Hormuz Stopped Being a Chokepoint Today
The Strait of Hormuz stopped being a chokepoint today.
Trump launched Project Freedom overnight, and starting Monday morning Middle East time, US Navy guided-missile destroyers begin escorting foreign-flagged commercial ships through the strait under direct presidential authorization.
Within eight hours of the announcement, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard fired at two ships on opposite shores: a bulk carrier off Sirik on the Iranian side, and an empty Emirati tanker called Barakah near Fujairah. The UAE Defense Ministry confirmed it intercepted four Iranian cruise missiles over Dubai and Sharjah, the first missile alert on Emirati soil since the April ceasefire. Iranian state media claimed the IRGC stopped a US warship and hit a US Navy patrol boat with two missiles.
CENTCOM denied both within hours.
The mainstream media is filing escalation stories, but the actual frame, as usual, is the opposite. The IRGC fired drones at an empty tanker and missiles into the Gulf because the regime has nothing else left, and the American escort operation just told every neutral country on earth that Washington is the guarantor of global shipping in this waterway, not Tehran.
The numbers behind the kinetic noise are the story. CENTCOM’s commander said today that the blockade has now stranded forty-one tankers carrying roughly sixty-nine million barrels of unsellable Iranian crude, somewhere in the range of six billion dollars of oil that nobody can buy and nobody can deliver. The Apache flyover of the strait the day before Project Freedom was totally a walk-through.
But the harder story landed away from the cameras.
Saudi Arabia today restored its East-West pipeline and, by regional energy desk reporting, is now pumping something close to its full export book across the Arabian peninsula to Red Sea ports, bypassing the Strait of Hormuz entirely. Combine that with the United Arab Emirates exiting OPEC last week, the UAE-South Korea Economic Partnership Agreement entering into force today (eliminating tariffs on most goods, the first such deal between South Korea and any country in the Middle East), and Trump rejecting Iran’s fourteen-point peace plan on camera as “not acceptable.” The Saudi-Emirati-American-Korean corridor that the war was supposed to put at risk is being formalized in writing, in public, in the same week the Iranian regime is firing missiles at empty tankers.
The chokepoint Iran spent forty years building its entire foreign policy around is being deleted by infrastructure, by trade agreements, and by escort operations, simultaneously. That is the Hormuz story. It is the loud one, and it is the easier of the three to read.
The other two stories were quieter. One of them is sitting inside the Pentagon, and it explains why this corridor matters more than the war that built it: