The very dumb U.S.-Israeli war on Iran appears to be wrapping up, as the Trump administration nears a deal with the Iranian government in which we mostly lose. While many hope that an end to the war would mean the resumption of free-flowing crude oil, a sudden glut of oil hitting the market as the Iranian blockade of the Strait of Hormuz is lifted, it turns out things aren’t quite that simple. In fact, oil has been flowing through the strait for months, all thanks to U.S. military-backed smugglers.
A new report from Reuters details the scheme, in which tankers willing to traverse the Strait of Hormuz delivered their crude payloads not to customers waiting at faraway ports, but to ships waiting just beyond Iran’s reach. These ship-to-ship transfers, between boats with dimmed lights and disabled transponders, were meant to avoid Iran’s naval panopticon — yet stay within full view of the U.S. military, which coordinated the transfers.
Ship to ship to you
Of course, the watchful eye of the United States (and its associated military contractors) doesn’t guarantee safety. Iranian forces shot down an Apache helicopter involved in the oil-smuggling scheme, a move that prompted a retaliatory strike from the U.S. — yet it now seems that the helicopter attack itself was retaliation for running the Iranian blockade. The U.S. has been guiding ships through the strait, hoping to evade Iranian authorities, since at least May, according to Reuters.
This form of blockade running, transferring oil directly from smuggler ships to bigger boats, has long been in use by nations that need to evade U.S. sanctions — even Iran itself. It’s a bit ironic, then, that our current oh-so-apocalyptic oil shortage is nothing unfamiliar to the nations we disagree with. If our solution to an oil blockade is to borrow techniques from other nations, what have we done to force those other nations to develop those techniques?
