I was thinking more like the expectation we used to have that the police didn’t just start shouting in a surprise ambush. For example, the U.S. navy knew that the ship was unarmed and returning from an event hosted by the Indian government which the U.S. had also participated in, that it was attempting to dock rather than attack, and that even fully loaded it posed an insignificant threat, so there’s an argument that the Navy could have one of their thousands of aircraft to give them the opportunity to surrender or evacuate before the boat was sunk. We did that for actual Nazis, who posed far more of a peer-level threat than Iran does.

The ship posed the only plausible threat, not the sailors.