Eighty to ninety percent of global commerce moves by sea - including 75% of the world’s oil and almost all liquefied natural gas (LNG). So when the Strait of Hormuz shuts down, the shockwaves reach every corner of the Indo-Pacific and beyond.

In this episode, Ray Powell and Jim Carouso welcome back maritime historian Dr. Sal Mercogliano - Campbell University professor, former merchant mariner, and host of the popular YouTube channel What's Going on with Shipping? - to unpack the two-month-old crisis that has bottled up 800 ships inside the Persian Gulf and pushed the U.S. Navy to seize tankers thousands of miles away in the Indian Ocean.

Sal lays out what he calls a “tale of two blockades”: Iran rerouting traffic into its own territorial waters, shaking down shipping companies for multimillion-dollar transit payments on an international waterway and seizing Mediterranean Shipping Company vessels, while the United States mounts a blockade from the Northern Arabian Sea, firing inert shells at the Iranian container ship Tuska and boarding stateless tankers in the Indian Ocean under U.S. Department of Justice warrants.

We dig into the Venezuela vessel seizure precedent, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), the return of mine warfare, and why ship owners aren’t budging even with insurance on offer. Sal explains how ship-to-ship transfers off East Johor, Malaysia launder sanctioned Iranian crude, and why that anchorage could be the next target of U.S. enforcement.

He also walks through the pressure building inside Iran: storage tanks filling, old supertankers towed out of retirement at Kharg Island, and the looming prospect of permanently damaging Iran’s aging low-pressure oil wells. We close on the ripple effects reaching Pakistan, India, Africa, and Southeast Asia - refineries shutting down, fertilizer supplies choked, and bunker fuel prices doubling - plus the quiet winner: Russia.

Join us for a masterclass on why a regional war has become a global economic crisis and what the breakdown of freedom of the seas means for the Indo-Pacific.

👉 Follow Sal on YouTube and X, @mercoglianos

👉 Follow us on X, @IndoPacPodcast, LinkedIn, or Facebook

👉 Follow Ray Powell on X, @GordianKnotRay, or LinkedIn, or check out his maritime transparency work at SeaLight

👉 Follow Jim Carouso on LinkedIn

👉 Sponsored by BowerGroupAsia, a strategic advisory firm that specializes in the Indo-Pacific

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