What action can Iran take today that they couldn't take a year ago? No one who has been paying attention should be surprised that Iran can shut down the straight. It has been a known factor for decades.
They have less leverage. The have so much less that they are forced to openly use their last and most powerful card for their survival, when they never have had to before. That is a position of weakness, not strength.
>The have so much less that they are forced to openly use their last and most powerful card for their survival
That is not their most powerful card. Their most powerful card is mining the Strait of Hormuz and taking out all GCC desalination and oil infrastructure. That would result in a global depression, and probably end the Gulf countries as we know them.
Destroying the gulf states would dramatically reduce the importance of the Strait, which would make mining it or otherwise shutting it down somewhat pointless anyway. It is a bit of mutually assured destruction, but the USA is probably in the best position of anyone to weather that storm.
I suppose it is more powerful in an absolute sense than just temporarily shutting down the Strait, but like Russia's nukes, I think the threat is more useful than the play itself. Unless they are just looking to take others down with them.
> What action can Iran take today that they couldn’t take a year ago?
Remove of sanctions, ability to monitize traffic through the strait, guarantees against aggression and a cessation of military bases in their region. IMO, a much stronger position than they were in a year ago.
All policy aimed at preventing nuclear Iran has one goal: buy time. I think it is hard to argue that time has not been bought (though how much and whether the price was right is another question). The only semi-stable long term option is a friendly Iranian government. The IRGC's main purpose is to occupy Iran, so anything that makes them weaker, less stable and more decentralized improves the odds of successful internal revolt in the long run. It is really hard for me to see how any of this has made the IRGC more stable in the long run.
The threat of the strait closure has always been a major factor in Iran policy from all relevant nations, it is just now explicit. It's hard to take the Russia point seriously when the war forced both Russia and Iran to shift resources form the Ukrainian theater to the Persian Gulf; it seems to be close to a wash. It's also kinda silly to gas up using interceptors for their intended purpose as "heavy damage" or catastrophize about rounding errors in damage to USA assets, while simulatenously writing off the total effect of all USA/Israel actions as inconsequential.
Disruption to global fossil fuel supply chains was also a goal of this war, so I am not sure you should list it as a negative. In the current state of the world, USA interests and global economic interests are becoming increasingly decoupled, and one shouldn't assume they are automatically aligned.
Also this has probably done more to hasten the world's weaning off fossil fuels than any action by any other government.
IRGS domestic propaganda has always been that US is a military murderous malevolent regime, mercilessly going after their land and their children.
With just a little bit of propaganda spin, or even without it, US just proved to the entire Iranian population that IRGS was right all along.
This should strengthen or even harden their regime as they will have new generation of hardliners join the movement.
This is like 1930s Germany kinda thing. Who won or lost is semantics at this point, the regime is free to spin it any way they want, and will have quite the support to do it.
> All policy aimed at preventing nuclear Iran has one goal: buy time. I think it is hard to argue that time has not been bought (though how much and whether the price was right is another question).
Given that Iran has been one week/one month/one year away from acquiring nuclear capabilities since 2014 - first Trump Presidency, and they are not any closer a decade later this "buying time" rhetoric is nothing short of "Iraq has WMD" level of absurdity.
It is not jist Bibi, but also the IAEA and other international organizations. And at least the last 5 US administrations. I suppose they could also all be in Israel's pocket though.
Iran's 60% enriched uranium stockpile is really not up for debate. Iran is happy to tell everyone that they have it. With the proper equipment, 60% can go to 90% in a single month. So the question is how advanced is the Iranian infrastructure for the final enrichment step, and (less commonly talked about) how ready they are to actually make a fission bomb out of that material. The latter task is not considered to be very hard, North Korea did it after all, so the main focus has been on the former. There does seem to be some decent information that the centrifuge array has been under active development at various points, and has been consitently, actively targetted by Mossad/CIA for at least the past 20 years or so. For example, Stuxnet was a joint CIA/Mossad operation that begain in 2005 and continued through both GWBush and Obama.
Unfortunately, even with some nice bribes from Obama, Iran was always a little cagey with the IAEA inspectors, and officially kicked them out in 2021. So after that, the only sources for the state of Irans nuclear infrastructure information effectively became Iran itself and Mossad.
>It is really hard for me to see how any of this has made the IRGC more stable in the long run.
It's not hard for me to see. It's very similar to the situation in Ukraine. They have suffered losses but I can only imagine that their morale and confidence is through the roof. Conversely, the population must feel that there is no hope of getting rid of them. The cavalry sounded the horns but mostly rode into the river.
>Disruption to global fossil fuel supply chains was also a goal of this war
I am not convinced that a population that just recently had 30k people die in a revolt is gonna immediately rally around their oppressors after a foreign power kills 2k. I have yet to see compelling evidence that formerly IGRC-hostile segments of the population have switched alleigances. It is possible. But one could also imagine an exhausted population that is tired of a goverment they despise putting a target on their backs. The Iranians I personally know suggest that the second idea is more true, but it is anecdotal evidence with heavy selection bias. Another factor is that Iran has an unstable food and water supply, and people who lack food and water tend to focus their anger on whoever is closest that has food and water.
The Trump administration is actively interested in the dissolution of the current global economic order. This is why they are relatively unbothtered by the global economic shock that is a Strait of Hormuz closure, whereas the globally-oriented neoliberal administrations of the past wanted to avoid this at all costs.
That will take hundreds of years to accomplish. No Iranian has forgotten Operation Ajax in 1953[0] - overthrowing the lawfully elected government of Iran and replacing it with a dictator[1].
> In the current state of the world, USA interests and global economic interests are becoming increasingly decoupled
This is entirely due to Trump constantly "ripping up" previous agreements and treaties. It has become obvious to all observers that the US can no longer be trusted to act in the interests of any other nation. For their own survival, they have to become independent of US economic and political interests.
> It is really hard for me to see how any of this has made the IRGC more stable in the long run.
It's not really that hard to see - if you open your eyes.
If you refuse to do that, to the point where you see nothing but the hint of a silver lining in every carcinogenic cloud, then yeah I guess things must look pretty silvery.
It’s a nation of 90 million people. Now that basically every facet of society has been hit by a single common enemy, they will galvanize and it won’t matter what name IRGC or whatever you give it they will start to work in unison for common security and deterrence.
Fukuoka's desalination plant treats about 16400 m^3 of water per day. Assuming 3kWh per m^3 of water, this works out to a time-averaged power consuption of ~2000kW.
The osmotic power plant generates about 100kW, so it's about 5% of the total desalination energy requirement.
Depends on the CAPEX and OPEX requirements. If it is cheap to do, it could be a solid win, but if the plant requires a lot of capital, it might be cheaper to just take the hit on efficiency
Yes the brine could just be diluted wih gray water to reduce the environnemental impact without the energy recovery of the osmotic plant and the capital can be invested in other renewable with better efficiency.
That being said it's a first so it's a pilot project needed to have feedback on a real plant in operation and not just back of the enveloppe calculations and suppositions. Sometime you need to just build the thing to encounter problems, issues or non-issues.
I wish this comment was more representative of my personal experience in science.
Instead I got PIs happy to say that weak evidence "proved" their theory and to try suppress evidence that negatively impacted "fundablity". The most successful scientists I worked with were the ones who always talked like a PR puff piece.
The issue is not really with the difference in impact between drone attacks and other types of aerial attacks, but with the dramatic increase in scale, resulting from reduced cost and risk.
It probably would have been more accurate to say something like "mass extra-judicial assasination/execution of individuals opaquely labelled as 'militants,' including US citizens, in foreign jurisdictions" instead of "drone strikes," but the latter is shorter and I thought would be understood as implying the former.
They invaded two countries simultaneously (one landlocked). Then used secret stealth helicopters to fly a hit squad into an allied nations territory for one particular individual.
I don't think this is a fruitful debate but I doubt risk & cost are as much a determining factor as you'd like.
Using something similar to a benzene ring with spokes sticking out of it is absolutely a reasonable choice for depicting sodium hexametaphosphate in a schematic. This is actually a pretty common choice in scientific literature regarding this molecule.
If you look at it more carefully, it isn't really a benzene ring, though. It's got multiple layers to it.
And the neural net crossover is just wrong. Really, really wrong.
This is nominally educational content. Any way in which it is wrong is something that people can and will pick up on and form incorrect assumptions about which they will carry forward. It's not enough that it is vaguely sort of, if we're generous, isn't entirely wrong. That's not the bar for human work either.
They have less leverage. The have so much less that they are forced to openly use their last and most powerful card for their survival, when they never have had to before. That is a position of weakness, not strength.
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