Hi, guys. This is Andrew Eger with the bulwark. Welcome to Bullwork Takes. If you had not heard of the Strait of Hormuz before this month, you probably have now. Iran's choke point on this passage, which is what connects the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Oman and beyond that to the Indian Ocean, it's been responsible for not all, but most of the economic disruption that we have already seen, just three weeks into America and Israel's war on Iran.

You've almost certainly heard that much, but this is really one of those stories that kind of

gets crazier, the closer at it you look. So to walk us through some of the ends and outs of

the Strait of Hormuz Crisis, I am very pleased to be joined by maybe the best guy there is on this

subject. Sal Mercogliano, he is a historian. He's a

former merchant mariner. He's a professor of maritime industry policy. And you may perhaps

have stumbled upon him recently or a while ago on his YouTube show, What's Going On

Shipping, which I have been a new convert to for perhaps good reason just this week as we

have been weathering this particular crisis. So, Sal, thanks for coming on to the show. Andrew, thanks for having me, big fan of the bulwark. Oh, that's so nice of you to say. Why don't you just start by setting the table for us here? What does normal peacetime function look like in the Strait of Hormuz? Who's going through there? And why is it important for the

economy? Yeah. So Strait of Hormuz is a classic maritime choke point, a little narrow pinch

in in the ocean where commerce and trade. So it's not the busiest place on the planet. You know,

that's the English Channel, the Strait of Malacca, the Taiwan Strait, but about 135 ships a day go through there, big energy ships.

We're talking about tankers, liquefied natural gas, liquefied petroleum gas, ore carriers,

you name it.

It's just a mesh.

About 25% of global trade goes through this narrow little choke point.

And what we've seen happen is that choke point has gotten choked off. Yeah. So let's talk about that. In the opening days of the war, I mean, it seems like this dawned on the president very quickly. And of course, you know, this is, this is something they had had in the back of their minds in the event of possible war with Iran forever, that this is something Iran could, in theory, do. Very quickly, it became clear Iran was grinding all traffic to a halt through this straight.

In the last week or so, though, that story seems like it started to change of it.

More vessels are making it through. The problem is it's mostly the ones that Iran wants to let through. Can you talk about kind of the new status quo that Iran is

sort of imposing on the straight in the last few days here? Yeah. So, I mean, we had a kind of shut

down with this. And again, we went from 130-something vessels going through the just, you know,

single digits in some cases until a complete stop there for a brief period.

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