A unilateral blockade.
Nuclear weapons cannot be used for most conflicts.
But about 30 middle East countries discovered they can bring the highly leveraged US to their knees by mining/drone attacking the two middle east shipping chokepoints.
Strait of Hormuz — Iran, Oman, United Arab Emirates; very near: Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Iraq
Bab el-Mandeb — Yemen, Djibouti, Eritrea; very near: Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Egypt, Sudan, Oman
(maybe add the straits of singapore too)
To the nationalists, this is a great thing.
International trade has been an inarguable disaster. And once we've severed ourselves out of being the committed fist of globalism, the United States actually needs very little from such trade. We possess the capacity to be a largely independent and self sufficient nation.
For all their posturing it was Europe and China that needed the Strait open. It is they who depend on international shipping.
Anyone who uses this thing called 'oil' needs the strait open. It's remarkable how many people don't understand what an 'international oil market' means.
Canada and Venezuala have more oil than all of the ME combined.
Where is it, though? For all the talk about "energy independence", for the US intervention in Venezuela and them winning the Canadian tariff war, why aren't these countries producing at capacity?
In the words of Judge Doom, "I bought the Red Car so I could dismantle it"
That's a facile argument generally used by pro-war people to try to say that messing with the Middle East won't cause problems. Truth is, there are different types of oil based on sweetness etc., for which different types of refineries are specialized. You can't just switch out one type for another.
Furthermore, as I I think I said, it's a world market. That's why "it's good for us because we produce oil" is a very stupid argument. When prices rise, you don't earn more money unless you have stocks in Big Oil, but you do pay more for everything that uses oil as input. Unless you are a petrostate, then higher oil prices are bad for you.
That's why Trump, even though he claimed that high oil prices are good for him (and they may be for his cronies) ultimately relented.
That's funny, because I'm pretty staunchly anti-war. Energy self-sufficiency actually means there is zero reason for us to be there.
No, but you can build infrastructure around them in the long term. I'm not asking "why don't the Americans and their allies start pumping more oil immediately?", I'm asking "why haven't the Americans been building their infrastructure around allied oil since the 70s?" Apparently, despite being at war with them for over 50 years, Iran has had control of their most vital resource (and never crashed them, until now) but the Americans never bothered to diversify their supply chain?
Well, I actually work for a living, so a booming energy sector means employment opportunities for people like me. Not just the (well paying) jobs in the actual industry, but homebuilding, personal services, secondary markets for goods, they all benefit. Canada has seen the full closure of many oil extraction projects since the prices of oil have fallen; it may be a "world market", but the world only needs so much and the Americans have decided that they'll put their money into the ME's reserves.
Which Canada and Venezuela both are.