IMPERIAL OVER-REACH: Iran, Ecuador & the Strait of Hormuz [INTERNATIONAL]

Welcome back, international readers! The subject of our next online discussion group really needs no introduction. In the past weeks, the United States and Israel finally made good on decades of drunken neocon boasting and launched an illegal all-out aerial attack on the Islamic Republic of Iran. All this so shortly after the ill-fated regime-change attempt in Venezuela, threats against Greenland, the ongoing economic strangulation of Cuba, and now, another imperial warfront in Ecuador.

No reading for this one - we'll be having an open discussion about the latest developments in geopolitics and their effects on all of us, particularly with regards to the economic meltdowns this latest eruption of imperial bloodlust has already created. Tom Stevenson's recent article in LRB is a good overview of the Iran situation.

We'll finally be using the encrypted Jitsi Meet service, courtesy of our friends at NerdVPN, an infosec/tech collective with no affiliation to the major VPN service of a similar name.

As of writing, the situation has escalated far beyond what US imperialist war planners seemed to be ready for, or at least what they tried to make the public ready for with their initial media spin. Say the line, Bart: what was supposed to be a two-week limited operation now, according to US war chief Pete Hegseth, looks set to last "eight weeks", which of course really means it can and will go on indefinitely.

And no wonder. Iranian retaliation has seen the entire Gulf region go into full-on panic mode as hypersonic missiles rain down on US bases across Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, the UAE, Qatar... Since this is a war for which the US-Zionist partnership had such a long time to prepare, let's consider the US military's own internal analysis of the situation. Former CENTCOM Commander Frank "Spuds" McKenzie wrote in 2024, “The United States will not be able to maintain these bases in a full-throated conflict, because they will be rendered unusable by sustained Iranian attack. It is the simple tyranny of geography.” Things do seem to be doing that way as admissions are finally made that all that billion-dollar hardware can't stop every Iranian missile or drone from landing. And supplies of interceptors are running out - not to be refilled. For the Gulf states, the imperialists' so-called friends, this is a death sentence, at least for their status as economic and trade hubs. As Middle East Eye reports, “The US is “stonewalling” requests by some Gulf states to replenish their air defence interceptors as pressure mounts on them to join the US and Israel in their war on Iran".

The death and destruction unleashed by the imperialists is breathtaking in its cruelty. Despite what Zionist trolls online have been saying for days, the US has now admitted it was "likely responsible" for the mass killing of 140 Iranian schoolgirls in an unprovoked, illegal strike in Minab, Hormozgan Province. This war crime was probably facilitated by Anthropic's Claude AI along with thousands of other "precision strikes" on the country.

But perhaps things don't seem so bad from where you're sitting. To be fair, after all, I've got it pretty good, things could be wors-- oh! There goes the global economy. All those missile strikes on the Gulf weren't going to leave markets and supply chains untouched. A few days ago, QatarEnergy declared "force majeure" - meaning that, due to circumstances beyond its control, it could no longer fulfil contracts. Energy exports from Qatar have completely halted, and Saudi production has fallen dramatically as operations halted at Ras Tanura, the world's largest oil refinery, after an Iranian drone strike. Already, Brent crude oil prices were up 10-133% as of the other day and liquified natural gas (LNG) up by even more. And it will get worse: as Energy Minister Saad al-Kaabi told the Financial Times in an ​interview published on Friday, “Qatar expects all Gulf energy producers to shut ​down exports within weeks and drive ‌oil to $150 a barrel ... Everybody that has ​not called for force majeure we expect ⁠will do so in the next ​few days that this continues. All exporters in ​the Gulf region will have to call force majeure".

Meanwhile, the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20% of global oil trade and 83% of LNG supplies pass, remains effectively closed. Major container shipping companies including MSC, Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd have all suspended transits. Shipping is now too risky to be insurable, and therefore coming to a stop. According to Insurance Journal, "Marine insurers are canceling war risk coverage for vessels and oil shipping rates are set to surge further after the widening Iran conflict left at least three tankers damaged, a seafarer killed and 150 ships stranded around the Strait of Hormuz." Can a $20 billion US-backed reinsurance fund turn the ships around? Time will tell.

On the US home front, economically speaking, things have gone from bad to worse in the blink of an eye. The economy of the imperial core shed 92,000 jobs in the month of February, "far below the expected gain of 55,000 jobs. Unemployment ticked up to 4.4%, rather than the expected 4.3%." Financial markets, unmoored as they always are from reality, have had a turbulent week, with many investors taking a "complacent" view of the Gulf conflict and its knock-on effects on energy, agricultural production (which relies on fossil fuels for fertiliser), and more. Many have wondered why all this geopolitical risk hasn't been "priced in" to stock prices, with the Dow up even as the Nasdaq and S&P 500 fall. Do investors really know something we don't? Or has investor sentiment simply not yet revealed itself in the fullness of its panic? It's hard to say, because BlackRock's $26 billion Private Credit Fund recently put a block on withdrawals as investors clamoured to get their money out. That can't be a good sign.

All told, we may - or may not - be teetering on the edge of the long-awaited economic "big one"; the financial crash to put 2008 to shame. We shall see.

Join us and give us your read on things as us situation-monitor-ers continue to monitor the situation!