JokersUpdates.com: News Stand - What the Iran War and crisis in the Strait of Hormuz means for the world. If this continues to spiral, we may be heading for a very different world than the one we currently inhabit.

The last bit of normal may be gone for a generation.

Sometime in the last three weeks, we passed through a door we are not going back through. Most people haven’t realized it yet. The groceries still show up. The lights still turn on. The commute seems to be the same. But the supply chains that make American normalcy possible are already breaking, and the damage is compounding by the day. This is the last stretch of normal, and we are wasting it by pretending otherwise.

On February 28, the United States and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury, a joint air and maritime campaign targeting Iranian military infrastructure, command and control centers, and ballistic missile sites.[1] The strikes killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.[2] Iran retaliated with missile and drone attacks across the Gulf that hit U.S. military bases, Israeli territory, Saudi oil facilities, Qatari LNG terminals, and UAE energy infrastructure. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) declared the Strait of Hormuz closed and began attacking commercial vessels.[3] Tanker traffic through the strait, a 21-mile-wide chokepoint that carries roughly 20 percent of the world’s oil and natural gas, has dropped by ninety percent almost overnight.[4]

This is a fundamental structural break from the status quo that cannot be walked back.

The Chokepoint

The Strait of Hormuz closure is already the largest disruption to global energy supply in history, exceeding the 1973 oil embargo and the 2022 shock from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.[5] Brent crude, which sat at roughly $71 per barrel on February 27, has surged above $110 as of this writing.[6] Diesel in the United States topped $5 per gallon for the first time since 2022. Jet fuel costs are up 83 percent in a month.[7] European natural gas prices have nearly doubled.[8] The IEA has authorized the release of 400 million barrels from emergency reserves—a record—but that covers approximately twenty days of normal strait traffic. It’s a band-aid on a hemorrhaging wound.[9]

Iran did not need a naval blockade to achieve this. It did not need to mine the strait or deploy anti-ship missiles against armored warships. Cheap drones were enough to cause insurers and shipping companies to withdraw.[10] The de facto closure was accomplished through risk pricing rather than military dominance.[11] It was an asymmetric advantage that Iranian leadership had hoped would deter military intervention.

Even if the war stopped today, supplies would be disrupted for months. Every week it continues extends the disruption timeline in a nonlinear manner. If it lasts through the spring, we are looking at years of cascading consequences. The damage to Gulf energy infrastructure, from fires at UAE’s Shah gas field, strikes near Fujairah, and hits on Qatar’s Ras Laffan LNG complex, means that even reopening the strait does not immediately restore production capacity.[12] Iraq is shutting down oil fields because it has nowhere to store the crude it cannot export.[13] More than three million barrels per day of refining capacity in the region has already gone offline.[14]

https://www.thedissident.news/the-last/

Edited (03/20/26 11:06 AM)