WHAT ELSE ARE THE FOREIGN POLICY GRAYBEARDS MISSING? The Parade of Hormuz Horribles Fizzles Out.
The news out of the Strait of Hormuz is pretty straightforward: The Islamic Republic of Iran has all but lost whatever control it once had over the maritime traffic flowing through that contested choke point. “Middle Eastern crude exports rebounded this month to around their highest level since the war began in February,” the Wall Street Journal reported. “Shipments via Hormuz and bypass routes were delivering just under 80% of their prewar regional flows as of last week, according to tracker Kpler.”
That’s just about where the U.S. wants energy exports out of Hormuz to be. After all, the whole point of the blockade is to ensure that Iranian exports never make it to market in the first place. In that sense, U.S. policy in the region has succeeded. Iranian outbound flows are basically at zero.
Since mid-August, the Trump administration has maintained that the blockade, and its efforts to protect shipping through the strait’s southern Omani channel, is bearing fruit. At the time, the claim met with some understandable skepticism. But, as I wrote then, it made sense that the inventories that Trump officials had described were invisible to trackers. They wouldn’t become visible until they’d successfully evaded Iran’s dragnet. Now, six weeks later, “It’s clear that Washington’s figures were substantially correct,” former Bush administration official Michael Allen observed. “As many as 22 million barrels may have passed through the strait in 48 hours over the weekend, compared with about 20 million a day before the war.”
If the community of foreign-policy observers has internalized the news that Iran is losing control of the strait, they have not yet wrangled with the development’s implications. We can speculate about these implications by reviewing the claims made by those who, mere months ago, not only anticipated that Iran’s control of the strait would persist indefinitely but also thought that it represented a greater geostrategic lever for Tehran than even a deployable atomic weapon. . . .
If the sequence of events that these and many, many other foreign-policy analysts forecast over the late spring and summer came to pass, it would represent a strategic disaster for the U.S. But since it hasn’t, what are the consequences?
Don’t rely on the people who got it wrong to tell us.