The Strait of Hormuz was operational until Trump unilaterally launched U.S. military action against Iran to predictably close it. Why would America close the strait? I find many people still scratching their head, especially after Trump announced he would keep the strait blockaded if Iran tried to open it. He clearly doesn’t want it to be open, even as oil prices go higher and higher.

Oil prices directly hit American pocketbooks. But they also are being raised by a military disruption that costs taxpayers billions every day. This post takes a look at some causal relationships for all this cost landing on Americans, and how it appears to be a get-rich-quick scam by the Trump family.

The closure is the third such event in the modern history of the chokepoint. The first was the Tanker War of 1984 to 1988, in which Iraq and Iran attacked one another’s shipping and the United States reflagged Kuwaiti vessels under Operation Earnest Will. The second was the tanker attacks and seizures of 2019, including the limpet mine attacks in the Gulf of Oman and the seizure of the Stena Impero. The current closure is the longest, the most kinetic, and the first in which the strait has been mined as policy rather than as harassment. The actors are thus very familiar, while the new arrangement is not.

As everyone with a clue predicted, Iran executed its asymmetric strategy designed across four decades for exactly this moment. Mining the strait, attacking the Fujairah pipeline terminal, and striking shipping at the Hormuz approaches are all historic doctrine the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has rehearsed since the Tanker War. The strait is the one instrument over which Tehran telegraphed their escalation dominance, and it is being used as designed.

The American response, branded Project Freedom, is a deployment of 100 aircraft and 15,000 personnel that the Pentagon says is not an escort mission. Earnest Will, in 1987, was an escort mission. Project Freedom however is the language of liberation attached to a permitting plan. The forces deployed are being called sufficient only for a traffic toll booth, declared insufficient to clear it and return to normal.

Venezuela puts all of this in proper context. The third actor in the arrangement is the one usually absent from press accounts of the Hormuz crisis. Maduro was captured on January 3, at great cost to the U.S. taxpayer, and Venezuelan hydrocarbon production was forcibly passed to U.S. operational control in the same week. Venezuelan crude is heavy, sour, and capital-intensive, meaning the economics all relate to high Brent prices and not the low ones. It goes something like this:

Price delta from the closure
Brent before the war	$72
Brent today	$114
Premium per barrel	$42
Windfall at current Venezuelan output (350,000 bbl/day)
Per day	$14.7 million
Per year	$5.4 billion
Windfall at 2018 peak output (1.2 million bbl/day)
Per day	$50 million
Per year	$18 billion

The table lays out the operating subsidy for Venezuelan production, paid by every oil consumer. It appears at the pump in Iowa that Trump keeps talking about. But it also is in the diesel cost of a Bavarian trucking firm, and in the invoice of a Singapore shipping line, let alone all the manufacturing that depends on oil. Trump interference in Hormuz is driving the numbers up, in a way reminiscent of tin-pot dictatorships squeezing their populations before making a run for exile.

Marcos stripped the Philippine treasury and flew to Hawaii. Mobutu looted Zaire and died in Morocco. Ben Ali, Duvalier, all did the same play of extract while in office, exit as it fell apart. Manafort’s work with Somalia’s Barre, before advising Trump, is surely no coincidence. And that’s not to mention Manafort’s clients also were Mobutu, Marcos and Jonas Savimbi of Angola.

The Trump family is deep into Saudi LIV money and UAE real estate, making a $2 billion Affinity Partners deal via Kushner. Trump projects run in multiple Gulf jurisdictions, along with crypto holdings to escape American oversight. Trump is personally controlling Venezuelan oil proceeds through an offshore account in Qatar, with $250 million already awarded to Vitol whose senior trader gave $6 million to the 2024 campaign, and Paul Singer positioned to convert Venezuelan crude into refined product through distressed U.S. assets he is acquiring. It’s yet another pipe into the Trump extraction architecture.

As long as Brent stays above the threshold at which Venezuelan crude clears, the closure looks more and more like a very cynical Trump family business plan to pump, destroy and run.

Looking at how the other Manafort clients ended up, if Trump abruptly fled to Russia, Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates, none of them would extradite him.

Speaking of the Gulf monarchies, they occupy a fourth position. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Kuwait need the strait to export their approximately seventeen million barrels a day. With the Fujairah strike they lost their principal alternative. OPEC’s announced production increase, of several hundred thousand barrels a day, contrasts against a wartime loss estimated at approximately fourteen million barrels a day. Riyadh and Abu Dhabi have thus become consumers of a security framework they do not control, from an angry “sitting duck” President they can’t depend upon.

European and Asian importers typically have been absent from the strategic conversation, yet they also fit. Japan, South Korea, India, and the European Union receive the price signals and pay it. The South Korean-linked vessel that exploded at the strait on Monday is one example. Nations declaring energy crisis and immediate pivot to other forms of energy is another. Denmark this month paused new grid connections after capacity requests reached 60 GW against a peak demand of 7 GW, with data centers accounting for nearly a quarter of that. The Danish framed a pause as their window to rewrite how large electricity consumers can abruptly demand supply.

Kpler reports 170 million barrels of crude and refined product trapped on 166 tankers in the Gulf, against roughly 900 million barrels sidelined since the war began. Kpler also tells us it could take at least three months to clear the strait once it reopens. The duration of the closure, the rate at which it is relieved, and the sequence in which tankers depart are now functions of U.S. permitting decisions rather than maritime conditions.

Treasury Secretary Bessent stated on Monday that the world will be awash in Trump oil on the other side of the Trump closure. If we look at history, the Tanker War ended when Iran accepted UN Resolution 598 after the destruction of much of the Iranian navy in Operation Praying Mantis and the shootdown of Iran Air 655. America strategically forced that conclusion. Earnest Will ended when reflagged tankers no longer were needed. The present closure has no comparable analysis, because resolution doesn’t actually seem related to the dispute between Iran and Trump. Instead, closure appears more and more to be a cynical Trump gambit to corner the supplies for a price at which a separate set of investments, in a separate hemisphere, becomes profitable to him.

On that math the strait will reopen when an artificially high Venezuela price no longer needs to be defended.

Just a theory. But if the dictator shoe fits…