The US fundamentally wants the oil to flow globally. Its secondary blockade of the Strait seems to be driven by optics and PR rather than strategic value.
It's a pressure campaign to get a nuclear deal. NYT reported Iran already offered to open the strait, end hostilities, and negotiate a nuclear deal later, but the US rejected that offer as they want to pressure them into giving up their uranium. Now Iran is demanding money in exchange for the uranium which is the primary roadblock.
The US should be happy about this. Maybe. Iran seeking reparations is a reasonable demand, this gives the US a way to satisfy a demand without having to pay themselves - which certainly would not be popular, to say the least - making an exit easier. There is of course the risk of setting an undesirable precedent and it is not clear what the consequences of that would be.
The US allowing Iran to levy a toll on Hormuz would completely discredit the US and set the precedent for other countries to levy their own shipping tolls . It's a non-starter.
Much of the post-WW2 American-led world order was founded partially on the United States using its military to keep international waters open. It would be quite stunning Iran defeated the united states in this sense. The military might is there, but this administration clearly had no idea what they were getting themselves into and did not plan accordingly. (and does not have the will or public support to do so) The b…
Has there been an administration that knew what they were getting themselves into? IIRC, US hasn’t won a conflict since WW2. Thus, the plethora of WW2 movies.
You're not wrong, except that USA is/was not always literally "keeping waters open" for everyone. The Cuba blockade, which is another form of war and has dire consequences for the population, has been going on for decades: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_embargo_against_...
This is factually incorrect. Blockade is not a synonym of embargo. Blockade is generally an act of war, and embargo is not. Dealing with Cuba is certainly a huge PITA for the majority of trading actors because of potential blacklisting in the US, but waters around Cuba are as open as they can be, and you can check marine traffic to make sure that ships arrive to Cuban ports. Even from the US itself (cause there are e…
Sorry, english is not my first language. I did not realize there was a strong difference between blockade and embargo. Thanks for the correction.
Though to be fair, there is currently an actual oil blockade run by the USA. And the previous embargo imposed sanctions on international entities dealing with Cuba, so it was not exactly 100% open even though technically you could sail there.
> USA can win this war with barely any casualties What do you mean by "win"? What strategic goals can the US achieve in this war? We're at a point where merely achieving status quo ante bellum--i.e., Iran doesn't charge for passage through the Strait of Hormuz--seems to require giving concessions elsewhere. In many ways, this looks like the American version of Pearl Harbor--a stunning tactical victory that is simulta…
> We're at a point where merely achieving status quo ante bellum--i.e., Iran doesn't charge for passage through the Strait of Hormuz--seems to require giving concessions elsewhere. No, there is no reality where the world will let Iran take tolls here, no matter what happens that part wont happen. The world depends too much on straits being open and toll free, if you let that slide once it will be done by others and t…
So now you pivoted from the US to the world. Yeah Trump tried that, first to engage 'the Europe', then eastern Asia (Japan, South Korea), now China. He has to own his failure, nobody will solve it for him. Meanwhile the SPR is draining, reserves all over the world are dwindling, thw world is hungry for oil - they will pay the tolls happily.
Were they theirs? Germany has nukes too but they're not theirs, they're from the US. Germany can't say "fuck off" to the ~50k Americans stationed in the country, leave NATO and get to keep the nukes.
If a country has nuclear weapons and can unilaterally launch them, then they are theirs. Who’s gonna come take them?
>can unilaterally launch them
Germany can't launch or even operate and maintain them without the US.
The US military is also just less powerful than it was at its peak at the end of the Cold War as well. Still the most powerful navy in the world, but spread increasingly thin (turns out "the whole world" is quite a big place). This is no longer Reagan's (almost) 600 ship navy, and projecting power halfway round the world is no mean feat when your opponent can lob missiles and drones at you from their back garden
I don't see how more more American war ships in the strait would change the calculus of the Iran war without. Even if they packed the strait with ships so that an admiral could walk from Oman to Iran without getting their shoes wet, Iran could still lob drones and missiles from inland.
Yep both things are true - it would be harder to operate in the gulf today than it was in 1990 because of better drones and missiles, but also they are short of ships and it’s limiting their options.
They don’t have enough ships to simultaneously attack Iran, defend US bases and their gulf “allies” and also enforce this blockade, so they’re forced to pick and choose and it is constraining them strategically.
Having twice as many ships wouldn’t solve the fundamental problem (they’re fairly screwed either way at this point), but it would give them more optionality
> After spending four weeks on it in an advanced ethics class, I feel the Hiroshima bomb was probably reasonably justified but that the Nagasaki bomb was not. In the full context I'm kind of surprised there was any kind of split twixt the two given the full context that both H & N were on a very long target list being systematically worked through and both were destined to be destroyed and effectively levelled regard…
I didn't want to digress too much on that sidebar but the split on Nagasaki was mostly centered around the number of days between Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I think nearly everyone would have agreed the second bomb was probably justified had it been dropped later. Many felt that given more time the Japanese side might have changed their minds without the second bomb.
Let's minimise the digression, I'll move on happily enough ..
I'll note that it appears as if the events were framed to your class as two events predestined to have an excessive impact that deserved pause and consideration rather than as (in the context of contemporary events) two orthogonal weapon designs being field tested and squeezed into an already ongoing, months in the execution, campaign of systematic destruction of urban areas one after the other.
Eg: Was it stressed that had the Nagasaki bomb not been dropped the city would still have been destroyed to the same degree via heavy explosives and incendiaries?
> USA can win this war with barely any casualties What do you mean by "win"? What strategic goals can the US achieve in this war? We're at a point where merely achieving status quo ante bellum--i.e., Iran doesn't charge for passage through the Strait of Hormuz--seems to require giving concessions elsewhere. In many ways, this looks like the American version of Pearl Harbor--a stunning tactical victory that is simulta…
The primary US strategic war goal was to slow down Iran's nuclear weapons program. That was not a smart reason to launch an attack, but the attack was at least somewhat successful in achieving the goal. Much of Iran's critical equipment is now destroyed or buried, so from the US perspective that's at least a minor, temporary strategic gain. I'm not claiming that any of this was a good idea or that it will work out we…
> let's be clear about the real goals.
You should watch “Wag the Dog”, a 1997 movie about a president who starts a war to distract from a sex scandal. The real goals here have nothing to do with anything Iran has ever done.