Welcome to the Eurointelligence podcast. I'm Wolfgang Munchau and with me, I'm Susanne Muncheng and Jack Smith.

Today we will talk about a region that is most definitely not in our reservation, the street of Hormuz, but it has important implications not only for our reservations, but pretty much for every reservation in the world.

And we want to talk about details here,

what it takes to secure a narrow waterway,

what the alternative supply routes are for the Gulf states,

what the diplomacy is in the Gulf.

Jack, if you could give us some explanations,

a rundown on, you know,

we all know why the street of Hormuz is important. But what are

the strategic constraints or the strategic problems that the U.S. campaign has in respect of the street

of Hormuz? So I think that the constraints are, I mean, primarily they're geographic, right?

Which is that as you'll see if you can, if listeners can look at a satellite map of the Strait of Hormuz, especially one that's sort of angled, so it's not bird's eye view, you can, you can start to see where the problems arise and that it's in a really, really narrow body of water at its very narrowest, as it goes around sort of the tip and, you know, from the Gulf of Persia back out into the Indian Ocean, it's about 39 kilometers, so not that far across,

and it's also extremely shallow. At points, it's about 60 meters deep. So it's a very narrow and very

shallow seaway, which makes it very susceptible not just to being blocked by

the Iranian Navy and by mine-laying ships, but also by anti-ship missiles and by drones

that are stationed in Iran itself, because at any given point, the sea lane that ships have to pass through is only tens of kilometers away from the Iranian coast.

And that, I think, is the really serious constraint.

And it's why it's so difficult for the United States to actually reopen the strait.

I think it's also difficult because, you know, previously there were calculus about mine laying and how quickly

you'd have to try to kind of destroy Iran's Navy, basically, and put in mine sweeping

ships so that you could clear the straight again, destroy launchers for anti-ship missiles and so on.

But we're really in a world that increasingly is being dictated by drone warfare, right?

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