From JMIC Update 45: Bab-el-Mandeb Strait tanker transits average 13.42/day May 7-13, 2026

 Strait of Hormuz 1.57/day.

BAM tanker transits aren't even up to 2022's average of 30/day. The crisis of the oil trade is not being significantly ameliorated by Red Sea operations.

 

Estimates continue to put 5 million barrels per day leaving Yanbu, much of it heading to buyers in east Asia.

Fujairah in the UAE exports shy of 2 million barrels per day, also to the east. 

Iran's exports in April are said to be shy of 1 million barrels per day.

Kuwait exported nothing.

Iraq exported maybe 0.131 million barrels per day.

So 8.1 million barrels per day in April?

21.0 million barrels per day left the region in 2022. 

 

Update 5/18/26:

IEA estimates 8 mb/day bypassing Strait of Hormuz, flows still far below pre-war levels.

 

Christopher Caldwell for The New York Times thinks the American Empire has met its match in the Persian Gulf when it already met it a year ago in the Red Sea

... the United States lacks the military means to impose its will on Iran in a long conflict. In 1991 a million soldiers from more than 40 countries were needed to reverse the invasion of Kuwait carried out by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, a country less sophisticated than Iran and a fraction of its size. When Iran and Iraq fought each other to a standstill in the 1980s, deaths ran into the hundreds of thousands on each side. The United States would have to send a significant portion of its armed forces — which total only 1.3 million troops — to stand a chance of subduing Iran, and that force, if successful, would have to stay for a long time. ...

Here.

Caldwell is just as blind as Trump.

Neither one gets it that the lowly Houthis already beat us to a draw last year in the Red Sea.

Nothing is moving out of the Persian Gulf today, and tanker traffic through the Red Sea is less than half what it used to be in 2022, even under the new conditions of a world desperately thirsty for the Middle East oil no longer coming out of the former.

And neither one gets it that you can't have an American Empire without paying for it. 

We're $39 trillion in debt and can no longer impose our will in the world's vital choke-points because elites have pretended since Reagan that low marginal income tax rates are sufficient to maintain American Empire when what those rates have done is impoverish us and enrich our adversaries.

1,135 billionaires are the symbol of our lost empire. 

Caldwell steers well clear of naming the obvious remedy, and Trump's Big Ugly Bill will  do nothing but put America $62 trillion in debt by the end of 2032.

Taxes must be raised . . . a lot.

Today's drinking word is CINO

 Ceasefire in name only.

 

 

It's embarrassing to have a whiny little baby for president demonstrating everyday that he's not up to the job of being the leader of the free world

 Trump lashes out at UK and France, telling allies ‘the U.S.A. won’t be there to help you anymore’

... “You’ll have to start learning how to fight for yourself, the U.S.A. won’t be there to help you anymore, just like you weren’t there for us. Iran has been, essentially, decimated. The hard part is done. Go get your own oil!,” he concluded. ... For its part, Tehran continues to demonstrate its ability to dominate and derail maritime traffic in the strait, hitting a fully laden Kuwaiti oil tanker in the anchorage area of Dubai’s port earlier Tuesday. 

If Daniel McCarthy were a conservative who understood history and human nature, he wouldn't issue embarrassing pronunciamentos like these

 Win or lose, Donald Trump has begun the last war the United States is ever likely to fight in the Middle East. ...

That's what we thought in 1991 about the victorious George H. W. Bush. And then somehow we lost our minds and elected blow-job Bill with his Sunday-go-to-meeting Bible under his arm, big enough to choke a mule. 

The state of mind – and the state of the world – that made possible the Persian Gulf War in 1991 and the invasion of Iraq in 2003, has passed, never to return. ...

There wasn't a single state of mind from 1991 to 2003.

We didn't choose 9/11. It chose us and changed our minds. And the lunatics in Tehran are crazier and far more dangerous than Osama ever was.

Hell, we didn't even choose the Gulf War. Iraq invaded Kuwait on August 2, 1990, and set it on fire as it withdrew in January 1991.

We didn't choose this Iran War, either. Iran chose it for us when its proxies invaded our ally Israel in October 2023.

The state of mind and the state of the world . . . hasn't changed at all, except that Trump's a little slow on the uptake. 

The passions that involve us in foreign conflicts in the future will be those of a younger cohort. ...

Yes, it isn't just about a state of mind, is it? Things happen which we can't control. You can't predict "no more wars" anywhere, even though you can pretend for a long time, for example from the summer of 1939 to late 1941, and then something forces your hand.

... if the Iran war goes badly – as badly as the Iraq War did for Bush – Trump’s new style of interventionism will be repudiated by voters as thoroughly as Trump’s own election repudiated the neoconservatives. 

Bush 41 was popular because he won the Gulf War and suddenly wasn't because of the economy. And Bush 43 was re-elected convincingly in 2004, hello. If America didn't support his Iraq War, it had a funny way of showing it. There is no comparison with Trump.

Trump's economy already sucks and unsurprisingly right out of the box polling indicates Americans are against his attack on Iran. We're blowing up $1 billion a day over there and can't afford a lousy hamburger at home. We don't have to wait for Iran to go badly for the voters to repudiate Trump.

The only thing Dan is probably right about is this, unfortunately:

. . . what comes next will be an even more radical phase in domestic politics. ... 

Here.

Tennessee sent 700 National Guard to Kuwait the day Hurricane Helene blew in

 In Tennessee, on the day the hurricane blew in, 700 National Guard troops were deployed ...to Kuwait, to take part in some waste-of-time military exercise organised by a Pentagon that hasn't won anything since VJ Day and takes twenty years to lose to goatherds with fertiliser. Ukraine matters, union disputes in Yemen matter, the millions swarming across the Rio Grande to be resettled across the fruited plain matter. But Maui, East Palestine, and rural North Carolina don't matter. ... Unlike Katrina, this hurricane is nothing to do with whoever's running the executive branch of the United States. As to who precisely that is, all we can say for certain is that, of the more than seven billion people on earth, it's not Joe Biden, because he's focused on collective bargaining in Yemen, and Kamala Harris, because nobody would put her in charge of anything.

Well, except for half the voters in the United States.

If those numbers hold up, expect a lot more of western North Carolina in your future.

-- Mark Steyn, here 

Over 700 Tennessee National Guard Soldiers Deploy to Kuwait for Operation Spartan Shield :

Over 700 soldiers from the Tennessee Army National Guard's 278th Armored Cavalry Regiment are set to leave their home state for a deployment in the Middle East this Saturday. These service members, specifically from the regiment's 2nd Squadron, will spend a few weeks at Fort Bliss, Texas for final preparations before heading to Kuwait.

Trump request for 1 million barrel per day oil production boost from Saudis and others debated in Kuwait over the weekend

What's this? Trump has to ask the Arabs to do what American producers cannot?

The story is here.

The false question remains "Why did Trump win?"

Two examples from today.

Liz Peek of FOX reassured Steve Gruber this morning on his radio program in Michigan that Trump won in 2016 primarily because the voters were most concerned to ensure we had a Supreme Court seat filled by a Scalia clone.

And then Josh Brown assures his readers in the line up at Real Clear Markets that the most important reason was class warfare: a tax cut for the middle class and a big tax increase on rich speculators.

It's been five months since the election and we still can't agree about the political state of the country. Hint: libertarians don't agree about very much.

One could go on. Ann Coulter would tell you it was the promise of The Wall and an end to indiscriminate invasion by illegal aliens. Independent small business owners and self-employed people would tell you it was the promise of repeal of Obamacare. Veterans . . . veterans' affairs. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

These various opinions tell us more about the values of the individual coalitions Trump cobbled together to win, not why he won.

Meanwhile the narrow character of Trump's victory in key states, the result of former Democrat voters boycotting Hillary by the millions, goes underestimated by the winners . . . and the losers.

That's fairly typical, even for otherwise prudent presidents.

George Herbert Walker Bush thought victory in Kuwait made him golden, promptly raised taxes after we read his lips, and was shown the door.

The same will happen to Trump if he doesn't deliver on his program.

And because his program is a Duodetrigintapus, the question is really "How many of my twenty-eight legs can I get away with chopping off and still have enough left to strangle my opponent with in 2020"?

He's already cut off three. Repeal of Obamacare has failed. DACA has not been reversed (what, did they run out of pens in the White House?), and suddenly we have to burn $100 million worth of cruise missiles because someone used a politically incorrect weapon.

What's next, an assault weapon ban?

There's still plenty of time for Trump to prove that he isn't some suicidal sea monster.

But at the rate he's going he'll be a legless jellyfish by Christmas.

Rubio and Kasich both want to send US ground troops in large numbers back to the Middle East

From the debate in Detroit:

BAIER: Gentlemen, the next topic to discuss is terrorism. Senator Rubio, ISIS is a big topic of conversation on Facebook. We have a map that shows the conservation about ISIS around the country. You proposed sending a larger number of American ground troops to help defeat ISIS in Syria and Iraq...

RUBIO: That's correct, and Libya. ...

KASICH: Fortunately in Libya, there's only a few cities on the coast, because most of Libya is a desert. The fact of the matter is, we absolutely have to be -- and not just with special forces. I mean, that's not going to work. Come on. You've got to go back to the invasion when we pushed Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. We have to be there on the ground in significant numbers. We do have to include our Muslim Arab friends to work with us on that. And we have to be in the air.

And we -- it should be a broad coalition, made up of the kinds of people that were involved when we defeated Saddam. Now, you've got to be on the ground and in the air both in Syria and Iraq. And at some point, we will have to deal with Libya. I am very concerned about ISIS getting their hands on the oilfields in Libya and being able to fund their operations. The fact is cool, calm, deliberate, effective, take care of the job, and then come home. That's what we need to do with our military foreign policy.

To end the Muslim ability to make war means dirty bombing their oil fields, not just setting them on fire