By Jo Nova
The big losers in this war, apart from some former Iranian leaders, appear to be China, and NATO.
In the last two months China has lost easy cheap access to cheap oil from Venezuela and now Iran. China was getting around the sanctions and buying discounted Iranian oil through a shadow fleet of ships. It was acquiring as much as 80% of Iranian oil production. Now it has to pay market prices and fight for a limited supply.
Meanwhile the divide between the US and Europe is suddenly very obvious. NATO has been shown to be an empty shell.
Victor Davis Hanson, the military historian, explains the big picture:
GB News: Basically, is this a victory for Donald Trump? Does Does this ceasefire represent a victory for his sort of strategic campaign?
Victor Davis Hanson: Well, if it’s honored, it is because when all of the rhetoric and all of the politics vanish, and if they abide by the agreement and we stop and the straits stay open and … if we’re viligant — then it is.
He [Trump] comes back and he says when I came into office Iran had the ability to make 11 bombs apparently … we’ve realized they had missiles that would reach Europe. They had shut down, through the proxies, the Red Sea. They had caused October 7th — and they can’t do that anymore at least for the foreseeable future. If they think they’re going going to try, I or any future president can stop them at very minimal cost. This has cost about 50 to 60 billion dollars.
It’s about probably a quarter of what was stolen in California under the Newsom regime by welfare fraud. And we’ve lost tragically 13 soldiers. We lost the same amount in one day in Afghanistan getting out of Afghanistan. So if everybody just keeps calm and looks at the actual data, the cost, the benefit, uh, and who wins and loses, … I think in two months nobody’s going to be talking about this if it holds.
We’re in an information war. I recommend people watch this to understand just how deep and complete the wall of anti-Trump propaganda is.
From the Transcript: A brief history of the last 47 years of the Iranian war — “Death to America”
Victor Davis Hanson asks “what was the alternative?”
Because for 47 years [the Iranians] had bombed the American embassy in Beirut. There were operatives who bombed us in Tanzania and Kenya. They had kidnapped people and butchered them. They blew up 243 Marines. They probably killed anywhere from 700 to 1,500 American servicemen in Iraq and Afghanistan by sending advisers and shape charges to the opposition.
They tried to kill Donald they had a plot to kill Donald Trump, Mike Pompeo, John Bolton and they wanted to kill the Saudi ambassador right inside Washington DC. They were supplying the Houthis that were disrupting and causing a lot longer and more extensive damage in the Red Sea, the entry to the Suez Canal. They shut that down for 5 months. And then in addition, we would never have [had] October 7th. None of this would have happened had Iran not supplied Houthis, Hamas, and and Hezbollah.
So at some point somebody had to bell the cat and every single administration said they were going to do it. Ronald Reagan said he was going to do it. We had the tanker wars where they did shut down the Hormuz strait. We had then George HW Bush who said this was intolerable. He did nothing. Bill Clinton thought of doing something. He did nothing. George W. Bush — people advised him.
People say that Trump is guided by the Israelis. The Israelis told him in 2003 it was a mistake to go after Saddam and it would be a preferable target for Iran which was the nexus really of terror not Saddam. [The US] did nothing about Iran even when they supplied these charges. Then we had Barack Obama and his idea was to appease them and create an alternate nexus of power in Iran and then Damascus and then Beirut and the Gaza and then play that off against the Gulf states in Israel and he would adjudicate as if there was a moral equivalence between the two. That didn’t work.
And then we had Trump’s first term — he didn’t want to do this. He put maximum pressure. He sanctioned them. He declared that the Houthi is a terrorist organization. And then they were silent for a while. Soon as Joe Biden came back in, he lifted all the sanctions, all the punitive measures. They got a hundred billion dollars in oil revenue. The Houthis were right back at it.
And then he came in a second time, Trump, and he said he was going to … stop this. And I think you could make a plausible argument that they have suffered the greatest military loss in the history of the Middle East as far as the number of missiles, uh, launchers, uh, naval assets. They don’t have an air force. They have shoulder fired missiles now. They will be resupplied by Russia and China, but they still, even when they had air defenses, the Israelis, the United States took them out.
The end of the NATO era?
Later in the interview Victor Davis Hanson wonders “What’s the purpose of NATO after this latest war?” The US helped the UK and Europe in the Falklands, in Serbia, in Libia, Ukraine, but now weak countries speak against the US and pay the Danegeld to Iran to get their boats through. Iran had long wanted to set up a payment system (effectively extortion) for ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea, and only one country stood against that.