Ladies and gentlemen, behold the much-discussed Strait of Hormuz. The white space above is water, the greenish space is land. To the left, the Persian Gulf -- to the right (east), the Gulf of Oman. To the north, Iran. To the south, Oman.
At its tightest point, there are just 21 nautical miles between Oman and Iran. That is even smaller than the mileage between England and France at the narrowest part of the Channel. Within that span, only an even smaller portion is actually useful for large vessels such as oil tankers, about two lanes, each two miles wide, separated from each other by a 2 mile buffer zone.
Until a few days ago, roughly 20% of the world's oil supply was passing with regularity through the Strait of Hormuz.
The name of the strait comes from nearby Hormuz Island, and the name of that island may come from a corruption of the name Ahuramazda, the Supreme deity in Zoroastrian religion.
The closure of that strait for any length of time will force a drastic re-routing and rewiring of the world's energy system. Maybe something more sustainable, something better, is on the other end of that transition but the change, and the possibility of a favorable change, is surely not something that justifies, say, bombing schoolchildren. May Ahuramazda have mercy on our souls.
"We don't use a lot of that Persian Gulf sourced oil anyway," the optimists say, "the US uses oil drilled closer to home -- much of it in fact AT home, with imports from Canada and the North Sea, etc. The Strait of Hormuz need not concern us."
An idyllic picture, but ... oil is to a great degree fungible, and the fungibility has long since created a single global market. If oil becomes more expensive immediately in, say, Thailand or Japan as a consequence of the closure of the Strait, then oil will head to east Asia that would in peacetime have come, or would have stayed, here.
Nor am I going to bemoan that fact. Valuable resources going to their best use: that is a good thing. And if anything is going to kickstart the development of alternative energy sources, that will be it.
One can imagine a near future in which President Trump issues an executive order banning the export of oil from the US in order to end this 'single global market' stuff and make the US autarkic as to this commodity. It would be a bit akin to President Truman's effort to seize the steel mills. It didn't work for Truman, and it likely won't work out for Trump either.
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