Because it would require a boots on the ground invasion to occupy the entire portion of Iran overlooking the Strait.
The strait is physically open but no insurance company will cover massive oil carriers because they are so easy to hit with small weaponry from the ridges of Iran.
Why doesn't the US government just insure them itself then? A quarter of a billion dollars is a major risk to an insurance company with no internal capacity to mitigate the risk itself, but it's not even a rounding error in the federal budget and the US government would then be expressing confidence in the ability of its own military to ensure safe passage.
And even if they had to pay a claim, it would cost the population less than the higher gas prices, since increasing supply lowers the market price for all supply, not just the incremental units.
That would require an act of Congress. So implicitly, the majority party in the House and Senate don’t want to do this. Ask yourself, who is in power right now?
> Because it would require a boots on the ground invasion to occupy the entire portion of Iran overlooking the Strait.
Which even the morons who started this conflict know is suicidal because Iran has literally at least a million loyal fanatics (Basij, the same organisation doing unarmed meat waves against Iraq)!ready to die for the regime, and the terrain is in their favour.
After all has been said about the ages of Biden and Trump, it’s ironic that having presidents with experience living through Vietnam and the Soviet-Afghan war has been so useful for their two terms.
The US could/can, they're just not willing to undergo the mass casualties it would take to put boots on the ground and put those boots up the ass of the people controlling Hormuz. Which absolutely cannot be achieved purely by air.
I'm not interested in a lengthy semantic debate about what "can" means but I'd hope we could agree at least one possible interpretation includes things you're unwilling but able to do.
Is it the case that if someone doesn't do something some time then they can't do that thing? Like, if you were playing basketball and Lebron James walked by and you threw the ball to him and said "dunk this!' and Lebron said "no, I'm not willing to" does this mean Lebron can't dunk?
Because personally, I'd still take Lebron on a basketball team even if he wasn't willing to dunk the ball that one time.
> if you were playing basketball and Lebron James walked by and you threw the ball to him
Yes, this is a terrible analogy for the war in Iran. Hugely unpopular, costing Americans vast sums of money daily, headed for possible catastrophe. Very much not a low-stakes "Lebron walks by" situation.
Better analogy with Lebron would be: championship game with a title on the line. He gets possession as time runs down and the team needs him to score or make a play that scores. It's not okay for him to then say he's fully capable of scoring but doesn't want to at just that moment for reasons.
NB: this is not to say the US military couldn't cause untold damage on the region. This is obvious, anybody can look at recent history to see that the US military is more than capable of destroying a country in the region.
Rather, this is an object lesson that war is politics by other means, and here we tried to do war without any politics and it has not gone well for us.
US military ain't some unstoppable force in all possible scenarios, it was stopped and won over quite a few times, last time I recall by taliban sheepherders. In some cases like first Iraq war yes, but they don't wage those wars anymore. And all mental limits re casualties are very real limits just like other.
Its like saying russia could/can conquer whole Europe, if only X, Y and Z. That effectively means they can't, as we see playing out right now despite them trying desperately to achieve this very thing.
Part of the reason that Americans prefer to lose that war is because the enemy is called "sheepherders", implying innocent civilians, when the military is winning. The blurring of when a militant is referred to as a civilian has proven to be a very effective tactic to reduce the American population's tolerance for war.
I'm confused, are you insinuating that the Taliban essentially ran a PR campaign to portray themselves as sheepherders to garner sympathy from the US population to reduce its appetite for fighting them?
No, I am stating that there are strong elements in popular media, news providers chief among them, who seek to weaken US influence and use US public opinion to drive that change.
If you cannot afford doing it, then you cannot do it. What's the purpose of having the capability to do something if you cannot afford the losses of doing it?
The strait is physically open but no insurance company will cover massive oil carriers because they are so easy to hit with small weaponry from the ridges of Iran.