Iran holds the trump card in this energy crisis

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Every day that the showdown continues in the Gulf, the world is deprived of an eighth of its oil supply and must draw deeper into its vanishing inventories.

“The scale of the challenge has not been well understood: as of today, we are losing 13 million barrels per day and tomorrow it may be bigger,” said Fatih Birol, the head of the International Energy Agency.

The shortfall is likely to rise to 15 million if the US navy successfully carries out its plan to blockade Iranian oil moving through the Strait of Hormuz, which it has so far failed to do. That’s not surprising, given that Donald Trump launched this war with inadequate forces based on Israeli assurances – deemed “farcical” by his own CIA chief – that Iran would crumble at the first shock.

Tehran warns it will expand the war to the Red Sea route if its ships are attacked or sunk, endangering another six million barrels a day at the Saudi terminal of Yanbu and causing wider havoc to global container shipping.

“The ports of the Gulf are either for everyone or for no one,” it said.

US Central Command says shipping from non-Iranian ports in the Gulf can move freely, but it has no credible way to restore normal traffic. It would take at least 200,000 US ground troops and months of fighting to secure the long Iranian coastline and knock out the remaining missile launchers and drone units hidden in the mountains.

A peace deal would have to be on terms closer to Iran’s demands than to Trump’s surrender ultimatum. We are a long way from that awful moment of realism in the Oval Office.

“The US and Iran are drifting into a familiar and dangerous pattern: a war of attrition where each side believes it can impose more pain than it can absorb,” said Danny Citrinowicz, a former head of the Iran desk of Israel Defence Intelligence.

The second dangerous twist to this blockade is that the US navy is now expected to board and seize Chinese-flagged ships, constituting a direct attack on China’s energy supply chain. This is arguably an act........

© WA Today