Mark Gagnon

Iran would threaten or harass shipping.

The United States and its allies would reinforce their naval presence.

Tensions would kind of chill out and eventually the situation would go back to normal.

And for decades, the conventional wisdom amongst defense analysts was that Iran would never actually shut down the strait because doing so would be

such a tremendous act of self-harm, you know, Iran's own oil experts are depending on the same waterway, that they would never do it.

And the conventional wisdom was right.

They threatened to shut it down numerous times, and they didn't.

Until now.

march 2026 and just a note before we continue the events that i'm going to be talking about now are still going on so i mean by the time this is posted it might be completely different so we're going to stick with what has been widely reported but the situation is fluid and it's difficult to really understand what's going on as they say christos the first casualty of war is hope the truth come on ah dude you were you almost had i like your guess i like the swing it's pretty good i like that

So what some analysts are beginning to describe as a regional conflict is not a war yet.

You can't call it a war, even though we're putting boots on the ground.

So conflict.

But it is escalating rapidly and following a series of confrontations between Israel, the United States and Iran that had been really building up for years.

The specifics of how the war began are complicated and will be the subject of their own episode at some point.

But the key things really came in March of 2026, when Iran appears to have taken the steps that strategists have debated for decades.

According to commercial shipping trackers and early intelligence reporting, it moved to effectively shut down commercial transit through the Strait of Hormuz.

Now, at this point in our episode, you should understand the implications of that.

I mean, we're talking about a waterway that has been controlled in some way by

for 2,000 years because of how important it is.

And almost never did it have the ability to get shut down, or was it this valuable?