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Comment by gpt5 | Hacker News Reader

While folks here are quick to jump to blaming the US for this, it's also worth noting that the US is the one that has been enforcing international order so far.

So it gives us a bit of a glimpse of what would the world would look like with a more isolationist US, or a multipolar world.

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Lol, the USA is the one who creates havoc and started this mess in the first place. What international order?!

Iran is the one blocking the strait, not the US.

The chain of events did not start there. 20 years ago it was not blocked, although it well could have been. ie A car hits a pedestrian. Claiming the pedestrian did damage to the car's fender misses the context of the conflict.

The chain of events probably started something like 2000 years ago depending on how you count it. The fact remains that threatening the ships of peaceful commercial traffic by uninvolved nations is entirely Iran's doing.

As they say, all's fair in love and war.

Trump was certainly warned that this would be Iran's response, and started bombing anyway. Trying to absolve the US administration of this is just propaganda.

Trying to absolve the US administration of Iran's actions? Again, my whole point here is that the US is not the one blocking the strait. The US is not responsible for the actions of an enemy nation, predictable or not.

Ahem: https://www.politico.com/news/2026/04/12/trump-announces-str...

I don't see any issue with the US blocking countries from giving monetary aid to Iran (which the US is at war with). That's not "blockading the strait", contrary to the headline. Neutral vessels can pass freely (or rather they could if Iran wasn't threatening to blow them up).

Iran is blocking transit of ships bearing the flag of countries it opposes. The US is blocking all other ships of countries Iran supports.

This might be outdated, but last I heard the US was only blocking ships going to/from Iran and ships which paid Iran's protection money, right? Not all traffic through the strait?

And for Iran it seems "countries it opposes" is basically everyone...

Iran was quite happy to let Chinese and Russian flagged ships to pass. Now, the US is blocking those as well as anything heading toward Iran. The US recently had a short lived Operation Dumb Name to have the US Navy escort ships out of the straight. It lasted less than 48 hours.

I stand corrected then. Blocking "anything heading toward Iran" is perfectly reasonable given they're at war, and blocking Russian ships makes sense given the separate ongoing conflict in Ukraine, but I don't really see the point in the US blocking Chinese ships going to countries that aren't Iran, unless there's credible evidence China is giving direct aid to Iran. Is there? Otherwise, allowing them through seems like a pretty easy way to fix the oil shortage without much downside, at least until Iran starts blocking them again.

China is buying the oil. They don't care about US Sanctions. Not really sure what you mean by easy way to fix the shortage. Twenty percent of the world's oil trade is no longer trading because the straight is closed. The US is playing a game of "if we can't have any, nobody can have any".

China can't buy oil from Iran that they physically can't get (due to the US blockade). If they want to buy oil from other non-Iranian nations though I say let them! Oil is a global market; every barrel China buys from that section of the Middle East is a barrel they're not buying somewhere else, driving up the price. We could even let them re-flag a bunch of oil tankers under the banner of China and restart global oil trade to the Persian Gulf tomorrow. China would benefit from that of course, but unless they decide to invade Taiwan tomorrow or something I don't see a problem with that. Not like it helps Iran at all (again, this is all provided China isn't somehow aiding them in the war, otherwise the US blocking their ships seems justifiable to me).

Meanwhile, every other nation in the world with a navy should be putting pressure on Iran to stop blocking their ships.

i wonder why that happened

What is this argument? Iran only started blocking after they were attacked by the US. They didn't wake up one day and decided to block the strait. If something happened due to your unprovoked action, it's your fault.

> If something happened due to your unprovoked action, it's your fault.

So if I punch somebody in the face and they respond by pulling out a gun and shooting an innocent bystander, I can be punished for murder?

That's not even remotely how moral responsibility works. People (and nations) are responsible for their own actions, not the actions of others.

It's not a punch in the face. The US executed decapitation strikes meant to kill the country's leadership and bombed civilians. Your analogy doesn't apply.

That wasn't an analogy, it was a counterexample to your assertion that "If something happened due to your unprovoked action, it's your fault." That's simply not true when the "something" that happened is another person's doing.

Please, lets end this lie about the "international order". It's always been a lawless world where rich and powerful nations did whatever they wanted. Now they've just stopped bothering to hide it.

True. I just happen to prefer the US to set the rules over an illegitimate, theocratic, and terrorist regime.

There are no rules. There's just what's convenient for some US corporations.

The US has been forcing on Latin America whatever some US corporation wants for more than a century. We've had coups over bananas!

Both things can be true: A lot of countries may suffer if the US is not a guarantor of their safety or an enforcer of safe passage through waterways. The USA can also suffer economically from no longer being a trusted partner and responsible actor. As an American, the problem for me is people who got so little benefit from the previous status quo that they don't care. I think of it like the unemployed and the pensioners who voted for Brexit. They just didn't have a lot to lose.

The US has pivoted to enforcing international disorder.

You can very specifically blame Trump for not understanding this at all. Possibly a symptom of being born rich, he acts as though America's standing in the world is a given and he has infinite political capital to spend any way he chooses and every other president was a moron for not doing it first. Obviously America has abused/misused their authority many times, but this is really the most humiliating in how quickly it unfolded and how very foreseeable the outcome was. We had a solid deal 12 years ago and instead we now have a mess and it's entirely due to one man's hubris.

>the US is the one that has been enforcing international order so far.

I'd be with you here if the US CIA wasn't the one who overthrown the democratically elected Mosaddegh and replaced him with their puppet Shah, triggering the Islamic revolution.

But I'll give you a pass since I heard they don't teach this part in american public school history curriculum.

I thought that was A. MI6, not the Americans

B. 25 years earlier and

C. Less of a revolution as Shah had always been around, they just supported him in kicking out his own prime minister (and exerting autocratic rule as a result)

The US has never been able to change a regime without a lot of help from insiders. I have read this history and it is a lot more complicated then "the US waived its magic wand." If the US could change regimes that easily don't you think we would have done it in Cuba, or contemporary Iran?

It's just as ignorant to cherry pick one event in the history of Iran as the source of all it's problems as it is to say Americans don't know their own history. It's not that simple.

"While folks here are quick to jump to blaming the arsonist for this, it's also worth noting that the arsonist is a firefighter and was responsible for putting out numerous other fires."

I mean, yay?

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