Mark Gagnon

And it's been coordinating mine clearing and escort operations throughout the conflict.

But the sheer volume of threats in this narrow strait make this a massive challenge.

So here's a number that puts the stakes into perspective.

If Hormuz remains commercially disrupted for 30 days, that's roughly 600 million barrels of oil withheld from global markets.

And that is hundreds of billions of dollars in energy that simply just doesn't reach the people who need it.

Meanwhile, China has been quietly hedging against exactly this scenario, investing in Pakistani and Omani ports, specifically the Gwadar and the Dukum, as part of its Belt and Road Initiative, specifically to create alternate energy import routes that bypass the Strait of Hormuz because they see the potential volatility.

Those investments all of a sudden look a lot less theoretical.

Every day, the strait remains commercially disrupted.

The economy bleeds out.

So the Strait of Hormuz is not the only choke point in the global economy.

The Suez Canal, the Strait of Malacca, the Panama Canal, and the Bab el Mandeb, the BEM, the BEM Strait, at the entrance to the Red Sea, all of these narrow passages through which enormous volumes of global trade must flow.

And in 2021, the world got a reminder of this vulnerability,

when the container ship Ever Given ran aground in the Suez Canal.

And it blocked one of the world's busiest trade routes for six days, and it caused an estimated $9.6 billion per day in disrupted trade.

You remember when that boat got stuck.

Think about that.

That's basically $10 billion a day for six days.

$60 billion in that one week.

This isn't happening in a vacuum.

In 2024 and 2025, Houthi militants in Yemen were attacking commercial ships at the Bab el-Mandeb, the narrow passage on basically the other side, the southern end of the Red Sea that connects to the Suez Canal.