James Lucas AT JamesLucasIT
More than 2400 years ago, the greatest democracy in the world was starved into surrender because its enemy seized one narrow strait.
History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes. And it's hard not to notice that we have built our modern world on the same fragile foundation...
In the fifth century BC, Athens was the wonder of the ancient world, powerful, wealthy, and culturally unmatched. But Athens could not feed itself. It depended on grain shipped from the Black Sea, and every one of those grain ships had to pass through a single narrow channel, the Hellespont (Dardanelles), the slender strait separating Europe from Asia.
Everyone knew that whoever controlled that passage controlled Athens itself.
In 405 BC the Spartan admiral Lysander understood exactly what to do: rather than storm the city, he sailed to the Hellespont and defeated the Athenian fleet guarding the grain route at Aegospotami. The historian Xenophon records that Lysander went there deliberately "to prevent the passing out of the grain ships." He closed the strait, and within a year, facing starvation, the mightiest city in Greece surrendered. Its golden age was over...
Until recently, a fifth of the world’s oil passed through a single narrow channel in the Persian Gulf, the Strait of Hormuz. But since war broke out with Iran earlier this year, traffic through it has dropped dramatically. So the world’s shipping has leaned on its backup route, the Bab el-Mandeb, the strait between Yemen and Africa. Now, in the past few days, the Houthis have seized new territory along Yemen’s Red Sea coast and reportedly taken control of multiple strategic islands, tightening their grip on the Bab el-Mandeb chokepoint. Saudi Arabia has also shut down its East-West oil pipeline following recent attacks.
But the deepest danger is not the price of fuel, it's the thing that flows through the same strangled waterways: fertilizer. In August of this year, JP Morgan published a report with a title that says everything, Food Security Is National Security: A Compounding Storm. Roughly a third of the world's nitrogen fertilizer, the thing that grows about half of all the food on earth, normally passes through the very Middle Eastern chokepoints now under threat, and unlike oil, there is no strategic reserve of it. You cannot release fertilizer from a stockpile the way you release oil. When it does not arrive in time to be spread on the fields, the harvest simply shrinks.
JP Morgan projects global food inflation climbing from around 2.8 percent now to roughly 5 percent in early 2027, and it warns the crops most exposed are the ones that feed the poorest, rice, wheat, sugar. The United Nations has said the same thing: if these straits stay closed, a severe food price crisis can form within months, and the countries that will suffer first are the ones that already spend half their income just to eat.
There is an old saying: "There are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy." Three days without food is what separates an orderly society from chaos. The Athenians discovered that during the Peloponnesian War, and the frightening part is not simply that something similar could happen again, but that the way our world is built today, a disruption in a few critical places could be felt by millions, if not billions, at once...
Brett Erikson AT BrettErikson28
The single most dangerous risk for the United States right now is a mass casualty event that would give the Israeli Lobby and Iran Hawks the ammunition to push Trump to employ insane measures against Iran.
If the blockade works, as we have seen over the past week, economic and energy infrastructure will be destroyed… and we lose.
If the blockade fails… we lose.
When the unavoidable reality is America being forced to end this war without accomplishing Washington’s ultimate goal of regime change, it is the RESPONSIBLE decision to derisk from the extreme tail events like an American mass casualty event.
This is the exact thesis of my recent op-ed in The Hill on Thursday, and the destruction of the Saudi East-West Pipeline makes this reality unavoidable.
There’s no way to accomplish all of America’s goals in the Iran War, but there ARE catastrophic risks of continuing the war.
Remove the troops. Call off the blockade. Avoid disaster.
Sigh.
This all spells "oh fuck" one way or another.