Middle East Eye makes the case that what is at stake in the Strait of Hormuz isn’t just the export of oil from the Persian Gulf, but control over the whole global trading system. Iran has spent the last 20 years or more building an alternative system so that it can trade despite US sanctions. Anybody who wants to get their oil out of the Gulf now has to engage with that alternative system.
“Because Iran has been under sanctions for such a long time, it has developed coping mechanisms for evasion that now make it less vulnerable to some of the blowback from its own economic weapon: which is the Strait of Hormuz’s closure,” Nicholas Mulder, an assistant professor of history at Cornell University and author of The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War, told MEE. “Iran has been artificially insulated from the fallout of this war by the US sanctions,” he added.
Look no further than its shadow fleet, which does not rely on western insurance, MEE’s Sean Mathews writes. Iran has been able to export 1.02 million barrels per day (bpd) of oil since the war started, with most of it going to China, Samir Madani, co-founder of TankerTrackers.com, told MEE. Iran averaged 1.69 million bpd last year.
