> eat the rich, and try to build something more sane
The tragedy is that right wing parties are sponsored by the rich snd serve primarily them. Economic grievances of ordinary people are exploited to make them vote agains their interests.
Pipelines are usually buried under the ground. Pumping statins could be protected by short range SAM systems. An undegraund pipeline can be destroyed by a heavy glide bomd (not an option for Iran) but should be relatively safe from shahed drones. Iran's ballistic rockets are not precise enough to hit a pipeline wihtout spending multiple rockets (in which case it would be cheaper to repair the pipeline than to produce all these rockets).
For land pipelines thiere no eqauvalent of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea according to which both Oman and Iran should allow free passage of ships. And "normal" path lies on Oman's waters which dones't stop Iran from attacking ships there. The strait toll is a pure racketeering.
You make it sound that there are only two sides in this story.
Spain, Argentina, Kenya, Indonesia, Kuwait and countless other countries haven't bombed any civilian infrastructure either and yet they will be affected by the aggressive posture around international maritime traffic.
Are you expecting that Iran will not apply the fee to ships that sell oil Malesia or South Africa?
Their only defense against being bombed was using their geopolitical position to its advantage. Their own civilian infrastructure was bombed by the US-Israel axis, with the support of the Gulf states.
I fully expect Iran to apply fees on every ship going through, and they should.
Spain, Argentina, Kenya, Indonesia and countless other countries are paying for the aggressive and reckless actions of the US-Israel axis.
That's the situation of the country where I live btw. I don't blame Iran for using the weapons at their disposal for survival, I blame the rogue states that attacked Iran and forced their hand. Let's not forget that Iran could have done it at any time in the past decades, and showed restraint in doing so, even with all the sanctions and Israeli aggression.
> They wanted trump to go further and destroy the regime.
It would require a large scale ground operation which is off the table. A few more weeks of air strikes would not have destroyed the regime anyway but a few more weeks of asymmetric strikes (when Iran strikes its neighbors because it can do little about the US/Israel) would have destroyed gulf oil infrastructure inflicting lasting economic pain on the whole world.
It not that impotent. Attacking civilan targets in the age of drones is not that hard - a small motor boat with explosives or a shahed style drone is all you need. And to keep the strait closed they don't need to attack all ships. Even 0.1% probability of an attack (maybe even 0.01%) is enough to halt the traffic. And they don't need to sink the ship - a fire on board is enough to create an unacceptable security risk for tankers and LNG carriers.
It was a while since Houthis attacked any ships and yet traffic via Suez is still 60% down from what is was befor attacks started in 2023. Because the risk of an attack is not zero.
Even if US refineries were designed for US oil to keep domestic prices low one would have to introduce export restrictions because oil is a global commondity. Big oil will not be happy about that and it seems they have a great influence over the respublican party and Trump.
Nationalization doesn't define who is in charge though. You can have the state taking over industry, you can also have industry taking over the state. Both ultimately lead to nationalization of the industry.
A dependency on solar panels which needs to be replaced every 5 years is less bad then a dependency on gas which is burned every day. Having said that nuclear decommission was a huge mistake.
Even 20 years is much below what most studies show. Panels tend to keep functioning well beyond 30 years, with degradation at 86%. It might be true that economically in 30 years they're so much cheaper that it's worth replacing them with new panels, but that's an optimisation, not a question of replacement need.
In a long run people may become more positive towards renewables but in a short run many countries are ramping up coal use and oil companies outside the gulf are getting windfall profits which they’ll continue to use to bribe politicians.
The tragedy is that right wing parties are sponsored by the rich snd serve primarily them. Economic grievances of ordinary people are exploited to make them vote agains their interests.
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