In a primetime address to the nation Wednesday night, President Donald Trump cast the U.S. effort in Iran as a show of strength. But he left the timeline of the war’s end conspicuously fuzzy, pledging the U.S. would hit Iran “extremely hard” in the coming weeks. Markets didn’t love that ambiguity. Investors recoiled out of fears of an endless quagmire. But Trump tried to quell fears by downplaying the stakes in the Strait of Hormuz, insisting the U.S. doesn’t depend on the critical trade choke point. “The United States imports almost no oil through the Hormuz Strait and won’t be taking any in the future,” he said. “We don’t need it. We haven’t needed it, and we don’t need it.”
But as Nobel laureate Paul Krugman highlighted in a recent Substack post titled “$4 Gasoline Is Less Than Half the Story,” and as many other experts have also emphasized, the strait is essential to not only oil, but trade of some of the world’s most vital resources. Diesel, jet fuel, fertilizer, and plastics are all resources that pass through the Strait of Hormuz—and the war has everyone from oil execs to airline leaders to farmers bracing for fallout from its impacts.
