Four Straits, One War
How a landlocked oil rig in the Caspian Sea connects to the price of gas at your local station — and why Taiwan is watching the Middle East more closely than anyone
People-powered, AI-Generated
AI-assisted draft, verified, and corrected: Anthropic Claude Sonnet 5
Edited and curated by: Guy Wolf
*Disclaimer: AI has been known to malfunction “hallucinate” therefore, a human-in-the-middle approach with a separate draft and verification AI has been used to provide the best quality, most accurate apolitical research on this topic
A note before we start: this piece is being written on July 26, 2026, in the middle of a fast-moving war. Some of what’s described below is happening right now and confirmed by multiple independent sources. Some of it is a reasoned forecast — an “if this, then possibly that.” I’ve tried hard to keep those two categories separate, and I’ll flag exactly where we cross from one into the other.
The platform in the Caspian
At around 2 a.m. local time on July 25, 2026, something unusual happened almost 2,000 miles from the fighting everyone was already watching.
Ukraine’s Security Service launched a wave of long-range drones across the Caspian Sea — the world’s largest inland body of water, ringed by Russia, Kazakhstan, Iran, Azerbaijan, and Turkmenistan. The target was the Filanovsky offshore platform, operated by the Russian oil company Lukoil. Two cargo ships, the Port Olya 2 and the Begey, were hit as well. Ukrainian officials said the vessels had been ferrying military cargo between Russia and Iran.[^8] President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called the results of the overnight strikes “very good” in a short post the next morning, without elaborating.[^9]
Iran’s foreign ministry saw it differently. It said Ukraine had also struck an Iranian commercial vessel in the same waters, killing one crew member and wounding another, and it blamed Kyiv’s leadership directly for the consequences.[^10][^11]
Almost nobody outside of shipping-industry newsletters and Ukraine-watchers noticed. Understandably — that same week, U.S. forces were flying a thirteenth consecutive night of airstrikes against Iran, Houthi fighters in Yemen had just set a Saudi oil tanker ablaze in the Red Sea, and Brent crude had crossed $100 a barrel for the first time in over a year.[^17][^21]
But the Caspian strike is worth pausing on, because it’s a small, concrete example of something bigger: a set of wars that keep insisting they’re separate from each other, and keep turning out not to be.
The turn: this isn’t four wars. It’s one war fought through four bodies of water.
If you’ve been half-following the news, you’ve probably absorbed pieces of this as unrelated headlines — Iran, Yemen, Ukraine, maybe a worried aside about Taiwan. That’s a reasonable way to get overwhelmed, and an equally reasonable way to miss the pattern.
Here is the pattern, plainly stated, which is the thesis of this piece: the U.S.-Israel war with Iran, the Houthi blockade of Saudi Arabia, Ukraine’s expanding drone campaign into the Caspian, and the long-simmering question of a Chinese move on Taiwan are not four separate stories. They are four fronts of a single strategic problem — the world’s oil and trade now moves through a small number of narrow straits, every one of which is currently touched by a live conflict or a plausible one, and every government involved knows it.
That’s not a conspiracy theory. It’s geography plus incentives, and we can walk through both.
What we actually know, and how confident we should be
Before going further, it’s worth being explicit about three different kinds of claims this piece will make, because conflating them is how good reporting turns into bad forecasting.
Established fact: things documented by multiple independent, reputable outlets — troop movements, oil prices, dates, tanker attacks that have been confirmed.
Expert consensus: interpretations that most specialists in the field share, but which involve judgment calls about intent or causation.
Speculative or contested: plausible scenarios that responsible analysts disagree on, including most of what follows about Taiwan and about future oil prices.
Keep that three-way split in mind. A lot of the alarm in this space comes from treating the third category as if it were the first.
Front one: Iran, Hormuz, and the Gulf states — established fact
Since February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel have been at war with Iran, in a conflict some are calling the Third Gulf War. It opened with a joint U.S.-Israeli strike campaign, code-named Operation Epic Fury, that killed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and a number of senior officials, and triggered mass Iranian missile and drone retaliation across the region.[^1] A ceasefire in early April gave way to renewed brinkmanship over the Strait of Hormuz — the narrow passage between Iran and Oman that roughly a fifth of the world’s oil transits — and by early July, direct fighting had resumed after Iran fired on commercial ships and the U.S. reinstated a naval blockade of Iranian ports.[^1][^17] As of this week, the U.S. is conducting nightly strikes against Iranian military and infrastructure targets, and Iran has struck U.S. positions in Jordan and Iraq, killing American service members.[^3][^13]
Front two: Yemen, the Houthis, and Bab el-Mandeb — established fact
On July 20, 2026, Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthi movement (formally Ansar Allah) declared a naval blockade against Saudi Arabia, framing it as retaliation for Saudi Arabia’s decade-old air and sea restrictions on Houthi-controlled territory, and for a Saudi strike on Sanaa airport meant to block an Iranian aircraft from landing.[^15] This matters enormously because, with the Strait of Hormuz effectively closed for months, Saudi Arabia had been routing a growing share of its oil exports through the Red Sea and the Bab el-Mandeb Strait instead — the 18-mile-wide chokepoint between Yemen and the Horn of Africa. Shipments out of the Saudi Red Sea port of Yanbu had quadrupled in recent weeks, to roughly 4 million barrels a day, precisely because it was the safe alternative.[^3] By July 22–25, that alternative stopped looking safe: Houthi forces attacked and set fire to Saudi oil tankers, deployed missiles and drones near the strait, and Saudi Arabia briefly suspended some crude shipments through the route.[^4][^5][^6] Analysts now warn that a simultaneous closure of both Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb could choke off roughly a quarter of the world’s oil and gas supply.[^3]
Front three: the Caspian Sea — established fact, but smaller in scale than the other two
Ukraine has spent 2025 and 2026 dramatically expanding a maritime drone campaign against what’s known as Russia’s “shadow fleet” — an estimated 1,000-plus aging tankers that move Russian oil around Western sanctions and the G7 price cap.[^12] That campaign started in the Black Sea and Mediterranean and has now reached the Caspian, where Ukraine says it’s targeting not just Russian assets but vessels used to move military cargo between Russia and Iran.[^8][^9] This is real, current, and escalating — but it’s a fundamentally different kind of front than Hormuz or Bab el-Mandeb. It is not (yet, and there is no evidence it is becoming) a blockade of a global chokepoint; the Caspian is a closed sea with no outlet to the world ocean, and its oil moves out mostly by pipeline, not tanker. Its significance is strategic and financial rather than a direct chokepoint on global shipping: it’s a signal that Ukraine considers Iranian support for Russia’s war a legitimate target, anywhere it can reach it.
Front four: Taiwan and the Strait of Malacca — genuinely speculative
This is where the established facts run out and informed guessing begins. What we know: Taiwanese officials and state media have, since March 2026, openly worried that China will treat the U.S. entanglement in the Middle East as an opportunity, and have pointed to a resumption of large-scale Chinese air incursions near Taiwan as evidence.[^13][^14] Foreign policy analysts, including Johns Hopkins professor Hal Brands, have argued in print that a prolonged Gulf war risks depleting and distracting the U.S. military in ways that could embolden Beijing, and that Xi Jinping has reportedly directed his military to be ready for a Taiwan operation by 2027.[^15]
What we also know, and what gets less attention in the alarmed version of this story: the U.S. intelligence community’s own Annual Threat Assessment, released in March 2026, concluded that Chinese leaders do not currently plan to execute an invasion of Taiwan in 2027 and have no fixed unification timeline — while still noting steady Chinese progress on the military capabilities they’d need for one.[^16] Those two things — rising opportunism rhetoric and an intelligence assessment counseling against imminent-invasion alarm — sit in real tension, and a responsible piece has to hold both.
If China ever did move on Taiwan, the Strait of Malacca — the 900-kilometer channel between Malaysia and Indonesia’s Sumatra — would become the pressure point to watch. Roughly 80% of China’s crude oil imports and about two-thirds of its total maritime trade pass through Malacca’s narrowest stretch, a channel less than three kilometers wide at points.[^28][^29] Chinese leaders have called this the “Malacca Dilemma” since 2003, when then-President Hu Jintao first raised it with the Communist Party’s leadership: the fear that a hostile power could throttle China’s economy at a single, narrow, foreign-controlled waterway without ever attacking Chinese soil.[^28]
Three history lessons — and where each one breaks down
Newsletter after newsletter on this topic skips the history. That’s a mistake, because we’ve been here before, more than once, and the parallels are instructive precisely where they fail to hold up.
1973: the Yom Kippur War and the first oil shock. In October 1973, Egypt and Syria attacked Israel, and within weeks Arab oil-producing states, led by Saudi Arabia, imposed an embargo on the United States and other Israel-aligned nations for supporting Israel’s war effort. Oil prices roughly quadrupled in a matter of months, gas lines formed across the U.S., and the shock reshaped global energy policy for a generation, including the creation of the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Where it holds: a regional war, once it touches oil infrastructure or export politics, can produce price shocks wildly disproportionate to the barrels physically lost. Where it breaks down: 1973 was a deliberate, coordinated embargo by oil producers with total control over their own exports. Today’s chokepoint risk is closer to disruption by force — attacks and blockades on shipping lanes — which is a different mechanism with different off-ramps; Saudi Arabia in 2026 is a target of disruption, not the author of one.
1956: the Suez Crisis. When Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, Britain, France, and Israel invaded to retake it — and the crisis ended not because of their military plan, but because the United States and the Soviet Union both opposed the operation and forced a withdrawal. It’s remembered as the moment Britain and France discovered they were no longer the powers that got to decide outcomes at global chokepoints; the U.S. and USSR did. Where it holds: a chokepoint crisis can expose, in real time, which powers actually have the leverage to end a conflict versus which ones merely have the ships. Where it breaks down: Suez had two clear superpowers capable of imposing an ending. The current landscape — the U.S., China, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and a fractured Gulf security architecture — has no equivalent single lever, which is itself part of why this conflict has proven harder to close down quickly.
431 BCE: the Peloponnesian War, and the Sicilian expedition. This is the parallel implicit in the framing many analysts now use for a possible Taiwan move: Athens, already fighting a long, grinding war against Sparta, chose to open a second front by launching a massive, ultimately catastrophic expedition against Sicily — a decision historians still cite as the textbook case of imperial overstretch turning a winnable war into a lost one.[^30][^31] Commentators drawing on this history explicitly warn that a power tied down on one front becomes tempting prey — or tempted itself into fatal overreach — on another.[^15] Where it breaks down, and this matters: historians of the period caution that the Athens/Sparta-to-modern-superpower mapping is popular precisely because it’s flexible enough to fit almost any two rivals, which is a sign to be suspicious of it rather than reassured by it.[^32] Sparta was a land power that never seriously contested Athens at sea; China, by contrast, has spent two decades building exactly the navy and missile force it would need to contest the U.S. specifically over Taiwan and Malacca. The historical pattern (a distracted hegemon inviting a second front) is real and worth taking seriously as a risk, not as a prediction.
Two ways to think straight about the Taiwan question
Analysts who study intelligence failures for a living have developed specific techniques to keep themselves from just confirming what they already believed. Two are useful here.
Key Assumptions Check. Much of the “China will invade while the U.S. is distracted” commentary rests on one unexamined assumption: that overstretch automatically produces opportunistic aggression. It’s worth testing that assumption directly. China’s own economy would be devastated by a Taiwan war regardless of U.S. distraction — its Malacca dependency cuts both ways, since a war would also disrupt the oil China itself needs to fight one, and Beijing has spent two decades trying (with limited success) to build pipeline alternatives through Myanmar and Pakistan precisely because it fears this scenario.[^29] An alternative reading of the same facts is that a genuinely oil-starved, war-strained global economy is a worse, not better, environment for China to launch a war that would immediately trigger its own energy crisis. The assumption that distraction equals opportunity deserves more scrutiny than it typically gets.
Analysis of Competing Hypotheses. Instead of starting from “China will exploit this,” it’s more rigorous to lay out the live possibilities and weigh the evidence for each:
Hypothesis A — opportunistic invasion within the next 12–18 months. Supported by rising incursions and hawkish commentary; undercut by the U.S. intelligence community’s own assessment of no fixed invasion timeline and by China’s own oil vulnerability.[^16]
Hypothesis B — continued gray-zone coercion without invasion (military drills, incursions, pressure short of war). This is what Taiwanese officials themselves have mostly described happening since March, and it fits both the historical pattern of Chinese behavior around Taiwan and Beijing’s stated 2027 military-readiness (not invasion) benchmark.[^13][^16]
Hypothesis C — no meaningful change in Chinese posture, with Gulf-war attention serving mainly domestic Chinese economic and propaganda purposes rather than a military decision. Less discussed, but consistent with Beijing’s greater near-term interest in stable oil prices than in a war that would spike them.
The evidence currently favors B over A, with C not ruled out — which is a meaningfully different, and less alarming, picture than the “China is about to invade” framing implies.
What the indicators would actually look like
If Hypothesis A started to look more likely, we wouldn’t have to guess — there are observable warning signs analysts watch for: unusual PLA reservist call-ups, large-scale fuel and food stockpiling beyond routine levels, evacuation notices for Chinese nationals in Taiwan and nearby countries, a spike in Chinese state media preparing the public for casualties, and unusual activity in Chinese sovereign wealth and capital-control markets suggesting insulation from coming sanctions. None of those indicators are currently being reported. Their absence doesn’t mean the risk is zero — Chinese military planners have historically valued surprise — but it’s a meaningfully different starting point than headlines implying imminence.
Three futures — what actually happens to oil, and to the world, in each one
This is the heart of the question this piece was asked to answer, so let’s take it scenario by scenario, using a straightforward what-if / alternative-futures approach: what would have to be true, and what would follow.
Scenario 1 — The war stays contained to Hormuz and the Gulf; Bab el-Mandeb stabilizes; the U.S. escalates to major combat operations against Iran
What this requires: the Houthi blockade fizzles or is contained by Saudi and U.S. naval protection (plausible — Houthi enforcement so far has been sporadic rather than a true blockade, per maritime intelligence analysts[^6]), while the U.S. moves from strikes to a broader combat posture against Iranian forces and infrastructure.
Oil: Brent has already traded as high as roughly $100–101 and WTI near $92 on Houthi-attack headlines alone, up over 30% for the month, even before any U.S. escalation.[^21] Commodity strategists at RBC have publicly floated the possibility of Brent revisiting its 2022 war-premium high in the $120s in an extended-conflict scenario, with an outside chance of testing the 2008 peak near $146 in a true worst case of full regional war.[^21] A U.S. move to major combat operations, without new fronts opening, would likely push Brent into a sustained $110–130 range and WTI into the $105–120 range for as long as the intensified fighting lasts, before easing as the market adjusts, reroutes, and draws on strategic reserves — this is a judgment call, not a certainty, and should be read that way.
Who feels it, and how: Asian refiners (Japan, South Korea, India, China) that depend on Gulf crude face higher landed costs and longer supply chains as insurance and shipping costs rise. European economies, still adjusting to the post-2022 shift away from Russian gas, see renewed inflation pressure. Lower-income oil-importing countries — much of sub-Saharan Africa, parts of South Asia — are hit hardest per dollar of GDP, since they have the least ability to absorb an energy-cost shock. In the U.S., gasoline prices likely rise meaningfully from the roughly $3.80/gallon third-quarter baseline the EIA had projected before the latest escalation, though the U.S.’s own production base cushions it more than most.[^18]
Drones and interceptors: in this scenario, the war becomes primarily a test case for missile-defense economics. The U.S. reportedly burned through more Patriot interceptors in the war’s first week than Ukraine received from all its allies over four years of fighting[^27] — a stark illustration of the cost mismatch between multimillion-dollar interceptors and low-cost drones and missiles. Expect accelerated U.S. interest in cheaper counter-drone systems, several of which Ukraine has already field-tested and offered to the Pentagon at roughly $1,000 per unit.[^27]
Scenario 2 — Scenario 1, plus the Caspian becomes a genuine third front between Iran and Ukraine
What this requires: Ukraine’s strikes on Iran-linked shipping in the Caspian escalate from the July 25 incident into a sustained campaign, and Iran responds by committing more of its own naval and air-defense assets to the Caspian rather than treating it as a minor sideshow.
What’s different from Scenario 1: this is less an oil-supply story and more a war-financing and escalation-risk story. The Caspian doesn’t move much oil to world markets directly — its exports rely heavily on pipelines like the Caspian Pipeline Consortium line to the Black Sea, which has already been disrupted by tanker attacks, temporarily cutting roughly 80% of Kazakhstan’s oil exports in a separate but related incident this same week.[^19] If Iran diverts military resources to defend Caspian shipping and Russian shadow-fleet assets, two things follow: first, Iran’s already-stretched military faces a genuine two-theater problem (Gulf and Caspian) for the first time in this war, which could either accelerate an Iranian push for a ceasefire or, in the more escalatory reading, push Iran toward wider retaliation against Ukraine’s Western backers. Second, a Kazakhstan export disruption adds a secondary supply shock on top of the Gulf story — smaller in absolute barrels than Hormuz or Bab el-Mandeb, but happening at the worst possible moment for an already-tight market. Oil price effect on top of Scenario 1: likely an additional $3–8 per barrel of risk premium on Brent, reflecting genuine supply loss from Kazakhstan plus a “widening war” psychology in energy trading desks, rather than a fundamentals-driven shift of that same magnitude.
Drones: the Caspian front is, almost entirely, a drone and naval-drone war — Ukraine’s Sea Baby and Sub Sea Baby unmanned surface vessels extending a campaign that started in the Black Sea.[^12] Its main global significance may end up being technological rather than economic: it’s a live-fire demonstration that long-range naval drones can strike targets thousands of kilometers from their launch point, a capability every navy in the Pacific, including China’s and Taiwan’s, is watching closely.
Scenario 3 — China sees U.S. overstretch and moves on Taiwan; Malacca becomes a chokepoint too
What this requires, and how far this is from where we are: this is the least likely scenario in the near term, per the U.S. intelligence community’s own current assessment,[^16] but it’s the one with the largest global consequences, so it’s worth taking seriously as a tail risk rather than dismissing it.
Oil, if it happened: this is where the numbers get genuinely severe, because Malacca dwarfs Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb in raw volume — an estimated 15–23 million barrels of crude pass through it daily, versus roughly 20 million for Hormuz at its pre-war peak.[^28][^29][^69] A Taiwan conflict serious enough to put Malacca in play — whether through a direct U.S.-China naval confrontation, Chinese attempts to interdict shipping, or simply insurers refusing to cover transits through a war zone — would functionally sever the shortest sea route between Middle Eastern and African oil producers and East Asian consumers (China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan itself). The alternative is the route already being used by some vessels avoiding the Red Sea today: around the Cape of Good Hope, adding an estimated 14 to 21 days and meaningfully higher fuel and insurance costs to every affected voyage.[^3] Stacked on top of an already-disrupted Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb, this is the scenario analysts mean when they invoke the 2008 all-time Brent peak near $146 as something more than a scare number — a sustained, multi-chokepoint disruption of this scale has no recent precedent, and price models built on the 1973 or 2022 shocks likely understate it, since neither of those involved three simultaneous chokepoints.
Who feels it, and how, worldwide: China itself is paradoxically among the biggest losers — its own war would strangle the 80% of its oil imports and two-thirds of its trade that move through the very strait it’s fighting over, which is exactly the “Malacca Dilemma” Chinese leaders have worried about since 2003 and one reason many analysts think Beijing has strong incentives not to trigger this scenario.[^28] Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan — all more Malacca-dependent as a share of trade than China — face similar or worse exposure. The U.S., as a net energy exporter with more Western Hemisphere supply options, is comparatively insulated on raw energy, but not on its economy broadly: global recession risk, semiconductor supply disruption (most of the world’s advanced chips are made in Taiwan), and a collapse in Asia-Pacific trade would hit U.S. growth and inflation hard regardless of gasoline prices specifically.
Drones and interceptors, tied together across fronts: this scenario is where the drone-technology thread running through this whole piece matters most directly. Taiwan’s own defense ministry has explicitly cited lessons from the Iran-Israel missile exchanges and the Ukraine war in designing its planned layered air-defense system, nicknamed the “T-Dome,” built around low-cost interceptors rather than expensive missile defense alone.[^26] Ukraine has separately and publicly offered to share its combat-tested drone and interceptor technology with Taiwan, and Taiwanese firms have already signed dozens of cooperation agreements with foreign UAV partners, alongside a formal U.S. certification partnership through AUVSI’s Green UAS program.[^22][^24][^25] None of this guarantees Taiwan could hold off a full Chinese assault — analysts are candid that Taiwan lacks the strategic depth Israel or the U.S. have to absorb and intercept a saturation attack[^54] — but the technology-sharing pipeline between Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan, accelerated directly by lessons from the Iran war, is one of the more concrete pieces of preparation happening in the world today for a contingency everyone hopes never arrives.
The ripple effects, beyond the headline numbers
Two second-order effects of the crisis itself, stated with appropriate confidence language:
It’s well-documented that sustained high oil prices act as a regressive tax, hitting lower-income households and countries hardest — since energy is a larger share of their spending — which means this crisis is likely to widen global inequality even in scenarios where it never reaches Malacca.
It’s possible but not yet evidenced at scale that sustained chokepoint risk permanently accelerates the shift toward alternative shipping routes (Cape of Good Hope, Arctic routes as they open, China’s overland Belt and Road corridors through Central Asia and Pakistan) in a way that outlasts this specific conflict — something worth watching rather than assuming.
And two second-order effects of the proposed solutions below:
Coordinated strategic reserve releases are likely to blunt the worst price spikes in the near term, but repeated use possibly erodes the reserves’ deterrent value for a future, larger crisis — a genuine tradeoff, not a free lunch.
Faster drone and interceptor cooperation between Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan, and the U.S. is likely to improve near-term defensive capability, but arms-transfer diplomacy of this kind has historically, and possibly again here, drawn China and Russia closer together in response, a dynamic worth watching in how Beijing and Moscow coordinate over the coming months.
What’s actually being done — and by whom
It’s not all escalation. Several concrete, evidence-based efforts are underway right now:
Diplomatic tracks remain open, even mid-war. Iran’s foreign ministry confirmed this month that mediators — reportedly including Oman and Qatar, which brokered the original June 2026 memorandum of understanding — have presented new proposals to Tehran, even as fighting continues.[^13]
Coordinated energy-market management. The U.S. Energy Information Administration and international counterparts continue publishing monthly outlooks specifically to give markets accurate supply data rather than letting rumor drive prices; the IEA’s mechanism for coordinated strategic reserve releases among member countries remains available if chokepoint disruption becomes acute and sustained.[^18]
Shipping-industry adaptation. Commercial shipping is already rerouting around Bab el-Mandeb toward the Suez Canal and the Cape of Good Hope, and maritime security groups like the Bahrain-based Joint Maritime Information Center are issuing real-time threat notices that have measurably changed vessel routing behavior even before formal blockades take effect.[^6][^15]
Cross-border drone-defense cooperation. The Ukraine-Taiwan-U.S.-Israel technology exchange described above is a genuinely new and fast-moving effort: Taiwan’s Industrial Technology Research Institute formally partnered with the U.S.-based AUVSI in January 2026, the Pentagon began evaluating and purchasing Ukrainian-designed low-cost interceptor drones in March, and Ukrainian manufacturers are now co-producing with over 20 countries.[^22][^27]
Independent verification of blockade claims. Maritime intelligence firms like Windward and Kpler are providing real-time, independently sourced tanker-tracking data that has repeatedly complicated both Houthi claims of a full blockade and Saudi claims of unaffected shipping — a genuinely useful check on propaganda from every side.[^17][^6]
Something you can do
You don’t control any of the above. But you’re not powerless in the face of it, either. Two concrete steps:
Track the actual data, not the headlines. Sites like the EIA’s Short-Term Energy Outlook and public ship-tracking dashboards (MarineTraffic, Kpler’s public releases) let you see real tanker movement and real price forecasts, rather than the most alarming version of a story. Five minutes with the EIA’s monthly outlook will tell you more than a week of cable news.
If you drive for a living, run a small business dependent on fuel costs, or are budgeting a major purchase this year, build in a wider price cushion than usual. The honest answer, per the analysis above, is that nobody — including oil traders with billions on the line — knows whether we’re looking at $90 oil or $130 oil six months from now. Plan for the range, not a single number.
Where this leaves us
The Athenians who voted to send their fleet to Sicily weren’t fools, and they weren’t unaware of the risk — Thucydides is explicit that plenty of them argued against it. They did it anyway because, in the moment, a second front looked like an opportunity too good to pass up, and the war they were already fighting felt, wrongly, like it had room to spare for one more.
Nobody currently making decisions in Washington, Tehran, Riyadh, Sanaa, Kyiv, Moscow, or Beijing needs a history lesson to know that overextension is dangerous. They know. The question this moment actually poses isn’t whether anyone understands the risk — it’s whether understanding a risk is enough to keep a government from taking it anyway, once the fighting has already started and stopping feels more costly than continuing. That’s been the hardest problem in the study of war for 2,500 years, and nothing about narrower straits or faster drones has made it easier. It has only raised the price of getting it wrong.
3-Minute Summary
The U.S.-Israel war with Iran (since Feb. 2026) has effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz. Saudi Arabia rerouted oil exports through the Red Sea’s Bab el-Mandeb Strait — until Iran-backed Houthi forces in Yemen declared a naval blockade there too on July 20, 2026, and began attacking Saudi tankers. Ukraine has separately expanded its drone war against Russia’s oil “shadow fleet” into the Caspian Sea, striking a Lukoil platform and Iran-linked cargo ships on July 25. Brent crude has surged past $100/barrel. Taiwanese officials worry China could exploit U.S. military distraction to move against Taiwan — though the U.S. intelligence community currently assesses no fixed Chinese invasion timeline. If it happened, the Strait of Malacca (carrying more oil daily than Hormuz, and 80% of China’s oil imports) would become a fourth chokepoint, potentially pushing oil toward record highs and forcing global shipping onto the far longer Cape of Good Hope route. Drone and interceptor technology-sharing between Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan, and the U.S. — accelerated directly by lessons from this war — is one of the most concrete real-world preparations underway for that worst-case scenario.
Something You Can Share
“Four straits, one war: Hormuz, Bab el-Mandeb, the Caspian, and — if the worst happens — Malacca are all connected. What happens in the Middle East doesn’t stay in the Middle East; it shows up at the pump everywhere.”
Sources & Further Reading
[^1]: Britannica, “2026 Iran war” — https://www.britannica.com/event/2026-Iran-war [^3]: Al Jazeera, “Yemen’s Houthis declare naval blockade of Saudi Arabia: What to know,” July 20, 2026 — https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/7/20/yemens-houthis-declare-naval-blockade-of-saudi-arabia-what-to-know [^4]: Al Jazeera, “Yemen’s Houthis claim attack on two Saudi oil tankers,” July 22, 2026 — https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/7/22/yemens-houthis-claim-attack-on-two-saudi-oil-tankers [^5]: CNBC, “Houthis deploy missiles and drones to attack ships in southern Red Sea,” July 22, 2026 — https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/22/houthis-red-sea-bab-el-mandeb-saudi-oil-iran.html [^6]: Al Jazeera, “As oil soars, experts watch Red Sea tankers for clarity on Houthi blockade,” July 24, 2026 — https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2026/7/24/as-oil-soars-experts-watch-red-sea-tankers-for-clarity-on-houthi-blockade [^8]: GlobalSecurity.org / RFE-RL, “Ukraine Says It Struck Russian Warship, Iran-Linked Vessels In Caspian Sea,” July 25, 2026 — https://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/library/news/ukraine/2026/07/ukraine-260725-rferl03.htm [^9]: Jerusalem Post, “Ukraine hits Russian warship, Iran-linked cargo vessels, Volodymyr Zelensky says,” July 25, 2026 — https://www.jpost.com/international/article-903598 [^10]: Ynetnews, “Ukraine strikes Iranian vessel in Caspian Sea” — https://www.ynetnews.com/article/bk0zvfmsfe [^11]: Al Arabiya English, “Ukraine says it hit Russian warship and ships used for Iran-linked military cargoes,” July 25, 2026 — https://english.alarabiya.net/News/world/2026/07/25/ukraine-says-it-hit-russian-warship-and-ships-used-for-iranlinked-military-cargoes [^12]: Wikipedia, “Ukrainian attacks on the Russian shadow fleet” — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_attacks_on_the_Russian_shadow_fleet [^13]: CNN, “July 24, 2026 — Escalation in Iran war nears 2-week mark” — https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/24/world/live-news/iran-war-trump [^14]: CNN, “The US is re-evaluating the threat of Chinese military action in Taiwan,” March 19, 2026 — https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/19/asia/china-taiwan-invasion-plans-us-intl-hnk [^15]: Foreign Policy, “American Power Is Dangerously Overstretched by Trump’s Iran War,” June 9, 2026 (Hal Brands) — https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/06/09/iran-war-trump-china-united-states-military-defense-weapons-geopolitics-strategy-taiwan/ [^16]: Reuters via Yahoo News, “US assesses China not planning to invade Taiwan in 2027,” March 18, 2026 — https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/us-assesses-china-not-currently-151356368.html [^17]: CNBC, “Oil prices today: Brent, WTI, Hormuz blockade,” July 15, 2026 — https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/15/oil-prices-today-brent-wti-hormuz-blockade.html [^18]: U.S. Energy Information Administration, Short-Term Energy Outlook, July 7, 2026 — https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/ [^19]: Trading Economics, “Crude Oil - Price - Chart - Historical Data - News” — https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/crude-oil [^21]: CNBC, “Oil prices: WTI, Brent rise after attacks on Saudi tankers,” July 23, 2026 — https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/23/oil-prices-today-wti-brent-trump-iran-hormuz.html [^22]: DSET (Research Institute for Democracy, Society and Emerging Technology), “Drone Superpower: Ukraine’s UAV Success and Where Taiwan-Ukraine Cooperation Fits In” — https://dset.tw/en/research/000491-2/ [^24]: Global Defense Corp, “Ukraine Offers Cutting-edge AI-enabled Drone Warfare Capability to Taiwan,” June 20, 2026 — https://www.globaldefensecorp.com/2026/06/20/ukraine-taiwan/ [^25]: Focus Taiwan, “Experts highlight potential of Taiwan-Ukraine drone cooperation,” April 23, 2026 — https://focustaiwan.tw/business/202604230018 [^26]: South China Morning Post, “What lessons does Taiwan see from Iran and Ukraine for its air-defence strategy?” March 16, 2026 — https://www.scmp.com/news/china/military/article/3346773/what-lessons-does-taiwan-see-iran-and-ukraine-its-air-defence-strategy [^27]: Military Times, “These are Ukraine’s $1,000 interceptor drones the Pentagon wants to buy,” March 11, 2026 — https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2026/03/11/these-are-ukraines-1000-interceptor-drones-the-pentagon-wants-to-buy/ [^28]: Foreign Policy, “China’s Malacca Dilemma, After the Hormuz Blockade,” May 12, 2026 — https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/05/11/china-oil-economy-insurance-hormuz-strait-malacca-dilemma/ [^29]: GEOPOL, “Strait of Malacca: Asia’s Oil Lifeline & China’s Weak Spot” — https://geopol.uk/chokepoints/strait-of-malacca/ [^30]: U.S. Army War College, War Room, “The Many Traps of Thucydides & The Virtue of Complexity” — https://warroom.armywarcollege.edu/articles/thucydidean-traps-and-the-virtue-of-complexity/ [^31]: Wikipedia, “Imperial overstretch” — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_overstretch [^32]: War on the Rocks, “What Thucydides Teaches Us About War, Politics, and the Human Condition” — https://warontherocks.com/what-thucydides-teaches-us-about-war-politics-and-the-human-condition/ [^54]: National Defense Magazine, “Commentary: Ukraine Lessons Provide a New Taiwan Air Defense Paradigm to Deter China,” April 3, 2026 — https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2026/4/3/commentary-ukraine-lessons-provide-a-new-taiwan-air-defense-paradigm-to-deter-china [^69]: CountryReports, “Strait of Malacca: The World’s Most Critical Maritime Chokepoint” — https://www.countryreports.org/global/strait-of-malacca-the-worlds-most-critical-maritime-chokepoint