Elisabeth Braw,
A tugboat is seen attached to a massive shipping barge across a stretch of open water. On the other side of the ships is the shore, with mountains rising up against the horizon.A tugboat tows a barge off the coast of Khasab, on Oman’s Musandam Peninsula, overlooking the Strait of Hormuz on June 24. Giuseppe Cacace/AFP via Getty Images
After U.S. bombers hit three key Iranian nuclear facilities over the weekend, the world immediately began worrying about shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. The shipping industry, though, reacted more calmly than the commentariat, and the ships kept sailing. Whether or not the Israeli-Iranian cease-fire declared by U.S. President Donald Trump holds, the shipping industry’s storm-weathered managers offer an example of how to keep calm in a crisis.
On June 22—just hours after U.S. bombers struck Fordo, Natanz, and Esfahan—the Majlis (Iran’s parliament) declared that Iran should close the Strait of Hormuz. But that doesn’t mean that it’s actually going to happen. Iranian politics and military command are deeply divided and messy, and such decision would be made by Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, not the Majlis.
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