“Iran’s regime has lost control of the Strait of Hormuz,” Swiss energy analyst and investor Alexander Stahel declared in his Monday morning investment letter The Commodity Compass.
Stahel followed up his assertion with a 1,200 word description (excluding maps and charts) of how the operation that he describes as “the Hormuz shuttle” got stood up and is now running massive quantities of oil out of the Arabian/Persian Gulf to an oil-thirsty world.
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Find and read Stahel’s detailed analysis. He has an “X” account where he posts under his own name and links to his newsletter. He is persuasive.
First, the United Arab Emirates and then its neighbors developed an enormous system to shuttle oil out of the Gulf via a new shipping channel which hugs the Omani coast and which is patrolled and protected by the United States military. Central Command isn’t replicating the destroyer-heavy escort system of decades past when Iran threatened the Strait, but its new tactics are effective and the September decline in the price of oil demonstrated that, as October’s anticipated decline will as well.
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Stahel writes: “The key development over the past month was the UAE’s refusal to become hostage to Iran’s regime. Instead, it established what I describe as the ‘Hormuz Shuttle’.”
It started early. Already back in May, it placed eleven hulls — mostly VLCCs [very large crude carriers], owned, leased & operated by ADNOC [Abu Dhabi National Oil Company] — to get the risky job done of shuttling crude out of the Persian trap via the Oman Lane into the Gulf of Oman, unloading it via Ship-to-Ship (STS) transfer and then re-entering the Persian trap to repeat the trade.”
The detailed assessment focuses on the key exporters: “ADNOC has become very good at the Hormuz Shuttle, Aramco [Saudi Arabia’s state-owned energy giant] and Kuwait have learned from the UAE and copied the model. By now, we have some 116 hulls active in the Shuttle trade around the Strait of Hormuz, most of them using the Oman Lane.” The assessment is that Qatar and Iraq are also now using the “Hormuz Shuttle.”
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“Iran has failed to shut the Strait,”’Stehal concludes, “the shuttle system is scaling, and time is increasingly working against Tehran.”
At this writing, West Texas crude — critical to the American market — is at $94.50 a barrel and Brent just under $107.00 as the world’s commodity traders worry that President Trump rejected the Iranian overtures to reopen talks.
That bump-up in prices will fade as Iran proves incapable of stoping or even scaring any of the participants in the “Hormuz shuttle.” The price will continue to fall as more and more traders and buyers realize that Iran is out of cards. President Trump has joined Prime Minister Netanyahu in a posture made famous by Clint Eastwood: “Go ahead. Make my day.” Every attempt to bully Trump has brought exponential response from the American military. Iran hasn’t tried that in weeks. It’s flat out afraid of Israel as they know Bibi would love to be provoked right now.
Every country that depends on the Strait of Hormuz has its oil export-driven cash flow up and running at around 80-90% of the January rate. Except Iran, of course. The IRGC has spent six months flailing itself into a corner from which there is no escape without President Donald Trump’s ok.
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President Trump is unlikely to give away his hard won leverage over the killers in Tehran absent genuine concessions on their part of the sort that signifies the rump regime really has thrown in the towel on its nuclear ambitions and missile program. The first meaningful step would have to be opening all of the devastated nuclear program sites to inspection by the International Atomic Energy Commission as well as the caverns and tunnel at Pickaxe Mountain.
More important than verifying for those afflicted with Trump Derangement Syndrome that Iran’s nuclear ambitions have indeed been obliterated, is the lifting from the world not just of the premium imposed on the cost of energy by the battle with Iran that began in February but the lifting of the “mullah tax” that has burdened the world’s economy since 1979.
Markets price every factor and possible factor into the cost of every good. The world has been paying a “mullah tax” since the Shah of Iran went into exile and Ayatollah Khomeini returned from his. Once the nature of the regime was fully revealed to the world, the risk of what an irrational group of religious fanatics would do with Iran’s incredible wealth of natural resources and an educated population has weighed on the world’s economy.
Israel paid the highest price, of course, as it was obliged to prepare for battle on many fronts, all of those threats financed by the fanatics in Tehran. The awful massacre of 10/7/2023 was the doing of Iran just as the assault by Hezbollah on the Jewish State was the doing of Iran. The Israelis have long known they were paying for Iran’s religious fanaticism, but the rest of the world played the role of the frog being boiled to death slowly. Had Iran achieved a nuclear breakout, the cost of the “Iran tax” would have skyrocketed as the region’s blackmailer became even more bold in its demands.
President Trump and the American military, assisted by the Israelis and now by our Gulf allies, had enough of the low-grade blackmail that had stretched over decades and the ever-increasing threat of much worse. Operations Epic Fury and Roaring Lion pummeled the Islamic Republic in the spring. The third string rulers — the most talented of the Iranian leadership, were eliminated in the opening strike of the war — could have accepted the loss of one part of the regime’s strength and abandoned its nuclear ambitions, but instead the retirees from the revolution’s glory days who were called off the bench to helm the crippled regime doubled and tripled down on fighting the world’s greatest military as well as Israel’s and some of the Gulf’s forces — and lost.
Now the American naval blockade has combined with the American shield over and around the “Hormuz Shuttle” to bring Iran to the United Nations General Assembly to beg for negotiations on its sideline and on American cable news. President Trump wisely rejected the desperate appeals, noting only that Iran had “overplayed its hand.”
At the same time as the “Hormuz Shuttle” scaled and brought relief to the world’s oil markets, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent took the lead in part two of President Trump’s drive to collapse the ability of the Islamic Republic to threaten anyone in the region. American sanctions went from a “6” to an “8.” The impoverished and devastated economy of Iran is being smothered before our eyes.
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The junta running Iran, drawn from the not-so-talented retirees of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and maybe half a Supreme Leader, counted on domestic pressure on President Trump as a result of the imminent midterm elections to force him to the table. The president agree to a Memorandum of Understanding on June 14, and signed it three days later as a test of Iran’s new leadership. They flunked the test and resumed attacks on shipping in the Strait. President Trump has stayed the course and refused to blink even as polls show a growing Democratic advantage in November.
President Trump knows that history will not long remember the results of an off-year election. It will, however, never forget the collapse of the Islamic Revolution if the president sees his strategy through to its inevitable end.
Hugh Hewitt is a Fox News contributor and host of “The Hugh Hewitt Show” heard weekday afternoons from 3 PM to 6 PM ET on the Salem Radio Network, and simulcast on Salem News Channel. Hugh drives Americans home on the East Coast and to lunch on the West Coast on over 400 affiliates nationwide, and on all the streaming platforms where SNC can be seen. He is a frequent guest on the Fox News Channel’s news roundtable, hosted by Bret Baier weekdays at 6pm ET. A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996 where he teaches Constitutional Law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990. Hewitt has frequently appeared on every major national news television network, hosted television shows for PBS and MSNBC, written for every major American paper, has authored a dozen books and moderated a score of Republican candidate debates, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in the 2015-16 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio show and his column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump over his 40 years in broadcasting. This column previews the lead story that will drive his radio/ TV show today.
