The Administration Holds More Options Than Anyone Realizes

Thanks, Elly.

… Strait of Hormuz calculus is wrong.

We need to go back to the drawing boards.

That's it. That's the tweet. Now a hypothetical 🧵 with my personal thoughts.

Background on the Hormuz Crisis

You can skip this long section but know this: THIS IS ALL ABOUT SHIPS, SHIPS, SHIPS… and the US Navy giving them permission to pass.

The Strait of Hormuz is twenty-one miles wide. Two shipping channels, each two miles across, separated by a two-mile buffer. The normal traffic separation scheme runs through Iranian territorial waters, past the islands of Qeshm and Larak, where the IRGC has radar stations, missile batteries, and fast-attack craft bases overlooking every transit.

Twenty million barrels of oil and petroleum products flow through this gap every day. One-fifth of global consumption. There is no alternative. Saudi Arabia’s East-West Pipeline to Yanbu and the UAE’s pipeline to Fujairah can handle maybe 5 million barrels combined. The math doesn’t work. The bottleneck is not political. It’s geological and hydrographic.

When those seven P&I clubs belonging to the International Group issued 72-hour cancellation notices for war risk coverage in the Persian Gulf, they didn’t just raise costs. They made transit impossible.

Here’s why.

Continue reading …

No comments:

Post a Comment