I think in general it makes sense to try to account for externalities in everything. If you spend lots of money on things like protecting shipping routes and accounting for that in the product cost tips costs in favour of manufacturing closer, then that's important to understand.

Considering just how much US military presence is in the Middle East primarily for protecting energy assets, I think it is useful. It's disproportionate to the actual value produced compared to other shipping protection deployments.

How much of the oil used in US comes from middle east?

That's the crazy thing. Nowadays, it's not even very much (on the order of $30 billion in oil per year, much of which is refined and re-exported as gasoline, etc), but we have massive military investments in military bases in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, UAE, Oman, Djibouti, etc. There's no way this passes the cost vs benefit sniff test.

Unlike the mid-aughts, the US is very nearly a net exporter of oil and oil products: https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=pet&s=m...

What matters is mostly the global price.

It doesn't matter how much physically comes from there to here, it matters how much their production brings down the price of the global commodity.

Well, that's the key point about becoming a net exporter of oil, isn't it? If the global price of oil shoots up, the extra cost to consumers is easily offset by the increased revenue for domestic oil production. If that's not good enough for you, there's also the option of protectionist measures to keep the price of oil for consumers nearer what it was originally (which is less economically efficient but is no worse than where you were at first).

That's the main argument for being "energy independent."

I suppose this depends on the relative risk that said items have.

I would guess that for a pirate in East Africa some items would be more valuable than others. Is oil more valuable than say iPhones to them?

the war in iraq was exclusively about oil

I think most major wars in the last 100 years could be characterised as for either markets or energy.