Egregoros

Everyone is watching the oil, not the water.

Kuwait gets 90% of its drinking water from desalination plants. Oman 86%. Saudi Arabia 70%. There is no aquifer, no river, no rainfall. The entire Arabian Peninsula drinks water that is manufactured from the sea.

One drone. One plant. Millions without water.

That is not speculation. A 2009 US diplomatic cable concluded: Destroy the desalination infrastructure and you could force the evacuation of the Saudi capital within a week.

Iran has not hit desalination plants yet. That restraint is a choice. It's also a card.

Iran's navy is gone. Its air force is degraded. Its Supreme Leader is dead. Its missile rate has dropped 70%. Every conventional military option is being systematically closed.

What remains is asymmetric warfare against infrastructure that the entire Gulf coalition cannot function without.

You do not need to win an air war to win an asymmetric war. You need to hit the thing your enemy cannot replace on any timeline that matters. Oil can be rerouted. Gas can be replaced. Water in the Arabian desert cannot be improvised.

The GCC has built redundancies since this vulnerability was identified. But redundancies are not immunity. And Iran knows exactly where every plant sits.

The oil war is being priced. The water war has not even entered the model yet. If it does, this conflict has a second act that makes the first one look contained.

The trade route is a good point, but I don't think it's big enough to make the middle east into the lynch pin of the world economy.

The US is going to fuck off and lick it's wounds for a while - and hopefully go back to being a constitutional republic - but the US with it's 2 oceans and 2 mountain ranges remains effectively uninvadable, so even if another global hegemony were to ever emerge, it would probably also be based in the US...

But more likely, the US will return to the world stage as an arms merchant, just getting rich selling weapons to everyone.

Again, a lot of things have been "silly" and suboptimal because Pax Americana eliminated practically all of the evolutionary selection pressure on nation-states.

Why does everybody agree to just buy all of their oil from this one tiny place instead of exploring everything they can? Because it's cheap, it doesn't matter, you can just borrow the money anyway...

Take away all of that, suddenly every country needs to secure energy to survive, and now we'll suddenly see a lot more energy being produced...

I think Greater Israel could become a thing - particularly if they contrive to make Jews around the world so hated that they're run out of every other country and forced to settle there.

But I think the notion that they're going to become a World Hegemony is some eschatological nonsense. Israelis telling other Israelis to think they're going to have 2000 goy slaves - which is not entirely unlike 72 virgins.

The reality is oil is not actually that scarce, and it's becoming less and less important. China has first generation molten salt reactors, power costs are going to go down, hydrogen / ammonia / batteries are all on the up-swing. The middle east is more likely to go back to being a bunch of dumb boring desert than a world hegemony.