Originally Posted by Villages Kahuna

Great summary of the situation; probably pretty accurate.

The question regarding a blockade, which is significantly different from Kennedy's situation with Cuba, is the "outbound stuff" from Iran. Presumably, they are shipping lots of oil to both Russia and China and neither would be terribly happy about a U.S.-allies blockade of Iran.

A blockade of Iran's outbound shipments of oil would obviously be at the Straight of Hormuz. I don't know for sure, but I'm guessing that almost all of their shipments of oil to Russia and China go thru there. It's probably not reasonable to think that Iran could negotiate a way to ship oil overland from their northern borders thru Armenia and Georgia to get to the Black Sea (to supply Russia), so the naval blockade might work.

Trying to blockade the Straight of Hormuz might be kind of wild and wooly--trying to separate the Iranian tankers from all the other tankers shipping oil from Saudi Arabia and Iraq out to the world. Kind of like picking all the cars of one color out of rush hour on the Kennedy in Chicago. Not exactly the same situation that Kennedy faced blockading Cuba. And again, how would China and Russia react?