https://archive.ph/zTeSg#selection-2173.0-2173.69

'The U.S. and Iran may have agreed to a temporary cease-fire this week, but economic warfare is here to stay.

Tehran’s chokehold on the Strait of Hormuz is a stark demonstration that control of a critical waterway, technology or even company can give governments enormous sway in an interconnected global economy.

The closure of the critical energy corridor during the war with the U.S. and Israel sent oil prices surging past $100 a barrel, effectively ransoming global energy supplies in an effort to pressure the U.S. to back off.

President Trump on Tuesday agreed to a cease-fire as long as the strait reopens. Trump also said the U.S. military’s objectives had been met.

Tehran has said it intends to charge ships to transit the strait, weaponizing its control over the channel far into the future. It isn’t yet clear if the U.S., its Middle East allies or those in Europe and Asia that depend on energy supplies flowing through the strait will tolerate such interference in what previously was an open waterway, or how they might stop it.

In exploiting the economic pinch-point off its coast, Iran is following a trail blazed by the U.S. and China, which for years have used their dominance in key areas of global commerce to pursue their foreign-policy goals. 

And Iran is far from alone. Even before it shut the strait, major economies—including U.S. allies—were building arsenals of deterrence against rising economic pressure.

Hit by both U.S. tariffs and China’s industrial juggernaut, the European Union adopted a so-called anticoercion instrument in 2023 to make it easier to deploy a range of economic countermeasures, including export controls, though the tool has yet to be used. The Netherlands, a EU member state, has restricted sales to China of advanced lithography machines made by Dutch firm ASML, depriving the Asian giant of devices essential to manufacturing cutting-edge semiconductors.

Japan is spending billions of dollars to diversify its supplies of energy and critical minerals and support industries that are indispensable to the modern economy, including key parts of the semiconductor supply chain.

Officials and analysts say the goal is “strategic indispensability”—building deterrence by mutually assured economic destruction.'