Strip away the communiqués about the embattled Strait of Hormuz and look at the data, because in maritime commerce the data never lies.

Before the war began in late February, roughly 130 vessels transited the Strait of Hormuz every day. It is the aorta of the global energy system — a fifth of the world’s oil, a third of its seaborne LNG.

Then came the American campaign, announced in March with a simple promise: bombing would reopen the strait.

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The verdict of the tankers
Consider what four months of that promise has produced. Over the three days of July 10–12, a total of 73 vessels crossed– fewer than 25 a day.

On July 12, the day CENTCOM completed its fourth strike wave in a single week, transits collapsed to 11. By last Thursday and Friday, shipping data showed just three commodity vessels crossing in 24 hours, with not a single VLCC or LNG carrier transiting for two consecutive days.

Lloyd’s List Intelligence reports that no vessel above 10,000 deadweight tonnes has used the Oman-side “Southern Highway” — the very corridor the Americans coordinate and champion — with its transponder on since July 7.

Read that sequence again. More bombs, fewer ships. Every single escalation wave since March has deepened the shutdown. The strikes are not failing to achieve their objective. They are producing its opposite — measurably, in Kpler and Lloyd’s List data, week after week.

The tanker market has voted with its keels.

Chabahar and the CENTCOM confession
Last week the campaign reached Chabahar, where American forces destroyed the maritime control tower at the Shahid Kalantari port. The stated rationale: the tower was an IRGC surveillance node, and its destruction “protects freedom of navigation”.

Examine that claim on the map before you examine it in law. Chabahar sits on the Gulf of Oman — outside the Strait of Hormuz entirely. It is Iran’s only deep-water port with direct access to the Indian Ocean, the one Iranian harbour whose traffic never touches Hormuz at all.

It is also the port India has spent a decade and hundreds of millions developing as its corridor to Afghanistan and the North-South Transport Corridor. Striking it does nothing to reopen Hormuz. It does, however, tell New Delhi exactly how much its equities weigh in Washington’s calculus.

And a port’s traffic control tower is the classic dual-use facility. Whatever surveillance function it may have served, it is also the instrument that sequences civilian shipping safely in and out of a harbour.

Destroying it does not enhance safe navigation in those waters; it degrades it. Iranian maritime domain awareness, meanwhile, rests on coastal radar, drones, dhows and AIS itself. One tower blinds no one.

But the deepest problem is in CENTCOM’s own language. The strike, we are told, protects freedom of navigation “for all vessels, except for ships attempting to violate the ongoing US naval blockade against Iran.”

CENTCOM: THE DESTRUCTION OF THE TOWER DIRECTLY DEGRADES IRGC’S ABILITY TO COORDINATE ATTACKS ON INNOCENT CIVILIAN CREW MEMBERS. FURTHERMORE, THE STRIKE PROTECTS FREEDOM OF NAVIGATION IN REGIONAL WATERS FOR ALL VESSELS, EXCEPT FOR SHIPS ATTEMPTING TO VIOLATE THE ONGOING U.S. NAVAL…

— First Squawk (@FirstSquawk) July 17, 2026

I have practised in the law of the sea for more than 35 years, and I can tell you that sentence is a confession. Freedom of navigation under UNCLOS is not selective. It cannot be granted to some flags and withdrawn from others at the discretion of one navy.

A blockade is not the protection of free navigation — it is its suspension. What the United States is defending in Hormuz is not the principle of open seas. It is a claim to decide who sails. That is not freedom of navigation. That is contested control, dressed in the vocabulary of the thing it replaced.

This is the Legitimacy Principle in its purest form: a rule becomes real only at the point of enforcement. Washington says the strait is open. The point of enforcement is the strait itself — and at the point of enforcement, three ships crossed in a day.

What the underwriters know
Here is what no CENTCOM statement will ever change, and it is the lesson of a career spent in war risk and P&I.

Straits are not opened by admirals. They are opened by underwriters.

A shipowner does not ask whether the US Navy has declared a corridor safe. He asks what his war risk premium is, whether his P&I cover survives the transit, whether his crew will sail, and whether his charterer will pay.

War risk premiums respond to kinetic activity in the area — full stop. It does not matter whose ordnance is falling or whose infrastructure is burning. Every strike, on either side’s assets, keeps the Strait of Hormuz uninsurable at commercial rates. And an uninsurable strait is a closed strait, whatever the press releases say.

This is why the bombing cannot work even on its own terms. The campaign’s theory is that destroying Iranian capabilities restores confidence. But the underwriter does not price Iranian capabilities. The pricing is based on violence — and the campaign itself is the violence.

The second chokepoint
And now the war has done what escalation always does: it has multiplied the battlefield.

On July 16, Reuters reported — from three sources — that Iran has instructed the Houthis to stand ready to close Bab el-Mandeb if the United States strikes Iranian power infrastructure, as Trump threatened on July 14.

JUST IN:

Iran has reportedly told the Houthis to close the Bab al-Mandab Strait if the United States attacks power plants.

– Reuters pic.twitter.com/j171TCvR6q

— China pulse (@Eng_china5) July 16, 2026

A source close to the Houthis says the missiles and drones are already deployed in the highlands overlooking Hodeidah and the Gulf of Aden, awaiting the order. And the trigger is not in Sana’a: IRGC representatives already inside Yemen will decide when the gate closes.

Understand what this means. Bab el-Mandeb — the “Gate of Tears” — carries 10 to 15 percent of global maritime trade and a significant share of Europe’s energy imports. Since Hormuz shut, the Red Sea route has been precisely the alternative on which Gulf exporters and the entire architecture of workarounds has depended.

Close it, and the Middle East’s two great oil gates are shut simultaneously. Every laden vessel between Asia and Europe rounds the Cape of Good Hope, adding two to three weeks and rewriting freight economics overnight. South African ports are already running heavy.

The Americans set out to open one chokepoint by force. They are on the verge of closing two.

The loaded gun
Let me be rigorous rather than merely alarmed, because the counter-argument deserves its hearing.

There is a serious school of thought — well argued this month by Yemeni analysts — that Tehran will never actually pull this trigger. A proxy’s value lies in the threat, not the execution.

The Houthis’ leverage over Hodeidah, Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea terminals, the risk of dragging Egypt and the Gulf states into open confrontation: three concentric circles of deterrence all counsel restraint. The loaded gun on the table, in this view, is worth more than the fired one.

In a stable environment, I would agree. But this is not a stable environment. It is an escalation spiral in which each side has repeatedly done the thing the analysts said was too costly to do. Iran was not supposed to close Hormuz. The United States was not supposed to blockade a nation of ninety million people. Chabahar was not supposed to be struck. The power grid was not supposed to be threatened.

Deterrence logic assumes rational actors husbanding their leverage — but four months of this war have shown both capitals converting leverage into rubble at every juncture. The gun stays holstered only until someone’s escalation makes the holster untenable. Trump’s power-grid ultimatum may be exactly that.

The reckoning
Machiavelli warned that wars begin when you will, but they do not end when you please. Washington began this campaign believing that firepower could substitute for the one thing that actually opens sea lanes: the confidence of the men and women who insure, crew and charter the world’s ships.

Four months on, the strait is emptier than ever, a second chokepoint is mined with intent, and the phrase “freedom of navigation” has been bent into its own negation — freedom for all vessels, except.

The rule is only real at the point of enforcement. At the point of enforcement, the sea is empty.

You cannot bomb a strait open. You can only bomb it shut.

Lim Tean is a Singaporean lawyer, politician and commentator. He is the founder of the political party People’s Voice and a co-founder of the political alliance People’s Alliance for Reform. He also hosts Lim’s Substack.

Democrats in Congress have sounded the alarm over US President Donald Trump pledging to commit more war crimes in Iran after he traded threats to energy infrastructure with the Iranian government, with the Republican declaring Saturday that he would take out the country’s power plants unless it reopened the Strait of Hormuz to all traffic.

Just a day after Trump claimed that “we are getting very close to meeting our objectives as we consider winding down our great Military efforts in the Middle East with respect to the Terrorist Regime of Iran,” in a post that remains pinned to the top of his Truth Social profile, the president took to the platform with a clear threat on Saturday night.

“If Iran doesn’t FULLY OPEN, WITHOUT THREAT, the Strait of Hormuz, within 48 HOURS from this exact point in time, the United States of America will hit and obliterate their various POWER PLANTS, STARTING WITH THE BIGGEST ONE FIRST!” Trump said.

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Trump’s post came after Ali Mousavi, the Iranian representative to the International Maritime Organisation, told the Chinese news agency Xinhua on Friday that the Strait of Hormuz — the waterway between the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman that is a key shipping route, including for fossil fuels — remains open to all vessels not linked to “Iran’s enemies.”

It also followed the Israeli military — which is bombing Iran alongside the United States — suggesting that the US was responsible for a Saturday attack on Iran’s uranium enrichment complex in Natanz.

According to The Associated Press, with his new threat, Trump “may have meant the Bushehr nuclear power plant, Iran’s biggest, which was already hit last week, or Damavand, a natural gas plant near Tehran, Iran’s capital.”

Responding to Trump’s Saturday post, US Representative Don Beyer (D-Va.) said: “It’s important not to shy away from candidly discussing the president’s increasingly erratic behaviour. His worsening instability is a clear and growing threat, not only to the American people but to the world.”

Trump has no plan to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, so he is threatening to attack Iran’s civil power plants. This would be an attack on civilians. This is what Putin is doing in Ukraine. This would be a war crime. End this war in Iran.

— Ed Markey (@SenMarkey) March 22, 2026

Hell-bent on destruction
Representative Yassamin Ansari (D-Ariz.) was similarly critical  over Trump’s pledge “From ‘help is on the way’ for Iranian protestors to threatening war crimes against an entire population. The United States is being run by a maniacal tyrant hell-bent on destroying this country and the world along with it.”

Other critics also pointed out that Article 56 of the Geneva Convention states in part that “works or installations containing dangerous forces, namely dams, dykes, and nuclear electrical generating stations, shall not be made the object of attack, even where these objects are military objectives, if such attack may cause the release of dangerous forces and consequent severe losses among the civilian population.”

The AP reported that after that strike on the Natanz complex, “Iranian missiles struck two communities in southern Israel late Saturday, leaving buildings shattered and dozens injured in dual attacks not far from Israel’s main nuclear research center.”

“Israel’s military said it was not able to intercept missiles that hit the southern cities of Dimona and Arad, the largest near the centre in Israel’s sparsely populated Negev desert,” according to the news agency. “It was the first time Iranian missiles penetrated Israel’s air defence systems in the area around the nuclear site.”

Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Speaker of Iran’s Parliament, said on X on Saturday that “if the Israeli regime is unable to intercept missiles in the heavily protected Dimona area, it is, operationally, a sign of entering a new phase of the battle… Israel’s skies are defenseless.”

After Trump’s threat, the Speaker added on Sunday that “immediately after the power plants and infrastructure in our country are targeted, the critical infrastructure, energy infrastructure, and oil facilities throughout the region will be considered legitimate targets and will be irreversibly destroyed, and the price of oil will remain high for a long time.”

Jessica Corbett is a senior editor and staff writer for Common Dreams. This article is republished under Creative Commons.