You can't blockade me, I'm blockading you



It turns out having the biggest stick still matters. After weeks of many analysts tap-dancing on the apparent grave of US military hegemony as traffic through the Strait of Hormuz remained disrupted by Iranian attacks, the US took the dramatic step of moving a group of aircraft carriers and destroyers into position to blockade Iran’s ports, immediately disrupting millions of barrels per day in oil and potentially putting the war-torn and export-dependent country in dire straits. It remains to be seen how well this will work in the long run, and whether the downstream impacts of disruptions in the Gulf will cause the US to blink before Iran and its Eastern proxies (though newsflow for most of the week clearly favored one more than the other), but we think it’s fair to say that the TACO meme has officially grown stale. Many commentators have spent the past couple decades highlighting, with good reason, how the US is showing all the signs of a decaying Great Power – and the decadent AI slop posted by its Commander in Chief may be particularly strong evidence for this thesis – but we think the events of the past few months, and especially this week, speak more to the US’s full embrace of the imperial phase of the Great Power cycle. We don’t celebrate this trend by any means, but it’s increasingly tough to deny all the ways the US is consolidating leverage and carving out a hard sphere of influence around the world (a large collection of which are documented below).

...read more at ten31timestamp.com