🇺🇸🇮🇷 America isn't fighting Iran over the Strait of Hormuz; it's fighting to stop Tehran from proving that U.S. control of the Middle East can be broken.
Most people still think this war is about ships, oil, or transit fees, but military and political analyst Elijah Magnier says it stopped being about that a long time ago.
According to him, Washington believed it could strip Iran of its greatest source of leverage by moving Gulf shipping away from the Iranian-controlled channel and through Oman instead.
He says they fundamentally misunderstood how Iran thinks.
Tehran could negotiate over uranium enrichment, frozen assets, and it could even tolerate parts of the Memorandum of Understanding being chipped away, but Hormuz was never negotiable.
For twenty years, Iran lived under sanctions while the rest of the world largely carried on as normal.
Now, for the first time, Tehran has a way to make everyone else feel the consequences too.
Its message is simple: If we cannot export our oil normally, then nobody else in the Gulf will either.
That is why Elijah believes this war has become much bigger than a dispute over a shipping lane; the U.S is now fighting for its reputation.
Because if Iran proves that it can defy Washington, absorb U.S military power and still dictate the terms of navigation through one of the world's most important chokepoints, every American ally and adversary will draw the same conclusion.
U.S dominance is over.
@ejmalrai
