על רקע המצור הימי: איראן מרחיבה את השימוש ברכבות לצורך מסחר עם סין | פרשנות

And as the U.S. naval blockade continues, Iran has increased its railway shipments with China in an effort to mitigate the blockade's devastating effects on its economy. Joining us now is political analyst Rod D. Martin, founder and CEO of Martin Capital, to discuss. Rod, how effective could rail be to mitigate the U.S. naval blockade, which has been very effective? Well, it can't be very effective. That's exactly the point. There is a rail line from Xi'an to Iran traversing Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan. It is not meaningless by any means. And the Chinese built it as part of the Belt and Road Initiative in 2014 with significant upgrades last year. But at best, we're talking about handling 6 percent of Iran's exports. This is not a huge number. An oil tanker can carry a couple million barrels. A specialized tanker train would only carry about 70,000. So this is a far cry from solving their problem. Incrementally, of course, it helps. But even there, it doesn't help as much as it sounds like because the cost to transport by rail is about 40 percent higher than to do so by sea. It's a little bit quicker, but it's a whole lot more expensive. And you may rest assured that the Chinese are going to pass along those costs to Iran. Now, it seems like Iran's regime is playing the waiting game against the U.S., knowing that the longer it takes, the more political pressure that the president feels. So even though it's only 6 percent of the volume via rail, is it enough for the U.S. to say it's just elongating the regime's survival and we need to do something about this rail evasion? Because these are sanctioned goods. We see them taking action on the sea against sanctioned goods from China that have dual use. Should they also take action against rail? Well, we probably will. I mean, it really depends on if the ceasefire survives and the president was saying that it is on extreme life support yesterday. I think that may be being generous. The ceasefire exists in part to buy time and reset on the War Powers Act. It exists in part to give the appearance of negotiating with people we know can't be trusted and we know won't keep any deal they do make. And they haven't even offered a deal that is something we could consider. And further, it's time to get more naval assets into the region to finish this. So if hostilities commence again, and I'm pretty sure they will, if that should happen, these rail facilities are the easiest thing in the world to attack. And you can say, well, it's absolutely true that during World War II even, with much lower technology, various powers attacked each other's rail lines and those rail lines were back in service pretty quickly. And that's absolutely true. But they didn't have our level of technology. They certainly didn't have our capacity to just really mess with someone's day. So if we keep hitting the terminals in question or key rail lines at key points, we can pretty much eliminate this as a meaningful source of funding for the regime. And I think that's exactly where we're headed in much the same way as the blockade has almost completely cut off the ability, not just for Iran to ship oil out of its ports, but for Iran to move tankers into its ports to increase storage capacity. And that's really the key. Everybody's got to understand. At a certain point, you run out of storage capacity. And when that happens, you don't just flip a switch on your oil fields. They actually have to stop pumping. And shuttering an oil field is a complicated process, especially when you have older fields, older tech, and some of those fields may never come back online.