Here’s a detail about the situation in the Strait of Hormuz that I was not aware of.
I’ve noted several times over the last two weeks that throttling oil tankers transiting the strait involves complicated definitions of risk. Iran doesn’t need to close the strait in a conventional sense. Simply creating a non-trivial risk that tankers might be damaged or sunk is enough to keep most tanker traffic from going through. In other words, even if Iran is militarily on its back, just keeping aerial and naval drones at ready or on patrol might be enough to cause a global oil supply crisis. It doesn’t need to be pretty or terribly organized. But this article from March 10 in the Journal suggests it’s much more a matter of control than a general harrying of shipping. Iran has managed to increase its shipments of oil because it’s allowing ships carrying it’s crude to go through unmolested. Iran’s oil can get through but no one else’s can.
This article was from March 10th. That’s three days before the U.S. military attacked Kharg Island, the oil hub which handles more than 90% of Iran’s oil shipments. So this may have changed. It might conceivably have been part of why the attack happened. But President Trump at least claimed that the attack targeted only military infrastructure and not the oil shipment infrastructure. If that’s true it’s not obvious why these shipments couldn’t have continued. But there are many possibilities.
In any case, it all suggests that while Iran is sustaining vast damage to its military and civilian infrastructure it may be exerting more control, more granular control, over the situation in the Gulf than I at least had realized.
