Edward Feser

So dumb. Iran’s tolls were a mafia protection racket to (would be a shame if something happened to that beautiful ship). If the U.S. opens the strait by force it will be protecting ships from Iran — and incurring enormous costs to do so. There’s nothing wrong with charging a substantial fee for that service. Indeed 20% might not even scratch the surface of the actual cost.

I think the inability to understand this point stems from the fact that, as I often point out, people dismiss political constraints and talk as if they were somehow less real than physical/economic constraints, but they aren't. People find it absurd that the US can't defeat Iran because they have in mind a scenario where the resources that the US is committing to the war is only limited by what it's physically/economically able to do. Of course, in that case, things would almost certainly turn out very differently. But in practice the amount of resources that the US government can commit to the war is much more limited than that. At the end of the day, there just aren't enough people in the US who care so much about Iran that Trump would have enough support to commit the resources it would have to in order to overthrow the Iranian government, so he just won't do it because in a very real sense he can't. The only reason why he tried in the first place is that he underestimated how difficult and therefore costly it would be. It doesn't matter what the US could do in a world where those political constraints don't exist, because we don't live in that world. You can lament that more people don't share your obsession with Iran, and you may even be right about that (though you aren't), but it won't change the fact that in practice there aren't and this severely constrains what Trump can do realistically.