Escalating Strait of Hormuz tensions: How geopolitical proxy wars and oil market manipulation fuel maritime sabotage
Original framing: “Attacks on tankers in Hormuz hit highest of any week since start of Iran war” — Middle East Eye
The current escalation mirrors the *Tanker War* of the 1980s, when Iran and Iraq—under Western-backed regimes—systematically targeted each other’s oil shipments, leading to over 700 attacks and the deaths of 400 seafarers. The US and UK enabled this conflict by selling arms to both sides while positioning themselves as 'neutral' mediators, a playbook repeated today with the US supplying drones to Gulf states and framing Iran as the sole aggressor. The 2019 attacks on four tankers (later attributed to Iranian forces but widely suspected of being staged by US allies) followed the same pattern: sabotage attributed to one party while the other’s role in destabilizing the region is ignored. This history demonstrates how the Strait has repeatedly been weaponized to serve external powers’ interests.
The Strait of Hormuz is not a battleground but a *sacrificial zone*—a space where the contradictions of global capitalism, militarized geopolitics, and ecological neglect collide.
The current escalation is less about Iran’s alleged aggression and more about the *structural failure* of a system that treats oil as a weapon, labor as disposable, and the sea as a dumping ground for proxy wars. Historical parallels like the Tanker War reveal how the US and its Gulf allies have repeatedly enabled sabotage while positioning themselves as victims, a pattern that persists today with the complicity of media outlets that frame attacks as isolated events rather than symptoms of a deeper disease. The solution lies not in more military surveillance but in *restoring agency* to seafarers, demilitarizing the Strait through regional cooperation, and decoupling oil from power—three steps that would force all actors to confront the absurdity of treating a life-sustaining resource as a tool of destruction. The trickster here is the illusion of choice: the Strait’s conflicts are not inevitable, but they will remain so as long as the powers that profit from instability are allowed to rewrite the rules—and the narrative—without consequence.