On March 4, 2026, the Strait of Hormuz — a waterway just 22 nautical miles across at its narrowest point — was officially declared closed to international shipping. Most people, at the moment they heard this, had only the vaguest sense of what that meant. They knew it was serious. They knew it was somewhere in the Middle East. They did not know that they were about to feel it at the gas pump, in the grocery aisle, in their heating bills, in the mounting impossibility of the m