Hypothesis: What If The U.S. Is In No Hurry To Re-Open The Strait

 I came across a March 18, 2026, article from John Konrad entitled: "The Hormuz Hypothesis – What If the U.S. Navy Isn’t in a Hurry to Reopen the Strait?" Obviously the tactical situation has changed in the nearly one month since the article was published, but surely not the strategic considerations. And those strategic considerations discussed by Konrad match up with those discussed by other commentators about a New American International Order.  

    I recommend that you read all of Konrad's piece, but he describes how Trump entered his second term determined to restore Maritime power through a combination of ensuring free passage of American vessels through choke points, strengthening the Navy, and using tariffs to address trade deficits and unfair competition. But he has push back from a multitude of foreign and domestic entities that, for the most part, were successful in killing his planned reforms. 

    What was Trump to do? Konrad's hypothesis:

    Strike Iran, and Europe either bends or goes dark in an energy crisis.

    The European shipping community and political establishment spent the past year dismissing, undermining, and mocking every Trump maritime initiative. They scoffed at the USTR tariffs. They laughed at the SHIPS Act. They blocked the IMO exemptions. They refused to take American maritime policy seriously.

    Now their energy supply runs through an insurance facility controlled by Washington.

    “Let their navies figure it out.” Except everyone knows they cannot. European naval forces are too small, too slow, and too poorly equipped for sustained convoy escort operations through a contested strait. All the European navies combined could not send more than three ships at a time to defend the Red Sea. An entire German task force sailed around Africa to avoid it.

    Eventually Europe will have to capitulate to get the U.S. Navy, and the U.S. insurance backstop, to fully reopen the Strait.

    What does “capitulate” look like? The IMO carbon tax. Greenland. Tariff concessions. The SHIPS Act. Every maritime policy priority that Europe and China have been blocking for the past year.

    I had a long discussion with a senior Department of Energy official yesterday on background. I cannot share details but it is clear that the conventional Strait of Hormuz calculus, the one every cable news analyst is running, is wrong. The administration is not thinking about this the way CNN thinks they are.     

And as for oil prices:

    While TV oil analysts focus on the global price of oil, the real experts in Houston are watching something different: the fracturing of the global energy market.

    The real threat is not $200 oil. It’s a fracture of the system. It is cheap energy in export nations and ruinous energy costs in places far from reserves. It’s $2 oil in the Persain [sic] Gulf, $20 dollar oil in the Gulf of America and $2,000 oil in the UK. 

 Alternatively:

An alternative version of this scenario is simpler: apathy. America just does not care about ships or how long it takes to reopen Hormuz or what happens to Europe as a result. But that version raises its own question. It was European encouragement of American maritime apathy, and European exploitation of that apathy to corner the global shipping industry and keep control in London, that created this situation. If American indifference is the reason the Navy is taking its time, is that not Europe’s fault for cultivating it?