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)
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.
Yeah, I didn't want to suggest that you're not. It's just one of the pro-war talking points that seeps through because it sounds vaguely plausible.
I'd argue that it doesn't make that much of a difference, without commenting on the costs and benefits of being there.
LOL. Yeah. I assume it's because it wasn't immediately profitable. And of course, these are private companies and if it is more profitable right now to use Middle Eastern oil, then they will. Or maybe they didn't think that anyone would be foolish enough to stick his finger in the hornet's nest.
You're only looking at one side of the equation. This is the equivalent of boomers believing that it's great for housing prices to go up. Truth is, you want housing to be as cheap as possible, and the same is true for energy.
How so? All these things need energy. If energy prices go up, everything gets more expensive. So it's not a net benefit, rather a gigantic loss. The benefits are concentrated and the losses dispersed.
Canada definitely not. Venezuela, maybe. But the US? Definitely not. Oil needs to be a gigantic percentage of your economy for you to benefit from higher prices rather than be hurt by.