Every actor with the power to end this war has instead spent September building permanent infrastructure to live around it. The House voted for a third time Tuesday to curb Trump’s war powers, passing the latest resolution 220-204, but there is little confidence it will make it through the Senate, and if it does, Trump would likely veto it. The one Gulf-wide diplomatic track aimed at reopening the strait (the Iran-GCC-Iraq meeting scheduled for September 11 in Oman) was postponed, with no new date set. And Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent (the point man on economic warfare) told a G20 audience this month that the strait will be “a worthless piece of water” in two years. They aren’t promising an end to the war in two years; just that Hormuz won’t matter. That leaves more questions than answers because there is no way to separate Iran from Hormuz. It is a geographical fact.
“Two years” is a big tell. Bessent made the claim September 1 in a sidebar with Larry Kudlow at the G20 finance ministers’ meeting in Asheville, not in any Iran-policy setting. The forecast rests on two facts that predate the war, not on anything Iran does.
US crude imports from Persian Gulf countries were already at their lowest level in almost 40 years before February 28 (about half a million barrels a day, 7% of US crude imports, per the EIA) because domestic production and Canadian imports had displaced them years earlier. Bessent’s point is that Hormuz stopped being a US chokepoint before…
Every actor with the power to end this war has instead spent September building permanent infrastructure to live around it. The House voted for a third time Tuesday to curb Trump’s war powers, passing the latest resolution 220-204, but there is little confidence it will make it through the Senate, and if it does, Trump would likely veto it. The one Gulf-wide diplomatic track aimed at reopening the strait (the Iran-GCC-Iraq meeting scheduled for September 11 in Oman) was postponed, with no new date set. And Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent (the point man on economic warfare) told a G20 audience this month that the strait will be “a worthless piece of water” in two years. They aren’t promising an end to the war in two years; just that Hormuz won’t matter. That leaves more questions than answers because there is no way to separate Iran from Hormuz. It is a geographical fact.
“Two years” is a big tell. Bessent made the claim September 1 in a sidebar with Larry Kudlow at the G20 finance ministers’ meeting in Asheville, not in any Iran-policy setting. The forecast rests on two facts that predate the war, not on anything Iran does.
US crude imports from Persian Gulf countries were already at their lowest level in almost 40 years before February 28 (about half a million barrels a day, 7% of US crude imports, per the EIA) because domestic production and Canadian imports had displaced them years earlier. Bessent’s point is that Hormuz stopped being a US chokepoint before this war started and is a chokepoint only for everyone else. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Iraq, and Turkey have separately reached bilateral agreements to build pipeline capacity around the strait, with Saudi Arabia’s own East-West line already carrying roughly 7 million bpd to Yanbu on the Red Sea during the worst of the shutdown. That is proof of concept, not full replacement capacity, and we already know this: Drone strikes from Iraq shut that same pipeline down on September 10. The Red Sea route it feeds into is compromised on its own terms: the Houthis seized Mocha and the Hanish Islands this month, took effective control of Bab al-Mandeb, and declared a maritime embargo against Saudi shipping in July. Bessent’s two-year forecast is a bet on infrastructure that, as of this week, is offline at one end and blockaded at the other.
The one caveat here is that the Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabia’s oil facilities are exaggerated to some extent. The strikes attributed to the Houthis this month don’t hold up as well as the coverage suggests once we separate what the Houthis claimed from what the Saudis confirmed. The one materially damaging hit on Saudi oil infrastructure (the East-West pipeline) was confirmed by NASA FIRMS fire detection and Sentinel-3 smoke imagery and came from drones launched out of Iraq, not from the Houthis. The Mecca drone, which drove most of this week’s coverage, was intercepted before it entered restricted airspace: no damage, no casualties, no facility hit. Plus, the Houthis deny any involvement at all. The Yanbu and Khamis Mushait strikes rest entirely on Houthi claims, and Saudi Arabia has not confirmed, either. Aramco has already responded to the shutdown by pivoting to spot sales and ship-to-ship transfers in the Gulf of Oman rather than waiting on the pipeline, and reportedly canceled or delayed some September deliveries to European refiners.
Before the war, nearly 34% of global crude trade – about 15 million barrels a day – passed through Hormuz, most of it bound for Asia. The IEA estimates existing Saudi and UAE bypass routes can reroute only 3.5 million to 5.5 million bpd, leaving a large share of those pre-war flows without a pipeline alternative. The two-year forecast is not a peace plan. It’s the Treasury Secretary conceding in public that the strait stays contested for the foreseeable future, and the narrative is now all about bypasses.
So what about the other Gulf producers? Qatar and Kuwait (the two GCC producers with no bypass pipeline of their own) have pushed combined exports back to 70% of the 2 million bpd they moved before February 28, using shuttle tankers into the strait and ship-to-ship transfers in the Gulf of Oman, a workaround built entirely inside the war zone rather than bypassing it. Kuwait’s output collapsed from 1.16 million bpd in March to 573,000 bpd in May before that partial recovery. Regional forecasters project a 2026 GDP contraction of 5.9% for Qatar and 2.9% for Kuwait, the steepest in the GCC.
Gasoline reached $4.44 a gallon nationally Thursday, 49% above the pre-war price, and diesel is up 68% over the same period. Consumer prices rose 3.4% YoY in August, up from 2.4% in February. The war has cost $38 billion in its first four months and produced a munitions shortfall, the Pentagon confirmed in writing this week. Trump’s approval on the economy sits at 32-33% (UMass Amherst and Reuters/Ipsos polls). Some 80% of Reuters/Ipsos respondents expect the war to continue indefinitely, and among independents, 33% say they’d back a Democrat in a House race held today against 19% for a Republican. House Speaker Mike Johnson pulled a vote on suspending the federal gas tax this week, citing disagreement among his own members rather than Democratic opposition. In other words, there was one legislative response to $4.44 gasoline that Republicans control outright, and they couldn’t pass it themselves. The move triggered a Freedom Caucus revolt, with Rep. Clay Higgins accusing Transportation Committee Chair Sam Graves of having “killed” the bill. Rep. Thomas Massie filed a resolution to impeach Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth over the Iran operations, forcing a floor vote within two days, and Johnson has already said it will fail. Both episodes are Republicans fighting Republicans over how to manage a war neither faction can stop, seven weeks before voters decide who controls the House majority.