Adam Hanieh
Amid the destruction of the US–Israeli war against Iran, much of the world’s attention has fixed on the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow passage through which roughly a fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas passes. In normal times ships traversing the Strait—which runs between Oman and the United Arab Emirates on one bank and Iran on the other—follow a pair of two-mile-wide lanes for inbound and outbound traffic, separated by a two-mile buffer. Shortly after the onset of the war Iran began attacking commercial vessels and laying mines in the waterway, effectively shutting it to most marine traffic. As of March 18 around 3,200 ships were stranded in the Gulf, with only a handful of tankers permitted to pass each day.
The disruption of this vital artery has sent markets into convulsions, with the international price benchmark for Brent crude oil briefly surging to nearly $120 a barrel on March 9, its highest level since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sparked panic. Donald Trump has urged Western allies to help escort tankers through the Strait in an effort to keep prices in check, so far finding no takers; more recently he has threatened to strike Iran’s power plants if its government refuses to reopen the waterway. Oil, in this sense, has become a proxy for the war’s nearly incalculable costs.
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