Its harder. 20% of Russians(my estimate) have connections to Ukraine (relatives, friends, or were born there) and could be Ukrainian agents, there are lots of land routes how you can smuggle stuff. Things are not as well connected between Iran and US.
Agents in the US would just be normal citizens asking for money/crypto. You'd need to find fools to deceive, but a lot of people fall for scams to get small gains. Many hard drug users in particular are often rather self centered in my limited experience.
Or if you wanted to attack refineries, you could possibly select some climate change activists to do it for you?
Or find angry children to do it. Make things go bang for fun.
Our industrial infrastructure appears to be vulnerable to me (as a superficial opinion).
The real fix is to help poor people in other countries to like the US. And work hard at avoiding doing things that radicalise dangerous haters.
It seems to me that there a large and well-established drug smuggling industry that might be quite interested in Iranian drone technology and has long-established logistics competence regarding transport into the US from distant countries. (I searched for 'fentanyl precursors' now, some search results named very distant sources.)
> That functionally cedes Emirati and Saudi sovereignty to Iran. Today it's $2mm. Tomorrow it's anything else Tehran requires.
the point is besides full scale invasion which Saudi and UAE won't do, there is no reliable way to remove threat of Iran striking oil infra, they just don't have way to deal with the problem.
> full scale invasion which Saudi and UAE won't do
Don't need a full-scale invasion. Just a land grab on the coasts. They can't do it alone. But they can provide troops (and mercenaries) as well as staying power where the U.S. cannot.
> there is no reliable way to remove threat of Iran striking oil infra
Barring invasion: mutualize the damage. Pot Iranian tankers. Seed their ports with mines. Israel locking up the Caspian and the UAE and Saudi Arabia locking up Hormuz to Iran changes the calculus of the war in Tehran and makes suing for peace–not with America and Israel, but with the Gulf–tenable.
> this just makes the soldiers on the coast the targets of the drones and missiles
Correct. That also reveals the locations of launchers, artillery pieces, et cetera. A winnable game if you have cheap bodies.
> it is a very large coastline to secure
To secure the Strait? Absolutely. To converge firepower onto a few beachheads? Not necessarily. And a Gulf land grab wouldn't be comprehensive. Just the islands (e.g. Larak, Hengam and East Qeshm) and maybe the land directly across from the Musandam Peninsula. (Probably not to hold. Just draw fire and trade back to Tehran. Hell, gift it to Trump.)
Kuwait and Iraq remain screwed. But if you're a Gulf exporter, that isn't necessarily a bad thing...
> There was a semi-stable equilibrium and the US ruined it. Now Iran controls the straight and it will be very very costly to go back
Sure. The point is how those costs will be borne. I don't think the emerging status quo is tenable for the Gulf.
Without the US, Saudi Arabia et al would be significantly outnumbered in a war with Iran. It's very unlikely that they have the capacity to invade Iran, even without considering drones. Factoring in drones, they will simply run out of soldiers before Iran runs out of drones, and the Iranian army can conduct mop-up operations at their leisure.
> Don't need a full-scale invasion. Just a land grab on the coasts. They can't do it alone. But they can provide troops (and mercenaries) as well as staying power where the U.S. cannot.
they couldn't win this against much closer, smaller and weaker Yemen. They just don't have functional military.
> mutualize the damage. Pot Iranian tankers. Seed their ports with mines.
I don't believe they will do this because they love oil money too much, unlike Iranian regime, which is idiologically/religiously driven, and endured for many years of various attacks and sanctions.
> couldn't win this against much closer, smaller and weaker Yemen. They just don't have functional military
KSA went it alone in Yemen. And from that–as well as various proxy wars in Africa–both it and the UAE have learned.
> don't believe they will do this because they love oil money too much
Loving oil money means wanting to export your oil. That said, I think the monarchies are more politically vulnerable. So it's harder for them to commit to this path. (It would also involve pissing off Trump.) But that doesn't mean it's strategically off the table, particularly for Saudi Arabia, which is less dependent on the Strait than the UAE.
But the issue is that KSA just didn't perform on the ground, well equipped troups were overrun by Houthies with AK consistently. Not clear if they changed anything.
> Loving oil money means wanting to export your oil.
right, if Iran will take reasonable cuts, gulf states won't escalate.
> if Iran will take reasonable cuts, gulf states won't escalate
Unlikely. Again, a reasonable cut today can turn into any ask tomorrow. It's worth tremendous costs to the Gulf to ensure the Strait returns to at least neutrality.
If there is a good time for unreasonable ask its today, Iran has strong incentive to say: you withdraw US troupes/bases or no tankers through the strait. If they don't do it today, they won't do it in next few decades.
Also, I don't think controlling shoreline will give anything: tankers are easily strikeable via drones/missiles from inner-Iran.
The only solution: is deep invasion supported with internal uprising with full defeat of current regime.
I suspect Trump may not care about money much, but at the end of the life he wants to be some historical figure. Similar motive was for Putin to invade Ukraine.
Except for the little detail that Ukraine doesn't have a history of launching rockets into allied nations, invading embassies and holding staff hostage, unprovoked attacks against allied interests and ships in international waters and massacring it's own people for the crime of speaking out agains their government.
Did that involve boot on the grounds or just shelling via cruise missiles or from air? Also, Yemen is poorer, but has more or less the same population as Saudi Arabia.
Their military is a paper tiger like Saddam’s was during the Iraq invasion. Modern gear but without the doctrine or officer corps to effectively use it.
My experience while working there years ago was that their armed forces were a weird mix of coup proofing and a nepotistic dumping ground for family members who couldn’t be trusted to help run the family business.
there are pathways to produce synthetic oil from coal or using carbon capture if you have cheap energy.
I hope they will catch up if fossil oil prices skyrocket.
This is the secret flipside of solar power's duck curve: it makes a lot of stupidly energy intensive paths towards non-fossil oil production a lot less stupid if you just have the energy to burn. Think about how in the 2000s we had a weird obsession with ethanol and other biofuels, only to learn that they were merely 40-50% efficient. If your energy mix is predominantly fossil fuels, you're better off just not burning the oil. But if you have solar, suddenly it becomes a good option for energy storage, especially in industries that need the weight properties of chemical fuels (i.e. aircraft, where you HAVE to be able to burn and exhaust your fuel or the plane will be too heavy to land).
Pretty much all chemical changes can be made with reasonable amounts of energy. That includes making "bioplastics" as well as the typical plastics we use today like polyethylene, polystyrol and so on, from biomaterials. What doesn't work in a way that's remotely economical is transmuting elements. It is, for example, possible to make gold today, the old dream of alchemists. But it's several orders of magnitude too expensive.
Common plastics are made from highly abundant elements, so running out of oil as a chemical feedstock is a quite surmountable problem given cheap enough energy.
there are many numbers in that article, but they didn't tell US became insolvent this year, or was insolvent last year too by their criteria. What about the last decade?
You could probably fill a 737 with biodiesel today and fly it. A jet will run on anything combustible within the right ignition temperature, density, and viscosity ranges and diesel is not far from kerosene aka jet fuel.
I mean, you could probably almost run a jet turbine on bacon grease if you kept it warm to keep it from solidifying. Some military stuff is intentionally made to be as “flex fuel” as possible in case you are cut off from official supply lines and have to do something like gas up a plane with road diesel of unknown quality.
You wouldn’t just do things like that with a million dollar plane since it might be bad for the engine but if the engine were tuned for it it’d be fine.
Iranian cheap drones/cruise missiles are efficient from another hand.
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