Adam Kinzinger writes a regular blog, where this important post appeared. He was a Republican member of Congress from Illinois who agreed to serve on the January 6 Committee, knowing his Trump-aligned party would isolate him. He decided not to run again, but he remains active in politics. He is a combat veteran.
He wrote that control of the Strait of Hormuz is the key to everything and that the U.S. is paying a price for Trump’s hostility to our allies:
It has now been over a month since the United States and Israel launched strikes on Iran under Operation Epic Fury. Iran’s nuclear sites are degraded. Its air force is largely gone. Its senior military leadership has been decimated. By the traditional metrics of military campaign assessment, the United States has won — or at least that is what the administration is telling itself.
But the Strait of Hormuz remains closed. And that changes everything.
The story of what happens next in this conflict is really three overlapping stories: economic, diplomatic, and military. They are inseparable, and each is deeply, structurally broken in ways that the triumphalist announcements coming out of Washington are not grappling with honestly. Understanding that requires sitting with the scale of what a closed strait actually means — and then asking the hard question of whether anyone in charge actually has a plan to reopen it.
On March 31st, 2026, reports emerged that President Trump had told aides he was prepared to end military operations in Iran even if the Strait of Hormuz remained closed. The White House press secretary, asked directly whether reopening the strait was a “core objective” of the war effort, said it was not. This followed a dizzying series of 48-hour ultimatums, deadline extensions, threats to obliterate Iran’s power plants, and a social media post in which the President of the United States referred to a critical international waterway as the “Strait of Trump.”
The signal this sends to global markets, to allies, and to Tehran cannot be overstated. If the United States walks away from this conflict with the strait still effectively closed, Iran will have achieved something extraordinary: it will have absorbed one of the most intensive American-Israeli military campaigns in modern history, lost its supreme leader, seen its conventional military largely destroyed — and still hold a chokepoint through which roughly 20% of the world’s oil flows.
That is not a defeated power. That is a wounded power with leverage.
Let us be precise about what the Strait of Hormuz actually means to the global economy, because the word “important” has been used so many times that it has lost all weight.
On a normal day, before February 28th, approximately 20 million barrels of oil transited this narrow channel — 21 miles wide at its tightest point — every single day. That is roughly one-fifth of the world’s entire oil supply, moving through a corridor that Iran can, and now demonstrably has, made functionally impassable at will. In the first full month of war, vessel crossings dropped from roughly 135 ships per day to an average of six. Six.
Brent crude has surged close to 50% since the conflict began, touching over $112 a barrel. U.S. gasoline prices have crossed $4 per gallon for the first time in nearly four years. The International Energy Agency has called this the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market. Every single one of those numbers will get worse if the strait stays closed — or worse, if markets conclude it will stay closed indefinitely.
That last point matters most. Oil markets do not price the present; they price expectations. Right now, markets are still pricing in some probability of resolution — a deal, a military reopening, a diplomatic settlement. The moment that probability goes to near zero, you will see another leg up in oil prices that will be sustained, not a spike. It would represent a structural repricing of global energy, with cascading consequences for inflation, interest rates, industrial costs, and food prices (fertilizer shipments through the strait have also been disrupted, threatening planting season in multiple countries).
What would that sustained leg look like? It is not difficult to imagine oil at $140, $150, or higher. The world has not truly absorbed the scenario where a major shipping chokepoint is closed not temporarily, by crisis, but semi-permanently, by policy.
The closure is not simply a matter of Iran’s navy physically blocking ships. That would actually be easier to address militarily. What Iran has done is subtler and, in some ways, harder to unwind: it has turned the strait into an active combat zone, where the threat of drone and missile attack makes the waterway functionally impassable for commercial shipping regardless of what any navy does.
The maritime insurance market understood this within days. Major P&I clubs — Gard, Skuld, NorthStandard, the London P&I Club, the American Club — canceled war risk coverage for vessels operating in the Persian Gulf within the first week. Rates for Very Large Crude Carriers hit record highs, with the benchmark freight rate for shipping oil from the Middle East to China rising more than 94% in a single day early in the conflict. Before the war, typical war-risk premiums for Strait of Hormuz transit ran between 0.15% and 0.25% of hull value per week. By late March, some quotes were coming in at 5% to 10% of hull value for a single transit. For a tanker worth $100 million, that is several million dollars for one voyage.
The U.S. government recognized this problem and moved to address it. The U.S. International Development Finance Corporation established a $20 billion reinsurance program, to backstop commercial insurance for ships attempting the crossing. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told the cabinet in late March that the program would begin soon. As of this writing, there is no confirmed evidence of any vessel benefiting from the program having actually transited the strait.
And here is the fundamental problem with government insurance as a solution: it covers the financial risk. It does not cover the human one. Charter agreements include clauses that allow captains to refuse orders to enter a zone if the risk to the vessel and crew is assessed as too high. No reinsurance program changes that calculus for a mariner looking at a drone war in the Persian Gulf. Sailors have families. They have life insurance policies that may have exclusions for active combat zones. They have the right, in many jurisdictions, to simply decline a voyage they believe will kill them. You can insure a hull. You cannot compel a person to accept a bullet.
The clean version of reopening the strait requires not just insurance but safety — and right now, even a degraded Iran has demonstrated it can put drones in the water and missiles in the air with enough frequency to make every transit a gamble with human life.
The administration has made much of the destruction of Iran’s conventional military capabilities. This is largely accurate. Iran’s navy has been severely degraded. Its air defenses are largely gone. Its air force is functionally inoperative. These are real achievements.
But the Strait of Hormuz does not require a navy to close. It requires, in the limiting case, a man with a drone and a coast to launch it from. The IRGC has spent decades building a distributed, asymmetric maritime warfare capability precisely because it understood that its conventional forces could never match the United States. Mines. Small fast boats. Land-based anti-ship missiles. Cheap drones that cost a few thousand dollars and can seriously damage a tanker worth hundreds of millions. These capabilities are dispersed, hidden, and enormously difficult to fully eliminate through airstrikes.
The harder truth is this: even if the United States were to conduct the most comprehensive military campaign imaginable against Iran’s remaining capacity to threaten the strait, Iran retains the ability to reconstitute a sufficient threat to close it again over time. An IRGC soldier with a shoulder-fired rocket launcher on a cliff overlooking the strait is a sufficient deterrent to commercial shipping. The threat can be rebuilt. The closure can be reimposed. This is the fundamental strategic problem that no amount of bombing resolves.
The only durable solutions are an agreement that gives Iran sufficient reason not to close the strait, or a change in the Iranian political order so fundamental that the intent to close it no longer exists. Everything else is temporary — and markets, over time, will price that temporariness accordingly.
This brings us to what is, in many ways, the most damaging and least-discussed dimension of this crisis: the United States walked into a conflict requiring maximum allied cooperation after spending months systematically degrading its most important alliances.
Trump’s Truth Social post on March 20th calling NATO a “PAPER TIGER” and its member states “COWARDS” for not dispatching forces to help reopen the strait was extraordinary. Not for its vulgarity, which has become routine, but for its timing and its logic. He was, in effect, demanding that allies sacrifice their sailors and their economies for a conflict they were not consulted about, had not agreed to, and in some cases had explicitly opposed — and calling them cowards for declining.
The response from allied governments was predictable to anyone paying attention. Australia said it had not received a formal request to participate in strait operations, and its prime minister pointedly noted that Australia had not been consulted before the February 28th strikes. Germany publicly condemned the U.S. posture (after being one of the most supportive allies of the strikes initially). Britain has cooperated in some defensive operations but has drawn clear lines about the scope of its involvement. The United Kingdom’s Foreign Secretary, while condemning Iranian attacks on Gulf partners, made clear that British operations were defensive and limited. France, whose relationship with Washington has been severely damaged by tariff disputes and the broader contempt the administration has shown for European institutions, has been largely absent.
This is the predictable consequence of a foreign policy that has treated alliances as transactions, demanded payment for commitments, threatened to abandon mutual defense guarantees, questioned the legitimacy of multilateral institutions, and — almost unbelievably — spent the preceding year threatening to invade Greenland and annex Canada. When you spend political capital like that, you do not get to spend it again quickly. Trust, once spent, does not regenerate on command.
The result is that the United States finds itself trying to manage a global energy crisis that affects Europe and Asia far more than it affects America — the U.S. is largely self-sufficient in energy, as multiple administration officials have noted — while the nations most economically injured are not actively helping to solve it and in some cases are actively frustrated with Washington’s handling. Europe gets far more of its energy from the Gulf than the United States does. Japan, South Korea, and India are massively exposed to Hormuz-priced oil. China, which has reached separate arrangements with Iran, is threading a different needle entirely. The international coalition that might have made a military or diplomatic solution to the strait possible does not currently exist, and the window for assembling it has narrowed severely.
And when you cannot assemble a coalition, and you cannot militarily guarantee a solution, and you cannot sustain unlimited military presence indefinitely, you are left with either a deal or an ongoing crisis. The United States currently doesn’t know clearly who within Iran’s fractured post-war power structure is even authorized to make a deal.
One detail that has received insufficient attention in the coverage is this: the administration has acknowledged it is not entirely clear who is in charge of Iran right now. Supreme Leader Khamenei was killed in the initial strikes. The government of President Pezeshkian continues to exist and engage in some diplomacy. But the IRGC — whose navy controls the actual mechanics of strait harassment — has historically operated with significant autonomy and has its own institutional interests, its own ideology, and its own command structure. The person with the finger on the drone controller at the strait may not be taking orders from whoever sits across the table in Islamabad or wherever talks are happening.
This is not an abstraction. It means that even a notional diplomatic agreement about the strait may not translate cleanly into tankers moving safely. It means verification is almost impossible in the near term. It means that a ceasefire at the political level is not the same thing as safety at the waterway level. The closing of the strait may have started as a strategic decision by the Iranian state. It may now be partly self-perpetuating — sustained by actors whose primary interest is leverage, money from tolls Iran is now legislating, or simply ideological commitment to bleeding the Gulf states and their Western partners.
Iran has, in fact, begun to formalize its control: its parliament is moving to codify tolls for ships transiting the strait, requiring detailed information sharing and fees. This is not the behavior of a state preparing to cede control of a chokepoint. It is the behavior of a state that has decided the chokepoint is now a permanent asset.
The range of outcomes is not large. At one end: a negotiated settlement that reopens the strait under terms that do not reward Iran disproportionately. At the other end: a prolonged closure that restructures global energy markets, accelerates the fracturing of the international economic order, and leaves Iran — weakened militarily, devastated at home, but strategically positioned — with a leverage point that will outlast any administration’s attention span.
The honest assessment is that the best outcome — a negotiated reopening that does not leave Iran stronger than it was before February 28th, and that does not simply reward closing the strait as a template for future coercion — is very hard to achieve.
It requires a negotiating partner with actual authority over the people who can end the attacks on shipping. It requires an American administration willing to sustain focus and strategic patience, operating through quiet diplomacy rather than Truth Social ultimatums. It requires the reconstruction of at least some allied cooperation to provide diplomatic cover and economic pressure. It requires Iran to conclude that reopening the strait under acceptable terms serves its interests better than continued leverage over global oil prices.
None of those conditions are clearly present right now.
The absolute worst outcome — the one we should be most worried about — is not a dramatic escalation or a ground war. It is muddling: mixed signals from Washington, periodic deadline extensions, occasional tanker attacks, oil prices that stay structurally elevated, markets that gradually accept $120-per-barrel oil as the new normal, Iran slowly consolidating its de facto authority over transit, allies who have drifted further away, and no clean moment of resolution that anyone can point to. Just a slow, grinding deterioration of the global energy order, presided over by an administration that declared victory and went home.
It would be dishonest to write this without acknowledging that negotiations are, as of this writing, apparently ongoing. Pakistan has facilitated back-channel contacts. Iran has acknowledged the exchange of messages, even while denying direct talks. Some tankers have moved. Deadlines have been extended. The fact that both sides are talking at all, even indirectly, is not nothing.
There is a version of a deal that could work. It would require Iran to reopen the strait under some formulation that allows it to claim a measure of dignity and face-saving — perhaps a ceasefire framework, perhaps economic relief, perhaps some form of international maritime governance for the strait that gives Iran a role without giving it a veto. It would require the U.S. to accept less than total victory — to not demand a posture from Iran that is explicitly weaker than before the war — while extracting enough in return that the closure of the strait is not simply rewarded.
The deep problem is structural: as long as Iran retains any capacity to threaten shipping through the strait — and as we have discussed, that capacity can be rebuilt and is, in the limit, as simple as a drone and a shore — the threat of re-closure is permanent. Any deal that does not include either a verifiable irreversible disarmament of Iran’s strait-harassment capabilities, or a fundamental change in the political character of the Iranian state, is ultimately a temporary arrangement. And verifiable, irreversible disarmament of a distributed asymmetric force is something no arms control regime has ever achieved.
This is not an argument against a deal. It is an argument for sobriety about what a deal can deliver. A negotiated reopening buys time, reduces near-term economic damage, and creates a space — however narrow — for a longer-term political evolution in Iran that makes the threat less likely to be exercised. That is worth pursuing. It is just not the same thing as solving the problem.
The shortest honest summary of where we are: the military phase of this conflict is likely winding down. The strategic problem — a wounded Iran with leverage over global oil supply, a fractured alliance system, a confused negotiating track, and a chokepoint that can be closed again whenever someone in the IRGC decides to close it — is not.
And it will not be resolved by a tweet, a deadline, or a declaration of victory.
Diane Ravitch's blog 