The Strait of Hormuz is somewhat back open. Tankers are seemingly creeping through, their transponders blinking again for the first time since late February, when US and Israeli warplanes lit up the Iranian coast and Tehran retaliated by slamming the door on the world’s most important oil chokepoint. From: The Wyoming Star News.
The US and Iran have signed a 14-point memorandum of understanding, brokered by Pakistan, that extends a fragile ceasefire for 60 days, lifts the American naval blockade, and promises toll-free passage. The world exhaled, oil prices cratered, and stock markets threw a brief party.
But wars that end this fast rarely end this neatly. The conflict killed thousands, displaced millions, and briefly pushed crude past $120 a barrel. It also demonstrated that the maritime order that has governed global trade since the Second World War is no longer self-enforcing. Drones that cost less than a used sedan can terrorize billion-dollar warships. A single strait state can hold a fifth of the world’s oil supply hostage for months. And the legal architecture that was supposed to prevent exactly this – UNCLOS, freedom of navigation, the right of transit passage – proved as fragile as the trust between the parties who signed it.
The Iran war was, in its maritime dimension, the convergence of three separate nightmares: the Houthi blockade of the Red Sea that began in 2023, the drone revolution of the Ukraine War’s Black Sea front, and the decades-old fear that someone, someday, would weaponize Hormuz.
Operation Epic Fury, which began on February 28, 2026, was billed as a limited campaign to degrade Iran’s nuclear and missile capabilities. It became, within days, a full-spectrum conflict that spilt across the Middle East. The US and Israel struck hundreds of targets. Iran lashed out with ballistic missiles, drone swarms, and a systematic campaign to close the Strait of Hormuz to commercial shipping. By early March, the waterway that normally handles 20% of global oil and LNG flows was effectively sealed, not just by Iranian mines and missile threats but by a reciprocal US naval blockade that trapped hundreds of vessels inside the Persian Gulf.
The economic shock was immediate. Crude prices spiked 50%. Supply chains that had barely recovered from the Red Sea crisis buckled again. The International Energy Agency coordinated an emergency release of 400 million barrels from strategic reserves, but the damage was already coursing through pump prices, airline tickets, and fertilizer costs worldwide.
The effects kept radiating outward: Gulf states came under direct fire, the South Caucasus saw its fragile energy calculus upended, and Europe still reeling from the energy shock of the Ukraine war – found itself staring at another winter of impossible choices. Asia-Pacific economies, heavily dependent on Gulf oil, took a direct hit. China, the world’s largest crude importer, slashed purchases to decade-lows and burned through strategic reserves.
The most audacious Iranian move came in the form of the Persian Gulf Strait Authority, a new entity declared by Tehran to collect tolls on vessels transiting Hormuz. The US and its allies howled that this was illegal under UNCLOS. Iran said it was exercising sovereign rights. For several weeks, it was unclear whether the world would accept the arrangement or fight it. The memorandum of understanding put the toll system on ice – Iran agreed to toll-free passage for 60 days – but the genie is out of the bottle.
What made this crisis different from the oil shocks of the 1970s was the technology that enforced it. Iran didn’t need to sink a single oil tanker with a conventional naval fleet. Its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy used a mix of anti-ship missiles, drone boats, naval mines, and swarming small craft to make the strait uninsurable. The US Navy, for all its carrier strike groups and guided-missile destroyers, found itself in a grinding, months-long campaign to clear mines, intercept drones, and escort tankers through a gauntlet that never fully opened.
The age of cheap, lethal, and ubiquitous uncrewed systems at sea has arrived. The Houthis have been attacking shipping in the Red Sea since 2023 with Iranian-supplied drones, forcing major carriers to reroute around the Cape of Good Hope. Ukraine, a state with virtually no navy, has inflicted outstanding damage to the Russian Black Sea Fleet using uncrewed surface vessels and aerial drones.
The full article is here.
