After the Bell: When rockets fly, there's no place like home

It’s not often that all of my family and I are awake and hungry at the same time on a Sunday morning.

Having two teenagers in the house means that four hours can pass between the first Sunday clank of a breakfast plate and the final thud as the cereal shelf door is closed.

But yesterday was one such day, and grabbing the moment, my wife was able to sit us all down together and so we could start the day having a wonderful chat.

Inevitably, someone started talking about the US and Israeli attack/invasion/bombing/NotSureYet on Iran.

Putting my fork to one side I mentioned that this was a very good moment to be where we are.

It’s not just that we are not in range of any of the parties involved.

As The Economist pointed out nearly three years ago, so many different groups and states with different interests in that area now have missiles or rockets of some sort, that the region was becoming even more dangerous than it already was.

It’s also that we live in a food-exporting country. Literally everything we eat comes from here. And that means, I said, picking up my fork again, that we should really be fine.

Of course, that is not nearly the end of the story.

By this morning the price of Brent crude oil was nearly $80 a barrel, and you know as well as I do that this is bound to come back to us at some point.

It’s true that Iran is not the world’s biggest seller of oil, but it could, if it wanted, easily find a way to block the Strait of Hormuz.

This is the chokepoint through which about 20% of the world’s oil travels.

Now, there are other ways for oil to flow, but if you were Iran, if your leader had been killed, if Donald Trump had promised to literally remove you from the Earth, what would you do?

Surely it would not just end there. You would attack US allies in the region. And while attacks on military bases on Israel would go some way, to really hurt Americans you would attack oil production centres in places like Saudi Arabia.

And this is where things really do begin to affect you and me.

Putting aside for a moment the scenario in which we all start to finally cycle to work, one of the bigger factors in keeping our inflation down has been that oil markets are in what analysts call a “period of oversupply”. This has kept oil prices down, fuel prices here are at a five-year-low and inflation is lower as a result.

This has been great timing for Lesetja Kganyago and his campaign to have the government formally lower the inflation target.

Read more: Middle East conflict- Oil and gold price surge will shock and awe SA

It’s early days in all of this, but you can imagine what would happen if oil prices surged higher for a long time. All our carefully laid plans might suddenly look a little like pie-in-the-sky.

Obviously, it is rational to worry that our government, the people within it, have appeared to strongly back up Iran until this point.

As Peter Fabricius reminded us this morning, our relationship with Iran seems to run deep.

I’ve never really understood why some people in the ANC are so attracted to Iran. It simply cannot be because of anything to do with values. The ANC and the regime in Iran are just too different for that.

And I don’t believe these conspiracy claims that Iran has “funded the ANC” either. No one has published any proof of such a claim.

Perhaps there are more personal interests, things that remain hidden, that would explain it. I would certainly like to hope it is something more sophisticated than just a shared belief that the US is the “Great Satan”.

But I can’t see the US really acting against us for this anyway. We are surely insignificant compared with what is happening now.

I have a sneaking suspicion that there will be another longer-term breakfast-table lesson in all of this.

I don’t for a second, at this moment, believe that the people who decided to launch these bombing attacks on Iran have any idea of what is going to happen in the longer term.

They surely have better intelligence about the situation than I do, but I’ll bet you an entire Sunday morning breakfast around my kitchen table that none of them can completely control events.

They will say they want to do this or that, or “Make Iran Democratic Again”.

But frankly, unless the US is going to put hundreds of thousands of soldiers on the ground in Iran, all they can do is bomb and hope.

And that must make a sort of Libyan scenario, where no one is really in power, a very likely possibility.

Last time I checked, armed men fighting each other for control of a state with an advanced nuclear weapons programme is less than ideal.

That is why the gold price, as I currently write, is nearly $5,400.

And a reminder in these troubled times, of how lucky we are to be here, and not in so many other places. DM

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