Blockading the blockade
When you can’t open a door, board it up and call it strategy
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Arleigh Burke was an American admiral in World War 2. Decorated, brilliant, the kind of naval officer they name things after. They named an entire class of destroyer after him - the DDG-51. It’s the workhorse of the US Navy, the ship that does the actual work while aircraft carriers pose for photographs. There are currently about 15 of them within striking distance of the Strait of Hormuz.
I want you to remember that name, because before this blockade is over, an Arleigh Burke might be the most important ship in the world.
Or the most famous wreck.
Two blockades now sit on top of each other in the same 33-kilometre waterway. Iran has been running one since the start of the war. The US just stacked a second one on top, targeting Iranian ports specifically, as of 10 AM Eastern on Monday. The president wants you to believe this is checkmate. The Foundation for Defence of Democracies wants you to believe Iran folds in 13 days.
I’ve been covering this war daily since it started. The Bretton Whoops, Straight to Brrrr, and 20-something wrap-ups.
I’ve watched every escalation get framed as the move that finally ends it.
This one is no different in that respect.
But it is different in another, and it took me a while to put my finger on why: this is the first time the US has voluntarily made the problem worse in order to claim it’s making it better.
Trump posted on Truth Social that the US Navy would blockade “any and all Ships trying to enter, or leave, the Strait of Hormuz”. CENTCOM, as it does, translated the president’s rhetoric into something operationally coherent: the blockade applies to ships entering or exiting Iranian ports, not the entire strait. Ships heading to Dubai, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar - those are technically unaffected.
The gap between the presidential post and the military order is an ocean.
Literally.
Iran’s blockade was never total either. Chinese tankers have been transiting since day 1. Indian vessels negotiated passage. Pakistan escorted its own ships through with Chinese-built frigates. Malaysia got a waiver. Spain got through. Turkey got through. The strait wasn’t closed. It was a members-only club, and the membership criteria was not being allied with the people who started the war.
So now the US is running its own members-only club on top of Iran’s members-only club.
Two bouncers, same door, opposite guest lists.
The bullish case for this comes primarily from one man: Miad Maleki, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defence of Democracies and former US Treasury sanctions official. Boris Schlossberg walked through Maleki’s numbers on Twitter, and I want to give the analysis its due before I take it apart, because the mechanics are genuinely sharp.
90% of Iran’s $109.7 billion in annual seaborne trade passes through the Persian Gulf. Oil and gas account for 80% of export earnings. Iran was exporting roughly 1.5 million barrels per day at wartime prices, pulling in about $139 million daily. A blockade zeroes that out overnight. Add petrochemical exports at $54 million a day. Non-oil exports at $88 million. Total damage: approximately $435 million per day.
$13 billion a month.
Then the storage clock. Iran has roughly 50-55 million barrels of onshore capacity, about 60% full. Spare room for maybe 20 million barrels. At 1.5 million barrels per day that can no longer leave the country, storage fills in approximately 13 days. After that, Iran has to shut wells down.
This is where Schlossberg got excited, and I understand why. Shutting a mature oil well isn’t like turning off a tap. Reservoir pressure drops. Water intrusion begins. The geological structures that hold crude in place start to degrade. Maleki estimates forced shut-ins could permanently destroy 300,000 to 500,000 barrels per day of capacity. Not sanctioned or frozen. Destroyed. $9-15 billion per year in revenue, gone forever, because the rocks just do rocky stuff.
Add a rial, already in freefall - even before the war, with capital control limits of $20 per day. Maleki projects here a further 50% decline, pushing annual inflation past 120%. Lenin gets quoted. Currency debauched, economy destroyed, civil unrest, regime change. All in 13 days. Because we didn’t think of that the last 44.
Clean. Elegant. And damn persuasive.
This think tank has been advocating this exact policy for longer than most of its current analysts have had LinkedIn accounts. They wanted this blockade. Argued for it. Provided the numbers that made it sound surgical and inevitable. When the people who designed the policy also produce the analysis saying it will work, I reach for the salt.
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the spreadsheet is right and Iran buckles in 2 weeks. But I’ve been watching this war for some time now, and the spreadsheets have been wrong every single time.
The US does not have the ships to enforce this blockade. Not the ships, not the aircraft, and not the bodies. The area is too large, the coast too dangerous, the targets too dispersed, and the one country buying 90% of the oil is a nuclear power the US cannot afford to confront.
So here’s my take on what I think will actually happen.
I see 6 scenarios for the next few weeks. They’re not mutually exclusive - several can and probably will overlap, cascade, or combine in ways that make all of them worse. Think of them less as predictions and more as the lanes this thing can drift into. I’ve also assigned rough probability scores for each.
Scenario 1: the FDD dream. ~5%.
Everything works. The 13-day clock ticks, the wells shut, the rial collapses, the IRGC fractures internally, Iran returns to the table with real concessions. Hormuz reopens on American terms. Oil drops. Trump declares victory before the midterms. In CAPS. And likely bolded.
This requires the dark fleet to fail, China to stand down, every NATO ally to suddenly reverse their refusal to participate, and the IRGC to behave differently than it has for 45 years. It requires Iran - a country that has survived revolution, war with Iraq, mass uprisings to fold in 2 weeks because a spreadsheet says so.
I have it at 5% because I can’t quite bring myself to write zero.
Scenario 2: the forever war. ~30%.
Nobody folds. The blockade becomes a new layer of friction on top of all the existing frictions. Oil stays above $100 for months. The dark fleet keeps running. De-dollarisation accelerates one tanker at a time. Europe enters recession. Asia scrambles.
Netanyahu gets his real prize: the war itself.
His corruption trial stays frozen under the wartime emergency framework. The Lebanon ground operation proceeds under cover of “wartime necessity”. Hezbollah is degraded. The process is the product. The only other winners are Russia, whose oil revenues skyrockets, and the US shale producers, who cannot believe their luck.
This is the default. The thing that happens when none of the more dramatic scenarios trigger. It’s the most likely single outcome, and it is the one nobody planned for and nobody except Netanyahu actually benefits from.
I keep thinking about that. The most probable result of American foreign policy is an outcome that primarily serves a man under indictment in his own country, whose trial cannot resume while the war continues, who personally called Trump 12 times during the Islamabad negotiations. Vance spoke to Netanyahu at least once during peace talks with Iran.
I’m not editorialising.
That actually happened.