Explainer: How Hormuz was reallocated

On March 11, three merchant vessels were struck inside or adjacent to the Strait of Hormuz within a single day. A cargo ship caught fire north of Oman. A containership was hit west of Ras Al-Khaimah. A bulk carrier was disabled northwest of Dubai. All three incidents unfolded while 150 tankers waited at anchor outside the Strait, unwilling to enter and while the US Navy declined, again, to provide escorts.

This is no longer a crisis of elevated risk. It is a crisis of systemic operational failure and the patterns now emerging suggest that what is happening to Hormuz is something more strategically deliberate, and more durable, than a conventional chokepoint closure.

Before hostilities escalated on February 28, the Strait processed 120 to 140 vessel transits per day.

By the first week of March, that number had fallen to between one and four. Some trackers recorded figures below one percent of normal throughput. The Strait is not physically sealed no chain has been stretched across its 21-mile breadth but the effect is indistinguishable from closure for the overwhelming majority of commercial operators.

The mechanism is overlapping and mutually reinforcing. Iranian-linked forces have conducted 10 to 13 attacks since late February. Naval mines dozens deployed, with Iranian capability for hundreds more have forced insurers to treat the entire waterway as uninsurable.

Major P&I clubs cancelled war-risk cover from early March. Maersk, MSC, CMA CGM, Hapag-Lloyd, and Evergreen have all suspended Gulf services or invoked force majeure. Without insurance, no commercially rational operator moves regardless of freight rates.

A threat vector underweighted in early assessments has since proven critical: GPS jamming and spoofing is now affecting over 1,100 vessels in the region.

The consequences compound every other risk. Navigation degradation clusters vessels increasing their exposure to mines. Erratic speeds and course deviations simplify targeting by drone or projectile. AIS integrity failures destroy the positional transparency that underwriters require to price risk at any level.

GPS warfare is not a secondary nuisance. It is a systemic disabler of the entire operating environment, transforming the Strait into a space where no vessel can reliably know where it is or where the threat is coming from.

The most consequential and least anticipated development is the US Navy’s sustained refusal to provide merchant escorts. Shipping firms have made near-daily requests.

The Navy has declined each, citing attack risk levels deemed too high for escort operations. President Trump has publicly urged tanker operators to ‘show guts,’ but no protection architecture has materialised.

This matters beyond the immediate operational paralysis. The 1987 Tanker War the last time Hormuz faced comparable kinetic disruption was resolved through the US-led Operation Earnest Will, which physically escorted Kuwaiti tankers through the strait and restored operator confidence within months.

There is no equivalent rescue mechanism available today. Every day the escort void persists, the structural damage to long-term operator behaviour deepens.

The most significant pattern to emerge from cross-referencing current operational data with the broader strategic architecture is this: Hormuz is not closed to everyone. Iranian crude has continued flowing to China over 11 million barrels since late February with Chinese-linked vessels transiting with apparent freedom while Western and non-aligned operators face the highest attack exposure. The Strait is being selectively permeated.

This is the operationalisation of a strategic logic that predates the current conflict.

China’s energy access is being maintained; Western competitors are being excluded. The Strait is functioning as a geopolitical filter open to aligned parties, hazardous to others which is a fundamentally different condition from a conventional closure and one that existing maritime law and naval doctrine have no established framework to address.

The container trade disruption is the visible surface. The energy architecture fracture runs considerably deeper.

Commercial shipping has navigated disrupted chokepoints before. It has no operational playbook for a chokepoint that has been transformed into a geopolitical instrument and no historical precedent for what happens when the world’s most critical energy corridor is quietly handed to one party while being closed to everyone else.

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