ANALYSIS: The Strait of Hormuz Under Siege — When 55 Kilometers of Sea Determine the Fate of the World

Hanane, 34, undergoes dialysis twice a week in Tehran

On April 26, the UN issued a warning about shortages of medical supplies in Iran, a direct consequence of the U.S. blockade that is cutting off imports. Hanane Sadeghi, 34, a dialysis nurse at Imam Khomeini Hospital in Tehran, knows what this means. Dialysis bags are starting to run out. Single-use filters are being reused—something that international protocols strictly prohibit. Patients who come twice a week are starting to hear that they may have to space out their sessions. For someone with kidney failure, spacing out dialysis sessions means allowing toxins to build up in the blood. It means dying more slowly, more painfully, in a hospital that can no longer do its job. Hanane doesn’t get involved in politics. She changes the filters and counts the remaining bags.

The blockade is hitting both sides simultaneously. The Iranian people, who have no say in the decisions of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, are paying the price for the sanctions and the counter-blockade. The people of Southeast Asia are paying the price for the Iranian blockade. Both populations are hostages. Both governments—Washington and Tehran—portray their adversary as the executioner and present themselves as the defender. The civilians, meanwhile, are counting the days and the missing medications.

We must call this out clearly: when a government uses a population’s access to medical care as a bargaining chip in a geopolitical standoff—whether it involves U.S. sanctions or the Iranian blockade—it is a form of violence against the innocent. Not a metaphor. A documented, ongoing medical reality.

The prediction market puts the odds at 13.5%. That number hides lives.

Prediction markets are fascinating in their unintentional cynicism. There’s a 13.5% probability that traffic will return to normal by May 15. A 13.5-cent contract offers a 7.4-fold return if it settles in the positive. Daily trading volumes of $36,459 are being traded on the question of whether millions of barrels of oil will flow or not. It takes $4,658 to move this market by 5 points. These are cold, precise figures, disconnected from any human reality. And yet, these figures reveal something that diplomatic statements do not: the people putting their money on the line do not believe in a quick resolution. And these people have access to far more information than what governments release.

The market’s plunge following Trump’s announcements—from 72% to 53% in a single day, on April 25—is the most stark signal. Traders who were betting on a U.S. announcement lifting the blockade by the end of May lost confidence en masse within 24 hours. Something happened. A negotiation had failed. A diplomatic signal had been misinterpreted. An ultimatum had expired. We don’t know exactly what. But a 19-point drop in probability doesn’t happen without a reason. And on April 26, an Iranian proposal for a partial reopening arrived—too little, too late, and too conditional to sustain a lasting market rebound.

What the U.S. President Can and Cannot Do

Donald Trump announced the U.S. blockade of Iranian ports with the conviction of a man who believes that economic and military force alone is enough to bring any adversary to its knees. He has been right about many adversaries. Iran is not just any adversary. Iran has forty years of experience with U.S. maximum pressure. Forty years of sanctions, isolation, and threats. Forty years that have taught Tehran one essential lesson: holding out is costly, but giving in is even more costly. A government that yields to U.S. military pressure will not survive the wrath of its own people. A government that resists, even in pain, remains standing.

Trump is trapped by his own logic. He announced the blockade as a measure of maximum pressure. Withdrawing it without a diplomatic victory would be a monumental public humiliation in a year when every decision is under scrutiny. But maintaining it costs the global economy billions a day—including the U.S. economy, Gulf allies, and Asian partners who are beginning to look with concern at their oil reserves. The White House convened an emergency meeting in the Situation Room on April 15. The results of that meeting were not made public. That silence is the most revealing outcome of all.

There is something dizzying about this moment. Trump has built his entire foreign policy on the predictability of unpredictability—being the man who cannot be read. But now, it is Iran that is unpredictable. And that is something Trump did not anticipate.

The allies are watching. Not knowing what to do.

Europe is watching the Strait of Hormuz as one might watch a fire when one doesn’t have the keys to the fire hydrant. France, Germany, and the United Kingdom—the three major European powers that still maintain a dialogue with Tehran under the now-defunct JCPOA—have stepped up their calls for de-escalation. These calls have had no measurable effect. Paris has offered to mediate. Tehran has responded that mediation would be welcome if Washington first lifted the blockade. Washington has replied that the blockade would end once Tehran complied with it. The diplomatic loop is closed. The Europeans are circling within this loop, searching for a door that does not yet exist.

China, which imports massive amounts of Iranian oil and signed a 25-year strategic partnership agreement with Tehran in 2021, is in an even more delicate position. Beijing cannot openly support the blockade of Iran—Iran is its supplier. Beijing cannot oppose it head-on—confrontation with Washington is not in its immediate interest. So Beijing is doing what it does best in crises: it is calling for restraint on both sides, offering its good offices, and continuing behind the scenes to find ways to route its tankers without passing through the strait. The Arctic route. The Kazakh pipeline. The costly alternatives in a world that is fracturing.

Alternative Pipelines and Their Limitations

Saudi Arabia has the IPSA—the Arabization Pipeline—which can transport 5 million barrels per day to the Red Sea, bypassing the strait. This pipeline has been operating at full capacity since April 23. Five million barrels per day. That’s significant. It’s also less than a third of what normally passes through Hormuz. The United Arab Emirates has its own pipeline to Fujairah, on the coast of the Arabian Sea. Maximum capacity: 1.5 million barrels per day. Kuwait, Qatar, and Iraq—they have no alternative. Their exports are blocked as long as the Strait remains closed. The markets had already factored this in even before governments publicly acknowledged it.

The price of a barrel of Brent crude surpassed $110 on April 24. It stabilized around $108 as of April 26—a stabilization attributable to the strategic reserves that consumer governments have begun to release and to the global economic slowdown that this very oil shock is beginning to cause. This is the cruel paradox of prolonged oil shocks: they destroy the very demand they sought to capitalize on. A price of $110 per barrel slows down the global economy. A slowing global economy consumes less oil. The price stabilizes—but at a level that devastates the most fragile economies, those with neither strategic reserves nor fiscal leeway.

There is one country that no one is thinking about in this crisis: Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka—countries that import all of their oil, have no strategic reserves, and will suffer the consequences of this closed strait far more devastatingly than France or the United States. Their suffering won’t make the headlines. It will shape the daily lives of hundreds of millions of people.

Southeast Asia Under Pressure—The Forgotten Victims of the Crisis

Before the blockade, Japan imported 87% of its oil from the Persian Gulf via the Strait of Hormuz. South Korea imported 72%. India imported 65%. These three major economies are currently calculating how many weeks their strategic reserves will last before their industries begin to slow down. On April 22, Japan activated its emergency oil mechanism for the first time since 2011—since Fukushima. South Korea has held emergency meetings between its Ministry of Energy and the major industrial chaebols. India, whose Prime Minister Modi is visiting Washington this week, is holding private talks with the Trump administration that have nothing to do with the official items on the agenda.

Asia is the real blind spot in this crisis. All media coverage is focused on Washington, Tehran, and Israel. But the most lasting consequences of this blockade will play out in Tokyo, Seoul, Mumbai, and Dhaka. It is these economies that will restructure their supply chains. It is these governments that will accelerate their plans for energy independence—a process that will take years, too late for this crisis. It is these populations that will pay the price for a confrontation in which they play no role and have no say.

What Tehran Has Proposed—and Why It Isn’t Enough

In the final hours of April 26, Iran proposed a plan for the partial reopening of the strait. The details remain vague—deliberately so. Tehran is an expert in the art of making flexible proposals: concrete enough to demonstrate flexibility, yet vague enough to concede nothing of substance. What we know: The proposal makes any reopening contingent on U.S. guarantees that it will not carry out military strikes against Iranian territory. What we don’t know: the exact guarantees requested, the proposed timeline, and the verification mechanism. Prediction markets reacted slightly to this news—the probability of normalization by May 15 briefly rose to 16.5%—before stabilizing. The reaction speaks volumes: traders saw a diplomatic opening, not a resolution.

Washington did not officially respond to this proposal in the hours that followed. The 13-hour silence between the Iranian announcement and the first U.S. reaction says it all. The Trump administration is assessing whether this proposal can be presented as a diplomatic victory—which it needs—without appearing to be a capitulation—which it cannot afford. This window for negotiation is narrow. It may last 48 hours before one side or the other closes it by declaring that the other has rejected its good-faith overtures.

This is the most dangerous moment in a crisis: when a door opens just a crack, but both sides are too rigid, too public in their positions, too locked into their respective narratives to walk through that door without losing face. The next 48 hours will be decisive. And no one in the capitals involved will really sleep.

General Kurilla is watching. And waiting for a signal.

General Michael Kurilla, commander of CENTCOM since 2022, is the man with the most information and the least leeway. He sees ship movements in real time. He monitors intercepted Iranian communications. He knows where the mines are laid. He knows how many anti-ship missiles are deployed along the Iranian coast. And he knows that any U.S. military action in the strait risks escalating into something neither his government nor its regional allies can control. His mission, right now, is to maintain enough pressure to force Tehran to negotiate, without crossing the threshold that would turn a crisis into open war. It is the most difficult mission of his entire career. He’s holding his ground. For now.

The U.S. Marines patrolling the Persian Gulf on April 26 have an average age of 20. They do not yet know what their superiors know. They know they are deployed in waters that may be mined, facing Iranian forces that have repeatedly demonstrated their ability to harass U.S. Navy ships. In 2019, the Revolutionary Guards seized a British tanker in these same waters. In 2024, they attacked a cargo ship linked to Israeli interests. There is a precedent. The tension is real. And these young sailors, somewhere between Bahrain and Oman, bear the weight of decisions made in crisis rooms 10,000 kilometers away from their positions.

Market Language as a Diplomatic Indicator

A drop from 20% to 13.5% in 24 hours isn’t just a market figure. It’s a condensed summary of an entire day’s diplomatic failure. Something happened on April 25—a conversation that broke down, an ultimatum that expired, a mediator who walked away—and traders who had bet on a quick resolution realized they were wrong. It takes just $4,658 to move this market by 5 points. That’s not a lot of money for a decision worth billions a day in global oil trade. But it’s enough to gauge, in real time, what informed people really think of the situation—without the filters of official statements, without the rhetoric of spokespeople, without the facade of optimism.

At 13.5%, the markets are saying this: there’s a one-in-seven chance that the strait will reopen within the next three weeks. A six-in-seven chance that the crisis will drag on beyond May 15. A six-in-seven chance that Asian economies will continue to draw on their reserves. A six-in-seven chance that the price of oil will remain above $100. A six-in-seven chance that Hanane Sadeghi is still counting her bags of dialysate in Tehran. And that the families of the 38 crews turned back by the U.S. Navy continue to wait for news of ships stranded in uncertain waters.

13.5%. That’s the probability that something fundamental will change in the next three weeks. And as I read that figure, I think of all those who don’t have the luxury of speculating on probabilities—those for whom the reopening or closure of this strait isn’t a contract on Polymarket but their next meal, their next dose of medicine, their next week of work.

April 7 is already a distant memory. A return to normalcy is slipping further away.

Less than three weeks ago, on April 7, 2026, the Strait of Hormuz was operating normally. Tankers were passing through. Insurers were calculating standard premiums. The economies of Southeast Asia were receiving their oil on schedule. Hanane Sadeghi in Tehran had the necessary supplies for her patients. General Kurilla was sleeping his standard six hours. That normality has vanished. It will return—not with a 13.5% probability by May 15, but it will return. Straits do not remain closed indefinitely. Economies find alternatives. Negotiations will eventually break the deadlock. But between now and that return to normalcy, there will have been deaths—patients who didn’t receive their dialysis treatments, sailors who sailed through mined waters, populations who suffered the economic violence of a crisis in which they played no part.

And that—that is what the West will not talk about. It will talk about oil prices, CENTCOM, prediction markets, and Trump’s next tweet. It won’t talk about 34-year-old Hanane Sadeghi, who is replacing her used filters for the second time because there are no new ones left. This woman doesn’t exist in any of the charts that policymakers rely on to make their decisions.

A civilization whose existence depends on 55 kilometers

We must pause to consider this fact and face it head-on without downplaying it: our civilization—the global industrial civilization that feeds eight billion people, heats their homes, powers their airplanes, and keeps their ambulances running—rests in part on a 55-kilometer corridor whose two banks are controlled by states hostile to the West. This is not a geopolitical curiosity. It is a structural vulnerability that we have chosen to maintain for decades because it was profitable in the short term.

The energy transitions that Europe has been advocating for the past ten years are not just a matter of climate change. They are a matter of basic sovereignty. Every offshore wind turbine in the North Sea, every solar panel on European rooftops, every nuclear power plant kept in operation, every investment in geothermal heating networks is a kilometer of freedom wrested from the Strait of Hormuz. Every time we have put off these investments because they were too expensive in the short term, we have strengthened Iran’s grip on our energy future. We are paying the price for that now.

For years, we were told that the energy transition was costly. No one presented us with the bill for not making a choice. Here it is. It’s $108 a barrel. It’s in the hospitals of Tehran that are running out of supplies. It’s in the shipyards of South Korea that are slowing down. It’s in the eyes of Hanane Sadeghi as she counts her air filters. The energy transition wasn’t a luxury. It was insurance we refused to pay for.

And we all just kept scrolling

There’s something we all need to admit about this crisis. We saw it coming. Signs of tension around the Strait of Hormuz have been mounting since 2019. Every clash, every incident, every ship seizure, every threat from Tehran against freedom of navigation—we saw it. We read the articles. We looked at the charts. And we scrolled past to the next notification. Not just us, the readers. Our governments, too. The pension funds that keep investing in Gulf oil with no exit strategy. The insurance companies that offer standard premiums right up until the last moment. The economists who model the risks of supply disruptions and then tuck their models away in a drawer because the results are uncomfortable.

And yet, when the strait closes, everyone pretends to be surprised. The shock of surprise is a form of institutionalized denial. We knew. We didn’t want to know what we knew.

24 Hours of a Crisis Taking Hold

At 3:48 a.m. Dubai time, prediction markets register a brief spike of 2 points. A rumor of secret negotiations between an Omani intermediary and an Iranian representative. The rumor lasts 22 minutes. It fizzles out. At 7:15 a.m., the first satellite images of the day show six tankers waiting off the coast of Fujairah—there had been three the day before. At 9:30 a.m., the UN issues its alert regarding medical supplies in Iran. At 11:00 a.m., an Iranian spokesperson reiterates that the blockade remains in place. At 2:00 p.m., Washington did not respond to Iran’s proposal for a partial reopening. At 3:50 p.m., the market spiked by 5 points on Trump’s announcement—a brief surge followed by a sell-off. At 6:00 p.m., Brent crude closed at $108.40. At 10:30 p.m., Asian markets opened slightly lower. The strait remains closed.

Between these figures, between these hours, people made decisions. Ship captains decided to wait rather than attempt the passage. Medical officials in Tehran decided which patients would receive full dialysis and which would have to wait. Negotiators hung up the phone. Admirals watched radar screens. And somewhere, Hanane Sadeghi closed her clinic at 8:00 p.m. and went home—to a city under pressure, a country under blockade, a world revolving around 55 kilometers of sea.

What haunts me about this crisis isn’t the 13.5%. It isn’t the $108-a-barrel oil price. It’s the continuity of ordinary life amid the extraordinary. Markets close. People go home. Families have dinner. The crisis continues to play out in crisis rooms and on radar screens. And tomorrow morning, 55 kilometers of sea will still be there, closed or open, with their mines, their warships, and their 20-year-old sailors.

Tomorrow—the Decisive 48 Hours

April 27 and 28 will be the 48 hours that determine the course of the next three weeks. Either Washington responds to the Iranian proposal and negotiations begin—imperfect, conditional, fragile, but negotiations nonetheless. Or Washington rejects or ignores the proposal, and the blockade takes hold for a period extending beyond May 15. Prediction markets have delivered their preliminary verdict: a 16.5% chance of normalization. General Kurilla has his orders. European diplomats have their phones. Iran has its proposal. And the strait, for its part, waits for humans to decide whether they prefer diplomacy or stalemate.

There are 21 days until May 15. 21 days during which strategic reserves will continue to dwindle. 21 days during which hospitals in Tehran will be counting their supplies. 21 days during which the families of the detained sailors will be waiting for news. 21 days of dwindling probabilities. And perhaps, during those 21 days, there will be a moment when someone in a room somewhere—in Muscat, Geneva, Washington, or Tehran—will say something that will make those 55 kilometers of sea navigable once again.

The Iranian blockade is rational. That is the real problem.

It’s very tempting to portray this crisis as the result of Iranian irrationality—of a fanatical regime holding the global economy hostage for ideological reasons. That would be wrong. And this misconception prevents us from understanding why this crisis is so difficult to resolve. Iran is acting rationally. Iran possesses a weapon—control of the Strait of Hormuz—that forty years of sanctions have failed to take away from it. This weapon is the only bargaining chip that forces the major powers to the negotiating table. Without it, Iran is an isolated, sanctioned country with no acknowledged operational nuclear capability and no formal military alliance. With it, Iran is the most important player in the world right now.

We do not resolve this crisis by hoping that Iran will behave irrationally. We resolve it by understanding its logic and finding a way to satisfy that logic without sacrificing the principles that define us. This is no simple task. There is no ready-made formula. There is no solution that comes at no cost to anyone. There are conflicting interests, populations held hostage, sailors at sea, and 55 kilometers of water waiting to be restored to its primary purpose: allowing ships to pass through.

What no one dares to say: the West has had the means to resolve this crisis from the very beginning. The diplomatic channels exist. The intermediaries—Omani and Qatari—exist. What’s missing is the political will to make the necessary concessions without calling them concessions. It’s as much a problem of language as it is of geopolitics. And people are dying while we search for the right words.

Oman holds the key—and no one is reaching out to it enough

The Sultan of Oman, Haitham bin Tariq Al Said, is the only leader in the world who maintains normal diplomatic relations with Iran, the United States, and Israel simultaneously. Muscat has been the hub of secret negotiations for forty years—it was there that the U.S.-Iranian contacts leading up to the JCPOA began. It is there that unofficial messages continue to circulate when all official channels are cut off. Oman is, at this moment, the most important player in this crisis—and yet the one we hear the least about. If the strait reopens, the key will likely come from Muscat—from a discreet, unannounced conversation between two delegations that will never admit to having met.

And yet, Oman is geographically adjacent to the strait. Its territorial waters border the shipping lane. Its economic stability depends on freedom of navigation. Its Sultan has everything to gain from a swift resolution and everything to lose from a war in its territorial waters. It is the perfect intermediary. And if prediction markets rise in the coming hours, it will be because someone, somewhere, will have picked up the phone to call Muscat.

The Strait of Hormuz has been closed long enough for everyone to realize that this problem won’t resolve itself. It has been open long enough in our collective memory for us to have forgotten just how much our entire world depends on 55 kilometers of sea over which we have no control. This crisis is not an anomaly. It is the logical consequence of decades of willful energy dependence, postponed energy transitions, and structural vulnerabilities that were ignored because they were not yet considered emergencies.

Hanane Sadeghi, 34, a nurse in Tehran, is counting her dialysis filters tonight. She has enough for four days. Maybe five. Prediction markets put the odds at 16.5%. General Kurilla stares at his screens. And somewhere deep in the Persian Gulf, 20-year-old sailors are patrolling waters they don’t fully understand, for reasons their heads of state have explained to them in simple—and false—terms.

The Strait of Hormuz was open 19 days ago. It could reopen in 48 hours, if someone picks up the phone in Muscat. It could remain closed until June, if no one figures out how to let everyone save face. Between these two scenarios, there is no destiny. There are only human decisions—cowardly or courageous, calculated or reckless—made by people who never see Hanane Sadeghi as a role model.

And Hanane Sadeghi herself has no role models. She just has four days’ worth of filters. Maybe five.

By Maxime Marquette, columnist