The Three Clocks Running Against Iran
The End of Playing Whack-a-Mole with Iranian Terror
The US blockade of the Strait of Hormuz has set three clocks running against Iran simultaneously.
The Economic Clock
Losing oil exports is costing Iran $400 million per day. That clock started April 13. Iran entered the war with an economy already in the toilet. Oil is essentially the only hard currency that counts. Without it, you cannot run a country. You cannot pay the Revolutionary Guard, the military, the police, the clerics, or the proxies. Ouch!
The Geological Clock
With no oil exporting, storage fills up. Iran’s wells will be closed down. It sounds temporary. In old fields it isn’t. That clock starts right about now.
When a well in an aging field sits idle, the pressure that holds water below the oil begins to fail. Water seeps upward into the oil-bearing rock and locks the oil in place permanently. No deal, no ceasefire, no Chinese engineer reverses it. The Khuzestan basin — the heart of Iranian production, some fields producing since 1908 — is especially vulnerable. Restarting takes years. Some fields may never come back.
The Relevance Clock
The world is working around the need for the Strait of Hormuz. Necessity is the mother of invention. Saudi Arabia has ramped its East-West pipeline from 770,000 to nearly 3 million barrels per day. The UAE’s Fujairah pipeline is adding capacity. Iraq’s Turkey route is reopening. Combined, these alternative routes may reach 9-10 million barrels per day within six months — still half of pre-war Hormuz flow, but enough to structurally loosen Iran’s grip. New pipeline projects being greenlit today won’t complete for years, but the infrastructure being built now doesn’t get torn down when the Strait reopens. Iran’s leverage erodes whether the shooting stops or not.
Europe was supposed to fold without Russian gas. Within a year it used almost none. The pipeline investment, the LNG terminals, the efficiency measures — all accelerated by the crisis itself. Russia lost its leverage permanently. Iran is watching the same movie.
The Blockade Isn’t Going Anywhere
If Iran could break the blockade, it would have done so already — or at least tried. The IRGC has harassed ships, laid mines, and fired drones at pipeline infrastructure — harassment, not blockade-breaking. The naval and air assets that could have made the blockade untenable were degraded in the kinetic phase. What remains is bluster. Bluster is free. Action has stopped because the capability to act has been significantly impaired.
The strategy from here is simple: stay. Let the three clocks do the work. Every week the blockade holds, the economic clock bleeds Iran further, the geological clock locks away more oil permanently, and the relevance clock makes the Strait permanently less indispensable to the world.
Trump has already signaled his willingness to do exactly that. Despite the hysterical pleading from the news media — the ceasefire-as-defeat narrative, the ammo-constraints story, the approval-ratings hand-wringing — he has shown no signs of backing down. He has 2.5 years left. The blockade is not going anywhere. The press keeps waiting for the blink. The blockade keeps holding — and the War Powers Act does not cover blockades.
(For more on why Trump pulled the trigger when he did, see The Iran War: Why Now?)
The Harpoon Is Securely In
No need to waste more ammo.
The harpoon is securely in. Time to let Iran’s economy bleed to death. With no money, they cannot make problems for anyone.
Game over.
Another Cranky Old Guy writes on geopolitics, technology, and financial markets at mecrankyoldguy.com.