21 miles of saltwater between Iran and Oman shouldn’t decide what Americans pay at the pump. But for the last six weeks, it has. 

Since the U.S.–Israel strikes on Iran in late February, daily transits through the Strait of Hormuz have collapsed from over 100 tankers to fewer than 20, Brent has climbed past $100, and U.S. gas prices are up roughly 40%. Yesterday, a sanctioned Chinese tanker ran the new American blockade. None of this is ending soon. Analysts say even a stable ceasefire would take until July to normalize flows.

The instinct is to read this as a Middle East story. It isn’t. It’s an electrification story, and the column should sit there.

Roughly 20% of the world’s oil and a third of China’s crude oil move through that single chokepoint. Every spike, from 1973 to 1979 to 1990 to 2022 to now, teaches the same lesson and the world keeps half-learning it: an economy that runs on combustion is an economy whose grocery bills, airfares, and election outcomes are hostage to whoever controls a strait. The fix isn’t drilling more domestically. The U.S. is already a net oil exporter and prices still jumped 40%. The fix is needing less of the commodity at all.

China has internalized this. EVs crossed 50% of new car sales there in 2025, explicitly framed by Beijing as energy security, not climate policy. Europe is at 26%. The U.S. sits at 10% and just rolled back EV incentives. That’s the real cost of the current crisis. Not the price spike, but the strategic gap it widens. Every quarter the U.S. spends defending other people’s oil flows, China spends building the cars that make those flows irrelevant.

The Strait of Hormuz isn’t a foreign policy problem. It’s a market signal. America should read it.