The cost of a nuclear strike is far lower than the cost of closing sea lanes, or threatening to, because a nuclear strike would harm one people or one city, while closing the sea lanes damages the whole world.
اضافة اعلان
Oil costs have risen and keep rising daily, and the costs of transporting goods and insuring them are rising too. Iran has replaced the threat of nuclear weapons with something more dangerous: a war of the straits, Hormuz and Bab al-Mandab. In doing so, it distributes the cost of the war among peoples near and far, because everyone is harmed by this situation.
Even the passage of ships in both directions sometimes proceeds only partially, and it is dangerous movement under threat. Missile launches, the scattering of naval mines, attacks by small boats, or any other technical means make navigation itself hazardous and liable to halt at any moment after any security incident.
This situation cannot continue, because leaving the war unresolved, whether by a military ending or a political settlement, causes a global bleed that can no longer be endured given the economic declines in many countries.
The damage Iran suffered in the war has been cleverly reproduced by spreading it across the world's countries: from the Gulf states and Iraq, which face challenges because of the Strait of Hormuz, through China, the European countries, Canada, Australia, and the interior of the United States, and the rest of the Arab countries, which are suffering gradual harm, including to imports and exports. It is enough to point here to the ultimate threats concerning the Suez Canal, for example, and what they mean for Egypt economically, politically, and in security terms.
The point to be made is that the belief that the war has stopped is false and misleading. It relates only to one form of war, the launching of missiles. At a deeper level the war continues. It is enough to note the decline in development, growth, and investment across the region, and the wave of high prices battering peoples, which may lead to security instability at the level of the structure of states.
Iran also threatens to prevent oil exports from all the region's countries unless its own oil is exported, and threatens to halt air navigation for the region's countries unless its aircraft can fly. That means the principle of distributing the cost of war, a principle Iran devised in this war, is being fully activated, as if Tehran were saying: let everyone sink with us in this war, for why should we sink alone? Tehran puts this slogan into practice even more through the sea lanes.
The problem facing the United States and Israel in the war with Iran is that Iran's territory is vast, there are weapons depots that have not been reached, and there are thousands of military personnel spread across all Iranian provinces who will not abandon their ideological military line even if the Iranian regime falls. This will push Washington to calculate the cost of toppling the regime, and it may discover that keeping the regime and negotiating with it is far better than an open vacuum with no officials, in which the forces driving its contents cannot be controlled.
This explains the theory that the United States may return to a plan of cutting off Iran's limbs before returning to the center, that is, ending the forces in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Iraq that may back Iran. These forces have proven to have reproduced Iran's militarily depleted power, whether through the sea lanes or missile launches, as if they had provided a strategic compensation to the Iranians in this war.
This is not a mere spat; we are entering a time in which everything may collapse.
