No. of Recommendations: 8
Do you think that we would not cover an active Naval base? Or any one of the many air bases that house US jets and personnel in the region?
Yep. We're not launching a nuke just because someone attacks one of our airbases. We're not launching a nuke because a country invades another country that has one of our airbases.
If Iran were to physically invade Kuwait and try to seize it for their own, we probably wouldn't retaliate with a nuclear strike. But if Kuwait had its own nuclear weapon and Kuwait got to make the choice whether to respond with a nuke, they probably would.
That's the difference. Countries physically located in the Gulf face existential threats to their national security that the U.S. does not.
If the neighborhood thug routinely spray paints your house, kicks your dog, steals from your neighbors and occasionally pushes the nice old lady from across the street down a flight of stairs, you may try to convince yourself that you don't have a problem but the reality of it is that you do.
Having a problem isn't the same as being in a hot war. The neighborhood thug is definitely a problem - but in your hypothetical, he's not actually murdering people. Probably because murdering people is an escalation well above what he's actually doing. If you respond to his thuggery by actually trying to kill him, though, then there's nowhere left for the escalation to go - you've already responded to his depredations by escalating to the highest possible level. So even though he might not have thought of trying to kill you before (closing the strait of Hormuz), there's no longer any reason to hold back, because now you're outright trying to kill him.
And it might be things might now be worse for you, having escalated to this point - without that making the prior status quo not a problem. Iran was a problem - that doesn't mean that this is a solution.
No one is saying Iran isn't terrible. Or that they don't cause terrible problems. We're pointing out that this response to their terribleness isn't going to help, and will probably result in us being worse off.
