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And I didn't say anything about opening it up. See, everyone is only thinking about one side of this. Iran can close it down and cause the world pain. Us? We'll be fine. We're energy independent. If Iran keeps it closed much longer, they risk alienating themselves further and strangling their partners. So from their perspective, it's not a scalpel which can cause localized pain to the United States. It's a tool of indiscriminate destruction which they can use, but only by causing mass collateral damage to everyone else they hope to win to their side or currently do illicit business with. Or do you think we're going to allow Iran to only "tax" imports to the West? Hmmm. Time is on our side, not Irans. We can easily sit back and let Iran run whatever scheme they want to where it concerns the 40 mile choke point. In turn, we can easily run ours from further afield. Iran can close it. Cool. They can likewise only open it under terms which suit us. That's the bigger picture. I mean even the simplest google search reveals that Iran depends on the straight for more than 90% of their oil exports and import 400,000 barrels (per day) of gasoline - fully half of what they use. So yeah, they're strangling themselves while we can sit back and watch their economy turn to dust.