The Strait of Hormuz is usually an idyllic place for a vacation. Expats stationed in Dubai travel by road to Musandam, the part of Oman that juts into the strait at its narrowest point. There they fish, snorkel in the turquoise waters and sleep on dhows.
Mohamad el Khatib, who has organized tours to Musandam for 22 years, said that when the moon is not shining, it is “the best place to watch the stars.”
After all, for decades, the safety of the strait was considered more or less a sure thing, by everyone from vacationers to oil executives and gleaming, cosmopolitan Dubai. It was so strategically important to the world’s energy supply that the United States policed it for over 75 years.
But when the United States and Israel attacked Iran in late February, tanker operators stopped sending their vessels through the strait. The halt has cut off a fifth of the world’s oil and gas supply, causing oil and fuel prices to soar in what is turning into a global energy crisis.
The strait’s closure has revealed Hormuz for what it is: one of the world’s great bottlenecks. And it underlined the degree to which the world economy is dependent on a small number of geographic regions that are increasingly at risk for shutdowns.
Too big to fail?
This was never supposed to happen.
Military planners and logistics experts fret endlessly about these choke points, the places where commercial traffic is heavy and vulnerable to climate change, disruption, blockade or attack.
Few thought the Strait of Hormuz would ever be allowed to choke. The world is too dependent on the enormous amount of oil, gas and fertilizer that is exported through the waterway.
But there is also geography. When other crucial conduits close, they can be avoided by taking other routes, though these may be costly and time-consuming. There is no alternative seaborne route out of the Persian Gulf. (There are pipelines to get the oil out — and more oil is being pumped through them — but they can’t carry anywhere near the amount of oil that goes through the strait on ships.)
“The classic line of everybody, including myself, up to this point, was always, ‘it’s too big to fail,’ it will never close,” said Neil Crosby, head of oil research at Sparta, an energy market analysis firm. “Western or allied naval powers will never allow this to happen.” At around 35 miles wide, maybe it was actually too small to fail — or just small enough that it could.
Historians say this shutdown, now at nearly three weeks, is by far the most severe since the Middle East became an oil-producing region in the 1940s. “This is the most closed I’ve ever seen it,” said Martin Navias, the co-author of “Tanker Wars: The Assault on Merchant Shipping During the Iran-Iraq Crisis.” Over 480 tankers are stranded in the Persian Gulf, on one side of the strait, and over 300 are idling on the other, in the Gulf of Oman, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence.
Throughout history, world powers have used their militaries to ensure that trade routes stay open. A U.S. warship first traversed the strait in 1879, but it was not until 1949 that the U.S. Navy had a regular presence in the waterway.
The 1973 oil price shock first revealed how dependent the United States was on the Middle East. In 1980, fearing that the Soviet Union was encroaching on the Persian Gulf, President Jimmy Carter vowed that the United States would use force to keep oil flowing through the strait, a commitment that became known as the Carter Doctrine. It showed that even presidents who lean toward restraint in foreign policy saw keeping the strait open as a core U.S. interest. “A Lifeline to Everyplace Else” is how The New York Times described the strait in an article on Mr. Carter’s policy.
In 1987, under President Ronald Reagan, the Navy helped escort Kuwaiti tankers through the waterway. “I’m determined our national economy will never again be held captive, that we will not return to the days of gas lines, shortages, inflation, economic dislocation and international humiliation,” Mr. Reagan said after he approved the tanker force.
Failing to keep the strait open this time was a miscalculation that has given Iran a powerful way to hit back at militarily superior enemies.
Wouter Jacobs, executive director of the Erasmus Commodity and Trade Centre at Erasmus University Rotterdam, said it was “no secret at all” that Iran would move to close the Strait of Hormuz if attacked. “That should not have come as a surprise to U.S. military planners,” he said.
Anna Kelly, a White House spokeswoman, said the Trump administration was prepared for Iran’s responses. “President Trump knew full well that Iran would try to stop the freedom of navigation and free flow of energy, and he has already taken action to destroy over 30 mine-laying vessels,” she said.
The U.S. economy was showing signs of stress before the war — the February jobs numbers were disappointing — and the shock of closing the strait could make things worse, some economists say.
Justin Wolfers, a professor of public policy and economics at the University of Michigan, said the conclusion the administration should have drawn from the weak jobs data was “don’t do anything big and dumb that might knock us over.”
But, he added, “It’s possible we went ahead and did it.”
Ms. Kelly said the military campaign against Iran would “ultimately result in a massive benefit to our country and the global economy in the long-term.”
Shock waves through the global economy
For U.S. military planners, there were plenty of recent examples of how disrupting supply chains can send shock waves through the global economy.
During the pandemic, an enormous shopping binge by stuck-at-home consumers caused a surge of imports that overwhelmed shipping companies and clogged the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, among others. The cost of ocean freight soared, helping to push inflation to multiyear highs.
After a drought in 2022 and 2023, the Panama Canal had too little water, creating delays and forcing some shipping companies to pay far more than they normally would to go through the canal.
And attacks by the Iranian-backed Houthi militia in Yemen against ships in the Red Sea have deterred container shipping lines from using the Red Sea to get to the Suez Canal, a crucial shortcut to Europe from Asia. (The attacks, which began in 2023, are retaliation against Israel for its war in Gaza.) The alternative route that shipping lines now use goes around the southern tip of Africa, a journey that takes many days longer and burns more fuel.
Noam Raydan, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said the Houthis had shown how a relatively small force could frighten a large number of ships away from an important trade lane. Iran also frequently targeted vessels in the Strait of Hormuz in recent years, including its 2024 seizure of a container ship with Israeli links. .
Iran has already hit 17 vessels during the war, according to Kpler, a maritime data firm.
The Fox News host Brian Kilmeade said earlier in the war that Mr. Trump had told him that the tanker operators had to “show some guts” and go through the strait. And historians say that, during the attacks on tankers in the 1980s, shipowners sent many vessels through the strait, and did so even before U.S. naval escort of 1987.
But Iran’s ability to attack ships appears greater today, in part because it has new types of weapons like drones.
“Tankers can continue to serve humanity on the high seas, but the West should not bet its long-term future on the Strait of Hormuz run,” a Ford Motor executive said in a letter to The Times in 1987, commenting on the U.S. escort operation.
In fact, the bet just got bigger. The Gulf States went from producing mainly crude to also exporting enormous amounts of natural gas, used around the world to generate electricity and heat homes.
“These guys” — the Gulf States — “are absolutely crucial for modern economies everywhere, and what they ship out of the Strait of Hormuz touches everybody on the planet,” said Jim Krane, a fellow in Middle East energy studies at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy.
And in a less and less predictable world, there is ever more risk from the increasing amounts of goods being forced through vulnerable trade lanes.
“Every time we have floods, earthquakes, conflicts, more of our supply chains get throttled,” said Vidya Mani, an associate professor at Cornell. “Almost all major transit points are running at full capacity with no buffer for these attacks.”
Peter Eavis reports on the business of moving stuff around the world.
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