ANALYSIS: The Strait of Hormuz, or How Iran Is Playing with the World’s Fire

Twenty percent. Think about what that really means.

Twenty percent of the world’s oil. The phrase has been repeated so often that it has lost its meaning. Let’s break it down. Saudi Arabia exports about 6.5 million barrels per day through the Strait. The United Arab Emirates, 2.5 million. Iraq, 3.5 million. Kuwait, 2 million. Qatar—the world’s leading exporter of liquefied natural gas—sends nearly all of its production through Hormuz. In 2024, the total volume passing through the strait was estimated at 21 million barrels per day. Twenty-one million barrels. Every day. If this flow stops for forty-eight hours, global strategic reserves begin to be tapped. If it lasts a week, industries grind to a halt. If it lasts a month, we’re talking about a global recession.

Ilham, a 34-year-old mother of three in Amman, Jordan, doesn’t have any oil at home. She has a gas stove and a used car that allows her to drive her children to school. If the price of diesel doubles in two weeks—as happened in a simulation during crisis exercises conducted by the IEA in 2022—she’ll have to choose between driving and eating. She doesn’t know what the Strait of Hormuz is. She knows what it’s like to make ends meet at the end of the month. These two realities are now one and the same.

That is what geopolitical discussions about Hormuz systematically overlook: Ilham’s face, Ilham’s calculations, and her right not to suffer the consequences of a war of nerves between Washington and Tehran. We talk about barrels, basis points, and geopolitical tensions. We don’t talk about Ilham. That’s our way of protecting ourselves from what we’ve built.

The Gulf monarchies held hostage

The Saudi Arabia of Mohammed bin Salman—MBS, the man who ordered the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi at the consulate in Istanbul on October 2, 2018, and who was condemned by the CIA in its own November 2021 report—that very same Saudi Arabia is now held hostage by the strait it does not control. Riyadh has invested tens of billions of dollars in developing an alternative route—the East-West pipeline, known as “Petroline,” which transports 4.8 million barrels per day to the Red Sea by bypassing Hormuz. But this capacity is insufficient. Insufficient to compensate for a total closure. Insufficient to reassure the markets. And the Red Sea itself has become dangerous since the Houthis—funded, armed, and directed from Tehran—turned Yemeni waters into a war zone in November 2023, targeting dozens of commercial vessels.

And yet, MBS met with Iranian emissaries in Beijing in March 2023. Saudi Arabia and Iran have restored diplomatic relations, which had been severed since 2016. Riyadh has chosen economic survival over ideological confrontation. This is an admission. An admission that even Saudi firepower—the F-15s, Patriot missiles, and drones purchased from the Americans—offers no protection against a closure of the Strait of Hormuz. No one can fight against a closure of the Strait of Hormuz. That is why Iran keeps it as a last resort. And that is why it is enough.

The Guardians and Their Small, Fast Boats

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy is not a conventional navy. It does not seek to win a traditional naval battle against the U.S. Fifth Fleet based in Bahrain—a fleet equipped with aircraft carriers, Aegis destroyers, and nuclear submarines. Instead, it seeks to make it impossible to use the strait without incurring unacceptable losses. The doctrine is called “asymmetric warfare in the Strait” and is based on four pillars: swarms of fast patrol boats armed with anti-ship missiles, pre-positioned underwater mines, land-to-sea missiles launched from the Iranian coast, and kamikaze drones—of which Iran has become one of the world’s leading producers—exported as far as Russia and used against Ukrainian civilians in Kyiv since the fall of 2022.

In April 2024, Iran launched more than 300 drones and missiles against Israel. Most were intercepted. But the point was not effectiveness—it was capability. Tehran demonstrated what it was capable of on a large scale, in a coordinated manner, at night. The same logic applies to the Strait of Hormuz. The Revolutionary Guards do not need to completely seal off the strait. They need to make it dangerous enough that marine insurance companies refuse to cover cargo shipments. When Lloyd’s of London declares an area a “war risk zone”—as it did for the Red Sea in January 2024—ships stop of their own accord. Not a single shot needs to be fired.

There’s something chilling about this dynamic. Iran doesn’t even need to fight. All it has to do is make a credible threat. And it has built that credibility over forty years—by taking hostages, funding militias, firing missiles, and waiting. Patience as a strategy. Time as a weapon. That’s what keeps me awake.

The Price of Credibility: Forty Years of Calculated Terror

The Islamic Republic of Iran was founded on a logic of confrontation with the West. On November 4, 1979, sixty-six American diplomats were taken hostage at the embassy in Tehran. They would remain there for 444 days. Ayatollah Khomeini understood before anyone else what it meant to hold Americans captive: impunity. Carter lost the election. The rescue operation—Eagle Claw—failed in the desert on April 24, 1980, with eight American soldiers killed in a helicopter crash. Tehran learned that lesson and has never forgotten it: America hesitates. America calculates its losses. America cannot afford another Vietnam.

Since then, Iran has methodically and patiently built up its capacity to cause harm. Hezbollah in Lebanon—150,000 missiles aimed at Israel, according to IDF estimates. The Houthis in Yemen—who have sunk or damaged dozens of commercial ships in just a few months. Islamic Jihad in Gaza. Shiite militias in Iraq that attacked U.S. bases 165 times between October 2023 and January 2024, according to the Pentagon. Tehran has built an empire of plausible threats, financed at low cost, impossible to decapitate without triggering a regional war that no one wants. And the Strait of Hormuz is the jewel in that crown.

The drones killing people in Kyiv come from Tehran

Volodymyr Zelensky, 47, a former comedian who has become a symbol of resistance, sleeps—when he sleeps—in a bunker beneath the presidential palace in Kyiv. Since the fall of 2022, Shahed-136 drones—manufactured in Iran and dubbed “Geranium” by the Russians to conceal their origin—have struck dozens of Ukrainian cities. Power plants. Hospitals. Residential buildings. The distinctive sound of the Shahed’s piston engine—a deep, steady hum that Ukrainians have learned to recognize even in their sleep—has become the soundtrack to their nighttime terror. Olena, a 28-year-old schoolteacher in Kherson, says she wakes her children every time she hears that sound, even at 3 a.m., even if it turns out to be a truck on the highway. “The body no longer knows how to tell the difference,” she says. “The body has decided to be afraid all the time.”

Iran is supplying Putin’s Russia with the weapons that are killing Ukrainians. At the same time, Iran is threatening to close the strait through which the oil that finances the Western economies supporting Ukraine flows. This is no coincidence. It is a coherent strategy of global destabilization. Moscow, Tehran, Beijing: three capitals whose interests converge around a common goal—to weaken the West, not necessarily to destroy it, but to bleed it enough so that it abandons its allies one by one. Ukraine first. Taiwan next, perhaps. This is not a conspiracy theory. It is documented by treaties, arms shipments, UN votes, and official statements.

And yet we continue to treat these crises as separate. Hormuz on one side. Ukraine on the other. Gaza elsewhere. The Houthis on the sidelines. We lack the political vocabulary to say that this is the same war fought on different fronts. So we don’t use that vocabulary. We prefer managed discomfort to uncomfortable truth.

Putin needs the Strait of Hormuz just as much as Iran needs Putin

Since 2022, Russia has been selling its oil while circumventing Western sanctions—via India, via China, via “ghost ships” with no identifiable flag that traverse international waters with their transponders turned off. In 2024, Moscow exported approximately 7.5 million barrels per day of oil and petroleum products despite all the sanctions. A significant portion of these revenues—estimated at between $15 billion and $20 billion per month—directly funds the war in Ukraine: tanks, missiles, and soldiers, with mobilized troops paid $2,000 a month. This system works because oil prices remain high. They remain high because the Strait of Hormuz remains a threat. The cycle is complete. It is in Putin’s interest for Tehran to keep up the pressure on the strait. It is in Tehran’s interest for Putin to survive so it can continue to buy its weapons and provide him with diplomatic cover at the Security Council. This is not a formal alliance. It is a symbiotic relationship for survival.

And Trump, in the midst of all this, says he is “dissatisfied.” He may genuinely be so. But dissatisfaction is not foreign policy. It is not a strategy. It is not deterrence. It does not protect Olena in Kherson, nor Ilham in Amman, nor the crews of oil tankers crossing the Strait of Hormuz at 6 knots while watching the Iranian coastline on their radar.

Reopening Something That Was Never Officially Closed

Here’s what you need to know about the “reopening” of the Strait of Hormuz that Trump is talking about: Iran has never officially closed the strait. The threat was merely brandished. Large-scale military exercises were conducted—in 2012, 2019, and 2023. Ships were seized—the British oil tanker Stena Impero in July 2019, the South Korean oil tanker Hankuk Chemi in January 2021. Mines were planted on tankers in 2019 in the Gulf of Oman—the United States accused Iran, and Tehran denied it. But an official, declared, total closure? Never. Because that would be an act of war. Because it would trigger a U.S. military intervention. Because Iran doesn’t need to do that.

The threat is enough. The threat is the weapon. When Iran says, “We could close the strait,” marine insurance premiums skyrocket. Oil prices rise. Western heads of state call emergency meetings. All of this without a single shot being fired. And when Iran then says, “We’re going to reopen the strait”—as if it had been closed—it’s the same mechanism in reverse. It takes credit for a de-escalation that it itself has fabricated. Trump is “unhappy” about this because he has figured out the game. Or because his advisors have explained it to him. Or both.

There is something almost admirable about the sophistication of this structural lie. Iran doesn’t need to lie about the facts. It simply needs to redefine the framework within which the facts exist. The “reopening” of a strait that was never officially closed—that’s Orwell in geopolitical form. And we, meanwhile, are discussing the terms of this reopening as if it were real. We have accepted the terms of the debate they have chosen.

Why Trump Can’t “Resolve” Hormuz

Donald Trump loves deals. He has built his political identity on this image—the negotiator, the man who gets things done. He said he would settle the war in Ukraine in twenty-four hours. It has been going on for more than three years. He said he would bring peace to the Middle East. Gaza is burning. He now says he is “dissatisfied” with the Iranian plan for the Strait of Hormuz—which implies that there is an Iranian plan he could approve if it were different. Applying this “deal” logic to the Strait of Hormuz reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of what this crisis is all about. Iran is not seeking an agreement on the Strait of Hormuz. It is seeking the lifting of sanctions. It is seeking recognition of its right to enrich uranium. It is seeking an end to the U.S. military presence in the Gulf. These are not negotiating positions. They are existential conditions for the mullahs’ regime.

And Trump—who tightened sanctions in 2018, who killed Soleimani in 2020, who promised “maximum pressure”—is not in a position to grant them without completely betraying his own principles. This is not a criticism. It is a structural constraint. There can be no deal on the Strait of Hormuz without a nuclear deal. There can be no nuclear deal without the lifting of sanctions. And there can be no lifting of sanctions without verifiable guarantees that Iran will not build a nuclear weapon. Iran will not provide those guarantees. It’s a vicious cycle.

Brussels watched the tankers pass by without saying a word

Europe imports about 14% of its oil from the Persian Gulf. Since 2022, it has reduced its dependence on Russian oil—it has increased its imports from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Iraq. All of this replacement oil passes through the Strait of Hormuz. The irony is cruel: in seeking to wean itself off Moscow, Europe has made itself more vulnerable to Tehran. It has replaced one dependency with another—one that is more volatile, less predictable, and controlled by a regime that funds militias killing NATO soldiers through proxy militias in Iraq and Syria.

And yet, Europe has no coherent policy on the Strait of Hormuz. There are statements. Condemnations. “Deep concerns” expressed by Josep Borrell, the former High Representative for Foreign Affairs, whose statements had the texture of cotton and the effectiveness of the same material against an underwater mine. Operation Aspides—deployed in the Red Sea in early 2024 to protect commercial shipping from Houthi attacks—is a start. It is a start. After forty years of Iranian threats to the strait, a start in 2024 is also an admission of being behind the curve.

I think of Ursula von der Leyen announcing “robust sanctions” against Iran for its drone shipments to Russia. Sanctions. Against a country that enriches uranium to 60%, that holds the world’s oil hostage, that finances a war in Europe. Sanctions. There must be a word for this disconnect between the gravity of a threat and the lightness of the response. I can’t find it. Perhaps because it doesn’t exist yet.

The moment when Europe must choose

The real question isn’t what Trump thinks of the Iranian plan. The real question is: what is Europe prepared to do if Iran actually closes the strait? Not a threat. An actual closure. Forty-eight hours. Seventy-two hours. A week. What strategic reserves? What military capability to forcibly reopen it? What solidarity with Gulf partners? Europe has no ready answer. It has contingency plans sitting in drawers that no one wants to open because opening those drawers would mean admitting the gravity of the risk.

Khalid, 52, captain of a Maltese-flagged oil tanker carrying Saudi crude to Rotterdam, has crossed the Strait of Hormuz 47 times in twelve years. He says the atmosphere has changed. “Before, we’d look at the Iranian coastline on the radar and keep going. Now, we look at it differently. We know there are missile batteries over there. We know the Revolutionary Guards are patrolling. We make the crossing. But we’re less certain we’ll make it back than we used to be.” He says this without drama. As a matter of fact. His throat tightens a little at certain points during the passage. He doesn’t say it. His hands on the helm say it for him.

Beijing is buying Iranian oil and waiting

There is one major player missing from this story, and its absence is as loud as an accusation. China imports about 90% of its oil from the Middle East, including a significant portion from Iran—officially under sanctions, but unofficially via intermediaries at prices discounted by 15 to 20%. Beijing is the leading buyer of Iranian oil. Without China, U.S. sanctions would have suffocated Tehran. With China, they are a manageable nuisance. It is Xi Jinping—the architect of this arrangement—who has the greatest interest in ensuring that the situation in the Gulf remains unstable without escalating into open war. Instability means oil prices rise, his American adversaries are distracted, and his supply of Iranian crude at preferential rates continues. Stability means no military conflagration that would effectively cut off his supply routes.

China brokered the reconciliation between Iran and Saudi Arabia in March 2023. It is positioning itself as a peacemaking power in a region where the United States has served as the policeman for fifty years. It does not want peace. It wants the image of peace. The difference is fundamental, and Beijing cultivates it with a mastery that the West observes with a mixture of admiration and helplessness. While Trump tweets his dissatisfaction and Europe issues strong condemnations, China signs oil agreements, builds ports, lends money, and waits.

This is where the dynamics become truly dizzying. The West’s adversary—Beijing—is financing the West’s adversary—Tehran—which threatens the maritime route on which the West depends. And the West is squabbling over the terms of its response while the pieces are being moved. We live to fight, we fight to live—but they have chosen a third path: letting others fight and living off their battles.

Iranian oil that funds everything we hate

Let’s get back to the numbers. In 2024, Iran exported an average of 1.5 to 1.7 million barrels per day—mainly to China—despite U.S. sanctions. At $80 per barrel, that’s about $45 billion a year in oil revenues. It is these revenues that fund the Revolutionary Guards. The Revolutionary Guards fund Hezbollah—with an annual budget estimated at between $700 million and $1 billion, according to the U.S. Treasury. They fund the Houthis—providing weapons, training, and intelligence. They fund the Iraqi militias that have killed American soldiers. They fund the production of drones that kill Ukrainians.

The causal chain is direct. Documented. Undisputed. Every barrel of Iranian oil purchased by China helps fund the destruction of Ukraine, the destabilization of Lebanon, and attacks on ships in the Red Sea. And China continues to buy. And the sanctions don’t fundamentally change anything. And Trump says he’s unhappy. And Europe condemns the actions. And Khalid crosses the strait with his hands clenched on the helm.

The Tanker War, 1984–1988: When Things Almost Exploded

We’ve been through this before. Between 1984 and 1988, during the Iran-Iraq War, 451 commercial vessels were attacked in the Persian Gulf. Both sides targeted oil tankers to deprive their adversary of revenue. Iran laid mines, attacked tankers with helicopters, and fired missiles from its coastline. The United States escorted Kuwaiti oil tankers that had been “reflagged” under the American flag. In April 1988, the U.S. Navy conducted Operation Mantis—the largest U.S. surface naval battle since World War II—in response to Iranian mine-laying that had damaged a U.S. frigate. In a single day, the U.S. Navy sank two Iranian frigates and a gunboat and damaged several other vessels. Iran backed down. But it did not forget.

It learned the opposite lesson: do not engage the U.S. Navy in a head-on battle. Develop asymmetric capabilities. Swarms of small, fast boats. Sophisticated mines. Long-range anti-ship missiles. Drones. Forty years later, Iran may still lose a conventional naval battle against the Fifth Fleet. But it can make the cost of that battle high enough to make Washington hesitate. That is all it seeks. That is all it needs.

There is something almost mathematical about the way Iran has learned from every confrontation with the West to build a more effective deterrent. We strike. They absorb the blow. They adapt. They come back more dangerous. We have no doctrine for confronting an adversary that turns every defeat into a lesson. We have one for confronting armies—not war-as-institution.

The JCPOA Is Dead, and What We’ve Put in Its Place

In 2015, the JCPOA—the nuclear agreement signed between Iran, the United States, Russia, China, France, the United Kingdom, and Germany—limited Iran’s enrichment to 3.67%, its stockpile of enriched uranium to 300 kilograms, and the number of centrifuges to 5,060. In exchange: the lifting of some economic sanctions. The IAEA inspected Iranian sites and concluded that Iran was complying with its obligations. It wasn’t peace. It was a framework. A space for mutual observation that allowed for verification.

Trump tore up this framework in May 2018. Iran waited a year—hoping the Europeans would offset the U.S. sanctions—and then resumed enrichment. Since 2021, Iran has been enriching uranium to 60%. It has installed advanced IR-6 centrifuges, which are eight times more efficient than the older models. It has built new facilities beneath Fordow—carved into the mountain, out of reach of conventional U.S. and perhaps Israeli bombs. In 2018, Iran was one year away from a hypothetical nuclear bomb. In 2025, it is just a few weeks away if the political decision were made. This is what we have replaced the JCPOA with: nothing. And an expression of dissatisfaction.

Military Options and Their Real-World Consequences

Options exist on paper. The U.S. Fifth Fleet in Bahrain has the firepower to reopen the strait by force if Iran were to attempt to close it. Aircraft carriers, Aegis warships equipped with interceptor missiles, submarines. Iran’s conventional military defeat is certain. But the consequences of such a victory are less certain. Hezbollah has 150,000 missiles aimed at Israel—and the order to fire would come from Tehran within the first few hours of a U.S. strike. Shiite militias in Iraq would attack U.S. bases in Baghdad, Erbil, and Al-Tanf. The Houthis would step up their strikes in the Red Sea. A limited strike against Iran could trigger a regional war engulfing five countries simultaneously. This is the calculation Tehran has been making for forty years. That is why deterrence works both ways.

The Trump administration—with Pete Hegseth at the Pentagon and Marco Rubio at the State Department—is ideologically more prepared for a tougher confrontation with Iran than the Biden administration. But the generals, for their part, are doing their own calculations. Admiral Christopher Grady, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff through 2025, has repeatedly stated in congressional hearings that any military option against Iran would have “significant regional consequences.” Translated from military jargon: it would go beyond what we think we can control.

We always come back to the same point. Iran has built a network of threats so interconnected that it’s impossible to strike one without triggering the others. It’s a malevolent and patient genius. And in the face of this, we have presidents who vent their dissatisfaction on social media and ministers who issue strong condemnations. I’m not saying there’s an easy solution. I’m saying there’s probably no solution at all within the current framework. And that’s the truth we’re not telling.

Negotiation, or How to Give Iran What It Wants While Calling It a Deal

There is still the diplomatic route. The nuclear negotiations. The rounds in Rome and Moscow. The emissaries meeting in luxury hotels while missiles streak across the Ukrainian sky and oil tankers sail along the Iranian coast with frightened crews. These negotiations are not about the Strait of Hormuz. They are about nuclear power. But the Strait of Hormuz is always in the room—invisible, looming, real. Iran knows it cannot negotiate from a position of weakness. It is not in a position of weakness. It controls the strait. It has the militias. It has the drones. It has time.

A possible agreement exists in theory: a gradual lifting of sanctions in exchange for a gradual return to the limits of the JCPOA with strengthened verification mechanisms. This hypothetical agreement would mean that the United States implicitly recognizes Iran’s right to enrich uranium for civilian purposes. Israel will oppose it. The U.S. Congress will oppose it. The Republicans will denounce it as a capitulation. And the mullahs in Tehran will call it a victory—because, objectively speaking, it will be one for them. That’s the trap. That’s why Trump is “dissatisfied.” Because all the available options seem unsatisfactory to him. Because they are.

We have built a world in which Tehran holds the reins

Here is what forty years of energy policy, oil realpolitik, and geopolitical complacency have produced: a theocratic regime that funds terrorism, arms Ukraine’s enemies, enriches uranium to 60%, and violates the fundamental rights of its citizens—with hundreds of protesters killed since Mahsa Amini’s death in September 2022 — holds in its hands a decisive share of global economic stability. This is not an aberration. It is the logical result of choices made over the past forty years. Choices driven by convenience. Short-term choices. Choices to turn a blind eye to what was building up.

We have built our cities, our industries, and our transportation systems on a dependence on oil that we have failed to secure. We have allowed a threat to develop that we have failed to contain. We watched Iran build its militias, its drones, its missiles, its networks, and we called it “a complex problem.” That was our way of absolving ourselves. Complexity as a moral exoneration. And today, Trump is “dissatisfied” with Iran’s plan for the Strait of Hormuz, and we read about it on our phones between notifications, and we move on to something else.

I’d like to end on a note of hope. I can’t. Not because hope doesn’t exist—it always does, somewhere, in the resilience of the Iranians who take to the streets knowing the cost, in the negotiators who continue to talk to one another despite everything, in the crews who cross the strait every day. But hope doesn’t change structures. It doesn’t reopen closed refineries. It doesn’t secure shipping lanes. Hope, here, is necessary but insufficient. And to say otherwise would be to lie to you.

What We Owe to Those Condemned by This Geography

Narges Mohammadi, a 51-year-old Iranian lawyer specializing in the defense of women’s rights, has been arrested thirteen times and sentenced to 31 years in prison and 154 lashes for defending women’s right not to wear the veil. She received the 2023 Nobel Peace Prize from her cell at Evin Prison in Tehran. She was unable to go to Oslo to accept her prize. Her daughter accepted it on her behalf. It is this very regime that controls the Strait of Hormuz. It is this very regime that Trump says he is “dissatisfied” with regarding the plan. This is not a nuance. It is the crux of the matter.

What we owe to Narges Mohammadi, to Olena in Kherson, to Ilham in Amman, and to Khalid on his oil tanker is, at the very least, clarity. To call things as they are. To name who is doing this. To name what our choices—collective, political, and energy-related—have made possible. That isn’t solving the problem. But it is refusing to keep pretending that it is something other than what it is.

The Strait of Hormuz is thirty-three kilometers of sea. And behind those thirty-three kilometers lie forty years of decisions we didn’t want to make.

Signed, Maxime Marquette, columnist