larry johnson shows us some things we may not have considered;

 

 A chokepoint is not a wall. It is a tollbooth — expensive, annoying, survivable — and the traffic always finds another way around. That is the single lesson I would press on anyone in Washington who believes the dollar can be made into a cage for Iran, and it is a lesson the last great naval hegemon paid for in starved cities and a needless war. Britain held the sea lanes in 1812; the United States holds the dollar-clearing system in 2026. Both powers convinced themselves that command of the arteries of commerce could bend a rival without fighting him. Both discovered that a blockade, whether of ships or of payments, leaks — because networks reroute, and a determined adversary treats the chokepoint as a toll to be paid rather than a barrier that stops him.

I want to walk through why I think the parallel is exact rather than poetic, because when you lay the two systems side by side they line up almost part for part, and so — so far — do their results.

Networks reroute: the pattern that governs both cases
Start with the behavior that decides everything, because it is the same in both centuries. Coercion by commerce generates its own antibodies..........more............