> American exceptionalism bleeds through

None of this requires America be better at anything. It just requires the current finance and trade flows to be what they are.

> Seemingly this was the idea with Iran too

The analogy doesn’t work. American sanctions and adversarialism with Iran have famously granted us few grabholds on their system. Tehran is sovereign.

To the extent there is an analogy here, it’s in European reliance on America being its Hormuz. The obvious vulnerability that gives America asymmetric capability over Europe is the financial, security, energy and trade reliance. Unlike the Hormuz, those aren’t geographic features. But if Brussels is content with mincing around with their own special pile of AMD chips (or tourism bans or whatnot), it might as well be carved into rock.