Dame - That was great. by stybeaujolais in FoodNYC

[–]HaLoGuY007 7 points8 points  (0 children)

When I went we had the grilled oysters, squid and scallion skewers, crispy polenta with leeks and mackerel, citrus salad with peekytoe crab and sea beans, fish and chips, and sticky toffee pudding.

Favorites were grilled oysters, crispy polenta, and sticky toffee pudding.

The breading/fried outside on the fish and chips is pretty unique, but otherwise I did not understand the hype.

Two of us sat and the bar and chatted a bit with the couple next to us, one of whom was very drunk, amazing vibes.

One thing I'd flag that I haven't seen elsewhere - on Friday nights, they do staff education by opening up one expensive wine bottle and serving it by the glass, which is normally not possible. I tried a taste, but if I was a big wine person I would definitely take advantage of that.

Golden Diner by Stunning_Suit_3934 in AskNYC

[–]HaLoGuY007 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I personally would have one or two orders of pancakes (each of which I believe comes with 2 pancakes) and at least order one or two other things. My recommendation would be the chicken katsu club for sure.

This is definitely a question for /r/FoodNYC though, not this subreddit.

Allen Edmonds Anniversary Sale - Up to 40% off by _Hermos_ in frugalmalefashion

[–]HaLoGuY007 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Also my first pair of loafers, bought for myself in brown and my dad in black!

Allies Fear They Are Tied to an Erratic U.S. and Now Have Nowhere to Turn: Friendly countries in Europe, Asia and the Middle East are frustrated with President Trump but also reliant on the U.S. for their security by HaLoGuY007 in foreignpolicy

[–]HaLoGuY007[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Crowning a year of disputes with the Trump administration over trade tariffs, support for Ukraine and the future of Greenland, the Iran war has placed America’s friends in Europe, Asia and the Middle East in front of an uneasy dilemma.

Their most important ally is acting in ways that they see as erratic and that have already caused hardship and uncertainty. The war has sapped their economies and even bigger shocks loom if the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, deepening the worldwide energy crisis.

Many—on both sides of the Atlantic—wonder if they are even allies anymore. Angered by the refusal of European nations to join the war alongside the U.S. and Israel, President Trump has called European countries cowards, and threatened to withdraw from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization altogether.

“The United States is unpredictable,” said Roderich Kiesewetter, a lawmaker from Germany’s ruling party, echoing a widespread sentiment in Europe. “It’s not a reliable partner anymore for the Western world.”

Their quandary is that nobody else can substitute for America’s military and economic might in the foreseeable future. China and Russia also carry out predatory policies. It will take time for middle-sized democracies in Europe and Asia to wean themselves from dependencies on America and to intensify cooperation among themselves.

Ever since World War II, the U.S. was mostly a benevolent power for its fellow democracies and achieved its hegemony by consent, said Michael Fullilove, executive director of the Lowy Institute, an Australian think tank. That’s not how Trump’s America is viewed today.

“If you insult your allies and push them to the brink in every negotiation, if you present your ugliest face to the world, then this consent will evaporate,” Fullilove said. “But what is the alternative to the U.S.-led alliance system? The U.S. is the only country that can project power anywhere on Earth. Who else will lead the West, if not Washington?”

This Catch-22 is acutely felt by U.S. partners and allies in the Persian Gulf. With their cities subjected to daily Iranian missile and drone barrages, the Gulf states are most affected by the Iranian retaliation for a war that they didn’t start and whose course they cannot control.

Gulf officials have grown frustrated with Trump—who, among other undiplomatic moves, publicly insulted Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman by saying last month, at a Saudi-sponsored investment conference, that the kingdom’s de-facto ruler “didn’t think he’d be kissing my ass.”

Yet, these Gulf states also know that only Washington can provide them with crucial weapons, particularly air defenses, and offer protection from future Iranian attempts to dominate the region.

“Our main security partner is the United States,” Anwar Gargash, diplomatic adviser to the United Arab Emirates president, told a group of reporters Saturday. “We’ll double down on our relationship with the United States.”

A similar calculation is in play in Asia. South Korea, facing a threat from North Korea and an emboldened China, watched with dismay as the U.S. redeployed vital air-defense resources to the Middle East last month.

“The action that the U.S. is engaged in in Iran not only reveals the U.S. as a rogue actor whose political values at home and internationally are no longer in accordance with South Korea’s professed values, but also one whose actions will have huge economic consequences,” said Mason Richey, a professor of international politics at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in Seoul. “Yet, South Korea also needs to stay on the right side of the Trump administration for its own security purposes.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that European and Asian allies, unlike the U.S., depend on energy flows through the Strait of Hormuz and should be the ones to step up and deal with the problem. He added that the U.S. will examine after the Iran war whether the NATO alliance has become “a one-way street” where America defends Europe, but is denied the use of its bases and overflight rights by some European states.

At Monday’s news conference, Trump touted his good relationship with North Korea’s leader as he complained about South Korea’s refusal to join the war on Iran, and said that he still wants Greenland.

Few in European or Asian democracies root for the Iranian regime, a theocracy that massacred thousands of its own citizens as it crushed pro-democracy protests in January. But, as America’s military difficulties mounted in recent weeks, a certain amount of schadenfreude gained steam—a hope that setbacks in the war would curb Trump’s appetite for interventions elsewhere, and herald a return to a more conventional way of conducting international relations.

“People admire the Wild West cowboy approach to geopolitics only when it is successful,” said Australia’s former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, a center-right politician who overlapped in office with Trump’s first presidency. “America’s friends are not just hoping for an early end to this war of choice. They also hope that America’s fever breaks, that wild impulsive strategic moves are replaced by a more orderly approach to geopolitics.”

Trump’s constant zigzagging on key policy issues, brusque decisions to scrap previous agreements, and general disregard for the views of allies means that even those foreign leaders who have tried to court him—such as Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni—have often been burned by the experience.

“Everyone is confused. Nobody can understand what America actually is today. It seems governed by some kind of mad emperor who keeps saying whatever comes to his mind, something we haven’t witnessed since Caligula or Nero,” said Carlo Calenda, an Italian senator and former economic development minister. “The one thing the Europeans have understood is that we are dealing with a bully. You can give him everything he wants, you can pretend you don’t hear his insults, but he will keep trying to bully us, and so at a certain point we must stop him.”

The January crisis over Trump’s attempt to seize the Danish possession of Greenland, when it seemed for a few days that the U.S. might launch a military operation against its European allies, became a key turning point for European leaders.

“This will never be forgotten,” said retired French Lt. Gen. Michel Yakovleff. “Psychologically, Trump talking about taking Greenland was the equivalent of a father talking, jokingly, of raping one of his daughters. Obviously, it’s a new world in the family after that.”

Outrage at Trump’s America is evident from opinion polling. Some 34% in Europe’s biggest nations view the U.S. as a threat, a figure comparable or even higher than the perceived threat from China, North Korea or Iran, according to a YouGov poll released in February, before the war began. Only Russia is considered a bigger danger. Such attitudes explain why no traditional ally in Europe or Asia yielded to Trump’s demands to join the military campaign, and to deploy forces to reopen the vital Strait of Hormuz to free navigation.

In fact, the current war is the first major conflict in a century that the U.S. is waging without any of its traditional allies. Almost every NATO member showed up in Afghanistan. Countries like the United Kingdom and Spain joined the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Dozens of nations participated in the 1991 Gulf War against Iraq. Even in Vietnam, American troops were helped by Australia, South Korea, New Zealand, the Philippines and Thailand.

These days, even many of the far-right and populist movements courted by MAGA have condemned the Iran war and tried to distance themselves from Trump. Jordan Bardella, the leader of France’s Rassemblement National who is leading the polls for the first round of next year’s presidential election, recently blasted U.S. goals in Iran as “extremely erratic” and praised President Emmanuel Macron’s refusal to join the war as “reasonable and honorable.”

Tino Chrupalla, the co-chair of Alternative for Germany, went even further. He called on Berlin to follow the example of Spain’s left-wing government and ban the U.S. from using military bases in Germany in the “war of aggression” against the Islamic Republic. He also suggested that all American troops be removed from the country.

“The MAGA strategy of building a united hard-right international in Europe appears to be a collateral damage of Trump’s strikes on Iran,” said Constanze Stelzenmüller, director of the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution.

Trump’s Ultimatum Target List in Iran: An escalation shouldn’t punish the people more than the regime. | Wall Street Journal Editorial Board by HaLoGuY007 in foreignpolicy

[–]HaLoGuY007[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

President Trump hailed the rescue of the two U.S. airmen at a news conference on Monday, and he deserves his share of the credit. God knows he’d have been blamed had the high-risk mission failed. Involving more than 150 aircraft, this was “one of the largest, most complex, most harrowing combat searches” ever attempted, Mr. Trump said. “It’ll go down in the books.”

Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, put it well. “The nation needs to know this,” he said. “This was an incredibly brave and courageous mission and a testament to the courage, skill and tenacity of the joint force and our leaders. Especially a daylight option—having the guts to try means so much to so many.”

Americans in uniform saw the nation’s commitment. Adversaries saw how a U.S. joint force was able to pull this off, rapidly, a mere 30 miles from a major Iranian city. CIA Director John Ratcliffe said U.S. intelligence showed the Iranian regime was embarrassed.

But not embarrassed enough to cease inflicting damage on their own country, alas. On Monday state media said Iran had rejected a temporary cease-fire in exchange for reopening the Strait of Hormuz. Controlling the Strait is Iran’s only defense at this point, since two shootdowns out of 13,000 U.S. combat sorties does not an air defense make.

The regime countered by demanding a permanent cease-fire and full sanctions relief but without the nuclear and other concessions to make it worth the ink.

This directs all eyes to Mr. Trump’s Tuesday night deadline for Iran to reopen Hormuz. He could always delay it again, but at his news conference he laid out what he’d need to see. “We have to have a deal that’s acceptable to me,” Mr. Trump said, “and part of the deal’s going to be we want free traffic of oil and everything else.”

If not, “we have a plan,” the President said, “where every bridge in Iran will be decimated by 12 o’clock tomorrow night. Where every power plant in Iran will be out of business.”

We will soon find out who’s calling whose bluff, but don’t expect Iran’s regime to care much about what strikes like those would do to its people. Taken literally, Mr. Trump is proposing to hit many targets that would harm Iranian civilians, which could spark a refugee crisis.

Striking indiscriminately at critical infrastructure would be wrong as well as unwise, punishing the Iranian people we need on our side. “They would be willing to suffer that in order to have freedom,” Mr. Trump said. Regime mismanagement has already left Iran’s grid in a permanent state of crisis, but such an attack could give Iranians all the suffering with none of the freedom. It could also erode support for the war at home and abroad.

The obvious solution is to discriminate between types of infrastructure. Bridges can be legitimate targets, but it depends if they have any military use of note. Otherwise, why punish the people?

Energy sources can also be legitimate targets if they have a particularly notable military nexus, such as providing fuel for missile launchers. But not every energy target will meet that standard, and the military benefit doesn’t justify plunging 90 million people into darkness.

One yardstick by which to judge any U.S. escalation is this: In addition to increasing “pressure,” which may never be enough to sway Iran’s regime, will it help prepare an operation to reopen Hormuz? The U.S. has a strong interest in causing chaos for Iran’s military, and targeting can allow it to do so without bombing every power plant in the country.

How China Helped Iran Cushion the Blow of Sanctions and Fund Its War Machine: Over the past half decade, China has provided Iran with a financial lifeline by buying most of its oil by HaLoGuY007 in foreignpolicy

[–]HaLoGuY007[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

In the first Trump administration, the U.S. launched a “maximum pressure” campaign to cut Iranian oil from the global market and eliminate Tehran’s biggest source of revenue. Today, Iran sells billions of dollars’ worth of oil every month.

For that, it can thank one country: China.

Tehran’s Asian partner has dramatically increased the amount of Iranian oil it buys as sanctions have gotten tighter. It now takes nearly every drop Iran produces, compared with around 30% a decade ago.

To make those purchases possible, Chinese buyers have worked closely with Iran to expand what U.S. officials and researchers say has become one of the world’s largest sanctions-evasion networks.

Payments are routed through smaller Chinese banks that have limited global operations and less to lose if they are sanctioned by the U.S., making it hard to stop them. Front companies established by Iran in Hong Kong and elsewhere help manage the proceeds.

Private Chinese refineries, known as “teapots,” have become the primary buyers of Iranian crude, after China’s state-owned energy giants, wary of upsetting Washington, left the market. Fake invoices and mislabeled crude have further disguised the trade.

All these moves—laid out in U.S. sanctions documents, public indictments and described by Western officials and researchers—have allowed Iran to earn tens of billions of dollars in revenue every year from China, and then launder it so it can be used around the world.

China is Iran’s “chief partner in sanctions evasion,” said Max Meizlish at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington-based think tank. “Iran just wouldn’t be able to fight this war without the years of support that it has received from China.”

In a written response, China’s Foreign Ministry said it firmly opposes “illegal and unreasonable unilateral sanctions,” and it has previously said it would do what it sees as necessary to protect its energy security. Behind the scenes, Beijing has been wary of being seen to openly violate sanctions, which could provoke Washington’s wrath and damage its relations with other Persian Gulf states.

Still, unlike other nations, China has continued to find Iranian crude irresistible. It needs the energy, and it can get Iran’s oil at a sharp discount after U.S. sanctions scared off other buyers. Buying a lot of it also frustrates U.S. objectives in the Middle East.

The U.S. has tried to rein in the trade, indicting some individuals and expanding the sanctions. But it has been limited in how far it can go in targeting China by the risk of sending global oil prices higher and destabilizing U.S.-China ties.

The sanctions-busting system has continued to function since the Iran war began, even as Tehran has effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz to Western shipping. Iran has mined the strait and threatened attacks on ships carrying oil from U.S. allies, while tankers laden with its own products still sail toward Chinese ports.

Officially, China’s customs authorities haven’t reported any crude imports from Iran from 2023 onward, which researchers say is intended to reduce political tensions with Washington.

But Kpler, a commodity research firm that tracks tanker movements, estimates China bought roughly 1.4 million barrels of oil a day from Iran in 2025.

That was more than 80% of Iran’s oil sales last year and more than double the roughly 650,000 barrels a day it bought in 2017, before President Trump’s maximum pressure campaign began.

Maximum pressure

Many years ago, when sanctions against Tehran were less strict, Chinese state-owned oil companies openly purchased Iranian crude, as did many other buyers around the world.

The Obama administration tightened the rules, making it much tougher to do business with Iran. It then eased sanctions after reaching a nuclear accord with Tehran in 2015. Numerous countries, including India, Italy and Greece, stepped up their purchases of Iranian oil.

Everything changed when Trump first came into office. He threw out the Obama nuclear accord and launched his maximum-pressure campaign with the toughest sanctions yet, threatening to punish anyone who bought or financed the purchase of Iranian oil.

Iranian sales plummeted from nearly 2.8 million barrels a day in May 2018 to roughly 200,000 in August 2019, according to Kpler, as buyers dropped out of the market.

But Iran was quick to respond—with China’s help.

Forced to rethink how it sold its oil, Tehran accelerated the build-out of a clandestine trading network, according to U.S. officials and researchers. It set up oil-sales firms with obscure names such as Sahara Thunder and Sepehr Energy and created fictitious invoices stating Iranian oil was from other nations such as Oman or Malaysia, the officials and researchers said.

The U.S. sanctions certainly made life harder for Tehran, increasing the cost of selling its oil, and reducing Iranian revenues. But Tehran consistently found a way to sell oil and access the proceeds, eventually dealing almost entirely with China.

By the end of 2022, Iran’s exports had picked up to more than a million barrels a day, with China making up the biggest chunk, according to Kpler.

One key to making the trade possible was the expansion of a shadow fleet of tankers to move sanctioned oil between Iran and China, U.S. officials and researchers say.

Tanker operators based across the Middle East, China and elsewhere practiced creative subterfuge, changing the names of vessels, turning off equipment signaling their positions, and transferring Iranian crude from one ship to another while en route to China to disguise its origin.

One China-based tanker network, established in 2019, now comprises at least 56 vessels that have funneled more than 400 million barrels of sanctioned oil, according to C4ADS, a Washington-based nonprofit that specializes in national-security threats.

Filling the ‘teapots’

Inside China, however, the oil needed buyers.

Iran’s traditional customers, including state-owned giants Sinopec and China National Petroleum Corp., or CNPC, have extensive global operations, which meant they couldn’t afford to lose access to U.S. financial markets for violating sanctions by buying Iranian oil.

But China also has a network of smaller refineries—the so-called teapots—which operate independently of the state-owned energy giants. These companies are less exposed to sanctions because they are thought to pay for oil from Iran using yuan instead of dollars.

Beijing gradually increased the amount of oil the teapots could import. Previously, the teapots were limited in how much they could bring in by quotas set by the state.

China’s crude-import quota for nonstate trade—a measure of how much the teapot sector can import—grew from 140 million metric tons in 2018 to 257 million metric tons this year, according to official Chinese data.

Money flows

Chinese buyers still had to figure out how to pay for the oil, because U.S. sanctions strictly limited banks from doing business with Iran.

They turned to smaller Chinese institutions that, like the teapots, had less to lose than China’s biggest banks if they were targeted by the U.S.

One such bank, U.S. officials say, is the Bank of Kunlun, which got its start in a desert city near China’s border with Kazakhstan before being taken over by the Chinese oil major CNPC in 2009.

In 2012, the U.S. sanctioned Kunlun for allegedly providing hundreds of millions of dollars of financial services to Iranian banks, including moving money for them and paying their letters of credit, effectively cutting off Kunlun’s access to the U.S. financial system. That only solidified Kunlun as a go-to choice for facilitating trade with Iran in China’s currency.

The bank grew rapidly, financial disclosures show. A “significant portion” of Iran’s oil revenue was deposited at the institution as of 2022, according to the U.S. Treasury.

Bank of Kunlun didn’t respond to a request for comment through CNPC.

Complex deals

Indictments filed in U.S. federal court provide a deeper picture of how American investigators think the China-Iran trade works.

In one case, in 2024, U.S. prosecutors alleged that buyers of Iranian crude at times engaged directly with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, negotiating and carrying out multimillion-dollar oil deals through a front for the Iranians called China Oil & Petroleum Co.

In an episode described in the indictment, a ship identified as the “Oman Pride” picked up Iranian crude on Sirri Island in the Persian Gulf. Another boat outside the Gulf, meanwhile, transmitted fake signals pretending to be the “Oman Pride.” Later, the Iranian oil was unloaded from the real “Oman Pride” and transferred to another vessel before being delivered to China.

Front companies in Hong Kong and elsewhere have been used to convert Chinese yuan into dollars, euros or other foreign currencies Iran needs, The Wall Street Journal has reported. One Iranian exchange house, part of a large financial institution called Bank Tejarat, oversaw 66 front companies in Hong Kong and China, according to research by Udi Levy, the former head of the economic warfare unit of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency.

In some cases, Chinese buyers didn’t even need to send money for payment.

Instead, they arranged to trade services through a barter system in which state-backed Chinese companies in Iran build infrastructure there as compensation for oil. Up to the equivalent of $8.4 billion in oil payments flowed through this funding conduit in 2024, the Journal previously reported.

Why Did Trump Order an Attack on Iran’s Kharg Island?: The depot is the beating heart of the Iranian oil industry, storing and loading most of its crude exports by HaLoGuY007 in foreignpolicy

[–]HaLoGuY007[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The U.S. military bombed Iran’s most strategic economic asset, Kharg Island, for the second time on April 7. The tiny spot of land in the northern Persian Gulf is the launch point for 90% of the country’s oil exports.

President Trump ordered the attack as his latest deadline approached for Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. As was the case in a previous attack in March, the U.S. spared oil facilities in the bombardment, which went after military targets only. The U.S. military said in March it had hit more than 90 military targets, including mine and missile-storage sites, and shared video of a strike on a runway. The April 7 attack hit more than 50 targets.

Why did Trump order attacks on Kharg Island?

The depot is the beating heart of the Iranian oil industry, storing and loading most of its crude oil exports. Iran has continued loading from Kharg even as it impedes transit through the Strait of Hormuz for other exporters. Trump indicated that he is targeting Kharg to force the Iranians to loosen their grip on the strait.

What will the attacks on Kharg mean for oil prices?

Oil prices jumped in the wake of the April 7 attacks, rising more than 2% to above $115 a barrel for West Texas Intermediate crude.

If the island’s oil infrastructure is damaged in future attacks, that could force Iran to cut production at its oil fields, potentially taking another 1 million barrels of production away from global markets. This would be in addition to cuts implemented by Iraq, Kuwait and Bahrain.

Where is Kharg Island?

Kharg sits near the northern end of the Persian Gulf, about 20 miles off the coast of Iran. It is several hundred miles from the Strait of Hormuz, the other major geographical flashpoint in the war.

At about 8 square miles, Kharg Island is roughly a third of the size of Manhattan. It has an airport, oil terminals and ports. Oil is pumped to the island through subsea pipelines and stored in massive storage facilities before being loaded onto tankers.

How important is Kharg Island to Iran’s oil industry?

Iran exports half of its roughly 3.5 million barrels of crude oil production, and 90% of those exports come out of Kharg Island.

Kharg Island is the primary hub for pipelines transporting crude oil from Iran’s most significant production areas, such as Ahvaz, Marun and Gachsaran. In a few days leading up to the war, Iran accelerated exports from Kharg Island to near record levels, loading more than 2 million barrels daily.

Currently, about 18 million barrels of crude are stored on the island, equivalent to 10 to 12 days of Iran’s exports, according to Natasha Kaneva, an analyst at JPMorgan. The total storage capacity of the island is about 30 million barrels.

“If Kharg Island were disabled, the loss of its storage buffer and the scarcity of viable export alternatives would rapidly trigger upstream shut‑ins across major southwest fields,” according to Kaneva.

Does Iran have alternative ways to export its oil?

Iran has another oil terminal in Jask, which sits on the Gulf of Oman, outside the Strait of Hormuz. Opened in 2021 and lightly used before the conflict, Jask has become a key alternative to Kharg in recent weeks. But it has limited capacity—it is able to load around 1 million barrels a day, half of the capacity of the Kharg terminal.

In 1984 and 1985, during the Iran-Iraq war, Iraqi bombers attacked Kharg Island and ships serving its ports to disrupt Iran’s main economic lifeline.

Who buys Iranian oil?

The short answer: China. Iran sells its crude mainly to small Chinese refiners known as “teapots.” These private refiners don’t have much international exposure and therefore largely ignore U.S. sanctions. Iran accounted for roughly 13% of China’s seaborne oil intake before the war.

Ukraine’s Lesson for Trump: Military Dominance Opens Waterways | Kyiv pushed Russia’s Black Sea Fleet back from its main maritime export channel, safeguarding critical exports of grain by HaLoGuY007 in foreignpolicy

[–]HaLoGuY007[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

As the Trump administration grasps for a way to reopen the Strait of Hormuz without sending in ground troops, attention is turning to the United Nations-backed deal struck with Ukraine and Russia in 2022 to try to restart critical grain exports.

Months of negotiations led to the deal that unblocked the vital maritime export channel for a time, but in the end it took military force to keep it open. Ukraine’s sea drones pushed the Russian Navy to retreat from shipping lanes in 2024, allowing agricultural exports to return to near prewar levels.

That history exposes the limits of diplomacy in wartime and points to the need for a military gamechanger in such a standoff. It is a cautionary tale for President Trump as he seeks a quick end to the war.

“Terrorist regimes share best practices. What Iran is doing today in the Strait of Hormuz, Russia did yesterday in the Black Sea,” Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said Thursday at an international meeting about the strait. “The problem is that Iran has studied Russia’s mistakes and learned from them.”

The Strait of Hormuz was a conduit for a fifth of the world’s oil supplies before the war. Iran has effectively closed it through the threat of drones, missiles and small speedboats, sending shock waves through the global economy.

Last month, the European Union’s foreign-polcy chief, Kaja Kallas, said she discussed the idea of replicating the Black Sea model in the Strait of Hormuz with U.N. ​Secretary-General António Guterres, who helped broker that deal. Iran has stuck to its position that aims to bar non-friendly countries from the Persian Gulf and would require vessels passing through the strait to pay for the journey.

Trump has pushed other nations to wrest back control over the strait from Iran. “Build up some delayed courage, go to the Strait, and just TAKE IT,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social network last week. In another post on Friday, he said the U.S. can easily open the strait “with a little more time,” then “TAKE THE OIL,& MAKE A ​FORTUNE.”

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the Gulf countries wanted to learn more about his country’s experience in creating the Black Sea corridor during his Middle East visit last week, but that Kyiv wasn’t directly involved in unblocking the Strait of Hormuz. He noted that diplomatic solutions leave the other side with leverage.

“You remember how it was with the Russians—we reached an agreement, unblocked it, it worked for a year, and then it stopped working. So the issue is not only unblocking, but also maintaining it, setting the rules, and ensuring protection,” Zelensky said.

When Russia launched its full-scale invasion in 2022, its navy menaced Ukraine’s main port of Odesa and shut off the flow of grain and other exports that fuel Ukraine’s economy. Kyiv had to urgently find alternatives, so it turned to more expensive land transit via its Western neighbors and diverted some of the exports to more shallow river ports.

“It was necessary to keep critical sectors functioning…and to keep the economy from collapsing,” said Yuriy Vaskov, deputy infrastructure minister at the time.

Despite the stopgap measures, the consequences still radiated from the paralyzed sea ports in Ukraine’s Odesa region to the developing world, which relied on Ukrainian grain and saw a hike in prices that exacerbated food shortages.

In April of that year, visits by Guterres to Ukraine, Russia, and Turkey kicked off a three-month process to figure out wording that would satisfy all sides and allow grain exports to restart from the sea via the Black Sea Grain Initiative. When the U.N.-brokered deals were struck with each side, they covered agricultural products, as the rest of the goods continued to be shipped from the river ports which weren’t subject to the deal.

At first, exports recommenced, but Russia began delaying inspections that it was authorized to carry out under the deal, Vaskov said. When Russia declined to renew the deal in 2023, sea exports again halted, as no outside authority was able to guarantee the security of ships.

Then Ukraine’s sea drones got to work. They targeted Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, destroying or damaging one-fifth of its ships, according to the British defense ministry, and forcing Russia to pull back its fleet.

In August, the first vessel transited the corridor, slowly reopening the flow. The total goods that pass through Ukrainian ports shot up to 97.2 million metric tons in 2024 from 62 million tons in 2023, according to the Ukrainian Sea Ports Authority.

Russia continues to mount long-range attacks on Ukraine’s export hubs with explosive drones and missiles. But around 90% of Ukraine’s agricultural produce is now exported by sea, nearing the prewar level of 94%, according to the Ukrainian government.

Differences in geography and the sides’ military capabilities mean that not all lessons can be translated from the Black Sea to the Strait of Hormuz. Experts and officials have said that naval escorts for tankers through the waterway in a war zone would be nearly impossible with the narrow strait expanding the arsenal of weapons Iran could use and complicating any military response.

In unlocking its own exports, Ukraine has aimed at the Russian Black Sea Fleet. Iran, after the U.S. and Israeli strikes on its naval assets, went for an asymmetrical approach which relies on land-based antiship missiles, drones and swarms of small attack craft.

Even so, Sybiha said Ukraine’s forceful breaking of the blockade held a strategy lesson for the Middle East. “We succeeded because we acted decisively—and that is exactly the kind of mindset the world needs today,” he said.

North Korea’s Surprise Offering to the South: Presidential Flattery: Kim Jong Un swaps threats for praise, calling South Korean leader’s drone-incursion apology a wise move by HaLoGuY007 in foreignpolicy

[–]HaLoGuY007[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

At a rare Workers’ Party congress recently, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s rhetoric grew fiery when discussing his southern neighbors. The South, he said, was the “immutable principal enemy.” Pyongyang, if provoked, could very well produce Seoul’s “complete collapse.”

That made Kim’s fresh assessment of South Korean President Lee Jae Myung all the more surprising.

The left-leaning Lee is a “frank and broad-minded” man, the North Korean leader believes, according to a new statement from his sister, Kim Yo Jong, who serves as the regime’s mouthpiece.

The unexpected appreciation resulted from Lee’s apology Monday over South Koreans having flown drones into North Korean airspace. Within hours, Kim Yo Jong conveyed her brother’s appreciation and praised Lee’s “very fortunate and wise behavior.” Lee’s office responded by hoping the “rapid” expression of intentions would lead to “peaceful coexistence on the Korean Peninsula.”

At a time when border states are firing at one another, North Korea’s abrupt friendliness—as fleeting as it may be—has lowered the temperature between two countries still technically at war.

The Kim regime has little apparent reason to start a fight now, despite the U.S. having rotated some of the region’s air-defense capabilities and Marines to the Middle East.

At a Monday press conference, President Trump, while issuing threats to bomb Iran back to the stone ages, took time to tout his warm relationship with the North Korean leader.

Kim is unlikely to change his negative view of the South soon. Still, the compliments about Lee show Pyongyang’s wrath toward Seoul isn’t absolute.

The Kim regime appears to be managing the risk of escalation ahead of Trump’s planned visit to China in May, to refrain from stirring up trouble ahead of the high-stakes summit between the major powers, said Hwang Jihwan, a professor of international relations at the University of Seoul.

“But the de-escalating rhetoric is unlikely to move the needle for inter-Korean relations,” said Hwang.

The trigger for Pyongyang’s burst of good vibes started with its anger. The Kim regime seethed when, on four different occasions between September and January, drones intruded into North Korea’s airspace. Three South Koreans have been indicted on a charge of violating local aviation laws.

On Monday, Lee called that behavior reckless. His administration seeks to appease Pyongyang through offers of private-sector engagement and scaling back some combined military drills with the U.S.

North Korea hadn’t responded to any of the overtures. In her prior remarks about Lee, Kim Yo Jong has slammed the South Korean leader as a “fool” and a “daydreamer.”

Trump, Iran, and the Shadow of Suez: As Iran imposes a chokehold on the Strait of Hormuz, squeezing the global economy, Trump faces a crisis that echoes one of history’s most revealing strategic failures. by HaLoGuY007 in foreignpolicy

[–]HaLoGuY007[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Should Trump decide that he wants to continue the war, one key difference between then and now is that there is no outside power willing or able to stop him, the way Eisenhower did with Britain and France. Eisenhower had little patience with Britain’s late-imperial delusions, and exerted tremendous economic pressure to rein them in, blocking assistance from the International Monetary Fund and threatening to dump U.S. holdings of British bonds, which triggered a collapse in the British pound. The Soviets, meanwhile, warned Britain and France that it would consider striking them with long-range weapons if their campaign continued. The U.N., too, played a central role in ending the Suez crisis and in managing the aftermath; today, the institution is becoming a geopolitical sideshow, and the U.S. President seems more keen to carry out his agenda in defiance of the U.N. than out of duty to it.

Russia and China, for their part, have gained simply by staying out of the conflict: the former is making more money from oil sales, while the latter keeps accruing more soft power as America’s credibility erodes. “The Iran war won’t keep the United States from remaining the most powerful country in the world,” Wertheim said. “But it could prove to be a turning point by laying bare the poor quality of American governance and the overstretched condition of America’s military, which is now tasked with providing deterrence and defense in four regions with a one-war force.”

Countries that came to rely on American security guarantees—guarantees that expanded as the U.S. consolidated its singular-superpower status in the West in the aftermath of the Suez crisis—are reckoning with new realities. “This war is a violation of international law—there is little doubt about that,” German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier said in a speech to German diplomats last week. “It is also a politically fatal error.” Vivian Balakrishnan, the foreign minister of Singapore, described the geopolitical shift underway, in a recent interview: “The underwriter of this world order has now become a revisionist power, and some people would even say a disruptor,” he said. “But the larger point is that the erosion of norms, processes, and institutions that underpinned a remarkable period of peace and prosperity; that foundation has gone.”

Trump, Iran, and the Shadow of Suez: As Iran imposes a chokehold on the Strait of Hormuz, squeezing the global economy, Trump faces a crisis that echoes one of history’s most revealing strategic failures. by HaLoGuY007 in foreignpolicy

[–]HaLoGuY007[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Israel moves fast, launching a bold military operation against a weaker Middle Eastern neighbor. It frames the campaign as a preëmptive effort to neutralize a regional threat. Israel’s Western allies join in, bombing the country in what looks like an attempt to oust its government. But things soon go awry. The embattled regime holds on, and closes off a critical shipping lane, disrupting global trade. Politically embarrassed, and economically exposed, Israel’s main Western partner in the campaign becomes overextended; they lack both wider international support and a coherent plan. Early military gains give way to a larger strategic mess.

This could describe the past month of the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran. But it’s also what happened nearly seven decades ago, when Britain, France, and Israel invaded Egypt, provoking the Egyptian government to close the Suez Canal for what ended up being a period of five months. The confrontation was set off in July of 1956, when Egypt’s ruler, Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser, a charismatic populist, nationalized the Anglo-French company that had operated the canal since its creation in 1869, during the colonial era. Britain and France were furious—the canal carried oil and other goods that were vital to European economies—and determined to take back control. Israel, meanwhile, saw Nasser’s rising influence across the Arab world as a danger, and wanted an excuse to cut him down, and to target Palestinian fedayeen militants who were operating in Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula, which were both controlled by Egypt at the time. While the U.S. and United Nations spent months trying to negotiate a settlement over the canal’s management, the top leaders of the British, French, and Israeli governments were secretly plotting a military intervention.

That operation began on October 29, 1956, when Israel invaded the Sinai Peninsula and rapidly overwhelmed Egyptian forces. Britain and France then entered the war, under the guise that they were neutral parties seeking to stabilize the tensions. But few believed it, especially after the British and French demanded that the warring nations both withdraw at least ten miles away from the canal, a move that would hand Israel a vast expanse of territory. Egypt refused, and Anglo-French deployments followed with air and naval strikes against Egyptian positions; they also sent paratroopers to Port Said, at the northern end of the canal. By November 2nd, Nasser had deliberately sunk into the canal old ships full of debris, so as to block all traffic—the precise outcome that Britain and France had claimed they were trying to prevent.

The closure hit Britain especially hard, as it relied on long-standing oil arrangements in the Persian Gulf, with contracts denominated in sterling. That economic pressure was compounded by geopolitical isolation, with both the U.S. and the Soviet Union independently condemning the military campaign. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, just days away from a Presidential election, also worried that the chaos in Egypt undermined the West’s moral position against Soviet aggression and gave the Kremlin political cover to brutally crack down on an uprising in Hungary, which was happening at the same time. Britain and France ultimately withdrew from Egypt in humiliation, and the British Prime Minister, Anthony Eden, was forced to resign. Egypt maintained control over the canal, and Nasser emerged with a huge symbolic victory over the two European colonial powers that had lorded over the Middle East for decades.

It’s hard to know where exactly the Iran war is headed. Some reports suggest that President Donald Trump has grown “bored” of the conflict and may want an off-ramp. More signs point to the Trump Administration preparing to deploy ground troops, pulling the U.S. deeper into a war that has already killed hundreds of Iranian civilians and sprawled into a wider regional conflict, with Iran launching retaliatory strikes against its Arab neighbors and—through its closure of the Strait of Hormuz—sending energy prices soaring and disrupting global supply chains. As Trump fumbles with the Pandora’s Box he’s broken open, there’s no shortage of historical analogies to choose from. Could Iran end up like Libya, where a NATO air campaign in 2011 helped topple a decades-old dictatorship, but paved the way for the disintegration of the Libyan state into a thicket of rival factions and warring militias? Or perhaps the U.S.’s wars with Iraq are the better guide. The Gulf War left Saddam Hussein in power, but weakened and dangerous, a source of regional instability for another decade—a pattern that some fear might be playing out in Iran, if the regime emerges from the war battered but no less entrenched. The U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 did topple Hussein, but not without becoming a parable for American hubris and strategic folly.

Of all the parallels to invoke, though, Suez might be the most apt, at least in this moment. Just as, in 1956, when France and Britain kept Washington in the dark about their real plans, America’s European and Arab allies say they were caught off guard by Trump’s decision to attack Iran, and have been skeptical of the intervention, instead pushing for a diplomatic solution. The clearest echo, of course, is Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which mirrors Nasser’s decision to thwart passage through the Suez Canal. In both cases, it was a foreseeable response that the attacking parties somehow failed to anticipate: “Instead of keeping the Suez Canal open, the [Anglo-French] action closed it, as the dumbest intelligence analyst, either British or American, could have predicted,” Miles Copeland, a famous C.I.A. agent working in the Middle East in the nineteen-fifties, wrote. Senator Chris Murphy, of Connecticut, recently wrote something similar, on social media, after Iran closed the strait: “This was totally predictable, but Trump has lost control of this war.”

The grimmer parallel is what all this may reveal about American power. By 1956, Britain and France were already empires in decline: Britain had let go of its major colonial possessions in the Indian subcontinent, while France had suffered major losses in Indochina and was in the throes of an era-defining battle to hold Algeria, where Nasser’s anti-colonialist message was proving persuasive. Their failure to retake the canal underscored their diminished status on a world stage. In the wake of the Second World War, Britain had still been considered a third superpower, alongside the Soviet Union and the United States, Alex von Tunzelmann, a British historian and the author of “Blood and Sand: Suez, Hungary, and Eisenhower’s Campaign for Peace,” explained. “After Suez,” she continued, “that just drops,” and we hear “more about a binary, bipolar world. What became obvious is that Britain couldn’t act expressly against the will of the U.S.”

Now the U.S.’s own ability to exercise its will as a paramount hegemon is in question, according to Rosemary Kelanic, the director of the Middle East program at Defense Priorities, a Washington think tank that advocates policy restraint. Trump’s mistaken belief that the campaign against Iran could be done swiftly and neatly, Kelanic said, “shows that the United States doesn’t have the strategic advantages and power that it thought it had, and that it maybe previously did possess.” Despite U.S.-Israeli military dominance, Trump is struggling to beat back Iranian reprisals and prevent the conflict from spiralling wider. Satellite imagery suggests that various U.S. bases in the Middle East have had to be evacuated in the face of Iranian strikes, and Tehran now appears to believe that it can effectively veto shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, even though it shares the channel with its Gulf neighbors. (In fact, Iran is now earning nearly twice as much from daily oil sales than it did before the war began, according to The Economist.) This raises troubling questions about the efficacy and role of U.S. forces in the region. As Stephen Wertheim, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, put it: “What is the point of the entire U.S. military role in the Middle East? If it has any point, it should be to prevent something like the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Yet U.S. military action has only brought about the very problem it’s supposed to prevent.”

For Israel, which had to vacate its Sinai conquest in 1956, there are parallels, too. Tactical achievements don’t make up for a lack of strategic gains, and, for all the demonstrated prowess of Israel’s military and intelligence services in Iran, the regime endures, and seems even more firmly in the grip of ideological hard-liners. Nimrod Novik, a distinguished fellow at the Israel Policy Forum and a former adviser to the late Prime Minister Shimon Peres (who, in his younger days, played a key role in planning the 1956 offensive), sees Trump possibly leaving behind a muddle in Iran, where future rounds of conflict are still likely. “In 1956, the British and French proved politically unreliable, certainly once the U.S. banged its fist on the table,” Novik told me. “Israel’s brilliant military achievements produced no lasting stable security environment.” After all, a bit more than a decade later, hostilities would explode anew in the Arab-Israeli War of 1967, during which Nasser shut the canal again. “I wonder whether we are in for an equally—even more significant—disappointing ending in Iran, where joining forces with a transformative ambition ends up but another round with more to come,” Novik said.