President Trump, You Should Shut Down the Strait of Hormuz

Townhall 

Iran and Democrats are united on a great many things, but none more than the desire to see President Donald Trump fail. The Iranian regime, or whatever remains of it, is trying to survive, and Democrats are, well, pretty much in the same boat. The two places in this country where the terrorists in Iran and the terrorists in the Democratic Party are most welcome are college campuses and cable news studios. That’s not a coincidence. To break up this cabal and destroy at least the foreign terrorists in this equation, President Trump needs to do something dramatic…like lock down the Strait of Hormuz.

As I’ve said before, I don’t really care what ultimately happens to the people of Iran. I would prefer they rise and overthrow their tyrannical government, freeing themselves from 47 years of oppression and rejoin the civilized world. That would be the best outcome for their people, but if they aren’t willing to stand up and do it, then remaining oppressed doesn’t matter much to me.

Liberty has to be won, not handed to people, in order to be appreciated – just look at the spoiled left-wing Americans who’ve had every advantage of freedom given to them and would like nothing more than to trash it with progressive politics. Some people won’t stand up for themselves, and others are too stupid to. Motivation doesn’t matter; the end results do.

To the extent that the Iranian regime still matters, it is only because there remain pounds of enriched uranium buried in a mountain there; they could still murder a lot of their civilians, and they have terrified all the ships in the Persian Gulf with the prospect of flying an explosive drone into them as they pass the Strait of Hormuz.

What if we took that last one off the table?

The uranium we could get with overwhelming force, and we should – killing anything and everything between us and it. If Iran tries to murder more of its citizens, maybe that would make Europe finally care…or not. It can’t be our focus; the first point matters most.

That leaves the Strait. Iran shut it down with threats and only a few ships have dared to believe that they won’t attack now, effectively keeping closed that which is allegedly open.

We should close it.

Shutting down the Strait on our end takes the leverage Iran has and ties it off. We can work to empty out the Gulf of ships there now, but nothing else goes in or out after that.

“But doesn’t that supply a lot of the world’s oil?!?!” It does, at least some. Not to us, but a lot to Europe. Maybe this will make them care?

That’s not the reason to do it; harming Iran is.

The President should work with the countries that would be cut off from shipping to facilitate new pathways to get their goods out of the area. Pipelines, a canal, trucks, railroads, whatever.

If we were able to render the waterway irrelevant, Iran would be left with zero leverage.

We managed to supply the city of Berlin with pretty much everything it needed to survive for 15 months during the airlift from 1948 to 1949; we surely could handle this. The world could act quickly to remove Iran from relevance by creating new pathways for whatever goods that flow out of there. Fly it, drive it, pipeline it until new permanent paths are established.

The Hoover Dam took five years to build, the Panama Canal took 10 years to complete, the Empire State Building took just over a year and none of these things held the future of humanity in their completion. Surely the greatest engineering minds could get goods flowing through alternative channels immediately, then increase the speed of that flow over time.

This would leave Iran to its own devices – nothing out, only inspected cargo in.

I hear people talk about the fertilizer that comes through the Strait. Fertilizer can and should be made elsewhere, but it can also be moved across land to another port, then shipped. As can everything there.

At the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, I heard endlessly how it could lead to mass starvation because Ukraine grows a lot of grain. I suggested at the time that this would be an opportune moment to plant grain in other places in the world, as it was stupid to rely so heavily on one of the most corrupt countries on the planet. The same logic can be applied to the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz.

The world can create new ways to get whatever it needs or wants out of there that leaves Iran flopping in the wind, or it can spur innovation and production of those things elsewhere. Iran’s “leverage” is an opportunity to not only neuter them but to build up other places to spread the load and deflate the threat. It would make Iran irrelevant. Do it.