00:00Maybe it was a mistake to start this war, but leaving it midway this way is a strategic disaster,
00:05not just for Israel or the Gulf or the U.S., but also for Europe and China and Asia,
00:12because Iran controls Hormuz, because they decide forever who gets in, who gets out,
00:17and there will be another war, or one sort or another, and they proliferate with nuclear bomb,
00:23with more missiles, with more drones, and it's a nightmare.
00:26So maybe it was a bad idea to start a war, but conditionally having started it, you have to finish
00:31the job.
00:32And finishing the job means to have regime surrender.
00:37Instead, they don't want to do it this way, because they don't want to put any troops, even on the
00:41islands.
00:41So they're trying to achieve the same result of strangling the revenues of the regime by doing a blockade.
00:47If you do a blockade, you strangle them economically, but they're not going to surrender anytime soon.
00:52And if you don't restart the war by bombing the hell out of them, military infrastructure,
00:59killing more of the leadership of the country, trying to take over the island of Hormuz,
01:05to try to demine it and open it up, then just a blockade by itself is a game of chicken.
01:13And it's a game of chicken that I think the Iran eventually wins, because they can suffer for a while,
01:20while there are political costs and economic costs of just trying the slow motion strangler of the regime.
01:26You know, it took decades for financial and trade sanctions, I don't know, in Zimbabwe,
01:32to eventually have a regime collapse.
01:34So economic, financial sanctions and blockades that don't get you what you want to.
01:39Unfortunately, you have to do stuff that is more risky.
01:42You have to risk troops and you have people die.
01:44But if you're not willing to do it, they're not going to succeed.
01:47So there will be a half-baked escalation, and then you don't achieve your results and will be in a
01:54worse world,
01:54because you still have higher oil prices, you're going to have stock markets falling,
01:59bond deals higher, consumer business confidence falling, more growth slow down globally,
02:05more higher inflation for longer, and you don't even achieve the results.
02:09So it's kind of like a half-escalation, there's not the way to do it.
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