International media outlets were awash Thursday in headlines proclaiming a “global energy crisis” as oil and gas prices pushed higher.
Recriminatory bluster surrounding an Israeli attack on Iran’s South Pars gas field appeared to presage a further turn for the worse in the Gulf, where the IRGC retaliated with missile strikes on the world’s largest LNG facility, Ras Laffan, in Qatar.
Both Doha and Tehran blamed the IDF for the mid-week bombing of Iran’s natural gas infrastructure, a brazen escalation and a thinly-veiled threat to the regime.
Iran depends heavily on South Pars to power its electricity grid. The field’s responsible for as much as three-quarters of Iran’s natural gas, which in turn supplies the power plants that generate the lion’s share of the nation’s electricity.
Long story short, the Israeli strike was a message: Keep blocking the Strait of Hormuz and it’ll be lights out. Literally.
Donald Trump initially insisted the US “knew nothing about” the South Pars attack, but exactly no one believed that. To the extent the strike was a message to the regime, it came from Trump who, at least politically, needs the Strait unblocked far more than Benjamin Netanyahu.
Israeli officials who spoke to the American media were unequivocal: The US was informed ahead of time about the attack. Not only that, the strikes were described as “coordinated” with the Trump administration.
That scarcely needed confirmation. The entire war effort this month can be aptly described as a darkly beautiful, jointly-produced ballet — a remarkable display of synchronized destruction executed to harmonic perfection by the US and Israeli war machines.
The notion that the IDF “lashed out” (as Trump put it) in a rogue bombing run against the world’s largest gas field without so much as warning its dance partner was wholly implausible.
Trump on Thursday mostly dropped the pretense. “I told [Netanyahu] ‘Don’t do that,'” Trump said, during remarks to reporters at The White House. It was a de facto admission that the US was well aware of the IDF’s plans.
Trump realizes the peril. Or he’s hearing it from his plane-gifting friends in Doha, who’d rather not see any more Iranian missiles slam into the LNG plant responsible for 20% of global supply.
In an asinine attempt to placate everyone involved, Trump absolved Doha and Tehran, while simultaneously (and unironically) threatening to take Israel’s Wednesday strikes to their (il)logical extreme.
“Qatar was in no way, shape, or form, involved with it, nor did it have any idea that it was going to happen [but] Iran did not know this, or any of the pertinent facts, and unjustifiably attacked a portion of Qatar’s LNG Gas facility,” Trump explained.
He went on to promise that Israel won’t strike the South Pars again, but said he might. “[If] Iran unwisely decides to attack a very innocent Qatar, the United States of America, with or without the help or consent of Israel, will massively blow up the entirety of the South Pars Gas Field,” Trump declared, before describing what such an operation would entail: “An amount of strength and power [no one’s ever] seen or witnessed before.”
I assume this goes without saying, but just in case: We’re now deep in the realm of the absurd. This is almost pure farce, and yet it’s somehow real.
Trump was quick to say he’d rather not blow up the South Pars because, as he correctly assessed, doing so would have “long-term implications” for Iran. And here I thought Trump was incapable of understatements. If “Tariff Man” were to go “Little Boy” on Iran’s most important natural gas infrastructure, 92 million people would be stranded with no energy.
Iran has a hard enough time generating reliable electricity already. Power shortages and outages aren’t rare, despite the country’s enormous fossil fuel reserves. To cut them off from their own natural gas is to start the clock on a slow genocide. And also to trigger a refugee crisis of Biblical proportions.
It’s worth asking who, if anyone, is still capable of dialing things down on the Iranian side. Far be it from me to question the IDF’s policy of “eliminating” every regime official who pokes their head out of a bunker, but I’m only barely exaggerating when I say that after this week’s round of assassinations (particularly the death of Ali Larijani), Israel and the US are running the risk of killing everyone in Tehran with the capacity to issue binding orders.
Apparently, Mojtaba Khamenei is in fact still alive, but scarcely anyone else of rank in the military-security apparatus is. Masoud Pezeshkian has no power. It’s not a stretch to suggest Bagher Ghalibaf, along with whoever’s in charge of the IRGC now, are Iran’s acting leaders, and yet they’re not presenting themselves as such. Neither did Larijani.
These people are watching their country burn for the sake of loyalty to a 37-years-dead ideologue and his just-assassinated successor. Up to and until one of these hardliners stands up and says, “I’m the guy now, the clerics are sidelined and while I’m not repudiating the Revolution, I’m committed to finding a path forward that doesn’t entail never-ending, existential animosity,” it’s going to keep burning.
Every current IRGC officer’s a target and my guess (with the usual caveat that I’m not advocating for assassinations) is that Israel will kill Ghalibaf eventually. He’s a former IRGC officer, after all, and Israel’s stance on that is “once a Guard, always a Guard.”
I keep hearing “experts” and “analysts” question the effectiveness of Israel’s “decapitation” strategy. The same people purport to delineate that strategy’s ostensible limits.
For example, The New York Times this week quoted a former head of the Iran branch inside Israel’s military intelligence. “I don’t think we’ve scratched the surface in the ability of Iran to find replacements,” he said.
As the Times went on to write, paraphrasing the same person, “Israel killed nearly all of Hamas’s leaders in Gaza, and both [Hassan] Nasrallah and his successor as Hezbollah’s leader, yet both organizations are still functioning.”
With all due respect to Israelis still menaced by the remnants of Iran’s network, no they aren’t. Still functioning, I mean. All that’s left of Hamas is the political leadership in Doha, a few thousand guys with small arms in Gaza and an ideology, which’ll never die.
As for Hezbollah, it’s “still functioning” about like the Italian mafia’s “still functioning” in America. Does it still exist? Yes. Does it still operate local patronage networks? Yes. Is it still dangerous? Yes. Other than modus operandi, does it bear any resemblance to its former self? Not really, no.
One way or the other (and that could mean a lot of things in this context) the regime in Tehran isn’t going to make it out of this intact. It’s just too much.
You can’t run a country with the head of state in hiding and senior officials subject to assassination. And as we’re seeing with the South Pars, you can’t sustain a war by threatening regional energy infrastructure when you’re dependent on the same infrastructure, and in the case of natural gas, much more so.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a scenario that was this ripe for exploitation by an enterprising general (or former general) without a military coup. The absence of that in Tehran’s incredible.
There has to be someone inside the IRGC with enough ambition and charisma to declare himself leader of an interim junta, tell the clergy it’s over, temporarily dissolve parliament and open negotiations with Trump conditioned on a strict moratorium on Israeli airstrikes for the duration of the talks.
Failing that, someone like Ghalibaf could cobble together a junta-lite and work behind the scenes through Oman to communicate the effort to Trump. I’m sure that with enough concessions, they could negotiate to keep Mojtaba on as a figurehead who’d be allowed to preside over public prayers, assuming he still has arms, legs and a face. (Pete Hegseth this week suggested he might be “disfigured.”)
Let’s not forget that the current, Trump-approved president of Syria — who visited The White House not six months ago — was a former Camp Bucca prisoner who became leader of al-Qaeda’s Syria franchise, and who counted Bakr al-Baghdadi as an acquaintance.
Suffice to say that his pretensions to staff excellence notwithstanding, Trump doesn’t insist on “the best people.” In fact, as we saw with Ahmed al-Sharaa, pretty much anybody will work other than the people Trump explicitly says won’t.
If I’m a ranking IRGC officer, I’m going to be the guy who works for Trump. Because if not, I’m just going to be another guy Netanyahu kills.
Late Thursday, Netanyahu sought to bolster Trump’s claim that regardless of whether the US was aware of Israel’s plans to attack the South Pars, the IDF acted alone.
During the same briefing, Netanyahu said the IDF’s succeeded in crippling Iran’s capacity to enrich uranium and manufacture new missiles. The war, he said, could be over “sooner than people think.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a scenario that was this ripe for exploitation by an enterprising general (or former general) without a military coup. The absence of that in Tehran is incredible.”
Regime Change 101: Normally(?) when you use military or political power to destabilize a government in order to facilitate a coup, you already have someone in mind ready to seize power and erect a puppet government — one that is immediately recognized by the belligerent power — in order to quell the situation (e.g., Venezuela). That usually works until it doesn’t (e.g., Diem in Vietnam or Allende in Chile). Is this a case where we thought we had someone, but things went horribly awry; or did we simply choose to ignore that part of the equation? The evidence would seem to support the latter. Either way it was an egregious mistake.
They had a few guys selected but then mistakenly blew them up too. This “war” would make a great slapstick comedy if someone had scripted it.
There is nobody left that could step up. But there are many fanatics in Iran and other countries, that will be heard from for the rest of our lives. This was not well thought out and far from over.
“Trump on Thursday mostly dropped the pretense. “I told [Netanyahu] ‘Don’t do that,’” Trump said, during remarks to reporters at The White House. It was a de facto admission that the US was well aware of the IDF’s plans.”
I dunno. My understanding of the timelines was slightly yet significantly different. My reading was that earlier today, DJT said he had not been informed on the IDF strike on the gas infrastructure. Later I saw reports that he had called Bibi and told him to lay off hitting the gas fields. Then it’s followed by the hint of something from Scott Bessent on Fox saying that some sanctions on Iranian oil would be eased. Marginal, for sure, but a gesture. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bessent-says-us-aiming-unsanction-131549439.html
I don’t have your level of expertise on the region and the minds of their leadership, but I read this as DJT reacting to the “unexpected” surge in energy prices thanks to their little Excursion. Might it be that less than the promised good news from the excursion is starting to trigger the president’s usual reaction of blaming others for everything?? Might he quietly or publicly turn on Netanyahu to deflect any blame AND punish Bibi for talking him into it? All while starting to extract the US from this mess? “It’s Netanyahu’s fault. I believed he was a true ally but not anymore!”
That would also please the wing of the MAGA led by MTG, Tucker Carlson and Joe Kent (who you profiled for us yesterday.) It’s a minority but not a trivial part of his sacred base.
Is this construct all that unreasonable?
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I mean plainly he told Netanyahu to go out later on Thursday and say Israel acted alone, but we already knew that. Acting alone’s different from acting alone without telling anybody. To reiterate what I said in the article, I think it’s entirely unrealistic to suggest the IDF conducted a bombing run against the world’s largest natural gas field in the middle of an ongoing, major joint military operation with the US and didn’t tell The White House anything at all about it ahead of time. I mean, there are projectiles of all kinds flying all over that region, all day, every day. You don’t reckon the IDF would’ve wanted, at the very least, to say “Hey, by the way, those fighters / missiles / etc. that you’re going to see in and around the South Pars here in about an hour are ours”?
And I don’t think Trump gives a single damn about Tucker Carlson, let alone MTG, or Joe Kent, or, for that matter, anybody else. If he did, we wouldn’t be doing this. The idea that Netanyahu pulled Trump into war may be true from a big picture perspective, and also from a timing perspective (if you blow up the leadership compound in Tehran with Khamenei in it, it’s a “go” from there), but Netanyahu didn’t move the largest US naval formation assembled since the Iraq War into place. Trump did. And he did so deliberately over a period of six weeks.
Plus, parsing the timing on these daily soundbites for clues is a bit like interpreting Jerome Powell’s every vocal inflection and mannerism during an FOMC press conference: I do it, just like everybody else does, but am I absolutely sure that when Powell’s left nostril twitched it wasn’t a dovish hint amid an otherwise hawkish series of remarks? No. I can’t say that with any degree of certainty, just like I can’t say, for sure, how many times Trump and Netanyahu spoke over the past 24 hours, who said what, when, and whether someone might’ve “massively blown up” something today that the other one didn’t want blown up until tomorrow.
Thanks. Many valid points.
Though I’m not as convinced as you that Bibi actually did alert Trump ahead of the bombing or with enough time for his team of elite advisors to give any thought to the ramifications. Maybe he was following the UBER playbook of “move fast and break things”?
We’re talking about Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu here, no?
But this take on the timelines sure does not support my conjectures here. Ah well. Everyone should note the date when I was incorrect about something.
“Speaking to reporters Thursday at the White House, Mr. Trump implied that he had spoken about the strike ahead of time with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel.
“I told him don’t do that,” Mr. Trump said. He went on to say, “we’re independent. We get along great. It’s coordinated.””
In addition to backing Trump’s mixed-up messaging, Netanyahu also dismissed out-of-hand the notion that Israel was “dragging the US into its war” by saying, sort of glibly, “Does anyone really think that someone can tell President Trump what to do?” That made my spidey-sense tingle because I think an increasing number of people are starting to believe exactly that when it comes to Netanyahu.
I could answer Bibi’s question with a question. “Does anyone really believe President Trump knows what to do?” Because unless it involves ballrooms, drapes, or bathrooms, I think he has to be told what to do about almost everything. With the right advisers, that could turn out ok, but that’s a stretch in an Administration that can’t even keep its stories straight. And given that Trump is suggestible enough to be convinced that magnets don’t work underwater, windmills cause cancer and that they’re eating the cats and dogs, I don’t think we can rule anything out – I mean Newt just popped out of his lair to suggest we nuke a new canal.through the UAE and Oman. Should he followed that advice, Trump might even name it the Strait of Dormeuse, given his penchant for decorating.
We are talking about a man (Trump) who is a notorious liar and who is in steep cognitive decline, why are we still weighing whether anything he says is the actual truth? It might be, or maybe he forgot, or maybe he’s lying again? Either way, what difference does it make? Even if he is telling the truth, he operates on his “gut” and might change his mind after his 10th cheeseburger to just blame the whole thing on Bibi and then send the military to attack Israel. Or maybe he’ll invade Spain because they wouldn’t let us park there, this is the whole point of not putting someone like Trump in charge of the most powerful military in the world and then having Congress turn him into a king.
I have a much simpler question — can Trump truly deliver a strict moratorium on Israeli airstrikes for the duration of the talks as the condition for negotiations?
I don’t know much, but I do know Israel has a habit of offensive operations in the face of negotiations it doesn’t favor or favor how they are progressing. Israel also has repeatedly ignored some of even the most nominal conditions we have put on our military aid for its war in Gaza, and it wasn’t too long ago we had to build a ridiculous quarter-billion dollar floating port off the coast of Gaza City, in large part because Israel was throttling food aid through clogged check points on land.
Unsanctioning Iran’s oil seems irrelevant, since China is buying it anyway. Iran will just make more per bbl.
Iran was “negotiating “ with Trump when the bombs started to fall, twice! Why would anyone believe what he agrees to now?
Yes. And further, Trump withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal in 2018 – created after painstaking negotiations which allowed for careful inspections. The only “deal” with Trump and Bibi a foreign power could trust would be if it was clear Trump and Bibi were getting exactly what they wanted. What do I know, but I suspect Bibi doesn’t want any kind of reorganized Iranian state around Israel anymore than he wants a Palestinian State or a functioning Lebanese State.
Scapegoating, hate, devaluation, us vs them, appeasement to the far right, dominance, distraction are all just too appealing…
My understanding is that Netanyahu pulled the trigger first in both instances, as a deal got close to being sealed. Prior to last year’s bombing we actually knew the location of the enriched uranium and now we don’t. Not knowing that has now increased the probability of boots on the ground, in a war that is escalating out of control. This is looking more like Vietnam by the minute…, but far worse.
Which Iranian in their right mind would trust that they could negotiate with the US (especially with Trump) after our track record? We just took part in the killing of 100,000 Palestinians and the displacement of over a million. Feelings gotta be raw over there, ya think?
“The entire war effort this month can be aptly described as a darkly beautiful, jointly-produced ballet — a remarkable display of synchronized destruction executed to harmonic perfection by the US and Israeli war machines.”
Creative license notwithstanding, this reads like how I imagine one of Arthur C. Clarke’s engineers would describe the Death Star annihilating Alderaan.
Insanely good article
According to the London Times, Scott Bessent stated that “The regime is in collapse and the people are starting to turn against them. We’re starting to see defections. At [the] Treasury, we now know where the Iranian leadership bank accounts are and those are being frozen, and we will hold them and see who comes forward in terms of defections. But we’re starting to see defections throughout the regime — and that’s how this ends.”
If the money truly gets cut off- this is a significant nail in the coffin of the regime.
If Tariff Man” were to go “Little Boy”…? Scary thought is that the man might just be crazy enough to do such a thing somewhere, sometime. But at least it sounds cuter (like the movie of that name), and not so over-used as “going nuclear”…
It’s hard to achieve goals that aren’t stated because no one will be working on them. It’s clear the commander in chief via his gut is the only person in government who can tell us what these goals are and unfortunately he’s a bit constipated at the moment. We’re all waiting..
One way to see the problem is to look at the governing structure Trump has created. It’s not a team, it’s a court. Trump is an autocrat, so no one in the executive branch can do anything without his direction. We know he’s the king of the court because when he speaks to the world he rarely references the country, it’s always ‘I, I, I,…’. Scary that a considerable number of US citizens either can’t or refuse to see why this is a very big problem. As a result, they think the fight for America’s soul is happening somewhere outside our borders and don’t realize it’s on their home turf, waged not in the streets but in the halls of power. Regardless of what style government one prefers, America only exists as a democracy.
“An amount of strength and power [no one’s ever] seen or witnessed before.”
So something bigger than the Hydrogen bomb?
The other issue I have with the most extreme versions of the Netanyahu conspiracy narrative is that Israel’s cards are, and always have been, on the table. It’s not exactly a secret that they want regime change. And Trump’s had it out for Iran for decades. Amassing a “powerful armada” (as he put it) on Iran’s doorstep and then blaming Israel for “tricking” The White House into war is about like me taking $25,000 in cash out of the bank, putting it in a tote bag, going into Louis Vuitton and then blaming the store when I walk out of there with $25,000 in clothes and bags I don’t need.
I haven’t heard any mention of the Islamic calendar. Any chance the Iranians who might be open to a coup are waiting for Ramadan to wrap up, which is this weekend?