Iran closes Strait of Hormuz with cheap drones
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- Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz using cheap drones rather than a naval blockade or mines, halting tanker traffic entirely and triggering what analysts call the biggest energy crisis since the 1970s oil embargo; the strait carries roughly 20% of the world's oil supply daily.
- Energy Secretary Chris Wright dismissed oil-disruption concerns before the conflict escalated, noting that prices had barely moved during the 12-day Israel-Iran war in June 2025 — a miscalculation the author links to overconfidence inflated by the clean January 2026 Venezuela intervention.
- Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) reported after a closed-door briefing that the Trump administration had no plan for the strait and did not know how to reopen it safely; Iran's new supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei has vowed to keep it closed.
- A US submarine sank an Iranian frigate 2,000 miles from the theater of war off Sri Lanka's coast, days after the ship had participated in Indian navy exercises with 74 nations including the US — a strike the author says caused entirely foreseeable damage to relationships with two countries the US now needs to help counter Iran's blockade.
- The Trump administration failed to anticipate that Iran had rebuilt and dispersed significant military capacity since June 2025 or that it would strike neighbors including Azerbaijan, widening the war into the Indian Ocean — a failure the author attributes to a lack of "strategic imagination" rather than an intelligence gap.
- Iran has selectively kept the strait open to Turkish, Indian, and Saudi vessels while punishing US allies, driving wedges through the coalition — and the author argues Iran needs only to raise costs and wait for a political fracture, not defeat the US conventionally.
- The "hubris/humility index" the author introduces, grounded in political scientist Robert Jervis's work on patterned misperceptions in international relations, argues that clean victories like the January 2026 Venezuela operation are "dangerous teachers" that inflate overconfidence precisely when skepticism is most needed.
Why it matters: Tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has dropped to zero after Iran shut it with drones, and Sen. Chris Murphy says the administration has no plan to reopen it — exposing 20% of global oil supply and US standing with India and Sri Lanka to a blockade strategy that mirrored the Ukraine drone playbook the US itself helped underwrite.
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