• Elisabeth Braw

June 24, 2025, 3:11 PM View Comments ()

After U.S. bombers hit three key Iranian nuclear facilities over the weekend, the world immediately began worrying about shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. The shipping industry, though, reacted more calmly than the commentariat, and the ships kept sailing. Whether or not the Israeli-Iranian cease-fire declared by U.S. President Donald Trump holds, the shipping industry’s storm-weathered managers offer an example of how to keep calm in a crisis.

On June 22—just hours after U.S. bombers struck Fordo, Natanz, and Esfahan—the Majlis (Iran’s parliament) declared that Iran should close the Strait of Hormuz. But that doesn’t mean that it’s actually going to happen. Iranian politics and military command are deeply divided and messy, and such decision would be made by Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, not the Majlis.

But for politicians feeling impotent in the face of U.S. and Israeli airpower, threatening the strait offered an obvious way to hit back. The Strait of Hormuz is a narrow bend between the Persian Gulf to the north and the Gulf of Oman (and then the Arabian Sea) to the south, and thus a critical choke point. All oil leaving the Persian Gulf must pass through it on its way to the Arabian Sea and the world market—and that’s an estimated 20 percent of the oil that the world consumes.

That reality renders blocking that trade—“closing the strait” in popular parlance—an attractive option. As Iran searches for ways to retaliate against the U.S. strikes, blocking strait shipping is indeed such an obvious option that on Sunday night, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio appealed to China to pressure Iran not to do it.

The prospect of a strait blockade is indeed a concern for China and the many other countries that are heavily dependent on Gulf oil. By extension, a blockade would also have benefited Russia’s oil exports, on which Western governments have imposed a price cap of $60 per barrel but which continue to flourish thanks to its so-called shadow fleet. No wonder political leaders and commentators obsessed over a potential Iranian blockade.

The industry that most immediately had to make sense of the messy situation was the shipping sector, a field that is intimately acquainted with disruption. In the past five years alone, it has weathered the COVID-19 pandemic, the Houthis’ continuing attacks on Red Sea shipping, U.S. tariffs, and the persistent menace that is the shadow fleet.

And whatever the disruption, the shipping industry somehow has managed to adjust. Even during the so-called tanker war between Iran and Iraq in the 1980s, which saw 451 attacks on oil tankers and other ships in the strait and ultimately killed 116 seafarers, the ships kept sailing. Though some neutral ships were caught in the crossfire, the shipping industry knew that the two countries, both oil exporters, were out to harm each other’s merchant vessels, not global shipping itself. Shipping bosses and underwriters are not an excitable crowd, and they’ve developed impressive skills interpreting geopolitics.

Over the past two weeks, the shipping community has remained remarkably calm. When Israel launched airstrikes on Iran on June 12, and when it continued the attacks in the following days and Iran retaliated with strikes against Israel, the Joint War Committee (JWC)—the nongovernmental maritime insurance body that assesses and lists waters according to risk—decided against raising the strait’s (already high) risk level.

“The JWC met [on June 19] to review recent developments between Israel and Iran but the Listed Areas were left unchanged as ships calling or transiting most of the Middle East already have to notify underwriters, who can then assess such voyages on their merits,” Neil Roberts, the Joint War Committee’s secretary, told me. The JWC didn’t convene a meeting after the United States’ entry into the conflict on Israel’s side.

And in the strait, the traffic kept flowing. On June 20, 104 ships transited the waterway; on June 21, 122 ships did so; and on June 22, as the United States bombed Iran, 117 sailed through. That’s about the same volume of traffic as during June 2024, when an average of 114 ships transited the strait each day.

There was, of course, some concern. One executive told me that some seafarers were—unsurprisingly—reluctant to sail through the Strait of Hormuz, which meant that owners faced the possibility of having to make crew changes for journeys in and out of the Persian Gulf. But the risk was nowhere close to the risk in the Red Sea, where the Houthis actively target Western merchant vessels.

But Iran didn’t close the strait. Instead, it retaliated against the United States with a limited attack on a U.S. military base in Qatar—after letting the Americans know that it would attack. That allowed commanders to make sure that no troops were in harm’s way.

That calm may have paid off—although the situation remains chaotic. Late on June 23, Trump declared that a cease-fire had been reached. “It has been fully agreed by and between Israel and Iran that there will be a Complete and Total CEASEFIRE,” he posted on social media. “Israel & Iran came to me, almost simultaneously, and said, ‘PEACE!’,” he added in a subsequent post.

In the hours immediately following, Israel and Iran seemed to suggest that no such agreement had been reached. But in the early hours of June 24, all sides confirmed the cease-fire, which had been brokered by Qatar and the United States. But that was followed with more exchanges of missiles and an angry rant by Trump on the South Lawn of the White House.

It remains unclear whether the cease-fire will hold. But in the strait, with missiles flying nearby, the ships are still sailing. There are plenty of governments and armed groups that might like to make a splash, as it were, by attacking shipping. But they hold back because they know that they, too, depend on these ships and seafarers.

The Iranian government may be many things, but it’s not so stupid as to harm shipping at its doorstep—at least, not before it has exhausted every other option. That’s what the world’s shipping managers believe, anyway. Let’s hope that pragmatic optimism holds.