IRAN'S PAPER BLOCKADE.

Only last week, I asked, "Where is the fleet of Aegis carrying destroyers and cruisers to quarantine the Iranian ports?"  I got the answer I was hoping for on Saturday when two Arleigh Burkes sailed into the Strait of Hormuz, ignored Iranian requests to go away, and sailed out again.  In so doing, they made the case that Iran's closure of the strait was a paper blockade.  That's something the United States Navy understands well: there was a reason Gideon Welles rushed anything that would float to close secessionist ports in 1861: should some other naval power (meaning primarily Britain and France in those days) send a warship to make a port of call in Charleston or New Orleans, the rules of war (even without a transatlantic cable let alone radio) allowed that power to declare it was a blockade in name only, and interesting diplomatic or military things could follow.

In the American Civil War, it wasn't closing overseas commerce so much as sundering the Confederacy that mattered., according to Commander Eric Schuck in Naval History.

By one estimate, Confederate steamers successfully penetrated the Union blockade into North and South Carolina ports over 90 percent of the time, a rate that raises serious doubts about the blockade’s effectiveness. Yet despite the seeming porousness of the Union Navy’s efforts, the effects of the blockade were still devastating to the Southern economy. The relevant question, then, is “Why?”

The root challenge is that blockades are really economics problems nested within a warfare problem. For planners, the issue starts with getting the economics right, and then applying military pressure in a way that achieves the desired outcome. This begins by acknowledging that not every economy is even susceptible to blockade. For a blockade to work, the target economy must depend on imports or exports, the blockading power must have the means to effect the blockade, and neutral/nonaligned powers must lack the desire or ability to bypass the blockade.

Iran clearly depends on exports,  the United States Navy have the means, and the neutral and nonaligned powers have a number of options.  Red State's Duane Patterson suggests that the timing of the closing of Iranian ports was to offer Saudi Arabia time to get their pipeline (which the Iranians flipped at least one missile at) up to full capacity; ships that were outbound from the Arabian Gulf before combat began delivered their cargoes and many are now headed in ballast for ports in the Gulf of America, which is a way of bypassing the blockade that helps the United States.  Do be alert, dear reader, for unintended consequences.  Commander Schuck notes, "The reliance on cotton exports coupled with the geographic division of food production also meant the prewar Southern economy was highly dependent on maritime trade and therefore vulnerable to a blockade."  And the British came up with a work-around based on cotton grown on the subcontinent.

The Commander also notes,

For contemporary planners, the lesson is that the physical effects of a blockade, measured through changes in imports and exports, may be significantly less important than how the blockade affects the ability to distribute matériel. The critical effect is the stress on the economy as a system and breaking its ability to adapt.

The second is that monetary impacts can be just as damaging as physical impacts. Losing the capacity to buy materiel leads to the exact same outcome as losing the materiel itself: empty supply chains. As a result, when executing economic warfare, the effects of a blockade on a target nation’s monetary system must be evaluated in the same manner as the physical effects of the blockade. Simply put, money is also a target.

Iran's money:

Furthermore, Iran import gasoline, of all things.  It's hard to power speedboats or those drones that sound like angry leaf-blowers or the pickup trucks for the El Rukns, or whoever is enforcing martial law in the cities, to get around thugging on people.

Unknown at this time: whether China desires and musters the capability to escort its ships into Iranian ports.  Central Command will be working with the Gulf Arab states to move ships from Iraqi, Kuwaiti, Saudi, and the various emirates' ports.

Windward explain what a naval blockade is these days, and how it works, and BBC provide news.  According to LHGrey, "The blockade is not containment; it is strangulation."

The Iranians, predictably, do not see things that way, nor do their willing accomplices in the United States.  Did you notice, dear reader, the Iranian social media posts the morning of the Islamabad gathering touting how all their negotiators had Ph.D.s and they were dealing with ... real estate developers.  That's clearly an information operation aimed at ... the professional and managerial classes of the United States.  "The progressive elite is enthralled by their sense of burden to regulate the speech, movement, and ideas of others. By virtue of their compassion and cultural disposition, they have inherited the responsibility to remake society."  And Outside the Beltway's Steven Taylor took the bait.  "US to Blockade Closed Strait."

Well, no.  National Command Authority could have handled things better.  The straits were never closed, that sortie by the Arleigh Burkes confirmed as much.  And with as much wargaming of patrolling that strait as United States war planners have done, there had to have been a file with an Iran Quarantined, Arab States Protected operation (it would be cool to have that folder labelled SALAMIS, but I digress) and for that, which is what Central Command ultimately announced, to have been announced to deprive the ankle-biters of their chances to carp.

But that's how the Iranian information operation goes.  Bring one of those graybeard Ph.D. negotiators to Troy State, put a mushroom hat on him, have Professor, er, sorry, Dean, Taylor put on his mushroom hat and they could stroll across campus without anything seeming amiss.  But the mullahs' representative might be silently chuckling at this.

Understand, I would prefer that there be no further nuclear proliferation globally, and I especially prefer that the current regime in Iran not acquire such a weapon. But not only was this assault not necessary to stop them (and, again, we had a deal that was definitely slowing them on their pathway that Trump tore up), but this assault will have cemented the notion in the minds of Iranian leadership that they must acquire a bomb to forestall such attacks in the future.

Side note: the way in which Trump is dismantling the rules-based order wherein the US acted as a security guarantor for many allies, including being firmly under our nuclear umbrella, will almost certainly lead to more nuclear proliferation in the medium term. Allies who can not rely on the US and are fearful of regional adversaries will be motivated to acquire their own nuclear deterrents. This is just another way that the reckless and ignorant foreign policy of our erratic president has created long-term instability problems that will well outlive him.

I do understand that a total blockade of the Strait will have negative effects on Iran (as they have been allowed to sell oil with sanctions lifted and Iran has allowed some allied ships to pass through the Strait), but the bottom line is that a total closure will exacerbate the already significant damage to the global economy.

There they go again, that so-called rules-based international order that is well past its sell-by date, and "definitely slowing them on their pathway" is still a pathway that leads to a different sort of mushroom hat over Tel Aviv or Paris or Chicago.  As far as some future Iranian leadership doing nuclear physics, well, there are long-standing tensions between Persian and Arab, but heightening those contradictions in the quest of the return of the twelfth imam doesn't sound like something the so-called rules-based order can handle in a meaningful way.  Surely not by another 47 years of "death to America" rhetoric.