Who Will Control the Strait of Hormuz?

By
The Editors
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By AKANG @ Adobe Stock

According to Nick Giambruno at LewRockwell.com, the answer to who wins the war between the United States and Iran will be who controls the Strait of Hormuz after it’s over. He writes:

Forget the press conferences, casualty estimates, satellite images, and declarations of victory.

In my view, one metric will tell us who won the Iran war:

Who controls the Strait of Hormuz when the fighting ends?

Hormuz represents the most important energy chokepoint on the planet.

Iran sits along its northern shore and has spent decades preparing missiles, drones, naval forces, and other weapons to control the traffic through it.

If Iran emerges from this war with the ability to decide who passes through Hormuz, under what conditions, and at what cost, the implications will extend far beyond the Persian Gulf.

But if Iran controls the strait, might it be a Pyrrhic victory? The UAE and Saudi Arabia are already working on alternatives. Bloomberg reports that the UAE is looking for “zero Hormuz dependency.”

The United Arab Emirates says it wants “zero Hormuz dependency” whether the strait stays open or not, and is studying another harbor on its east coast, expanding Fujairah, Dibba and Khor Fakkan, and planning billions of dollars in pipelines, roads and railways connecting energy infrastructure to the Gulf of Oman.

While Saudi Arabia has been considering expanding its pipeline to the Red Sea to bypass the Strait, the pipeline itself was hit by missiles fired by Houthi rebels from Yemen, allies of the Iranians. The Saudis have repaired the pipeline and are moving at least some oil through it once again. The Wall Street Journal reports:

The resumption of East-West pipeline exports comes as Saudi Arabia has also figured out how to get more oil past Iran in the Strait of Hormuz. Loadings at Saudi Arabia’s Gulf port at Ras Tanura recently surged to around 6.5 million barrels a day from 1.5 million barrels a day in early September, ship tracker Kpler said.

President Trump told reporters today that “We’re getting more oil out of the Hormuz Strait now than we did before the war.” 

If that’s true, it will be difficult for Iran to maintain any leverage on the oil industry, even if it controls the Strait of Hormuz.