Tension between the United States and Iran has escalated, following Washington’s proposal to place guards on commercial ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz in the Gulf, and to send more than 3,000 US sailors to the Middle East, as part of a plan to strengthen military presence in the region.
Tehran considers the Strait of Hormuz a strategic point, and has long used it as a pressure card on the West to push for the lifting of sanctions on Iran.
Washington, for its part, justifies its decision by saying that Iran has seized or attempted to capture about 20 ships in the region over the past two years. It says its forces prevented two Iranian attempts to seize two oil tankers in international waters off Oman on July 5, while Tehran seized a commercial ship the next day.
In April and early May, Iran captured two tankers within a week in the territorial waters, and was also accused of launching a drone attack on a ship owned by an Israeli company in November 2022.
A US official told AFP last week about plans to deploy armed personnel on commercial ships traveling through the Strait of Hormuz, in what would be an unheard of action aimed at stopping Iran from seizing and harassing civilian vessels.
Strategic corridor
The escalation of tension, which has been renewed for years, highlights the real importance of the Strait of Hormuz, located between Iran and the Sultanate of Oman, which connects the Gulf to the Gulf of Oman and the Arabian Sea.
Its location within the world’s largest oil-producing region has given it both economic and political importance.
The website of the Omani Ministry of Information states that the Strait of Hormuz is an international water strait located between the Omani Musandam Peninsula in the south and Iranian territory in the north. It stretches along 280 km and is approximately 56 km wide.
A fifth of the world’s petroleum liquids and a quarter of the world’s liquefied natural gas are transported through the strait, while 10 percent of the total US oil imports pass through it every month.
This makes the Strait of Hormuz not only the world’s busiest shipping lane, but also the most strategically important point for the world’s oil supplies, as very limited alternatives are available to bypass it.
The US Energy Information Administration (EIA) says on its official website: “The Strait of Hormuz is the world’s most important oil chokepoint because of the large volumes of oil that flow through the strait. In 2018, its daily oil flow averaged 21 million barrels per day (b/d), or the equivalent of about 21% of global petroleum liquids consumption.”
EIA estimates that 76% of the crude oil and condensate that moved through the Strait of Hormuz went to Asian markets in 2018. China, India, Japan, South Korea, and Singapore were the largest destinations for crude oil moving through the Strait of Hormuz to Asia, accounting for 65% of all Hormuz crude oil and condensate flows in 2018.
In 2018, the United States imported about 1.4 million b/d of crude oil and condensate from Arabian Gulf countries through the Strait of Hormuz, accounting for about 18% of total US crude oil and condensate imports and 7% of total US petroleum liquids consumption.
China’s interests
China – the world’s largest oil importer - has major interests in the Strait of Hormuz.
Maritime security consultancy Dryad Global indicates that about 25 percent of the oil exported daily through the strait goes to China.
From here, it is possible to understand the dimensions of the Iranian-Chinese cooperation program that was signed in March of 2021.
At the time, the New York Times published a report saying that the 25-year commercial and strategic cooperation agreement provides for Beijing investing $400 billion in the Iranian economy, in exchange for Iran providing China with steady oil supplies at very low prices.
