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Columbia Energy Exchange

Iran Conflict Brief: What It Will Take to Open Up the Strait of Hormuz

March 11, 2026
Guest

Michael Knights

Head of Research, Horizon Engage

Transcript

Daniel Sternoff:
Events in the Middle East are changing quickly and the complexities of understanding the global energy landscape grow deeper by the hour we are cutting through the headlines to bring you real time analysis. Join me as we talk to leading experts on the latest developments in the region and what it means for the rest of the world. Welcome to our new rapid response podcast series, the Iran Conflict Brief. I’m Daniel Sternoff, a senior fellow at the Center on Global Energy Policy. We are recording this podcast on Wednesday, March 11th at 8:00 AM in Washington DC and 4:30 PM in Tehran and 4:00 PM in Abu Dhabi and Riyadh. At the current time, all eyes in the energy markets are on the Strait of Hormuz, which is effectively closed to tanker traffic, leaving stranded some 16 million barrels per day of crude oil and oil products and 11 and a half BCF per day of LNG, almost a fifth of world supplies of each commodity, petrochemicals, fertilizers, construction materials, food imports, are all seeing widespread delays.

Storage capacity limits have been rapidly hit across the Gulf for crude oil, forcing the shut-in of almost 7 million barrels per day in production and perhaps two and a half million barrels per day of regional refining capacity. The IEA is on the brink of releasing some 300 to 400 million barrels in strategic reserves, which would be the largest release in history. And at current disruption rates would cover perhaps 20 to 25 days of current losses. So needless to say, these are dire straits if you forgive the pun, and it is essential for the world economy and energy markets that transit be restored. Yesterday, oil prices were retreating sharply on a tweet from Energy Secretary Chris Wright, that the US Navy had escorted a tanker through Hormuz, raising hopes that the cavalry is riding to the rescue.

That tweet, however, was retracted and was followed by reports that US intelligence has detected signs Iran has begun mining the strait. President Trump sent out a confusing Truth saying the US sees no signs. Iran is mining the strait, but if any mines have in fact been laid, they need to be removed IMMEDIATELY in all caps. Now through this fog of war, I’m joined today by Mike Knights, one of the keenest observers of the Gulf and Middle East security environment, and an expert on the asymmetric capacities of Iran and its regional proxies. Mike is currently head of research at Horizon Engage a strategic advisory firm, and for over 20 years he’s advised operators and investors in the region of political insecurity risks. Mike is also an adjunct fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy where he co-founded the Militia Spotlight, focused on Iran-backed proxies. So there is no one better to try to pierce through this fog of war than Mike and we are going to explore today what needs to happen for flows to resume through the strait. Good morning, Mike.
Mike Knights (02:51):
Good morning Dan. Great to see you.
Daniel Sternoff (02:53):
You too. So let me kick this off by asking your assessment of what is currently happening in the Strait of Hormuz moves. The closure of the strait is probably one of the most war game contingencies ever for US central command. And I think before this crisis, the general assumption in the oil markets was Iran might be able to impede shipping, but not for a great length of time. And most non-military observers like myself have assumed that the IRGC and Iranian Navy could use mine layers or fast boats with explosives or shore-based missiles to impose a blockade. And we really haven’t seen any of those things. We’ve seen some cheap drones and a small number of incidents targeting ships, foreign insurers and shipping companies who then decided it’s unsafe to cross the narrowest S-curve of the waterway. So from the looks of it from a military standpoint, the IRGC has essentially weaponized commercial risk aversion rather than actually imposing a blockade. So how does that asymmetry change CENTCOM’s calculus? What does it mean or does it mean Iran can sustain the closure even if the US is destroy its surface Navy? So take it away. How are you seeing this?
Mike Knights (04:08):
You just made my job easy for me by basically listing all the key operative factors, but I’ll just say this, as you said, the US Navy has been preparing for this contingency for over 40 years. When it started back in the 80s and we did the tanker re-flagging during the Iran Iraq war when Iran was attacking Iraqi and Gulf tankers, we were deploying about 30 surface vessels. We’d be in the US out of 268. If we deployed the same number of vessels today, we would be deploying them out of only 111 US surface naval vessels. So it’s a far heavier lift for today’s downsized US Navy than it was back in those days. And the US Navy is facing a much more advanced anti-shipping threat than they were back then. Back then it was very mechanical. It was about dropping mines off the back of little ships.
(05:11):
It was about facing pretty limited anti-ship missile capabilities and artillery from within visual range almost of the Strait of Hormuz plus a bit of Iranian air power. But we felt like we could get a handle on that. Nowadays, as we saw with the war between the US and the Houthis in 2025, you can fire extremely accurate anti-ship ballistic missiles from a few hundred kilometers in land and hit with a very high degree of accuracy even against a moving ship. And being that the strait of all Moses flanked on the Iranian side by a few hundred kilometers of mountainous terrain, it gives you an extremely wide area that you have to suppress nowadays. And there’s more chance than ever that an anti-ship ballistic missile will come crushing down within a mere 30 seconds flight time, one minute flight time, and hit with tremendous kinetic impact, whatever it’s crashing down on.
(06:25):
So we’ve got a more complex problem and a broader area to kind of a broader operational area to consider when we try and protect Hormuz now compared to the 80s, and we have far less ships to do it with. And this is the reason why the US Navy is pretty hesitant to get in there, and it’s very clear that President Trump seems to have been made to understand by the Navy, I’m sure that he stands a high chance of seeing a US warship on fire if he moves one into the Strait of Hormuz. Now, shippers are not going particularly large shipping firms, they’re not going to go back in until they both have insurance, but also until they see the US Navy doing repeated [unclear] navigation cruises through the Strait. In other words, the US Navy has got to go first and has got to show that it’s willing to put its ships in the strait before anyone else is going to put a tanker through or even more an LPG carrier, LNG carrier.
(07:32):
So the problem is the US Navy’s not doing that. I think an interesting thing to watch in the next 24 hours is going to be the movement of the Ford Battle Group through the Red Sea. You can see that the Ford carrier has come down from the Med through the Suez Canal, and right now it’s psyching itself up around Jeddah for a run through the Red Sea and through the Bab al-Mandab Strait to get out into the Indian Ocean, to come down to the Gulf. And this is, if you think about it, a miniature dry run of what we’re about to do in Hormuz potentially, which is to say a bunch of US ships have got to move past the hostile coastline, in this case Yemen’s coastline with the Houthis against a lesser set of capabilities than the Iranians have, and they’ve only got to do it once.
(08:23):
And we are still taking a couple of days to psych ourselves up for that and get ready for a full combat transit through the Bab al-Mandab Strait. If this goes well, maybe we’ll feel a bit more confident about doing it in Hormuz. If it goes badly, we might feel less confident about doing it in Hormuz. But it shows you that the modern US Navy, it’s thinking about the war in the South China Sea in the Pacific in five years time, and it’s saying it’s against every rule in our book to put our ships this close to an enemy coastline with advanced anti-shipping capabilities, and we are going to need every one of those 111 ships in a couple of years time in a China scenario. So is it really worth it, Mr. President, or perhaps can the world just stretch a little bit, use its reserves and we don’t do the restoration of freedom and navigation in Hormuz before the end of the conflict. I think that’s the situations we see it right now. Well,
Daniel Sternoff (09:24):
That’s extremely sobering. If everyone is waiting for the US Navy and the US Navy doesn’t want to do it alone or do it first. There were some reports that the Pakistani military has deployed warships to escort its commercial vessels. There’ve been noises coming from the likes of France, Greece, Italy, the UK, even India, floating the possibility of some form of international naval escorts. How likely is it that we’ll see some kind of a coalition come together and given Iran’s current capabilities, do you think that will come together and what can you tell us about the history of those kinds of maritime coalition task forces that might help here?
Mike Knights (10:05):
Yeah, so we shouldn’t rely on the Red Sea completely for case study material because the Red Sea ultimately is a nice to have. It’s a shortcut. It didn’t exist before the 1850s through Suez. So you can replace it if you really need to, whereas Hormuz at the moment is a must have, and that’s going to affect probably the level of international willingness to help here. But I will say this, even in the Gulf, the Arabian Gulf, we have had a difficulty in pulling together true multinational coalitions in the last decade. What you’ve tended to find is that a European maritime escort and security effort will work in parallel to a US one and they will interact closely, but they won’t actually be the same coalition and they will have slightly different goals, rules of engagement and levels of commitment. And that may well be what we see here.
(11:07):
If we do look at the Red Sea, what we found is that the US Navy ultimately was not willing even with the Brits alongside to do an actual escort operation in the Red Sea with a lower level of threat, but also a lower level of criticality. Instead, we had a kind of a broad protective cloud of missile interception capabilities, drone interception capabilities, but the shippers had to actually make their own way through themselves. And as a result, we largely saw shipping reopened to not the large shipping lanes, lines rather Hapaq Lloyd and all the others. And instead we saw, and we also saw of course, the dark fleet primarily using the Red Sea, Russian, Iranian, Chinese striking their own deals with the Houthis. And it’s quite possible that we could see similar type of arrangement in Hormuz, but I think what the US is probably hoping is that by the time they need to do something like this, the war is already over and we have seen indications from President Trump over the last couple of days, little signs, lines declaring victory, stressing how much has been achieved, stressing how short this conflict is going to be.
(12:38):
Don’t worry, oil industry, we are nearly there. You can see that I think you recognize is the easiest way to end the risk to Hormuz might be to simply end the war rather than to throw the US Navy in there.
Daniel Sternoff (12:53):
That’s a sobering thought because if we would end the war right now with a declaration of victory by having smashed the Iranian Navy and ballistic missile capabilities and the like, Iran will have proved that it has the capability to effectively shut down shipping through this strategic waterway used energy prices and pressure on the Gulf States to essentially force us to cut this shorter. I guess my question is what do you think Iran is trying to achieve now? I mean in that situation of Trump declaring victory, would Iran stop with threats against shipping and why would it not have shown it has tremendous leverage and before it agrees to sign some kind of a mutual ceasefire, it might want to get something in return. So maybe how do you think about Tehran’s end state here, Tehran, assuming the IRGC is consolidating behind Mojtaba Khamenei, which is what it appears, is this a bargaining chip for ceasefire negotiations, a punishment operation, a longer term attempt to demonstrate the US just can’t keep the straight open even if it wants to?
Mike Knights (14:10):
Yeah, I mean a lot of folks are wondering if the Iranians are going to immediately stop the same moment the US might stop. And I think I can see both sides of the argument that they would or they wouldn’t. Ultimately, my gut is that the Iranians will want a break as soon as they can get one from these strikes, which are starting to affect refined oil power, a range of things that if you’re trying to maintain rium security, it’s not good for you. And I think one of the key things that would make if the US said, we are stopping right now, but the Israelis have free reign, they just keep going if they want. Well, that’s maybe something where the Iranians would say, oh no, if the Israelis are keeping going, we are keeping going against elements of Gulf and against bits of Hormuz traffic we don’t like.
(15:15):
And the lesson of the Red Sea and the lesson so far in Hormuz is that you don’t have to hit every ship, you don’t have to hit even 1% of ships, you just have to hit a ship now and then to make people not want to fully return to this environment. So you’re right, the messy end is really if the US ends, but the Israelis don’t want to end and the Iranians can’t accept that. And so under those circumstances, you might see the US do, if you remember Trump’s very angry getting on an airplane comment where he dropped the F-bomb last time where he said, I’m trying to stop both of these sides from fighting, but they just won’t stop. And then we got a little while after that, yeah, he flexed enough that a kind of ceasefire happened that the Israelis knew they could probably go back to hitting again within a few months, but they need to let it calm down right now. That’s a credible scenario whereby Trump tries a US only ending. Iran won’t let that happen. It becomes an Israeli power down as well. And then at that point, it’s a little weird for the Iranians to keep attacking ships in M or to keep attacking the Gulf states. That’s where they might do themselves more harm than good if they just keep hitting for no discernible reason.
Daniel Sternoff (16:37):
Can you see a scenario if this conflict continues for a while? So Trump has said it could be it won’t go on for a really long time, but he didn’t really define what those operational objectives are, left himself flexibility to continue. The Israelis seemed to want to go still for weeks to hit hard at a lot of internal security targets. If Trump were to go along with that and we have weeks ahead of us, not days, do you see any ability to reduce Iranian capabilities that might at least see the beginning of some kind of escort operations and even a restoration of some level of flows?
Mike Knights (17:25):
Well, this is why the Ford is going to the Arabian Sea. It’s going there because it might be used in that manner to support our other carrier group there. He wouldn’t run the Red Sea and the Bab al-Mandab unless it had extremely good reason to do that. So even though I would say it’s not our first preference to do a Hormuz operation where we put ships in harm’s way, it is the backup plan and it is what’s being prepared. Ultimately, I think the Trump administration would probably prefer this thing to be over before it has to go that far and the Navy would certainly prefer that. But if we get into that scenario where this war is too sticky to detach from cleanly, then yes, I mean undoubtedly we can’t have a month or two months of closure the straight or from us at that point, we will probably feel that we have to do it. We might get some international help and we will have had a number more weeks of just pounding Southern Iran to the point where we feel like we can do this relatively safely and then you would see us try to do freedom of navigation first, military only, freedom of navigation through the strait and then later with packages of tankers in tow.
Daniel Sternoff (18:55):
This all sounds like it’s on a longer timeline than I think oil markets assume either for it to wrap up or for there to be some kind of us action to push it open. And so as long as this is going on, I suppose the only outlet for oil markets at least will be through the Red Sea with Saudi activating flows moving through the East West pipeline. Which raises a question of the Houthi dimension. Obviously you’ve done a lot of work on Houthis threats. The Houthis have not entered this conflict yet. Why is that? Are they waiting for an opportunity? Is that a potential threat here to this release valve that the Saudis have?
Mike Knights (19:40):
It’s really crunch time for the Houthis. They probably, like the rest of us can tell that the Iranian regime has a good chance of surviving this. And I believe, and I won’t say I’m in the minority with this, but I’ve studied the Houthis in real depth going back to the 80s, their involvement with the Islamic Republic of Iran and Lebanese Hezbollah right from the start, they are true believers in the Islamic Revolution and they might well outlast the Islamic Republic of Iran and Lebanese Hezbollah and become the last place where the Islamic Revolution still exists as originally conceived with a Yemeni spin. So they are true believers if they’re staying out now, it’s not because they’ve abandoned Iran, it’s because it’s either not the right time to come in or the best way to preserve the Islamic Revolution is for it to survive in Yemen, and we’re going to see in the next 12 hours whether they take shots at the US carrier group, there’s going to be no better chance to hit a US aircraft carrier in this entire crisis than what’s about to happen now with the straight transit down in the Red Sea.
(20:57):
If you want to create that iconic image of a US aircraft carrier on fire, now is the time to do it and we’ll see if they do, if they let it go put through. That’s really something. Then the Houthis have really signaled that they are just not in this for some strategic reason, and that bodes pretty well for them. Maybe not hitting Red Sea Coast export terminals, but the Iranians themselves can take a crack at the Red Sea Coast with their long range systems. Not many will get through, but they can. And they can also hit the eastern end of the East West pipeline as well as they have done before, and one would have to expect that in an extended conflict, they would not let the Saudis just send 7 million barrels west through the Red Sea. They would do something about it or try to at least.
Daniel Sternoff (21:53):
Yeah. I suspect that quickly gets into the worst case scenarios for the oil markets because, and the Saudis seem to be threatening that if Iran were to repeat something like the 2019 attack on Abqaiq , and maybe I would assume going after the East West pipeline has similar importance, you have to wonder whether hard Island and Iran’s export capacity would also remain intact. And then if we’re really getting into damaging the kind of critical infrastructure that has not been touched so far, those are the facilities that it’s not just a function of when does Hormuz traffic return to normal, it’s much more lasting. This is super sobering. Thank you for your insights. I guess my final question is, speaking of Hormuz coming back to normal, do you think we will ever go back to normal levels of tanker traffic?
Mike Knights (22:51):
Well, I mean, if we get the Red Sea up and running the way, it might be the Northern Red Sea, which of course far safer than doing southern transits in the Red Sea. If you’re only going north out of Saudi, it’s a relatively normal environment if very, very congested. But we’ve been talking about how sobering all this is everybody, the thing is everybody knows it’s sobering, including the combatants, and as a result, that’s why I kind of feel like this thing is going to fizzle within the next six to 10 days. I think the overall cost of this conflict are all involved is going to mean everyone finds a way to off ramp, I think within the next two weeks, and it might start partial and then become more complete. It might go through a bit where only the Americans stop, then they realize the Israelis have to stop for a while too. But I think we are down scaling in this conflict from this point onwards. I also think at some point, maybe not this time, but in the next couple of iterations of this, we’re going to get a change of regime in Iraq. And at that point, Hurmuz won’t just be better, it’ll be awesome, and we won’t have a web episode like this ever again.
(24:13):
And so I think it’s about getting through. It’s darkest before the door. We’re probably not going to see a change of regime this exact time. Maybe we could still, but the regime is circling the drain faster than it was before this crisis, I think, and one day we’re going to be, I think, very happy about that in the energy markets.
Daniel Sternoff (24:37):
That is an optimistic note potentially for opponents of the Islamic Republic. I suppose that would be a scenario that could see energy transit resume towards normal, although lots of question marks about what could happen inside of Iran and with Iranian production. But I imagine that is a topic for another episode for now. Mike, thank you very much for joining us this morning. I really appreciate your insights and we shall see how this unfolds.
Mike Knights (25:10):
Thank you.
Daniel Sternoff (25:16):
That’s it for this episode of Iran Conflict Brief, a limited series from the Columbia Energy Exchange Podcast. Thank you again, Mike Knights, and thank you for listening. The show is brought to you by the Center on Global Energy Policy at the Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs. I’m Daniel Sternoff. Mary Catherine O’Connor produced the show. Greg Vilfranc engineered it Additional support from Kyu Lee. For more information about the show or the Center on Global Energy Policy, visit us online at energypolicy.columbia.edu or follow us on social media at Columbia U Energy. If you like this episode, leave us a rating on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also share it with a friend or colleague to help us reach more listeners. Either way, we appreciate your support.

In energy markets, all eyes are on the Strait of Hormuz. As of March 11, 2026, this vital passage is effectively closed to tanker traffic, stranding almost a fifth of world supplies of crude oil, oil products, and liquefied natural gas. 

Yesterday, oil prices retreated sharply on a tweet from US Energy Secretary Chris Wright, claiming that the US Navy had escorted a tanker through Hormuz. That tweet was retracted, and was followed by reports that US intelligence had detected signs Iran had begun placing mines in the Strait. 

To help sort through the quickly-changing events in the Middle East and dig into how they impact energy security, we are launching a new, limited series of the Columbia Energy Exchange podcast: the Iran Conflict Brief. To kick off the series, Daniel Sternoff, a senior fellow at the Center on Global Energy Policy, speaks with Mike Knights about what needs to happen in order for oil and gas flows to resume through the Strait of Hormuz.

Mike is an expert on Gulf and Middle East security and leads research at Horizon Engage, a strategic advisory firm. For over 20 years he has advised operators and investors in the region of political and security risks. He is also an adjunct fellow at the Washington Institute for NearEast Policy, where he co-founded the Militia Spotlight, focused on Iran-backed proxies.

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