Mark Gagnon

And then, of course, you have Saudi Arabia with the United States increasingly hovering in the background.

Now, Iran under Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was America's closest ally in the Gulf, Washington's basically chosen policeman for the region.

And the Shah invested heavily in his military, purchased enormous quantities of American weapons, and really positioned Iran as the dominant power on the northern shore of the Strait.

The Iranian Revolution toppled the Shah, and it brought Ayatollah Rehola Khomeini to power, and really just transformed Iran from America's best friend of the region to one of its most sworn adversaries,

basically overnight.

And suddenly the fact that Iran sat on the northern shore of the world's most critical oil corridor went from being a massive boon and a strategic asset for the United States to a strategic nightmare.

Now, the first real test of the Strait of Hormuz in the modern era really happens during the Iran-Iraq War, which goes from 1980 to 1988.

And it's one of the deadliest conflicts in the 20th century, but a lot of people in America don't really talk about it, largely because both sides were kind of seen as adversaries of the United States, and the conflict didn't really fit into history.

what was going on with the Cold War.

The war really begins when Saddam Hussein's Iraq invaded Iran in September of 1980, hoping to exploit the chaos of the revolution that happened the year before.

And what Saddam expected to be a quick victory turned into a bloody, grinding eight-year war that killed somewhere between like 500,000 and over a million people.

And the borders never changed.

And low-key, America kind of like held out Saddam.

And they saw Iran as an existential threat.

And they were like, all right, we can help Iraq as like a proxy go against Iran.

And so by 1984, the war had spilled into the Persian Gulf itself in what became known as the Tanker War.

Now, Iraq, trying to strangle Iran's economy, began attacking Iranian oil tankers and oil facilities on Karg Island.

This is Iran's main oil export terminal.

Now, Iran retaliated by attacking tankers carrying oil from Iraq's allies, specifically Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.

Suddenly, the world's busiest oil shipping lane had become a war zone.