499 - Iran Forever, Belfast Riots, & College Commencement

**Tim Dillon** (0:00)
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to The Tim Dillon Show. JD Vance says, war is done in a year. How cool is that?
One more year. We've been a little skeptical here of the vice president, JD Vance. But I think it's fair. One more year of a war that no one wanted that we seem to be losing sounds like a good deal. I mean, another 12 calendar months of humiliation on the global stage with economic ramifications for all seems fair. It can't end tomorrow. Another year of a humiliation for this country and further proving that we are not militarily capable in the way that we thought we were.
JD Vance says Iran war will be history in a year. Well, good. And what kind of history will it be?
That's the real question. Fun history. Remember that war in Iran, you'll say, wasn't that a hoot? Fun, fun, fun. The war in Iran. Trump wants Karg Island, which is the home of the Iranian oil infrastructure. President Trump said the US military will attack Iran very hard tonight. But then he keeps doing this thing where he threatens the regime with a bombing campaign or ground troops, where he kind of teases nuclear annihilation. And then nothing happens. So it's an interesting strategy. We just threaten to do something and then nothing happens. And then the Iranians tell us to fuck off. And then we go, hey, you want to end the war now? And they go, not really, not really. So I think the straits of Hormuz are closed again. Here's the other thing about these wars. After a while, you just start losing, like, you know, you'll be talking to people. You go, is the strait of Hormuz open or closed? They go, I don't know. Who knows? After a while, like the Russia-Ukraine thing, it made me think about it. They're in year four of that, whatever the hell that is.
Wars don't work anymore.
Russia should have been able to beat Ukraine, even though we gave Ukraine a bunch of shit. We gave them a bunch of weapons, some money. But Russia should have been able to handle that, but they didn't. And we should have been able to take care of Iran, but we did it because wars don't seem to work.
You can't win these things unless you start nuking everybody and there's nothing to win. What would you even win? If you win, you lose, because now you have this country that you have to control. We all learned all of these lessons with Iraq and Afghanistan, and actually we learned the before that with Vietnam, but no one really cares because there's a lot of money to be made in war. And there's a lot of money to be made in the chaos right after a war, in like the aftermath of a war. So the goal here, I don't even know is the goal to win. Do the people who are, do the people who push this stuff even believe we can win? Do they even want to win? What is winning? Or is it just kind of like, what if we just had chaos and we, and missiles flew around and they killed some of our guys, and we killed some of their guys, and you know, we hold some territory, give some territory up. That's what they're doing in Ukraine and Russia. I don't even know what's going on in Iran. No one knows, but it doesn't seem to be, you can't govern the world anymore with this use of force.
You have to do it the way the Chinese did it. They did it with like TikTok. They did it with corporate espionage. They're doing it with a Belt and Road initiative. They're going all over the world. They're like building schools. They're making investments in countries and Africa and other countries. The economic reality of the Straits of Hormuz being closed is more of a disruption to the global economy than a missile flying into a base in the UAE. Even though nobody wants to see a missile, you know, but nobody wants to see US military bases blown to bits. I didn't. Some people do. But that's clearly not as much of a thing as the Straits of Hormuz. That's all they talk about with this war because it's a choke point where you could sever the pathway where a huge amount of the world I think is 40% or something like that gets its oil. 40% of the world's oil or something in that capacity goes to places like Korea and Japan and all of these places that need oil. And so this idea that you can just militarily affect the change you want in the world, 20 to 27% of the world's petroleum and crude oil goes through the straits of Hormuz. 20 million barrels a day, which equates to roughly 25% of all global maritime oil trade. It's a big number. 27%, 30%, whatever it is of the world's oil being cut off is a very big number.