Strait of Hormuz

Twenty-four miles wide. Twenty percent of the world's oil. No real alternative. And right now — closed.

The Strait of Hormuz is the most important body of water on earth that most people couldn't find on a map. Every day in normal conditions, approximately twenty million barrels of oil and a fifth of the world's liquefied natural gas transit this single narrow passage between Iran and Oman. When it is disrupted — as it is now, in the most severe closure since the 1970s energy crisis — oil prices surge, food prices rise, airlines ground flights, hospitals ration medical gases, and forty nations hold emergency meetings to discuss a strip of water they had largely ignored until it stopped working.

The Strait of Hormuz covers seven things most people don't know about the world's most consequential chokepoint. What it actually is and why this specific geography matters so much. Why the bypass pipelines that exist can handle less than half of normal Strait throughput — making the alternatives real but insufficient. How Iran acquired permanent structural leverage over the global economy simply by virtue of where its coastline sits. Why this crisis fits a pattern that has repeated four times in four decades — and what that history tells us about how it ends. What the full costs of closure actually are, beyond gas prices, reaching into food, fertilizer, aviation, medicine, and industrial production worldwide. And what reopening actually requires — militarily, diplomatically, and legally — and why reopening is not the same as resolving the underlying vulnerability.

Written as the 2026 crisis unfolds, this book provides the context that daily news coverage cannot — the geography, the history, the structural analysis that explains not just what is happening but why it keeps happening and why it matters so much.

Part of the I'm No Expert, But series: short, accurate, accessible books on topics that are more surprising than most people expect. Readable in thirty minutes. Essential right now.