But the strait has two sides and Iran only controls one side. The UAE/Oman on the other side could equally threaten to attack Iranian ships unless Iran pays them a toll.
the strait-using countries are surely going to "make a lesson out of" iran exactly for that reason
They are also not neutral - they have been paying in to the US protection racket, and are discovering that their payments haven't bought much.
it's not just gulf states -- look at who are the customers of those gulf states are. the whole asia, europe, and america -- the whole world is their customer.
Even if it's "extremely hard", those countries have no choice but "make a lesson out of" iran -- just like what we did with pirates
why would those "customers of gulf" just leave iran? after US leaves, will iran regime suddenly become nice and stop forcing that $2M-per-voyage bill?
no, and even if iran regime promises "I'll never bill those ships", how could you trust on that promise? the only way to ensure free-ship-passing would be obliterating Iran as an example, even if US backs away.
> They are also not neutral - they have been paying in to the US protection racket
hmm so were they "helping" US bomb iran? "being neutral" means it didn't participate on attacking iran, not whether it paid or not.
2 Million a ship seems like a pretty cheap price to pay for the damage the us and Israel have inflicted on Iran - they cannot be made to pay it though, so I suppose the rest of us will have to (through marginally higher oil prices in the long term - much less than the spectacularly high oil prices the US war will cause in the short term)
and do what?
Bomb shit. The Saudi and UAE militaries aren't anything to sneeze at. (The area cross the Strait from the UAE is majority Arab [1].)
I think it's generally good strategy to not provoke new belligerents against oneself.
But Saudi and UAE are ruled by rich regimes who benefit from oil revenue, and very vulnarable to Iran strikes, they more likely will pay those $2m.
Less plus some is still more.
> whatever could be bombed already bombed
This is plainly untrue. We're still bombing things. Missiles are still being fired. Power plants and refineries continue to run.
> Saudi and UAE are ruled by rich regimes who benefit from oil revenue, and very vulnarable to Iran strikes, they more likely will pay those $2m
That functionally cedes Emirati and Saudi sovereignty to Iran. Today it's $2mm. Tomorrow it's anything else Tehran requires.
the point is besides full scale invasion which Saudi and UAE won't do, there is no reliable way to remove threat of Iran striking oil infra, they just don't have way to deal with the problem.