Other than the Trump-hating crowd, which will root for just about anyone or any country that goes up against him, about the only asset Iran has been left with is the degree of their control over the Strait Of Hormuz.
But are they losing that as well? Two articles today suggest the answer is yes.
One is Gabrielle Fahmy’s article for the New York Post. Here is how it starts:
Iran appears to be losing its grip on the Strait of Hormuz while traffic through the critical waterway has exploded by nearly 400% over the last two weeks — as ships increasingly use a US-backed corridor to cross.
Nearly 200 ships navigated the strait last week, up from 150 the previous week and just 40 two weeks earlier, according to data from the UK Maritime Trade Operations Center.
The surge brings total traffic along the passage route to about 20% of pre-war levels, through which roughly 20% of the world’s seaborne oil flowed in peacetime.
The other from Amit Segal’s latest article, in his daily series titled “It’s Noon In Israel”.
Here is the key segment:
The conventional wisdom dictated that since a single IRGC survivor with one remaining drone is sufficient to make global shipping sailing the opposite direction, nothing short of convoys, and perhaps not even that, could reopen the strait. But a blind attacker is almost as harmless as a disarmed one, so CENTCOM went after the network of radars, cameras and sensors.
The radars went first. Iran had meant to protect them with mobility—a radar truck rolls out, paints the strait for a few minutes, finds a tanker, and folds back into hiding. The trouble is that a radar, the moment it switches on, becomes the most conspicuous thing over the water, and a missile rides its own beam back to the truck.
The cameras were the harder half. Electro-optical and infrared sensors don’t emit “kill me” signals, and the islands in the strait lent the Iranians a perch from which they could track a tanker without announcing themselves. According to Morag, there was no shortcut against passive sensors, only the slow work of finding them by eye and taking them out one at a time, until the whole network, radars included, was significantly degraded.
Despite being blinded, the regime is still selling the myth of control because the strait constitutes most of its leverage at the negotiating table. A press that wanted the story to be one of Trump’s failure is still running with the Iranian line.
Meanwhile, Washington has renewed much of the traffic. Convoys are running the southern lane along the Omani coast at night with transponders off—dark enough that Iran struggled to find them, and dark enough that civilian trackers missed them as well, leaving open-source intelligence observers to conclude that Iran’s dominance remained complete. At the same time, Washington began guaranteeing the ships against their new insurance costs and worked the captains one call at a time to run the newly protected strait.
All this work culminated in Energy Secretary Chris Wright’s announcement last week that the seven-day average of oil leaving Hormuz had risen to 9 million barrels per day—and about 15 million total when the bypass pipelines and export facilities are added in, against roughly 20 million before the war. Morag puts the total at 10 to 13 million.
Is this true? Do Gabrielle Fahmy and Amit Segal have this right?
If so, taking their information into account – then adding in the oil pipelines/alternative routes that are being built to further lessen Iran’s influence going forward – it would seem that Iran is on the brink of losing the one and only serious area of influence it has left.
And if it does? What happens then?
No one knows for sure – other than the fact that none of the various “leadership” entities runnin Iran on any given day (is it the military? The “Supreme Leader”? Someone/something else?) appear to give a damn about whether the people of its country live or die, as long as it/they stay in power.
The bottom line is that Iran’s situation is obviously in flux. Things are changing daily. Let’s all keep an eye out and see where this falls.
But let’s also be mindful of the apparent fact that, directionally, the course of this conflict seems to moving distinctly in our favor.
My wish (and, I hope yours)? That it continues in that direction, and accelerates.
