Mark Gagnon

If you're an insurance company,

Why would you tell a boat like, yeah, you guys can go through it, but we might lose billions of dollars of oil because you guys hit a mine.

No one's going to go for that.

And if the boats don't have insurance, who's going to ship their products thinking that, oh, it could just get destroyed at any moment.

So the people shipping it don't want to do it.

The private companies, that is.

The insurers don't want to insure it.

So with just creating instability, the entire thing is useless.

So in a world of maritime commerce, you don't have to close the waterway physically, just make it turbulent enough, put enough pressure and strain that you force them to come to your needs and make a deal or leave you alone.

And this threat became explicit during the 2011-2012 tensions over Iran's nuclear program.

As the United States and the EU tightened economic sanctions, Iranian officials, including Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and senior IRGC commanders, repeatedly threatened to close the strait in retaliation.

Iran conducted naval exercises near Hormuz, practicing mine laying and small boat swarming tactics.

And the message is very clear.

I mean, you affect us economically, you try to sanction us, you try to put pressure on us, and we will shut off the world's oil.

Ultimately, Iran didn't follow through.

The economic consequences would have devastated its own oil exports, which also transit through Hormuz, and it's kind of a mutually assured destruction situation.

But then came 2019, and things escalated from threats to action.

A series of tanker attacks occurred in the Gulf of Oman, just outside the Strait.

Several commercial vessels were damaged by what U.S.

intelligence would say were mines placed by the IRGC and their operatives.