The Strait Stays Half-Open. The Substitutes Are for Sale.

In late April, Iran offered to reopen the Strait of Hormuz in exchange for an end to the American blockade of its ports. Secretary of State Marco Rubio refused.

What they mean by opening the straits is, yes, the straits are open, as long as you coordinate with Iran, get our permission, or we’ll blow you up and you pay us. — Marco Rubio

The administration's message to European allies that same spring ran the other way: Washington would not guarantee the shipping, but it could certainly sell the substitute.

The hard part is done. Go get your own oil! — Donald Trump

A solution was on the table and was declined. A product was on the shelf and was for sale. They are the same mechanism, and the number at the center of the crisis is what proves it. As the war drove European gas up 84 percent and Asian gas up 108 percent, US Henry Hub futures fell to a 17-month low of $2.52 per million Btu ^[1][2]. The global market was broken; the American one was cheaper than it had been in a year and a half. That spread is what turns three otherwise separate sales into one strategy. The first buyer was Europe. The $750 billion commitment to buy American energy was extracted from Brussels in August 2025, months before the first strike on Iran, with tariff threats doing the extracting, alongside $600 billion in European investment in the US ^[3]. The template predates the war; Washington had run the same play on India, doubling tariffs while offering American energy as the replacement ^[4]. The crisis did not create the deal — it changed what the deal meant. A peacetime trade concession became a lifeline the moment the strait stopped reliably supplying Europe, and when allies asked for the shipping to be restored, the administration pointed them back at the contract already signed ^[5]. The second buyer was the Gulf. In March, Rubio invoked emergency powers to rush $23 billion in arms sales to the UAE, Kuwait, and Jordan past congressional review ^[6].

I'm not putting troops anywhere. — Donald Trump

The same Navy that was arming them spent those weeks declining near-daily requests from shippers for escorts through Hormuz ^[7]. The protection that eventually materialized ran through a corridor near Oman that has moved 1,300 vessels but keeps the strait at 30 to 50 percent of its pre-war flow. Riyadh got the same answer: a request for direct American military help against the Houthis was met with intelligence support alone, even as the Houthis seized the Red Sea coast and barred Saudi vessels from Bab al-Mandab ^[8][9]. Allies were told to buy the means of their own defense while the seller declined to provide the defense it had historically given away. The third buyer was the American consumer. At home the substitute for the unsecured strait was an emergency: a national energy emergency to accelerate LNG exports and block coal-plant retirements ^[10][11], and a Strategic Petroleum Reserve drained to its lowest level since 1982 to hold the pump price down. The reserve is the quiet backstop under the whole two-tier system — world prices stay high, domestic prices stay tolerable, and the difference is paid out of a hole no one is refilling. None of this means the administration simply let the price run. It extended waivers on Russian oil, releasing roughly 100 million barrels back into the market ^[12], and moved record volumes out of the reserve ^[13]. The escorts, once they began, were real if partial. But these read less like a resolution than a calibration: the blockade stays, the strait stays partly closed, and each lever pulled is the one that keeps domestic and allied markets inside a politically survivable band — not the one that would reopen the shipping for everyone. That band has a floor, and it is being reached. The reserve is approaching an operational floor of 250 to 300 million barrels, refilling six times slower than it drains. The arithmetic does not care about intent. The one action that would restore Hormuz traffic for everyone is the one Iran already offered and Washington keeps declining. Every other response is a product it sells — to Europe, to the Gulf, to the voters at home — and the inventory under the last of them is running out.