MacroVoices #541 Dr. Anas Alhajji: Bab el-Mandeb: The Next Oil Chokepoint Nobody's Watching

The Strait of Hormuz was closed not by an Iranian military blockade, but by European insurance companies canceling war-risk coverage after a single U.S. Navy attack on an Iranian vessel near Syria. That is the central, non-consensus argument Dr. Anas Alhajji makes in this extended interview on MacroVoices. He argues the closure was an intentional act of U.S. statecraft designed to demonstrate energy and AI dominance over China, and that the real bottleneck to watch next is not Hormuz but the Bab el-Mandeb strait at the southern entrance to the Red Sea.

The Insurance Trap: How the U.S. Closed Hormuz Without a Shot

Alhajji’s framework rests on a mechanism most analysts overlooked. He insists Iran cannot militarily close the Strait of Hormuz. What actually happened, he explains, is that the U.S. Navy killed 85 Iranian sailors near Syria, which triggered an EU solvency law. European insurers, already strained by floods and natural disasters, were required to expand their coverage zone to the entire Indian Ocean. Unable to do so, they invoked a seven-day cancellation clause on all war-risk policies. Any tanker loading in the Gulf needed more than seven days to finish and exit, so the ships were effectively locked in place without a single naval engagement.