Engaging in purely defensive tactics to defend something you have no obligation to defend is the losingest game of all.
What I find most distressing about threads like this is that they are filled with posts from Freepers who think it’s a good idea for the U.S. to use its military assets to defend someone else’s shipping industry. When the hell did this make any sense at all?
When the hell did this make any sense at all?
To our globalist masters it always made sense. Everything is interconnected in their global economy, and it all depends on cheap, reliable shipping to continue with the "offshoring" and arbitrage of 3rd-world labor that made them so wealthy.
So, yes, it makes perfect sense for them to use the American military to defend someone else's shipping industry. It is all their industry. Somebody has to protect it. Americans are the most capable and easiest to con in to doing that.
Their biggest problem is that they are stupid. They are wasting a valuable and irreplaceable tool by using half-hearted measures that will break the tool. They are riven by factional conflicts and some of the factions hate America more than they hate their other enemies. There is a distinctly pro-Iranian faction in the American oligarchy that wants to see a catastrophic American defeat in the Persian Gulf. They are the faction which dominates right now.
So, we are cruising around on patrols in the Persian Gulf to "Defend Our Allies" and "Protect The American Way Of Life" and make the world safe for "Our Democracy"(tm). It is a setup.
"War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious". (General Smedley Butler, USMC)
When avoiding shortages, severe inflation, and possible collapse of Western, allied, and other economies made sense. Diverting shipping will cause around 20% shortages of some commodities (considerably worse in Europe). In the short to medium term, at least in the US, supplies will mostly ...readjust at higher prices. ("mostly" - that fuel pump for my other (old) car, well, I may have to wish myself luck.) Just what we all needed, right? Europe, already much more "teetering", and the problems created with shipping capacity are much greater, will be much worse. Friendly Asian countries (S. Korea, Japan, etc.) OTOH will have production piling up in ports and warehouses, eventually forcing mass layoffs. China too, but even there, no one with any sense wants China's economy to collapse, unless we are in a shooting war with them: The fallout to us is just too severe. Agreed that purely defensive tactics is not going to work. The only alternative is to punch Iran quick and hard: The entire history of confronting the mullahs is that they'll back off, at least for a while.