Forget the body count, the missile tallies, and the diplomatic cables. Historian Niall Ferguson has identified a single metric that will determine whether the US-Iran war ends well: the number of oil tankers passing through the Strait of Hormuz.
Ferguson offered this assessment on the GoodFellows panel at the Hoover Institution alongside economist John Cochrane and former National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, as reported by "Hvylya".
"I'm counting tankers. I'm just counting tankers in the Strait of Hormuz," Ferguson said when asked what he would be watching over the next five days. The conditions for resumption: "the depletion of the regime's destructive capability and the gradual emergence of some kind of solution to the insurance problem." His impression is that "shipping and insurance interests are nervous as hell."
The economic stakes are immense. Ferguson warned that if the Strait remains effectively closed, "the world is going to be on the receiving end of one of the biggest energy shocks of our lifetimes." He posted a graph showing how current inflation mirrors the trajectory of the 1970s - arriving at "the exact time when the Iranian revolution happened and set in big oil price shocks." Cochrane pointed to the latest data: "The latest jobs report is weak and the latest inflation is up. So get out those bell-bottom jeans."
McMaster offered a more optimistic timeline, arguing that Iran's capacity to threaten shipping is collapsing. "I think we've hit the nadir of the crisis on gas and oil supplies," he said. But Cochrane noted the asymmetry: "It only takes one Shahed drone to keep an oil tanker out of the Straits of Hormuz." The gap between military dominance and commercial confidence remains the war's most dangerous variable.
Also read: Qatar Warns of Global Energy Collapse and $150 Oil if Iran Conflict Persists