The Strait of Hormuz Isn't Closed, It's open to Iran

On March 5th, 2026, one week into the war that President Trump launched against Iran without congressional authorization, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps announced that the Strait of Hormuz would be closed to all ships linked to the United States, Israel, and their Western allies, a declaration that every major American news outlet reported as a blanket blockade, with CNN, CNBC, and the Washington Post all running variations of the same framing: Iran closes the Strait of Hormuz, the world's most critical oil chokepoint, in a desperate act of retaliation. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reinforced this narrative from the Pentagon podium on March 13th when he told reporters not to "worry about it" and characterized Iran's actions in the strait as "sheer desperation," adding that Iran's military capability had been reduced by 90 percent and that "never before has a modern, capable military been so quickly destroyed and made combat ineffective." UN data tells a different story: daily ship transits through the strait collapsed from 141 before the war to just 4 or 5 by the second week, but those 4 or 5 ships were not military vessels running a blockade, they were Chinese-flagged oil tankers sailing through without interference, loaded with Iranian crude, because Iran didn't close the strait at all, it converted it into a selective passage where the price of admission is denominated in yuan.

CNBC reported that Iran shipped at least 11.7 million barrels of crude oil to China through the supposedly closed strait in the first two weeks of the war, and the Daily News Egypt and The Federal both reported that Iran is considering allowing additional tankers to pass on the condition that their cargo is priced in Chinese yuan rather than US dollars. Bloomberg commodity journalist Javier Blas posted satellite imagery on March 7th showing Iranian supertankers loading at Kharg Island and transiting the strait into the high seas "without any problem," while TankerTrackers.com confirmed 26 tankers at Kharg on a single day, all visually identified through satellite tagging. This is not a blockade born of military desperation, and the fact that Hegseth described it as one from the same podium where his own Energy Secretary, Chris Wright, admitted the US is "not ready" to escort tankers through the strait suggests either that the Secretary of Defense does not understand what is happening in the waterway his department is supposed to control, or that he understands perfectly well and is lying about it.

What the strait "closure" actually is

What Iran has built in the Strait of Hormuz is not a wall but a door, and the key to that door is a willingness to trade outside the dollar system that has underpinned American economic dominance since Nixon. The IRGC's March 5th announcement specified that ships from the US, Israel, and Western allies would be barred, while Chinese and Russian-linked vessels would be permitted to transit freely, and the subsequent reports about yuan-denominated passage conditions make the economic architecture of this arrangement unmistakable: Iran is using the most important energy chokepoint on the planet as an instrument of de-dollarization, punishing countries that trade in dollars while rewarding those that don't, and it is doing this in real time, during a war that the United States started, while American consumers absorb the full cost of the resulting energy shock.

Jeremy Scahill and Murtaza Hussain at Drop Site News published the most detailed independent assessment of Iran's actual military posture on March 12th, and the picture it paints is the opposite of Hegseth's "sheer desperation" narrative in almost every respect. IRGC spokesperson Ali Mohammad Naini told Drop Site that Iran can sustain "at least a six-month intense war at the current pace" and that the missiles deployed so far have been older models from 2010 to 2014 production, with modern systems deliberately held in reserve, claiming "in the last ten years, what's been produced, we haven't used at all." Iran maintains between 70 and 100 underground ballistic missile launch facilities embedded in mountains with subterranean silos and automated systems, according to Scahill's reporting, and has implemented a decentralized "mosaic" command structure that allows launches to continue even after communications disruption or leadership kills. Analyst Jon Elmer told Drop Site this represents "the war that Iran has been preparing for for a generation." Meanwhile, Kuwait Petroleum CEO Sheikh Nawaf Al-Sabah confirmed that Iran had effectively closed the strait not through physical barricade but through the credible threat of Iranian Shahed drones, which cost tens of thousands of dollars each and have transformed the security environment so thoroughly that Western shipping companies won't risk the passage regardless of what Hegseth says from behind a podium in Arlington.

The check is due

No single American news outlet has put the full economic cost of this war in front of the public in one place, and the fragmentation of the reporting is itself a kind of cover, because each number in isolation looks like a manageable cost of conflict while assembled together they reveal the most expensive foreign policy disaster since Iraq, compressed into weeks instead of years. CNBC covers the oil price. Time magazine covers consumer costs. Foreign Policy tallied military spending. Al Jazeera tracked the gas pump. But the full receipt, the one that every American taxpayer is paying whether they know it or not, looks like this.

The war costs $891 million per day in direct military spending according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, with the Pentagon's own closed-door briefing to Congress putting total costs at $28 billion through two weeks, a figure reported by the New York Times that includes $5.6 billion in munitions expended in the first 48 hours alone and 1,250 offensive and defensive munitions used in the first 36 hours, which Foreign Policy detailed in the most comprehensive military cost breakdown any outlet has published. Gas prices have risen $0.65 per gallon since February 27th to $3.60 and climbing, with analysts telling Al Jazeera that every additional week of conflict adds another 25 to 40 cents, which means that if this war lasts through April, as the Pentagon's own timeline suggests, Americans will be paying well over $4 a gallon, a price that the man in the Oval Office explicitly promised would never happen under his watch. Brent crude hit $119.50 per barrel on March 9th and has been fluctuating above $100 since March 11th, up from $72.87 on the eve of the war, and the downstream effects are already cascading: jet fuel has nearly doubled to $173.91 per barrel, urea fertilizer is up 35 percent with the Persian Gulf supplying 49 percent of global urea exports, shipping container costs have risen 15 to 20 percent with an additional $200 per 20-foot container according to Gulf News, mortgage rates have climbed from 5.99 to 6.29 percent in two weeks, 46,000 flights have been canceled, and roughly 1,000 ships carrying approximately $25 billion worth of cargo sit stranded in the Persian Gulf because no Western insurer will cover the transit. The Penn Wharton Budget Model projects total economic impact between $40 billion and $210 billion depending on duration, and Lindsay Koshgarian of the National Priorities Project reminded Gulf News that the Iraq war "ended up being almost $3 trillion" and warned that these costs could become "astronomical, easily."

The fertilizer number is the one that should terrify every American household, because a 35 percent increase in urea prices doesn't show up at the grocery store for 60 to 90 days, which means that the food price shock from this war hasn't even begun to hit consumers yet, and by the time it does, the media cycle will have moved on to whatever Trump posts next on Truth Social while families in Ohio and Georgia and Arizona quietly discover that their grocery bills went up 10 to 15 percent and nobody in Washington can explain why without admitting that the president started a war that made everything more expensive for everyone.

Who is actually profiting from this war

While American consumers absorb these costs, Russia's fossil fuel revenue has increased by €510 million per day since the war began, a 14 percent jump over February's daily average that has delivered roughly €6 billion in additional revenue in the first two weeks alone, according to analysis reported by the Kyiv Independent. Before February 27th, Russia was selling oil at a $10 to $13 per barrel discount because of Western sanctions pressure, and today it sells at a $4 to $5 premium, a swing of roughly $15 to $18 on every barrel that Russia exports, because Trump started a war that spiked global prices and then, on March 12th, temporarily lifted sanctions on 125 million barrels of Russian crude already loaded on tankers, a 30-day waiver through April 11th that Treasury Secretary Bessent called "narrowly tailored" and that Ukrainian President Zelensky estimated could hand Russia $10 billion to fund its war against Ukraine. European Council President Antonio Costa said what nobody in Washington would: "So far, there is only one winner in this war: Russia. It gains new resources to finance its war against Ukraine. It profits from the diversion of military capabilities. And it benefits from reduced attention to the Ukrainian front." The Kremlin welcomed the sanctions relief and pushed for the US to go further, and NBC News reported that Putin's team had spoken with Trump shortly before the announcement, with Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov claiming sanctions weren't discussed "in any detailed way," a denial that the timing makes difficult to take seriously.

The man who campaigned on ending the Ukraine war is now funding it with the windfall profits generated by his own separate war, while simultaneously enriching Beijing through a strait-based oil arrangement that accelerates the very de-dollarization that American foreign policy has spent decades trying to prevent, and doing all of it at the direction of an Israeli prime minister who visited the White House six times in a single year, provided the intelligence that triggered the initial strike on a February 23rd phone call, publicly celebrated that the war fulfilled something he had "yearned to do for 40 years," and told the Times of Israel that the decision to end the war would be made "mutually" with an American president who appears to have handed co-equal authority over US military operations to a foreign leader facing corruption charges and an election he can't afford to lose. Foreign Policy's assessment of Netanyahu's calculation was blunt: "As the next generation of Americans turns away from Israel, he likely figured he would never see a sucker like Trump in the Oval Office again." Senator Chris Van Hollen, after attending a classified briefing, said aloud what the evidence suggests: that Netanyahu "finally found a president stupid enough to attack Iran."

Whether he's compromised or just a fool doesn't change the outcome

The question of why Trump subordinated American economic and strategic interests to serve the agendas of foreign governments is one that the recently released Epstein files have given new urgency, with an FBI memo from the Los Angeles field office dated October 2020 describing Jeffrey Epstein as "a co-opted Mossad agent" who was "trained as a spy" for Israeli intelligence, and Epstein's own 2018 emails revealing his belief that Ghislaine Maxwell's father Robert, a confirmed intelligence asset, had threatened to "expose all he had done for them" unless given £400 million. Former Israeli intelligence operative Ari Ben-Menashe alleged on RT in February 2026 that Netanyahu holds unreleased Epstein material and that "American Government is trapped by the Israelis, Jeffrey Epstein was one of their tools to trap them," though Ben-Menashe's claims remain unverified and Israeli officials have categorically denied them, and the fact that he made these statements on Russian state media, which has its own obvious interest in framing the US-Israel relationship as coercive, is context that any honest assessment has to acknowledge.

But the operational question is whether it matters. A president who launches an unauthorized war because a foreign leader lobbied him for months and then provided the intelligence tip that triggered the strike, who announces that ending the war will be a "mutual" decision with that leader, who lifts sanctions on Russia to manage the oil crisis his own war created, and whose selective enforcement of a strait blockade is funneling discounted crude to China in a non-dollar currency has produced outcomes functionally indistinguishable from what a compromised president would produce, regardless of whether the mechanism is blackmail, manipulation, ideological capture, or simple incompetence. Thirteen American service members are dead, including six aboard a KC-135 refueling aircraft that crashed in western Iraq on March 12th. Over 2,000 Iranians are dead, predominantly civilians. American taxpayers are burning through $891 million every single day. And the beneficiaries are a Russian president using windfall oil profits to fund his invasion of Ukraine, a Chinese economy importing discounted crude in a currency that isn't the dollar through a chokepoint that American media keeps calling "closed," and an Israeli prime minister who spent 40 years waiting for an American president willing to fight his war for him, and finally found one.

Trump campaigned on cheap energy and America First. Seventeen days into this war, gas is up 22 percent, the most expensive military operation since Iraq is hemorrhaging nearly a billion dollars a day with no exit strategy and no congressional authorization, and the primary beneficiaries are in Moscow, Beijing, and Jerusalem.

-- dingo__dog