Iran - Israel/US War: Israel-US declare war on Iran, Iran responds

[lightning f57]

The next IEA petroleum/oil stocks-related release in July is Friday, 10 July 2026.

This may give a clue why trumpy is escalating.

 

[030292]

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@Persian Gulf you thoughts?

With America being skint and drowning in debt, it will be difficult to refill these strategic reserves

 

[Arash]

Answer from a geopolitical analyst upon a query from a GCC buffoon who wants a return to full scare war by the "international community" against Iran.

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Gcc pussies wnt war ????? I thought some of them got the lesson by now....

 

[VCheng]

What's paradoxical about it? The markets believe that Iran is not going to respond to the US strikes in a meaningful way.

But how and why would they form such a belief?

 

[ShapurII]

But how and why would they form such a belief?

Because of the concluding statement of the IRGC? Because Iran has failed to respond proportionally to the latest US provocations? Because satellite images show that the traffic in the Strait of Hormuz is still normal?

As a side note, Oman once again said, today, that the Sultanate of Oman does not support collecting fees from tankers passing through the strait. Oman has enjoyed a few years of tourism and development and they are turning into a new Emirates, it seems. Another blunder by the IR, we should've never gotten Oman involved in this at all.

 

[Flotilla]

If my goal is to continue resolving the issue by force, then all previous negotiations were false, any performance I put on television was to make the other side believe in me, all promises were false, and the delay was merely to replenish ammunition.

If it is like this, US didn´t replenish nothing.
You don´t know how hellish expensive and complicate it is assembling a JASSM/LRASM.

 

[Master Chief]

A similar take by the holy of holies, the New York Times. Trump has no good options on Iran. The article does say that the Iranian leadership is aware of Trump's predicament.

NYT : As Iran Cease-Fire Frays, Trump Faces a Muddled War and Unpalatable Options​

The president appears to be confronting the consequences of a cease-fire deal cobbled together in haste, with little movement toward resolving the key issues driving the conflict.

Just two weeks ago, opening the Great American State Fair, President Trump triumphantly declared: “For the first time in 3,000 years, we are going to have peace in the Middle East.”

It was typical bravado for Mr. Trump. But the “peace” he was celebrating — the cease-fire with Iran that on Wednesday he declared “over” after less than a month — was already beginning to unravel. The result was perhaps predictable for a 14-paragraph memorandum of understanding that skirted major issues and was hastily assembled so Mr. Trump could declare he had reached a deal, any deal.

Now Mr. Trump appears to be confronting the consequences of his haste, and of his assumption, born of his time in the real estate business, that his adversary would prize economic benefits over the revolutionary ideology that has driven its politics since the 1979 Iranian revolution. That has left him facing a range of unpalatable options amid seemingly intractable sticking points over the fate of Iran’s nuclear program — to say nothing of its missile program, its support for terrorist groups and its repression of its own people.

At the NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey, on Wednesday after the two sides had exchanged strikes, he threatened major new combat operations. Those included seizing a key Iranian oil processing island and attacking the country’s infrastructure and desalination plants, which experts have said could constitute a war crime. (Mr. Trump did say he was most hesitant to hit the desalination facilities.)

But Mr. Trump has made such threats without following through before, and he added on Wednesday that he did not anticipate a return to full-scale war. Such a move has little domestic support, and some of Mr. Trump’s Republican allies fear the economic and political consequences less than four months before the midterm elections. No one is more aware of that calendar, or Mr. Trump’s hesitation to repeat the experience of the spring, than the Iranian leadership.

The president could instead reimpose the American blockade of Iranian ports, an attempt to cut off the country’s economic lifeline. But that would require a continued, intense American presence in the region, and while Mr. Trump contended in April that it would lead to Iranian economic collapse, his earlier imposition of it did not.
Or he could elect to live in a world of neither war nor peace, an era of episodic skirmishes in the Persian Gulf, punctuated by periodic negotiations, with traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, a key oil-shipping route, greatly reduced from the 130 or so ships that passed through each day before the war. The energy markets would most likely adjust; to some degree they already have.

But for a president who promised a quick, cost-free confrontation with an old adversary — “four to six weeks” was the White House prediction in the opening weeks — an ongoing conflict would amount to near-total failure on the mission he initially set out upon. And the price would be staggering: The Pentagon has already asked Congress for about $70 billion to cover the early operations around Iran, and the cost rises every week.

“The problem is that all the options — endure, escalate or agree — are unattractive in different ways,” Richard Fontaine, the chief executive of the Center for a New American Security and a former aide to Senator John McCain, said on Wednesday. “The likeliest outcome is a continuing series of low-level, tit-for-tat attacks, followed by frantic diplomacy by mediators, the emergence of a new and fragile cease-fire, and then probably another round of strikes.

Mr. Fontaine added: “It will be a long oscillation between cold war and low-level hot war.”
Many of the problems Mr. Trump is facing today were exacerbated by the cease-fire deal itself. It left unresolved, for a later negotiation that Mr. Trump now says he has little interest in pursuing, the fate of Iran’s stockpile of near-bomb-grade nuclear fuel, the most prominent among the administration’s shifting reasons for attacking Iran on Feb. 28.

The agreement appeared to hand Iran at least some control over passage through the Strait of Hormuz, the superweapon that Tehran, and specifically the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, has skillfully manipulated to drive up oil prices, and now has used to justify attacks on tankers and cargo ships not hewing to its new rules.

“What we’re seeing now is Iran, and more specifically the I.R.G.C., trying to exert control over the strait and declaring that this control is their sovereign right,” said Kevin Donegan, a retired Navy vice admiral who served as a Navy commander in the Middle East. “That’s the main card they have to play, and as a result we can expect they will continue to try to disrupt any ship traffic that uses routes different from the ones they have published.”

The deal was silent on Iran’s missile arsenal, the key issue for Israel. And it depended on a cease-fire in Lebanon, though the parties to that conflict, Israel and Hezbollah, were not signatories of the agreement. And it set an unrealistic deadline, 60 days, to deal diplomatically with those and other issues that months of active combat had failed to resolve.

There are, of course, many more turns ahead in this drama. Mr. Trump threatened again on Wednesday to try to seize Kharg Island, where giant tankers collect Iran’s oil and head to world markets. He may seek to seize the 60 percent enriched nuclear material deep underground at Isfahan, a mission for which Special Operations forces have trained extensively, though he dismissed the need for it on Wednesday.
“We’ve already got the nuclear material, because it’s so far underground,” he said, noting that the Iranians do not have the heavy equipment needed to unearth it.

If Mr. Trump is right about that, and many nuclear experts agree that the material would be enormously difficult to recover, it raises a fundamental question: If the nuclear fuel was successfully buried in the June 2025 American bombing of three major nuclear sites, why did he go to war to begin with? His statement on Wednesday, a repeat of comments he has made several times in recent months, undercuts the argument he made in the days after the initial attack in February that there was an “imminent” threat.

That initial justification has been overtaken by subsequent contradictions. Mr. Trump has periodically praised the new Iranian leadership, and even its new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, the son of the slain ayatollah, as more “reasonable.” He has said many times that, unlike their predecessors, the new leaders would open up the strait and dilute the nuclear stockpile because it will be in their economic interest.

Vice President JD Vance sounded exactly that note last month, when he was signing the memorandum of understanding in Switzerland.

“The coolest thing about the progress we’ve made over the last few weeks is that you see people within the Iranian system, senior leadership, even I.R.G.C. officials say, ‘You know what, we may have some animosity, we may have some mistrust, but we recognize the way that we’ve done business with the United States for 47 years is a mistake,’” he said.

On Wednesday, Mr. Trump had a different word for those leaders: “scum.”
“They are sick people. They’re led by sick people, and they’re vicious, violent people,” he said, adding: “As far as I’m concerned, it’s just a waste of time dealing with them.”

Personally I feel that whatever happens now, Pakistani interventionism has run its course. We would do well to stay away from this gathering storm and only engage with either belligerent by clandestine mechanisms. We've tried our best to solve a gordian knot and further effort will prove futile.

 

[Flotilla]

This is going to be tough on Iran, as Iran will be hit
Iran will have to ABSORB the attacks

You hit the nail.
Irán doesn´t need to hit Washington or kill Trump (IMO that would be even counterproductive). Just freighten the market and deplete oil stocks.
US will get soon again at the verge of high inflation, oil stocks deplete and skyrocket US debt.
Irán suffered much more during Impossed war. And targets are now much more achievable than then.

 

[ShapurII]

You hit the nail.
Irán doesn´t need to hit Washington or kill Trump (IMO that would be even counterproductive). Just freighten the market and deplete oil stocks.
US will get soon again at the verge of high inflation, oil stocks deplete and skyrocket US debt.
Irán suffered much more during Impossed war. And targets are now much more achievable than then.

Are you comparing 8 years of bloody war on the ground where chemical weapons were used extensively by the Iraqi forces to 39 days of air strikes?

Adjusted for inflation, the war with Iraq cost Iran about 2 trillion dollars in 8 years. That's about $250 billion per annum. The US-Israel attacks on Iran have already cost Iran over $500 billion in a matter of 51 days. That's almost $10 billion per day.

Also, back in 1980, Iran was the world's 12th or 13th largest economy by nominal GDP. Where is Iran now? 51st, and going down fast. Even behind countries like Pakistan, Nigeria, Vietnam, Thailand, Philippines, Egypt, Chile, Romania, etc.

 

[PK781]

Yankee bases need to get vanished ​

View attachment 205381

then should not have agreed to ceasefire, but rather, should've levelled entire mideast.......have that capability and still willing to attack KSA ??

Entire Muslim world will not tolerate attacks on Saudi Arabia. Careful what targets you choose......

 

[ShapurII]

then should not have agreed to ceasefire, but rather, should've levelled entire mideast.......have that capability and still willing to attack KSA ??

Entire Muslim world will not tolerate attacks on Saudi Arabia. Careful what targets you choose......

We did attack Saudi Arabia in the first weeks of war and I didn't really hear much objection from the "entire Muslim world" really. No country deserves to be targeted for this war more than Saudi Arabia, IMO. A close second is the Emirates.

 

[VCheng]

Because of the concluding statement of the IRGC? Because Iran has failed to respond proportionally to the latest US provocations? Because satellite images show that the traffic in the Strait of Hormuz is still normal?

You seem to be implying that the evidence you suggest above might show who wins or loses this war? Is that the case? Please clarify. Thanks.

 

[ShapurII]

You seem to be implying that the evidence you suggest above might show who wins or loses this war? Is that the case? Please clarify. Thanks.

I think nobody has won yet. I agree with some users that if Iran keeps economic pressure on the US, it can win the war and have some form of deterrence for a while but it is yet to be seen if Iran is capable of doing that.

For me, it can go either way at this point. Iran is not responding to the latest US provocations, which can be interpreted in different ways. Also, the US politics is unpredictable.

If Iran keeps the pressure on the world's economy and Trump loses more power within the American system after November, which is a very big if, then yes, Iran can win this war simply by absorbing hits but I don't think that's very likely to happen.

If that doesn't happen and the situation doesn't turn in Iran's favor after November, expect the US to get even more aggressive and I doubt Iran would be able to sustain that for 2 years, as Iran's economy is already on the verge of collapse and it won't be able to sustain more economic and infrastructural damage with a naval blockade on imports/exports as well.

 

[Abdul q]

This time if Iran is unable to take on those warships it can’t establish deterrence

 

[VCheng]

I think nobody has won yet.

Agreed.

For me, it can go either way at this point.

Agreed.

If Iran keeps the pressure on the world's economy and Trump loses more power within the American system, which is a big if, then yes, Iran can win this war simply by absorbing hits but I don't think that's very likely to happen.

I guess we will know soon enough, given recent events.