by Ron Unz, The Unz Review:
According to news reports, a peace agreement may now be close at hand in the Iran War, a conflict that has heavily dominated most of the world’s attention during the last three months.
Such overwhelming focus has certainly been reasonable. Very soon after the American and Israeli attacks began, the Iranians closed the Strait of Hormuz to cargo ships associated with unfriendly countries, causing a huge drop in the flow of oil and other vital resources from the Persian Gulf to the rest of the world.
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President Donald Trump soon recognized that despite the overwhelming strength of his American navy, he was powerless to reopen that vital waterway and instead imposed a distant counter-blockade against Iranian oil shipments, further restricting supply. Meanwhile, the Iranians had responded to earlier attacks against their own infrastructure by using their huge arsenal of ballistic missiles and powerful drones to inflict similar destruction upon the civilian and energy infrastructure of the Gulf Arab allies who had facilitated those American and Israeli strikes.
Although a ceasefire began in early April, the combination of all these actions have reduced the global availability of oil by some 13% or more, with even larger reductions in the supply of LNG and other vital commodities. This has put the world at risk of a severe global recession if a peace agreement were not soon reached and the waterway fully reopened to traffic.
Throughout this period, Trump has regularly threatened to reignite the military conflict with a massive new bombing campaign, perhaps targeting much of Iran’s civilian and energy infrastructure and the Iranians have declared that they would retaliate against any such new attacks in equally strong fashion. In conjunction with its Houthi allies, Iran has warned that it would shut down the alternate Red Sea transit route and also destroy much of the fragile Gulf Arab infrastructure, including energy facilities and even desalination plants. The result of such mutual destruction would be a far greater loss of oil and other natural resources and one that would probably continue for years, thereby possibly throwing the world into a global depression.
Given the enormous potential threat to the global economy, I have heavily focused on this Iran War, making it the subject of most my recent articles such as these:
- Will Donald Trump’s Iran War Crash the Global Economy?
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During these months, this dire situation had naturally drawn attention away from other conflicts, notably including Russia’s continuing war with Ukraine. Furthermore, continuing advances in drone technology have drastically reduced the pace of Russian advances on the battlefield, with signs of a deadlock developing. Prof. John Mearsheimer even recently suggested that contrary to his own expectations the ultimate result of the Ukraine War might be the sort of frozen conflict that some others had long predicted.
