, taking the island would do absolutely nothing to stop Iran from still managing to block the straight of Hormuz. Car Island is located hundreds of kilometers away from the straight and its loss would have no impact on Iran's own stockpiles of drones and mines and its ability to continue threatening ships moving through the straight.
The same logic of attritional warfare would exist even if the US took control of Carg Island. Yes, it would eliminate Iran's oil exports and deny the regime the largest source of its funding. But Iran's leaders would likely still reason that they could continue outlasting the Americans by keeping the straight closed.
Again, even if they can just manage to keep the straight close through the end of April and into May, a timeline that might accelerate even further if their own oil supply to the world market gets knocked offline as well, there is a good chance that they can begin triggering a mild recession in Western economies that'll add even further pressure on Trump leading into the US midterm elections in November. The other operation that might actually be required to break open Hormos again without negotiating on Iran's favorable terms is a large combined arms operation within the strait itself. Over the past couple of weeks, the US military has been heavily bombarding this coastline.
A-10 Warhogs and other low-flying attack planes have made repeated strafing runs against Iranian speedboats and mine laying vessels, while they've even begun dropping huge 5,000 lb bunker buster bombs on Iranian coastal bunkers that are believed to store anti-hship missiles and sea drones. But permanently ending Iran's threat inevitably will require at least some boots down on the ground. Other than the highlyenriched uranium and car island options that have dubious strategic value, another operation that the US military is apparently considering is the seizure of critical islands in and around the straight of Hormuz itself that are currently controlled by Iran.
The most likely and politically justifiable islands they could seize are located just to the west of the strait, Abu Musa and the two Tumb Islands, Greater Tumb and Lesser Tum. These islands are currently controlled by Iran, but are more politically feasible and justifiable to seize because their sovereignty is disputed with the UAE. Back in 1971, only months after the British withdrew from these small islands, the Imperial State of Iran under the Shaw's regime unilaterally seized control over them.
While two small UAE predecessor Emirates on the Arabian side, the Emirate of Ross Alqaa and the Emirate of Sharia claimed them as well. After these two emirates joined with the greater UAE, the UAE inherited their territorial disputes over these islands with Iran, and Iran continued maintaining their control over them after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. The dispute over the islands never went away and has been simmering beneath the surface for decades now.
The UAE has repeatedly sought legal avenues to advance their claims to the islands over the years. But now during the fury and unpredictability of war and America's interest in breaking Iran's siege of Hormuz, could it be possible for the US military to launch amphibious operations into the islands under the banner of liberating them and then handing them over to the UAE's control? Control over the islands could enable the deployment of short-range air defenses to be set up on them to help protect tanker traffic, which could complicate Iran's angles of attack into the straight.
And if that still doesn't crack the straight open, there are further options potentially on the table, like seizing Iran's much larger Keshum Island that's within the straight of Hormuz itself. Or most ambitious of all, attempting to take control over sections of the southern coast of Iran itself. All of which will be massively escalatory, massively costly in terms of both resources and blood.
And still probably wouldn't actually prevent Iran from being able to just keep bombarding the straight with their drones from deeper in the interior, which means all of it still might not even open the straight anyway. The US has talked about using his navy to escort tankers through the straight in order to restore stability. But even that is a lot more difficult than it seems.
Convoys would need plenty of drones, helicopters, and fighters flying as protection above, along with airborne warning and control aircraft to help target incoming Iranian drones and missiles. Because of how narrow the straight is, each two tankers transiting through the straight would likely require one destroyer to escort them through under all of this aerial cover above them. With America's current assets in the region, as of early April, there are technically 14 destroyers available.
But since six of them are already preoccupied with protecting America's carriers, there's really only eight of them in the theater that could conceivably be used for escort missions. Redeploying additional destroyers to the theater for these missions will take additional weeks of time, and continue sapping American military power from other critical theaters like the Western Pacific. Escort missions will be expensive, will likely continue using up increasingly scarce stock piles of interceptors, and would potentially be an open-ended mission with no clear end in sight.
During the Iran Iraq war in the 1980s, amid similar attacks on commercial shipping in the Persian Gulf, the US Navy similarly escorted tankers through the Straight of Hormuz for about 14 months and used more than 30 of their warships at a time to do so. Whether or not Trump has the patience or not to commit to an operation of similar length and scope today is just about anybody's guess. And that's even assuming that tankers would have captains and insurance policies still willing to transit through what would essentially remain a gauntlet, which is of course far from certain.
Now that the wars lasted longer than a month and long enough for the Iranians to survive and shut down the straight of Hormuz, Trump's gamble in attacking them before they could actually do this has failed. And America is now left with no good options remaining. The war has expanded beyond America's control now.
And even if they wanted to simply walk away from it and cut their losses, Iran could just continue keeping the strike closed and harming the global economy until they actually get the concessions from America that they're currently demanding. Walking away now and doing nothing without fixing the mess in Ormuz is simply not possible. meaning that the only other two choices are either conceding to Iran's demands or escalating the war with any of the various options of boots on the ground to try and force Hormos open.
Neither of which are particularly attractive choices that will both be very unpopular decisions. There is no good path forward in what was meant to be a quick war that devolves into a nutritional war, just like what Russia has faced in Ukraine for more than 4 years now. which is why I argue that this war against Iran is quickly turning to America's Ukraine.
This whole situation is rapidly becoming a mess of monumental proportions that'll be extremely difficult to figure out. But something that thankfully is figured out right now, on the other hand, is what you should watch next or at least put on your list. And that's my Modern Conflict series.
Modern Conflicts is a Nebula original series, meaning that it exists only on the streaming service that myself and a whole bunch of other creators put together called Nebula. It's a show that explores the history and legacies of modern wars, conflicts, and battles, including many episodes covering more of America's long history of previous armed interventions in the Middle East, like the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the 20- yearlong occupation of Afghanistan, the final campaign of the Taliban that catapulted it back into power again in 2021, the raid in a Pakistan that killed Osama bin Laden, NATO's intervention in Libya against Muamar Gaddafi in 2011, the attack on the US embassy in Benghazi, the shoot down a Blackhawk military helicopters over Moadishu, Somalia, along with literally dozens and dozens of other episodes I produced over the years in addition to my separate Mad King series which explores the darker histories of some modern history's most well-known dictators. like other recent historical figures who were overthrown during US military interventions like Saddam's son, Uday Hussein, and other episodes covering the reigns of North Korea's Kiml Sunsung and Kim Jong-il and how they were actually able to avoid a US intervention.
These are my own projects that you can watch next, but there's also just so much good stuff on Nebula from other creators right now that you can watch, too. There's Tom Scott's England series following Tom as he road trips through every county in England and covers something interesting in every single one of them. There's Day Pass, hosted by Jason from Not Just Bikes, that explores the world through the lens of public transportation down on the ground.
There's Patrick Williams latest short film, The Dinner Plan, featuring big names like Griffin Newman and Zack Cherry. There's Abolish Everything, our new comedy debate premise recorded live in New York. We have Scav, a donkey series produced by the Wendover Productions and Jetlag folks, tracing the incredible drama and unfoldings of the world's largest annual scavenger hunt hosted at the University of Chicago and Oldest and Newest Places by Joe Scott.
A fulllength feature documentary exploring the oldest and newest rocks on the planet and what it takes to actually visit them. I could honestly just keep going and going, but just believe me when I say that with every month that goes by, the Nebula catalog keeps getting deeper, making becoming a subscriber even better. But we also need you to help keep this whole cycle going.
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