Tag Archives: defense policy

When is a Strategic Strength a Strategic Vulnerability?

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The lede laid out the misconception:

The oil states of the Persian Gulf have made great strides to diversify their economies in recent years, but they have also created a new vulnerability: more strategic targets for Iran to hit.

More targets to hit? Sure. But attacking them dilutes and dissipates any ability to attack a choke point in any economy, to seriously degrade or to destroy a Critical Item in an economy. Indeed, by diversifying, an economy’s single or a couple of Critical Items are eliminated, and what replaces them are a larger number of Important Components to that economy.

But that number protects the economy as a whole, and so strengthens the targeted nation: it will suffer economic losses, but it has become much harder to shut down.

When is a strategic strength a strategic vulnerability? Not this time.

A False Perception

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I’ve been over this before, but it bears repeating in light of President Trump’s (R) and SecState Marco Rubio’s contemplating the US leaving NATO altogether. The misperception is this:

The alliance’s lifeblood is its deterrent credibility: the perception by potential adversaries that attacking a NATO member would likely trigger a war with the full alliance, including the US.

As the news writer noted a bit later in his paragraph, though, this is a chimera, one that I claim is dangerous by its existence.

The alliance’s political promise to defend its members goes beyond the flexible wording of its famous Article 5, which says that each country in NATO would help a member that is attacked by taking “such action as it deems necessary.”

The relevant part of Article V is this:

The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence…will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.

“Such action” includes—but does not require—a military response.

Congress passed, in 2023 under the Biden administration, a law requiring a two-thirds vote of the Senate agreeing before the US could withdraw from NATO. The law has questionable constitutionality, interfering as it does with the President’s constitutional Article II role as our nation’s Chief Executive and our military’s Commander-in-Chief. This question is easily sidestepped, though, simply by adhering to the flexible wording of the NATO treaty’s Article V and declining to commit American military to a fight, confining our response, instead, to diplomatic words of demurral regarding an attack on other members.

Iran’s Nuclear “Dust”

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President Donald Trump (R) has repeatedly stated that one of the three goals for our war against Iran is the permanent destruction of Iran’s ability to acquire nuclear weapons. A critical part of that is for Iran to turn over all of its accumulated enriched uranium, some of which is enriched to 60% of what is needed for weapons grade purity. In conjunction with that, Trump is contemplating sending ground forces in to forcibly seize that enriched uranium.

Iran’s enriched uranium is reported to be stored in propane cylinder-sized containers and that those containers are in just a couple of sites, both of which the US Air Force so devastatingly hammered last summer. Which raises a couple of thoughts in my mind.

Stipulate, arguendo, that our ground forces can get in and out in the few days it would take to penetrate those two sites (whose physical accesses have been closed to some depth by those bombing attacks) with no or minimal casualties.

What is the quality, really, of the intel that says that uranium remains in only those two sites? Iran had, after all, more than a few days heads up that the attacks were coming, during which those containers could have been removed and disbursed among a number of new storage sites?

In conjunction with that, what intel do we have regarding the possibility that, having removed those cylinders in advance, the enriched uranium hasn’t been further disbursed among a number of smaller containers—expensive as that might be and cumbersome in handling that might make the “dust?”

Finally, having penetrated those two storage sites, what planning has been devoted to a) collecting further intel regarding Iran’s nuclear weapons development that would still be present in the form of equipment types and research and production documents, and b) setting the relevant explosives to further collapse altogether those remaining chambers? What planning has been devoted to, on the way back out of those sites, (re)collapsing those entry tunnels and doing so to a much greater depth than those earlier bombs had achieved?

Not that New

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Iran is using oil as a new weapon of war?

Iran’s move to choke off the Strait of Hormuz and turn crude oil into a weapon of war marks a new phase in the 21st-century competition for global power—one that will be defined by the control of critical raw materials and energy.

Not really. Oil as a war weapon may be new to the 21st century, but it’s an old weapon. The US and our allies, in the runup of our entry into the shooting war with Japan, used oil as a weapon of economic war with our embargo of oil sales and shipments to Japan. OPEC used oil as an economic war weapon with its embargo of oil sales to us over our support of Israel.

Oil as weapon isn’t really new to this century, either. Hungary’s Orban is using Russia’s attack on an oil pipeline that transits Ukraine from Russia to Hungary to accuse Ukraine of waging oil war on Hungary, even as he uses that oil blockage as his own weapon against Ukraine. Russia is using oil and other energy sources as weapons in its war on Ukraine by making that disruptive attack, along with other attacks on Ukrainian energy infrastructure, in the first place. The US, and subsequently Europe, began using oil as a war weapon against Russia following that barbarian’s invasion of Ukraine with our and their refusal to buy Russian oil and subsequent sanctions against Russian oil more generally.

Iran’s blockage of the Strait isn’t new, it’s just taking advantage of a chokepoint for oil, and natural gas, shipping.

Mistaken Responsibility

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A letter writer in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal Letters section wrote of the need for cooperation in the American-Israeli war against Iran. He was right that the war would benefit from the cooperation of serious players. He had this, though, on that war:

Making the case to other nations helps legitimize the mission and its necessity.

This is the letter-writer’s misapprehension. The legitimacy of the mission and its necessity is inherent in that mission: Iran is the world’s moneybags for terrorists and terrorist activities, the most significant of which are Iran’s satraps, Hamas, Hezbollah, and Houthis. Iran is bent on acquiring nuclear weapons, which it would promptly use to erase Israel and to peddle to terrorists for use outside the Middle East. Iran is bent on building ICBMs with which to shoot its nuclear bombs at us.

The mission is the elimination of Iran’s ability to build nuclear weapons, the elimination of Iran’s ability to build missiles of any reach, the elimination of Iran’s ability to fund or otherwise support other terrorists anywhere. Those efforts have been badly damaged by the actions of last summer and, so far, the current mission.

This war has cooperation between the serious players: the US and Israel. Natterers, including the British PM and the German Chancellor, though, are not at all serious players.

The responsibility for cooperating with the US and Israel and joining the mission lies solely with those “other nations.” Their decisions to remain absent, to shirk their responsibility to Europe for the restoration of oil and natural gas flows through the Strait of Hormuz, says volumes about their alleged reliability in any crisis.

So far, Japan has signed on to assist with reopening the Strait of Hormuz amid the war with Iran. So, lately, have France, Germany, Italy, and Netherlands after their initial reluctance. The five nations’ joint statement can be read here. The TL;DR is this:

We condemn in the strongest terms recent attacks by Iran on unarmed commercial vessels in the Gulf, attacks on civilian infrastructure including oil and gas installations, and the de facto closure of the Strait of Hormuz by Iranian forces.
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We express our readiness to contribute to appropriate efforts to ensure safe passage through the Strait. We welcome the commitment of nations who are engaging in preparatory planning.

Whatever “appropriate effort” means. “Preparatory planning” is just a weasel-word phrase meaning “but we’re in no hurry to do anything more than shake our fingers in the strongest terms.”

Japan’s assistance likely will be concrete; the units they send would gain valuable experience when the People’s Republic of China attacks the Republic of China and Japan needs to respond in answer of its commitment to RoC and to protect its South and East China Seas holdings. Those European nations? They’ll be busy hiding behind their definition of “appropriate effort” while they endlessly plan.