Splinter: The Other Major Chokepoint Iran Can Use to Squeeze Trump

“If the Americans intend to take action regarding the Strait of Hormuz, they should be careful not to add another strait to their challenges” said an unnamed military source to Iranian state media outlet Tasnim. “Iran is fully prepared to escalate the situation,” they warned. Another anonymous military source told Tasnim that “we will open other fronts for them as a surprise so that their action will not only be of no benefit to them but will also double their costs.” This is not subtle, in addition to the Strait of Hormuz, Iran is saying that Bab-el-Mandeb is a potential hostage they are willing to shoot too.

Trump and Israel’s war on Iran has unleashed a wave of potentially cataclysmic impacts across a diverse wave of basic needs. This is the greatest energy shock in history. It’s the spring planting season in the northern hemisphere and one of the world’s greatest sources of fertilizer is shut off, imperiling the lives of tens of millions if not hundreds of millions of people in the global south. Everything is about to get more expensive thanks to the oil shock that has already taken place, and should this war last much longer, some of these price rises could linger for years. It could lead to shortages of myriad products or even energy blackouts. There are countless deleterious secondary impacts from Trump and Israel’s decision to go on a killing spree, and the whole world will have to pay for them. What makes this ultra depraved is that they are risking the globe’s stability with seemingly the only goal being to destabilize not the Iranian regime, but the entire country of Iran. Like Iraq, it’s already clear that the calamitous impacts from this war will reverberate throughout the rest of our lives, and this is not going to be a quick in and out mission like Trump and his band of idiots believed.

It’s also brought another minor bane of Americans’ existence into the forefront: geography. It’s not enough to have to locate Iran on a map, but learning key sea passages around it? Come on man. Americans truly are being punished for our decades of decadence right now. The inflation this crisis will create is specifically designed in a lab to enrage the army of suburbanites being bankrupted by their monthly Ford F-350 payments. I do sympathize with the average American trapped in a system that does not teach them important things about the world though, because I am one of the lucky ones who has studied it specifically and even I had to go to Google maps to get an idea of why the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait is so important. Let’s all be honest and accept our limitations as boorish Americans and start with the basics: a map of the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and Europe. I have pointed to the two pertinent areas that Iran is credibly threatening to nuke the global economy with.

Zooming out in a lot of contexts is helpful, and doing it here, well, the story writes itself and we are no longer ignorant Americans. These two chokepoints are clearly how stuff gets to Europe and Asia, and if Iran squeezes them, stuff doesn’t get to Europe and Asia. America is a little more insulated from this double whammy because of our geographic location and our own liquid natural gas energy revolution, but we are as connected to the global economy as anyone, and we are already feeling the effects of events thousands of miles away. The last month has proven how Iran can completely upend the entire global economy by simply lobbing some drones and missiles into these two areas that combine to be 37 miles wide at their narrowest. Every day is filled with unlimited uncertainty now, but we do know that the economy can only take so many more days of the largest energy supply shock in history before it starts to crack.

And now Iran is threatening to tap into their Houthi proxies in Yemen who have already used this Red Sea shipping lane to really mess with global capital. In late 2023 through mid-2024, the Houthis imposed a blockade on shipping in the Red Sea, firing naval drones at ships and sinking the Greek-owned M/V Tutor, killing a Filipino sailor. Shipping subsequently plummeted through this area that leads to an important Israeli port. They did this to try to pressure Israel to stop its genocide in Gaza, and it really had an impact on the Western capitalist system that has bankrolled and backstopped Israel’s genocide. 

Last May, logistics platform project44 revealed that container ship sailings through the Red Sea dropped seventy-eight percent compared to the previous May, and the Defense Intelligence Agency noted that companies were traveling around Africa instead, which added about eleven thousand nautical miles, one to two additional weeks of transit time and one to two million dollars in extra fuel costs. Insurance risk premiums rose from 0.05% before October 7th, 2023, to 1% by February 2024, a 2,000% increase. For a vessel with $100 million worth of goods in transit, insurance for that trip alone went from basically nothing to $1 million. Insurance industry officials told Bloomberg that war premiums now may generate as much as $1 billion per year. With a few drones and a lot of determination, the Houthis simply rose the cost of doing business around the world in response to Israel’s genocide. There is a lot to be learned about modern warfare both from theirs and Ukraine’s successes of throwing endless waves of drones into the gears of imperialism and causing a lot of damage. 

Now Iran is implementing this strategy in the more impactful Strait of Hormuz, sending every oil trader into a month-long existential crisis, but the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait is its own thorny problem too. In 2023, 21.8 million barrels of oil per day flowed through the Strait of Hormuz, while 18.1 million combined barrels flowed through the Bab el-Mandeb Strait and the Suez Canal and SUMED Pipeline that sits behind its chokepoint. When Yemen’s Houthis squeezed it in 2024, just 9.1 million barrels of oil flowed through these two critical regions each day. In many ways, Bab el-Mandeb is a more immediate problem for the West, because the vast majority of the oil that used to flow through the Strait of Hormuz goes east.

But what goes west out of Hormuz crosses the Arabian Sea, enters the Gulf of Aden, and then travels through Bab el-Mandeb, through the Suez Canal, and then to Europe. These two straits are about 4,000 kilometers apart, but they are intrinsically linked both by natural shipping routes that have existed for centuries, as well as the Iranian regime planning to weaponize them. In this conflict, they have proven so far to be the only rational actor, and off-ramps seem likely to be dictated on their terms, not whatever TruthSocial posts Trump farts out on any given day.

Not to mention that Israel’s desire to expand its footprint has long been beyond reason, and bloodthirst is a far better explanation for its actions. In a leaked document, its own military judged that a full occupation of Gaza could throw the Israeli economy into crisis, and Benjamin Netanyahu’s war cabinet broke up in part over this fight. They have chosen the bloodshed of their neighbors over a sustainable future at home, and Israel’s increasing isolation will present myriad problems for the globe’s new hermit kingdom being ostracized from markets who once accepted them with open arms. It is difficult to find anything in Israel’s bellicose actions that resembles what I was taught is the classical definition of a rational actor (a country acting in its own self-interests). What Israel is doing could more accurately be described as a murder-suicide.

The United States and its mad King certainly aren’t acting in their own interests either, because shutting down the Strait of Hormuz in an election year is Trump doing a tribute to Sideshow Bob stepping on an endless number of rakes. The only regime in this whole shitshow acting in its own self-interest is the one whose leadership was completely decapitated and who now by all reports, is being directed by a more extremist caucus closer to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. At the very least, they have proven they know where their levers of power lie and how to make their enemy feel pain, and they are squeezing, but not as hard as they can yet. They are leaving that trump card in their back pocket to use if Trump lets Lindsey Graham talk him into becoming the one true neocon and launching a ground invasion of Iran to try to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. 

Both Israel and the United States have bombed Iran while Iranian negotiators were talking with Israeli and American negotiators. It does not take a genius to ask the simple question of why Iran would continue negotiate with these two proven bad faith actors, and despite Trump’s sweaty TruthSocial declarations, Iran denies that serious talks are ongoing. They have openly stated that they believe the best way to ensure this violation of their sovereignty does not happen again is to make the fallout from this so painful for the United States, Israel and the broader West that it serves as its own deterrent. In short, $150 barrel oil, which is what experts say will come after a shutdown of the Bab el-Mandeb (it is currently around $105 as I write this).

These two straits controlled nearly half of the globe’s maritime oil trade in 2023. This is all so unprecedented and gargantuan in scale, it’s hard to really put into words what this all means for the global economy should this status quo persist, other than bad bad bad bad bad.

It’s hard to take anyone’s word at face value in this whole mess, but the reports out of Iran are that the new regime feels emboldened by the past month, and the financial muscle they have flexed by delivering the largest energy shock in history has filled them with a belief that they have a strong hand to play. Long-term bond yields are currently hovering right around the TACO Trump number of 5%, while the S&P500 is nearing correction territory, down almost 9% from its February high before the war started. Trump can boast all he wants about American airstrikes that have nearly depleted our stocks and how much damage they have done to Iranian infrastructure, but the economic chaos Iran has already wrought and the future shocks this unprecedented event implies are far larger than yet another American bombing campaign in the Middle East that only partially achieves its goals. 

In 2024, the Houthis proved how damaging restricting Red Sea shipping can be, and in 2026, Iran created a genuine black swan event by shutting down the Strait of Hormuz and permanently changing the risk calculation around shipping anything through this area. Closing either chokepoint has proven to be a gigantic shock to the global economy, but the combination of both plays off of each other and if Iran flexes this muscle, it will create exponentially damaging effects. Iran is holding a gun to the global economy’s head, and they have already fired a bullet into its leg to prove to everyone that they’re not fucking around, all while they gesture to a bazooka sitting in the corner of the room. This is all very bad, and the intersection of these chokepoints and the AI bubble in the West has grave implications for a dangerously inequal country we have bet on chatbots that lie to you. Iran is speeding the global economy towards an iceberg, and no one is coming to save it.