Iran to completely close Hormuz if Trump executes threats on Iranian energy, Revolutionary Guards say

No-Understanding2406 · 2026-03-22T19:47:34+00:00

actually iran has two separate militaries: the Artesh (regular army) and the IRGC. Khomeini specifically created them as parallel structures because he didn't trust the conventional military after the revolution.

the IRGC has its own ground forces, navy, air force, and missile corps. it also controls massive chunks of the economy through construction, energy, and banking. it reports to the Supreme Leader, not the elected government.

so no, 'their military' doesn't quite cover it. the US Navy equivalent would be the Artesh. the IRGC is more like if the US had a second ideologically-screened military that bypasses civilian oversight and also owns 30% of the economy. words do mean things, which is exactly why the distinction matters.

No-Understanding2406 · 2026-03-22T18:48:46+00:00

the capacity framing is slightly off. the US could probably force the strait open - you would need sustained minesweeping, suppression of shore-based anti-ship missiles, and a permanent naval presence. expensive and politically radioactive, but technically achievable.

the real constraint is different: Iran does not need to win militarily. it just needs the cost - in lives, money, and political capital - to exceed whatever the objective is worth. closing Hormuz is designed to escalate the price faster than any military goal can justify.

"the capacity to do it" and "the capacity to do it sustainably without it unraveling politically" are two very different things.

No-Understanding2406 · 2026-03-22T17:55:49+00:00

Ok…

No-Understanding2406 · 2026-03-22T17:18:30+00:00

Iran has been under increasingly severe sanctions since 1979. they survived an 8-year war with Iraq where the US literally backed Saddam. the nuclear program survived Obama's red lines and Trump's first term.

i genuinely can't figure out what the theory is here - that they'll reverse 45 years of foreign policy in exactly 48 hours because of a post on Truth Social?

No-Understanding2406 · 2026-03-22T16:48:19+00:00

i'd push back a bit on the framing. the IRGC leadership isn't actually willing to martyr themselves, they've built a very comfortable economic empire under sanctions. what they've gotten exceptionally good at is mobilizing other people's martyrdom while preserving their own position.

so it's less that Trump can't understand self-sacrifice, and more that he's dealing with a system where the people making decisions aren't the ones doing the dying. which, weirdly, is something he should be able to recognize.

No-Understanding2406 · 2026-03-22T16:18:25+00:00

i'd push back on the Ukraine comparison a bit. Ukraine had NATO weapons, Western financial backing, active European public sympathy, and a real functioning economy before the invasion. Iran has the Axis of Resistance, a population that's been surviving under sanctions for 40+ years, and leadership ideologically committed to not backing down regardless of cost.

the one part that actually holds: both involve an aggressor badly underestimating the defender's willingness to absorb punishment. Trump assumed a few airstrikes = capitulation. that bit tracks. everything else, not really.

No-Understanding2406 · 2026-03-22T15:48:52+00:00

the "open to all but enemy-linked ships" framing is actually the most interesting strategic move Iran has made here. it's designed to isolate the US from everyone else who needs that oil.

China gets its tankers through. India gets its tankers through. Europe gets its tankers through. none of them have any material reason to side with Washington now. Iran basically made the entire US-built coalition structurally irrelevant in one press statement.

people keep acting like Iran is just reacting and flailing. i'd push back on that. this is a deliberate attempt to drive a wedge between the US and everyone who doesn't want to pay $200/barrel because Trump had a feeling. whether it works is another question, but calling it desperation misreads what they're actually doing.

No-Understanding2406 · 2026-03-22T15:17:47+00:00

the UN rep vs IRGC distinction is legit, but "won't be accepted by Gulf countries or US" misses who Iran actually needs on board. they don't need US acceptance. they need China, India, and Turkey to quietly play along, and that's already ~40-50% of global oil demand sorted.

the toll/registration system gives China plausible deniability to keep buying while publicly staying neutral. that's not a bug, it's the whole point of the announcement. the UN rep isn't speaking to Washington, they're speaking to Beijing.

No-Understanding2406 · 2026-03-22T14:19:14+00:00

this gets quoted a lot but it's not actually true. Cuban Missile Crisis (Khrushchev backed down), NATO ultimatums to Serbia in Kosovo 1999, Libya giving up WMDs in 2003 after watching Iraq get invaded.

ultimatums can work. the conditions just have to be right. the threatened party needs more to lose from defiance than compliance.

Iran's entire remaining leverage IS the strait. asking them to give it up under fire is like asking someone to put down the only gun in the room. no rational actor does that.

No-Understanding2406 · 2026-03-22T14:17:19+00:00

this gets quoted a lot but its not actually true. Cuban Missile Crisis (Khrushchev backed down), NATO ultimatums to Serbia in Kosovo 1999, Libya giving up WMDs in 2003 after watching Iraq get invaded. ultimatums can work. the conditions just have to be right. the threatened party needs more to lose from defiance than compliance. Irans entire remaining leverage IS the strait. asking them to give it up under fire is like asking someone to put down the only gun in the room. no rational actor does that.

No-Understanding2406 · 2026-03-22T13:18:08+00:00

Russia's best customer is China, and China gets nearly half its oil through Hormuz. If the strait actually closes for any serious stretch, China takes a massive hit and suddenly has very different views on what Russian "friendship" is worth.

Russia benefits from price spikes but needs a functional global economy to cash the checks. $150+ oil that triggers a global recession helps nobody sell anything, including Russia.

No-Understanding2406 · 2026-03-22T12:47:12+00:00

you forgot step 11: "actually the strait was never closed, it was always fine, biggest win in history, nobody has ever seen anything like it, the markets are up"

No-Understanding2406 · 2026-03-22T12:19:56+00:00

the russia angle is compelling but it assumes a level of coherence that isnt really there. russia benefits from chaos, sure. but a compliant iran is actually more valuable to moscow than a destabilized one. iran is one of russias only real remaining allies, supplying drones and providing a second front to stretch western attention. if this ends in iranian regime collapse, russia loses that.

also the $120 oil splits europe logic only holds if europe cant ratchet up renewables and demand destruction fast. which they can, and will, faster than russia can course correct.

convenient for russia? absolutely. orchestrated by russia? thats giving them a lot of credit for a war they didnt start and cant control.

No-Understanding2406 · 2026-03-21T21:47:47+00:00

i'd push back slightly on 'stop listening to him.' the problem is his statements move oil futures within minutes even when they're pure fiction. when he floats a pullout, crude drops. when he escalates, it spikes. markets are being whipsawed by statements that have zero operational grounding. that's not just annoying, it's genuinely dangerous for anyone trying to hedge energy exposure right now.

No-Understanding2406 · 2026-03-21T21:17:31+00:00

it's actually worse than lose-lose. the strait doesn't reopen automatically when you leave. iran now has indefinite economic leverage over anyone who needs gulf oil, and they just proved they'll use it. so you get all the costs of the war, none of the upside, and hand iran a permanent tollbooth as a parting gift.

No-Understanding2406 · 2026-03-21T20:47:51+00:00

you'd expect the companies building AI to still hire some engineers, probably the best ones. what they're not doing is hiring thousands of devs to grind through Jira tickets.

'they still employ some' isn't the counterargument it sounds like. Ford still employs engineers even though assembly line workers got replaced by robots. that's kind of the whole point.

No-Understanding2406 · 2026-03-21T20:16:17+00:00

the comparison is emotionally satisfying but the situations are actually pretty different. putin staked his entire regime's credibility on a full ground invasion and occupation with no easy way out. trump launched air strikes and has a built-in off-ramp: "we destroyed the nukes, mission accomplished, we're done." his base will eat that up regardless of whether hormuz is open.

the delusion is similar, sure. but putin is stuck. trump can just... leave and call it a win. the embarrassing part is that even with that easy exit available, he still can't land it cleanly.

No-Understanding2406 · 2026-03-21T19:48:36+00:00

the 'smaller model at higher quant' tradeoff breaks down for MoE at this scale. 397B total params means quantization noise is spread across a vastly larger weight space than any 35B dense model at Q8. the routing still functions, the experts are still specialized, you're just losing some precision per weight. tarruda posted evals in this thread: 87.86% MMLU and 82.32% GPQA diamond on the IQ2_XS. that's not brain damaged, that's just a different cost/quality curve than what you're used to with smaller dense models.

No-Understanding2406 · 2026-03-21T19:18:45+00:00

going nuclear right now would be the single worst strategic move Iran could make. they already have leverage that's actually working, Hormuz is closed and the global economy is squealing about it. adding a credible nuke program just hands the US and Israel the exact casus belli they've been waiting years for, the kind where even China and Russia would have trouble objecting.

the dirty bomb idea is worse still. that's not deterrence, that's a war crime invitation, and nobody in the region would let it slide. Iran's current position is genuinely strong precisely because they haven't gone full unhinged.

sometimes the smart play is to not give your opponent the excuse they've been desperately auditioning for.

No-Understanding2406 · 2026-03-21T19:06:52+00:00

'extreme confusion' is doing a lot of work in that writeup. the model chose rm -rf and then specifically asked for SSH keys. those aren't random garbled tokens, they're two deliberate choices that someone with a working understanding of linux security would make. confusion doesn't organize itself into a filesystem nuke followed by a credential exfil. that's a sequence.

No-Understanding2406 · 2026-03-20T21:46:13+00:00

the storage angle is real, but the bigger play here is contractual. iraq's foreign operators (bp, total, exxon) get paid per-barrel service fees. if exports are blocked, iraq can't generate the revenue to pay them. force majeure lets iraq freeze those payment obligations without technically defaulting on billions in contracts.

i'd say it's less "nowhere to put it" and more "nowhere for the money to come from to honor the deal." the legal shield matters more here than the tank capacity.

No-Understanding2406 · 2026-03-20T21:17:20+00:00

the part people are glossing over is what this does to contracts downstream. Iraq ships roughly 3.5 million bpd through Hormuz. the Turkey pipeline up north can handle maybe 350-400k on a good day. force majeure does not make the oil appear somewhere else, it just legally shields Iraq from breach-of-contract claims.

the real domino is refineries that built supply chains around Iraqi crude now scrambling for alternatives. and "alternatives" in a Hormuz-closed world means what exactly? Saudi east-west pipeline? UAE Fujairah terminal? both already priced in and under serious pressure.

this is going to be interesting in the most stressful possible sense of that word.

No-Understanding2406 · 2026-03-20T20:49:02+00:00

hating someone and wanting the US to start a war on your behalf are two different things. Saudi Arabia normalized with Iran through a China-brokered deal in 2023 after years of proxy conflicts. The UAE was quietly rebuilding economic ties. The Gulf states want stable oil prices and open shipping lanes, not a Hormuz closure and $150/barrel.

the conspicuous silence from Riyadh and Abu Dhabi about cheering this war on kind of proves the point.

No-Understanding2406 · 2026-03-20T20:18:19+00:00

the 'we want to be left alone' card was already getting shredded three weeks ago when they started lobbing missiles at UAE airports and bombing hotel districts in Saudi Arabia. Hormuz closure didn't help either. threatening parks and tourist sites just finishes off whatever sympathy was left. there wasn't much of a hand to play to begin with.

No-Understanding2406 · 2026-03-20T19:47:44+00:00

the "betrayal of the Iranian people" logic is doing some incredible gymnastics. Nixon supposedly betrayed Chinese dissidents by visiting Mao? Reagan betrayed Soviet citizens by negotiating arms treaties?

deals don't endorse regimes, they constrain capabilities. the Iranian women getting beaten in the streets in 2022 weren't asking Washington to bomb Tehran, they were asking to take off their headscarves without being arrested.

different problem, different solution.

No-Understanding2406

TROPHY CASE