The Americans still have plenty of options, but none of them are good in a long-term strategic sense. The US military needs to plan beyond the four to eight years of a sitting president.

I think what will happen after this war is that we will see the Gulf states taking away projection power from the US military, which will also significantly lower the chances of a more and more unhinged Israel projecting power into the other Gulf states.

Also, Iran did not even play its best cards yet.

That the leadership of Iran, who is still a murderuous regime, seems to be the more sane party in terms of answering aggression with "adequate measures" while mostly trying to prevent civilian loss of life is absolutely mind-blowing for me.

It’s like a rabid dog (US) hunting a fox (Iran) and now the dog got its head stuck in a hole and gets bitten in the nose once in a while until it learns its lesson.

What is way more important than oil and the Strait of Hormuz in this conflict is actually (drinking)water.

The Gulf region, with its desert climate, is among the most water-scarce in the world. The six states, which includes Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, use desalination to provide water to a combined 62 million people.

For the GCC countries (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, UAE, and Saudi Arabia), most of their freshwater supply comes from a constellation of groundwater aquifers. Many of these, however, are severely over-exploited, depleted at rates far exceeding what nature can replenish. The total renewable surface and groundwater resources of the six GCC countries together amount to 7.21 billion cubic meters (m3) a year, less than the annual flow of the Potomac River for a population of 62 million.

Water managers generally consider that societies require 1700 m3 of renewable freshwater per person each year to meet their populations’ water needs, from drinking, cooking, and washing to the demands of agriculture and industry.

By this metric, the members of the GCC exhibit “absolute water scarcity.”

According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, Oman enjoys no more than 296 m3 per capita of annually available renewable freshwater resources, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia each possess only 75 m3 per capita per year, Qatar has 20 m3 per capita per year, while the UAE and Kuwait receive just 15 m3 and 4 m3, respectively.

From 1990 to 2022, annual desalinated water production soared by 314 percent across the GCC, rising from 1.4 to 5.9 billion m3. The six Gulf states now count some 3,401 operational desalination plants, comprising 19 percent of all desalination facilities worldwide.

Collectively, these plants can churn out 22.67 million m3 of desalinated water each day, enough to fill over 9,000 Olympic-size swimming pools, representing 33 percent of global daily production capacity.

For the GCC countries, extensive desalination systems constitute indispensable critical infrastructure.

Desalination fulfills 77.3 percent of total water demand in Qatar, 67.5 percent in Bahrain, 52.1 percent in the UAE, 42.2 percent in Kuwait, 31 percent in Oman, and 18.1 percent in Saudi Arabia. Desalination plants are especially important for meeting drinking water needs. Qatar derives 99 percent of its drinking water supplies from its network of desalination facilities, and Bahrain over 90 percent. For Kuwait, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, the figures are 90 percent, 86 percent, 70 percent, and 42 percent, respectively.

The GCC’s desalination plants are large, fixed, open-air industrial complexes. Mostly concentrated along the coast within 350 kilometers of the Islamic Republic. So well within Iran’s drone and precision ammunition’s striking range.

Desalination plants are also essentially linear facilities, meaning that the seawater-to-freshwater transformation takes place through an ordered sequence of stages. Damage to sensitive parts of the system, such as high-pressure pumps or membrane buildings, could disable production entirely.

So the real bargaining chip for Iran is not Oil. It’s water.

This scenario has unfolded before btw. In 1991, during the first Gulf War, Iraqi forces purposely destroyed most of Kuwait’s desalination capacity and dumped millions of barrels of oil into the northern Persian Gulf, jeopardizing water intakes for plants in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.

After coalition forces retook the country, water shortages forced Kuwaiti authorities to cut household water services to four days a week while relying on contracted tanker ships and hundreds of tanker trucks to deliver bulk water for the population.

Article 54(2) of the 1977 Additional Protocol to the Geneva Conventions expressly prohibits attacking or destroying “objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population, such as drinking water installations and supplies.”

But if the US keeps threatening Iran openly with annihilation/genocide, I think it’s reasonable that from an Iranian position, a retaliation strike will go on the desalination of the Gulf countries, which means millions of people will die and all ties to the US will be cut off as they are essentially responsible for this outcome.

You’d think the president wouldn’t be stupid enough to go through with his threats, but nobody thought he would be stupid enough to turn a beheading strike into a months-long war, plunging the whole world into chaos, and even if the Iranians gave up the nuclear material, the damage caused by the US Administration with allies and to the global world trade will outweigh Iran not having a nuclear weapon.

We see North Korea having nuclear weapons as well as a supreme leader, but you’d need to search long and hard to find a single serious expert who says they would use them in a first strike even against their direct neighbour, South Korea. They also more or less take the sanctions put on them without threatening everyone with nuclear annihilation.

Instead, their supreme leader used the killing of Khamenei senior to update the North Korean constitution to retaliate with a nuclear strike if he ever got assassinated by a third party. Something that wasn’t necessary in a pre-trump era.

This whole conflict is FUBAR and at the whim of a person that is known for not being able to admit defeat, we still frequently hear about the "stolen election".

Might be Checkmate in Iran.

But if the person starting the war doesn’t understand the rules of chess to begin with, what is the expected outcome here?