Wangiss: Profedius: xaldin: I'd be inclined to say that it is more important than Syria or Egypt. One is a civil war, other a near civil war and neither I particularly view as our problem. Today's weather ranks higher.

There is just the little problem with the Suez Canal. Should a civil war in Egypt affect shipping through the Suez Canal the price of goods and fuel will raise by a good deal. Syria has oil pipelines that travel through it which even though we do not receive our oil from them the global price of oil would be affected. I would say Miley Cyrus is more interesting, but hardly more important.

We can destroy anything and everything that tries to stop the Suez canal in a matter of minutes.  This will not change if one or two or three Middle Eastern countries decide to have civil wars.  It would take a deliberate coalition of local countries and/or Russia or China to stop it, and that only because we would fear retaliation.

If we're really worried about that, we have a few fleets we're not using.  It's ground transportation that poses the threat to oil supplies.