The 21 miles that shook the world

How the Strait of Hormuz changes everything:

Iran's closure of the Strait of Hormuz has triggered the largest energy shock since the 1970s oil crisis. Twenty per cent of the world's oil has simply stopped moving. Here is what happened, who is On the morning of 2nd March 2026, something that never happened before happened, but so quietly, so almost anticlimactically, that nobody noticed.

For the first time in recorded history, not a single commercial tanker ship reported its position in the Strait of Hormuz during the previous night. The ships just vanished. One hundred and fifty of them, anchored outside the Strait of Hormuz, their engines running, their crews waiting below deck for instructions nobody knew how to give them.

Three days before, American and Israeli fighter planes had bombed Iran as part of a campaign that had killed its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Iran retaliated against American bases across the Gulf. And then, as promised to do for 40 years, it closed the Strait of Hormuz.

A Strait that, at its narrowest point, is only 21 miles across. A choke point through which, until this morning, some 20 million barrels of oil passed every single day of every year— one in every five consumed anywhere on Earth.

The consequences of this are only just beginning to be felt.