Mark Gagnon

And then the British come through.

And they police the Strait through the 19th century, and they're protecting their route to India.

And today, what flows through Hormuz isn't spices or diamonds from India.

It is the lifeblood of the entire global industrial economy.

And the 2026 crisis is a massive real-time demonstration of just how much the modern world depends on the uninterrupted flow of energy through a waterway that most people probably couldn't even find on a map.

Now, there will probably come a day in the future where the world's dependence on oil or fossil fuels, as people call it, will diminish.

And the Strait of Hormuz is no more strategically vital than the Strait of Magellan.

But that day is not today and probably not for the next couple of decades.

And until it comes, this 21-mile gap between Iran and Oman will remain unresolved.

what has always been one of the most consequential pieces of geography on the planet, a place where the ancient logic of empires and choke points collides with the modern reality of global energy dependence and where the fate of gas prices in Ohio or Florida or factory in

Guangzhou or Shenzhen or wherever you are on the planet is decided by currents and coastlines and the calculations of the empires that want a piece of this tiny piece of water.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is a brief abridged history of the Strait of Hormuz and why it is so vital today.

I really think one of the most impactful books I've read in my life is a book called Prisoners of Geography by this guy, Tim Marshall.

It's just an excellent book that basically takes this kind of geographical determinist view of the world and says, hey, let's just look at the geography of each country and how that affects their foreign policy and how the citizens are and all of that stuff.

I mean, there's so much where it's like, you know, like America being more Christian in the South is because of like fossil deposits a million years ago because it creates a more fertile ground and then that predicates the slave trade and then that predicates Christianity and dah, dah, dah, dah, dah.

It's like, you can look at a butterfly effect from millions of years ago.

That's just like, hey, because of Pangea, all of a sudden this neighborhood is like this.

Like it's just crazy.

So I think that that book has been extremely formative for me because it helps me understand like, oh wow, if you're able to control the shipping lanes and the geography that you have, having a port, having a warm water port, having a deep port,

Having a river is going to massively affect how audacious you can be as a country militarily, geopolitically, what kind of pressure you can put on the neighboring countries.