By wresting control of the Strait of Hormuz, Iran has turned the tables on US Submitted by Sean Mathews on Tue, 03/17/2026 - 20:08 If the US fails to push Iran out of Hormuz or washes its hands of the waterway, the repercussions will ripple across global trade and finance, experts say This frame grab, taken on 12 March 2026, shows smoke emerging from the Source Blessing cargo vessel, filmed from another vessel in the Gulf, north of Dubai (Wang Shang/Handout/UGC/AFP) Off Iran spent a decade building up a shadow fleet of tankers untouched by western finance and insurance to evade US sanctions. Now, those vessels are snaking through the Strait of Hormuz while their western-affiliated counterparts are locked out of the key chokepoint. Whereas the US used its heft as the underwriter of the world’s finance system to box out foes like Iran and Russia, the Islamic Republic is using missiles and drones to do the same. At least 17 vessels have been attacked by Iran in the Gulf since the war started on 28 February. Ship owners and operators in the West willing to transit the Strait of Hormuz must now face sky-high insurance premiums.   Traffic through the passage has plunged, but more than 20 long-range tankers have exited the waterway since the war on Iran began, according to data shared with Middle East Eye by analytics firm Kepler. At least six of those vessels are sanctioned by the US or part of the so-called shadow fleet. “Because Iran has been under sanction for such a long time, it has developed coping mechanisms for evasion that now make it less vulnerable to some of the blowback from its own economic weapon: which is the Strait of Hormuz’s closure,” Nicholas Mulder, an assistant professor of history at Cornell University and author of The Economic Weapon: the rise of sanctions as a tool of modern war, told MEE. “Iran has been artificially insulated from the fallout of this war by the US sanctions,” he added. Is the shadow fleet outdated?