The world’s most critical oil chokepoint has become a maritime no man’s land, caught between a de facto double blockade that defies a formal ceasefire and threatens to tip fragile economies into a food crisis of staggering proportions. Despite a truce that supposedly halted direct hostilities, neither Iranian nor US forces have fully relinquished their grip on the Strait of Hormuz, and the cumulative effect has been to paralyse tanker traffic that ordinarily carries a fifth of the globe’s petroleum. With each side hunting the other’s shipping, and both now engaged in sweeping for sea mines both real and imagined, the waterway is effectively closed to commercial navigation.

The spiral into strangulation began, viewed from the Persian Gulf, after the US bombing campaign started in late February. Iran immediately choked off transit for all foreign-flagged vessels, only to partially reopen the strait with informal tolls for non-Iranian ships once a ceasefire was agreed. Washington then chose to enforce its own stop on Iranian tankers, prompting Tehran to snap back with an all-out bar against foreign hulls. The result, as analysts in Rome note, is a dizzying tit-for-tat that has left the strait in a state of mutual veto: any ship that dares enter risks being boarded, shot at, or worse.

On the water, the cat-and-mouse game plays out with starkly asymmetric methods. Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps commandos using speedboats and helicopters have been filmed swarming container ships, scaling their sides and taking control in an echo of seventeenth-century piracy. Tehran’s ghost fleet, a shadowy network of vessels that switch flags and conceal identities, has perfected the art of slipping through sanctions — and now blockades — by continuously altering ensigns and owner registries, much as Caribbean buccaneers once did. Meanwhile, the US Navy speaks of clearing explosive mines, a painstaking effort that experts in Washington acknowledge could take months. But the deeper wound is psychological. As security analysts in the American capital point out, the real weapon is uncertainty: you do not need to lay mines; you merely need to convince the market you have.

Historical precedent, while instructive, offers only partial comfort. During the 1980s “Tanker War” phase of the Iran-Iraq conflict, US warships escorted reflagged Kuwaiti tankers through hostile waters, a muscular intervention that preserved the flow of crude. Yet viewed from Dubai, today’s IRGC small boats, swarming tactics and the blurring of maritime identity make a repeat of that relative success far more elusive. The current crisis is less a rerun of the 1980s and more an intensification of the grey-zone warfare Tehran has honed for decades.

The blockade’s gravest threat, however, stretches far beyond energy markets. As Madrid-based analysts calculate, a prolonged closure of Hormuz could disrupt the global grain supply chain to the point that 45 million people slide into hunger, sharpening the knife-edge on which many import-dependent nations already rest. Even if mine-sweeping operations were to declare the channel clear, London’s marine insurance market will likely balk at underwriting transits without a credible, enduring security architecture — not merely a fragile truce. The real crisis, therefore, may only be beginning, morphing from a military standoff into a protracted economic siege with the world’s most vulnerable as its principal victims.