Only thirty-three kilometers: that is the distance separating, at its narrowest point, the two shores of the Strait of Hormuz. It is a distance shorter than a daily commute between home and work in any major city such as Beijing, Tokyo, New York, Riyadh, and so on; nevertheless, this narrow strip of water determines every morning the fuel prices in Tokyo, the cost of fertilizers in the fields of India, and heating bills in the homes of Europe. Since late February of this year, this passageway has ceased to perform its function against the backdrop of military escalation in the region, and the world has rediscovered a truth it had known yet ignored: that one-fifth of the oil it consumes, and nearly one-fifth of its liquefied gas, all pass through a single hole on the map of the planet.
In economics, we like to console ourselves with the concept of the “black swan”: the rare event that cannot be predicted, whose occurrence therefore absolves us of the burden of negligence. Yet what happened in Hormuz was not a black swan, but precisely the opposite. It was a massive risk that we all saw approaching slowly over fifteen years, and then stood in its path as though we did not see it. The real scandal is not that the strait was closed, but that we were surprised by its closure. Tehran had repeatedly brandished this card since December 2011, then with the European embargo in 2012, then after Washington’s withdrawal from the nuclear agreement in 2018, then the tanker incidents in 2019, until the repeated threat over time turned from an alarm bell into noise that the world grew accustomed to ignoring. Here lies the essence of what I call the “risk management dilemma.” The problem is not that no one saw the risk, but that the logic of risk management itself clashes with the logic of short-term profit and loses the battle every time. The cost of building resilience is present, certain, and tangible: expensive pipelines, inventories that appear to be frozen capital, and alternative supply contracts. As for the return on this resilience, it is deferred, probable, and invisible. When a certain cost confronts a probabilistic benefit, humans, along with governments and corporations, tend to postpone payment. We call precaution “waste” as long as the disaster is asleep, then discover its true price at the very moment when we are unable to buy it at any price. Responsibility here is distributed among three parties. First are the Gulf exporting states, which are the first losers from any disruption in Hormuz. It is true that they did not stand entirely helpless — the UAE built the Fujairah pipeline in 2012, and Saudi Arabia owns the Petroline running westward — but the combined capacity of these alternatives does not come close to the volume that passes through Hormuz daily; indeed, the Saudi outlet empties into the Red Sea, that is, into another chokepoint that is itself threatened. The mere construction of these lines is an explicit admission that the risk was visible; settling for half a solution over fifteen years is not oversight, but a structural deficiency in risk management. Second are the major consumers, foremost among them the economies of East Asia. Japan, China, and South Korea have known for decades that their energy lifeline passes through a region of constant tension; nevertheless, their policies bet on the continuation of calm rather than hedging against its interruption. Their strategic reserves were designed to bridge a gap measured in weeks, not months, and with a prolonged closure such as the one we witnessed, the pace of withdrawal from them accelerates to twice the assumed rate. They could have diversified their sources, expanded their reserves, and accelerated their transition in the energy mix, but the logic of “efficiency at the lowest cost” prevailed over the logic of “robustness in the face of shock.” Third, and most astonishingly, are the maritime shipping companies and the giants of supply chains. In June 2025, during the first war between Iran and Israel following the U.S. strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, the Iranian parliament voted unanimously to close the strait — not as a passing threat, but as an official decision referred to the Supreme National Security Council. Nevertheless, as soon as tensions eased, the major companies returned to their previous practices as though nothing had happened: the same routes, the same “just-in-time delivery” models, and only a modest adjustment in insurance premiums. Thus, when the strait was actually closed only eight months later, the chaos that followed was not a surprise, but the fruit of an institutional choice to ignore an explicit warning.
What makes the 2026 crisis particularly harsh is that it did not come alone. While Hormuz came to a halt in the east, the Red Sea was itself suffering from disruption in the west, and for the first time in a long time, the two most important maritime passageways in the Middle East were disrupted at the same time. The solution on which the world had long relied — rerouting ships — was thereby lost. Thus the truth that everyone had long ignored was exposed: we designed supply chains to be the shortest route and the lowest cost, and in return they became the most fragile. The absence of alternative routes was not a coincidence, but a deliberate economic decision taken over years under the pretext of saving money. Behind all of this collapses an illusion deeper than oil and gas: the illusion that the global market repairs itself, and that globalized trade is immune to shocks. The truth is that immunity does not come from pursuing maximum efficiency; rather, it is deliberately built and paid for: through additional emergency production capacity, costly diversification of sources, and inventories that in times of prosperity appear to be idle capital, but in a crisis save an entire economy. We built a global system excellent at reducing costs, yet weak in the face of any shock; a system resembling a person who gave up the immune system because it was “costly” and had not been needed for a long time.
Finally, it has long been said that the market hates a vacuum; perhaps the more precise statement is that it hates something worse: suffocation. The Strait of Hormuz, with its thirty-three kilometers, is a silent witness to the fact that this astonishing global interdependence is nothing but a towering structure standing on a thin aquatic pillar. In an age in which warnings follow one another, it has become naïve to blame fate; the most dangerous thing that happens in the life of nations is not what suddenly pounces upon us, but what approaches before our eyes while we choose, of our own free will, not to see it. The question that should concern us today is not “when will the strait be reopened?”, but “has the time come for us to understand that the price of preparedness, however high it may be, remains cheaper than what we pay when complacency leaves us naked before a crisis?”