Before February 28 of this year, roughly 3,000 vessels passed through the Strait of Hormuz every month. In March, 154 did. That is not a shipping disruption. That is a near-total cessation of traffic through the chokepoint that carries approximately one-fifth of the world’s seaborne oil and natural gas.
The strait is twenty-one miles wide at its narrowest. Iran has been using those twenty-one miles since the United States and Israel launched strikes on February 28 to apply leverage that no amount of American military power has yet been able to neutralize. Iranian gunboats fire on tankers. Mines have been laid. The IRGC has published its own map showing an alternative route through Iranian territorial waters — the toll road version of international shipping, controlled by the Revolutionary Guard.
The United States responded on April 13 by announcing a counter-blockade of Iranian ports. The result is what analysts are calling a dual blockade: Iran controlling transit through the strait, the US preventing access to Iranian ports. Traffic, already reduced to five percent of normal, has not meaningfully recovered. As of this week, the ceasefire agreed on April 8 is technically still in effect. Iran fired on a tanker the same morning President Trump told Congress that hostilities had terminated.
The economic math is visible at every gas station in America. The national average is $4.30 a gallon, the highest in four years. That is the strait translated into a number most people can feel immediately. What is harder to see is the downstream pressure: refined fuel shortages building in Asia, where countries that depend on Gulf oil for the majority of their energy imports are drawing down reserves and scrambling for alternative supply. Fertilizer prices are rising because natural gas is the feedstock for nitrogen fertilizer, and LNG shipments through the strait have stopped. Food prices follow fertilizer prices, not immediately but eventually.
The ceasefire negotiations are being conducted through Pakistan, the only party both Washington and Tehran will currently speak through. The talks have not produced a permanent agreement. The reopening of the strait is the central issue, which means it is both the prize and the leverage point, and neither side has found terms they can accept in front of their domestic audiences.
Trump has threatened extensive infrastructure strikes if the strait does not reopen. Iran has said it will retaliate. The US Treasury has issued sanctions waivers to allow Russian crude to flow to markets trying to replace disrupted Gulf supply — a transaction that, in any other context, would be unthinkable. The war has already produced alignments and workarounds that would have seemed impossible a year ago.
One-fifth of the world’s oil trade was passing through a twenty-one-mile waterway because the global energy system was built on the assumption that the waterway would remain open. That assumption is now gone. The rerouting of supply chains, the repricing of energy risk, the military posture that will be required to protect any future settlement — these are not temporary adjustments. The Strait of Hormuz crisis has already permanently changed how the world thinks about where it gets its energy, and the full bill for that change has not arrived yet.
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