Hormuz: the strait that stopped moving

The Strait of Hormuz has a number that usually appears in the first paragraph of every article about it: roughly a fifth of the world’s oil and gas moves through this narrow channel between the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman. The number this week is different. The UN’s shipping agency, the IMO, says very few ships, if any, are crossing the strait, after attacks on vessels resumed when hostilities between the United States and Iran flared again on 12 and 13 July. The strait that normally sees around 135 transits a day is effectively closed to traffic.

The immediate victims are not governments. Around six thousand seafarers are trapped on about five hundred ships moored in the Persian Gulf, behind the strait, unable to leave and with no clear date for movement to resume. The IMO secretary-general, Arsenio Dominguez, has spent the week making the obvious point that needs repeating: these are crews trained to work, not to fight, aboard vessels with no defence against missiles and drones. The last time this question was asked, during the first phase of the war that began on 28 February, the same ships were stuck for months. The February war started with Israeli and American strikes on Iran; a memorandum of understanding signed in June raised hopes of a managed exit, and those hopes lasted about a month before the strikes and counterstrikes resumed.

The Secretary-General of the UN, António Guterres, told the Security Council this week that the situation was ‘getting out of control’, that one crisis was feeding another and that the political objectives were becoming obscured by the confrontation itself. He is describing a war that has expanded into the one place the global economy has no spare capacity for: the chokepoint that connects the Gulf’s oil to the world’s refineries. The strange thing about shipping chokepoints is that everyone knows their value in peacetime and no one can price them in wartime; the cost of a closed strait is paid in everything else, from fuel to food, and it shows up months later in prices nobody blames on the strait.

The Red Sea has already demonstrated the pattern. Houthi forces in Yemen, whose attacks on shipping began in late 2023, have widened their campaign, and the IMO describes the Bab al-Mandab strait, the southern gateway to the Red Sea, as a second front that is effectively closed to normal commerce. Two Saudi oil tankers were reported attacked last week. The combination of a closed Hormuz and a closed Bab al-Mandab removes the two sea routes that carry most of the energy trade between the Middle East and Europe and Asia. The Suez Canal, already carrying less traffic than before the Red Sea crisis, loses its eastern feeder. The alternatives, overland pipelines and longer sea routes around Africa, exist, but they are slower, costlier and in the case of the pipelines, already running at capacity.

The UN’s trade agency has noted that global goods trade in the first half of 2026 reached $13.7 trillion, up 12.5 per cent on the same period of 2025, and that the increase is driven by higher energy prices rather than higher volumes. That is the war in the trade statistics: the world is paying more for the same cargo because the same cargo is travelling worse routes or not travelling at all. The longer the strait stays closed, the more those prices feed into inflation everywhere else, which is how a regional war becomes a global story.

What happens next is a negotiation that the IMO says has barely begun. The parties have talked, in the sense that the June memorandum remains in place as a basis, but no agreement covers the future management of the strait, and the IMO’s first priority is not commerce but evacuation: getting the six thousand seafarers out, then getting guarantees that the waterway is de-mined and safe, and only then resuming the 135 daily transits. The seafarers are the measure of how far the situation has drifted from any rational calculation: wars can be sold to publics as contests over territory and security, but six thousand civilians trapped aboard cargo ships in the Gulf is a fact with no constituency, which is why it gets mentioned last and solved last.

The strait will reopen eventually; straits always do. The question is whether the reopening happens under the rules of the February memorandum, under new rules imposed by whoever controls the water, or under the older, murkier arrangement where every transit is a negotiation and every tanker a target. The IMO has reminded everyone that international law has no mechanism for charging ships tolls for safe passage, which is a way of saying that the management of the world’s most important waterway is being improvised. The seafarers are still waiting, the ships are still moored, and the strait that stopped moving is waiting for a war to end a second time.