I guess the text of the MOU with Iran is out. I've seen people on X, people I respect, howling that it is a terrible deal. Such adjectives are subjective, not objective. Whatever is in the MOU hardly matters. We did as well as could have been expected, given the global situation.
I'm still in Alabama, working while doing the 1031 Sprint. That's where, in pursuit of fulfilling the requirements of a 1031 capital gains tax exchange, we must get our new properties up and rented as fast as possible. I don't have time for a long post, but I wanted to get these noodlings down on the blog.
The only leverage Iran really has is the Strait of Hormuz. That leverage vanishes if we and our allies provide sufficient surface combatants to escort shipping going through the strait. In short, the Europeans and Asians lack both the will and the capability to do this. We're not talking a fleet like the one that took Okinawa in 1945, we're talking a dozen or so destroyers and frigates. The Euros could not protect shipping from primitive threats even if they wanted to and they don't want to because they've allowed themselves to be colonized by Islam.
Because the Euros could not protect shipping, we had to draw the line here, pack up our gear and go home. That in itself was a wise decision as the alternative was another neocon-style quagmire in the Middle East.
This is a watershed moment. Absent a violent spasm of Western patriotism and cultural confidence, this marks the point at which Islam can exert substantial and obvious power over Europe.
Thanks to our own poor decisions and lack of funding for the Navy, specifically the decision to build LCSs instead of the more expensive and capable DDGs and FFGs, we were not capable of providing those escorts ourselves. In that environment, this MOU was about the best outcome we could have expected, given Trump's aversion to war. The only other alternative would have been to carry out his threat to destroy all power plants and bridges and leave Iran in the Stone Ages. President Trump could not bring himself to inflict that kind of suffering on Iran.
Still, even with all those limitations, the war accomplished some good and important things. Iranian leadership was decapitated. The Iranian military, save for its infantry, has been effectively annihilated*. The Iranian propagandists, both within Iran and within the West, will claim victory, but that's ridiculous. Just compare Iran's international position a year ago to today.
The Chinese didn't do so good, either. Their military hardware was shown up badly. The other Gulf states are actively working to divorce themselves from the Strait via pipelines and harbors outside the Gulf. Once that's complete, Iran will never again have this much leverage.
Iranian influence took a massive hit. Iran's standing with their neighbors did as well as a result of their indiscriminate attacks on all around them. Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis are all scrambling around trying to figure out how to protect themselves now that their sugar daddy has been curb stomped.
In the end, it was a good result, probably about as good as one could hope, given the circumstances.
God, I miss the Royal Navy.
* - People will say that the Iranians can rebuild their military quickly and bandy about budgetary figures for ships and aircraft as if the military was a spreadsheet. It isn't. Think instead in terms of not just replacing the hardware, but having to rebuild a generation of NCOs and skilled support personnel as well as all the support infrastructure that got destroyed. How long does it take, for example, to build a modern pier, complete with loading and umbilical systems for an FFG? Now multiply that across the whole country for the Iranian navy and air force.
8 comments:
"In the end, it was a good result, probably about as good as one could hope, given the circumstances."
Eh. Maybe. But was it worth $100 billion or so in direct military expenditures, plus around $60 billion in added US fuel costs, and whatever additional costs accrued due to the resulting hike in inflation? That's a lot of money. Are we materially better off than we would have been if we hadn't spent that money?
I don't believe those dollar figures, but even if they're true, the answer is yes. An enemy like Iran needs to be smashed. They weren't just a threat, they were a metastasizing, destructive force.
Not being argumentative here, just intellectually curious. That dollar figure is certainly not the marginal cost of the war. It probably includes the full cost of the carrier battle groups, aircraft, etc. Those numbers probably assume the Abraham Lincoln BG was going to cost nothing until we attacked Iran. In actuality, the thing was going to be floating around somewhere, launching and retrieving aircraft as a part of normal operations.
The Republicans play the same game when they're out of power. The other side has spent elebenty zillion dollars on such and such!
Getting back to your underlying question, the answer is still yes. Those kind of questions assume that doing nothing has no future cost associated with them. I think the Iraq / Afghanistan adventures were based on an utterly ignorant understanding of Islam, but at least I understand and support the motivation. If you're going to act like you want to do us serious harm and you act on those goals from time to time, well, then, (shrug), we're going to come over there and beat the living daylights out of you.
The underlying mathematical problem is one of potential catastrophe. England has nukes, but isn't chanting "Death to America!" Yet. :-)
Iran, meanwhile, like Saddam, wants everyone to see they're working towards nukes and struts around telling the world how much they hate us.
Shrug. Looks like you need a whuppin'.
I agree that it is remarkably difficult to get a straight answer on how much the war has cost, because everyone who publishes a number has a clear incentive for either lowballing or overestimating the numbers. As far as I can find, the last number that the DOD gave out for direct expenditures and equipment replacement was $29 billion on May 12, which is a bit over a month old and would be consistent with about $40 billion by now. Meanwhile, other estimates are all over the place, with the high end being pretty outrageous, but overall they are clustering right around $100 billion. And given that back in March, Hegseth was requesting a supplemental $200 billion to prosecute the war, an estimate of $100 billion to date does not seem out of line with expectations. As for the added fuel costs, the EIA says we use 20.6 billion barrels a day, and the price went from around $60/barrel to about $90/barrel, so that's about an extra $0.6 billion/day. And it has been just a hair over 100 days, so that's $60 billion in increased fuel costs for all of us.
And for the "Was it worth it?" question, as far as I can tell the situation before the war was:
1. Iran had a navy and air force that nobody outside of the immediate area took seriously. They had been threatening to build nukes for ages, but somehow never actually got around to doing it, in spite of all their blustering.
2. Iran had been using the US as a bogeyman for decades. They were claiming that the threat from the "Great Satan" was ample justification to keep the mullahs in power to "protect" the Iranian population from "US Aggression".
3. The Iranian population was finally getting sick of this, and as of the end of last year, it looked like the mullas were in serious danger of getting overthrown and probably executed.
So what is the position after the war?
1. It was demonstrated that the Iranian air force and navy really weren't much of a threat. No real surprise.
2. The old mullas got replaced by new, younger mullas who now have real grounds for a grudge. And at the same time, they can now point at the US and yell, "See? See? They really were a threat! You really do need us to protect you from them!" And the Iranian population apparently is buying this, with the protests just kind of fading away.
So instead of being in imminent danger of having their heads up on pikes, the new mullas have a firmer hold on their country than before. They may have been "spanked" in a military sense, but they are long way from being "smashed". And they still have all their enriched uranium, with 60 days ahead of us where they can still use it as a bargaining chip. The most likely move is for them to use it to get a ton of money, the way that North Korea used to do before they decided "to hell with it" and just went ahead and built bombs.
Correction: I meant to type 20.6 million barrels for the daily oil consumption, not billion.
From KT Cat's original post 2026/06/17 "The only other alternative would have been to carry out his (Trump's) threat to destroy all power plants and bridges and leave Iran in the Stone Ages."
I don't believe that was or is the only alternative. I suggest two others.
#1 Use surgical strikes to break the pipes on Kharg island connecting the storage tanks to the tanker loading facilities. That would eliminate a major source of foreign currency for Iran.
If Iran couldn't pay for their military related hardware and commodities Russia and China might curtail shipments of same to Iran.
#2 Slightly more difficult but still possible IMO: Use surgical strikes on fuel and electric lines to cut power to the ports of Shahid Rajaee and Amirabad.
Both of the ports have two power stations nearby - one oil-fired and the other gas-fired.
Shahid Rajaee is Iran's major port near Bandar Abbas. Ingredients for making rocket propellants are shipped in bulk from China. I guess that they go through Shahid Rajaee. Amirabad is on the Caspian sea. Commerce between Russia and Iran likely flows through it.
From Tim Eisele: "as of the end of last year, it looked like the mullas were in serious danger of getting overthrown "
NOT ANY CHANCE IN HELL. The civilian population is unarmed. The IRGC is firmly in control and have demonstrated they are willing to kill civilians en masse.
From Tim "It was demonstrated that the Iranian air force and navy really weren't much of a threat."
True but not important. Iran mass produced and stockpiled drones and serious long range missiles. They fired some of that stockpile at just about every country in range. Some of the drones and missiles were shot down using very expensive and hard to replace missiles.
Consider if the U.S. and Israel campaign against Iran had never happened.
Iran would still be mass producing and stockpiling munitions. How would that end well?
IIRC some of Iran's munitions stockpile got stuck in their underground storage facilities. That's something to still worry about.
From Tim "they still have all their enriched uranium" True and concerning. It would be better if they were in a much weaker position. See previous post.
From KT Cat's original post 2026/06/17 again: "The other Gulf states are actively working to divorce themselves from the Strait via pipelines and harbors outside the Gulf."
There are two existing pipelines: the pipeline in Saudi Arabia that terminates at Yanbu on the Red Sea and the pipeline in the UAE that terminates in Fujairah.
Unfortunately, oil that makes it to Yanbu has to be shipped out via the Bab al-Mandab Strait which is controlled by the Houthis. Iran was able to hit Fujairah with drones.
I'm not aware of any other pipelines currently under construction. In general I don't believe pipelines could match the capacity of the normal level of ship traffic out of the Persian Gulf.
From KT: "Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis are all scrambling around..." Hamas is deservedly being crushed. Sucks to live in Gaza now. Hezbollah is inflicting casualties on the Israelis using FPV drones. If Iran's finances get back to normal -- which seems likely -- both Hezbollah and the Houthis will be a menace for years to come.
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