Arthur Michelino
The Strait of Hormuz is the point at which approximately one fifth of the world’s traded oil passes through a corridor 21 nautical miles wide, flanked on one side by Iran and the other by Oman. For 70 years, the implicit guarantee that this passage would remain open rested on a single assumption, namely that the United States had both the interest and the willingness to maintain it. The Iran war has exposed what this assumption had long kept from view, that Washington’s willingness to maintain the guarantee has always been contingent on its own stake in the system it is guaranteeing.
On 20 April, Trump posted that Iranian leadership had “forced hundreds of Ships toward the United States, mostly Texas, Louisiana, and Alaska, to get their Oil.” The formulation is analytically significant beyond its rhetorical register. It frames the near closure of a critical energy chokepoint as a condition generating commercial advantage for US producers, one whose resolution is incidental to that advantage. The structural question that formulation raises is how Washington arrived at a position where the disruption of a waterway carrying one fifth of global oil trade could be read as an outcome consistent with its strategic interests. The answer lies in the doctrine that preceded the war, not in the war itself.
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