> it would take all the trucks in the middle east to move a tiny portion of the export that typically goes via ship
May I suggest an alternative mode of freight that pre-dates trucks and can move much larger volumes at a much lower CO2 cost, namely... a transcontinental train line?
(obviously not going to happen, and might even trigger a few PR cycles about a "hyperloop", but if you were going to try to build large-volume freight, that's where I'd start)
I'd say there are orders of magnitude of difference between attacking a narrow passage of water that borders your very large country (here the narrower the area you want to block, the better), versus a few-meters-wide railway that starts in another country and goes thousands of kilometers in a direction pointing away from you (and in the second case, the narrower the target, the more difficult to hit).
May I suggest an alternative mode of freight that pre-dates trucks and can move much larger volumes at a much lower CO2 cost, namely... a transcontinental train line?
(obviously not going to happen, and might even trigger a few PR cycles about a "hyperloop", but if you were going to try to build large-volume freight, that's where I'd start)