Post #75414 by PucksFool on the US Policy board

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https://prospect.org/2026/04/09/iran-war-cease-fir...

The War Is Bad. The Cease-Fire Doesn’t Exist. The Future Is Awful.

Every other country or rogue actor in this position will wonder why they don’t just go ahead and do the same thing.

In such a fraught moment, casting our eyes forward to the aftermath may seem premature. But no matter whether hostilities resume or not, the future for the Middle East and the global economy is precisely the same as I said last week: Iran has operational control of the Strait of Hormuz. And this Wall Street Journal quote from a bank analyst sums it up: “This has been the economic catastrophe that everybody could have predicted, that everybody was predicting, but Trump did it anyway.”

International maritime law prohibits payments for passage on a natural waterway, but operational control is bigger than a tollbooth. A toll, however “illegal,” is just a cost of doing business that gets folded into the overall product. That toll is something like $1 per barrel of oil, paid in Chinese yuan or crypto. (Oman, which is on the other side of the strait, would split the fees with Iran, making them perhaps the biggest winner in this whole thing.)

Another dollar on each barrel is not going to crash the global economy, though the total cost will be a huge windfall for Iran. But the thing about a tollbooth is the gate can go up or down, as we’ve already seen hours after the non-cease-fire cease-fire. If Iran is attacked or even mildly offended, they can shut the gate. If Iran decides a country isn’t operating in their interests and a ship either bears that country’s flag or has goods destined for that location, they can shut the gate. If Iran’s oil exports aren’t doing well enough and they don’t want to compete with an OPEC rival, maybe they shut the gate.

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