As long as oil is a thing, money will flow to the Gulf...unless we can get the whole world to embargo them and actually respect the embargo

I can't imagine China paying us more for oil when they can get it cheaper from Kuwait and Qutar

We could bar the US oil services industry from operating in the Middle East. That would have them riding camels again really quick.

You're so confident that China and Europe and Russian experts wouldn;t fill the gap?

If the Saudi-Iranian conflict goes hot in the gulf, American oil will be pretty damned cheap in comparison.

Their oil is the easiest to get out of the ground

I'm confident that it would be an economic shock to the Middle East.

Possibly, but not for very long

And it would just continue to make the US irrelevant

Which is already slowly happening

Yeah, who knows how high the market's geopolitical risk premium on Middle Eastern oil can go.

Just witness how alternate currency transfer systems are being developed to get around the Dollar embargo in Iran

What did you expect to happen?

Exactly what is happening

The point of a US embargo is to cut the embargo target out of the US market, which it did.

I predicted the current middle east situation on 9/11/2001. I was stranded in Norfolk, VA a stone's throw from the biggest naval base in the world and outlined what I wanted to see (ME back to camel herding) and what i expected to happen (invasion of Iraq leading to civil war and an increase in world terror)

Iran won the US-Iraq War

All Americans go ahead and pat yourselves on the back

And terror won

I think everybody expects destabilization of any Middle Eastern dictatorship to unleash more global terrorism.

Assad and Saddam were actually good for us. Morality aside, realpolitik can be mighty handy.

Ghaddafi too once we tamed him

Everything Obama did in the Middle East defied realpolitik favorable to the US.

He only took over the mess that Bush II created

He made it 100x worse!

I can't think of a single good thing Obama did with respect to foreign policy.

He did exactly what he was elected to do. An election win that was the biggest since the Reagan era.

The Libya intervention was one of the worst blunders in grand strategic terms in the past century.

The American public in 2008 wanted OUT

The Libya intervention was done with lukewarm US support

I don't disagree that it was unwise

Obama's foreign policy was so consistently bad for us that it could only have been done with treasonous intent.

It's the European equivalent to Iraq for the US

Oh, pshaw

Without US military support it would not have been possible for France to do anything substantive in Libya. We only got involved at Hillary's incessant urging. She wanted to shore up her credentials for her presidential run.

I could say the exact same thing about Trump

Obama's Iraq (Syria) was a lot worse than W's Iraq.

But the American electorate wanted out. If there was support in 2008 to keep large quantities of troops in Iraq then McCain would have won

So basically Hillary thought she'd increase her Presidential cred by unleashing the migrant crisis on Europe.

Don't blame Iraq on Obama. It was Bush II that went in with no reason other than a family grudge.

Europe made Libya happen