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legally, the strait is an international route required for transit
Who enforces that?
The US Navy.
The Persian Gulf is a Persian lake without the US Navy. The British before that.
that strait was not a hot issue before the war.
The British invaded Iran in WW2... you probably didn't know that.
Time is a flat circle exactly because geography doesn't change.
Ships weren't passing through normally because Iran-backed terrorists were violating international law. The old story wasn't working so we have to negotiate a new legal framework.
The US is the only country that actually wants free trade through international waters. No one else shares that vision. Everyone else would rather set up toll booths on their coastlines so they can get paid for aiming cheap guns at peaceful merchants. It doesn't make sense for us to be protecting the world's trade routes from extortion for free, especially when we hardly ever use the route in question.
There's a few ways we could deal with the extortionists of the world. We could bomb them out of existence, or, everyone gets to collects taxes on their traffic and they get paid in proportion to how well they keep the peace. Iran is happy because they get to extort the strait (which they were already messily attempting anyway), and the US is happy as long as the payment method is BTC and not RMB. That sounds to me like a much better deal than the US working to protect someone else's strait from terrorists just to uphold some utopian meme of free trade that no one else genuinely cared about.
Yes, it was under attack but there was no physical or official blockade. Ships passed through normally because, legally, the strait is an international route required for transit. But now it’s a whole different story.