"The British Isles are declared to be in a state of blockade,” announced Napoleon Bonaparte, and elaborated: “All commerce and all correspondence with the British Isles are forbidden.”
It was 1806, and what would be known as the Berlin Decree aimed to strangle the British economy. The bold scheme seemed economically logical and militarily practical, but it ended up a grand flop.
Britain’s economy, coastline, and navy all proved too big for the plan, which also underestimated the kingdom’s link to America and access to the high seas. In fact, Napoleon’s blockade backfired. Europe, it turned out, needed British exports more than Britain needed European imports.
The impracticality of naval blockades was also demonstrated in Israeli history. It happened in 1967, when Egypt closed off the Straits of Tiran, thus blocking Israel’s access through the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean. Like Napoleon in his situation, Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser hoped to choke Israel economically, and like Napoleon’s ploy, Nasser’s blockade also backfired, as it sparked the war that ended in his defeat.
Does this mean that blockades are always a bad idea? It doesn’t.
In the American Civil War, the Union’s Anaconda Plan set out to blockade the Confederacy’s seaports and also to seize the Mississippi. Introduced shortly after the war’s outbreak in 1861, the plan was scorned by the North’s press, which wanted a swift military victory. Yet it worked. With the South’s cotton exports blocked, its economy was crippled throughout the war that ended in its surrender.
Now, as Iran blockades the Strait of Hormuz, the question is which way is its commercial war headed: Napoleon’s or Lincoln’s?
Tehran's multi-level blockade
LIKE ALL blockades, Iran’s has three levels: the political, the military, and the economic. In this case, the political part is the strongest, the military part is weaker, and the economic part, unlike the common impression, is the weakest.
Tehran’s political calculation is clear. Blocking navigation between the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean means obstructing Arab energy exports, which should make them and their clients pressure the US to end the war.
Yes, this assumption’s first half has, for now, proven unfounded. Qatar and Saudi Arabia this week urged the US to continue attacking until Iran is defeated. Still, the Iranian assumption’s second part, that the rest of the world will be impressed by its blockade, has been vindicated.
This is true for Asia’s big oil buyers, China, Japan, India, and Korea, each of which gets at least half its oil imports through Hormuz, and also for Europe, which has steered much of its oil importation from Russia to the Gulf, following the invasion of Ukraine.
And Iran is right to assume that these European and Asian customers will care about securing their oil supplies more than they would care for the victims of the Khomeinist scourge.
The successors of those who stood by in 1967, when the blockade on Israel was openly presented as a prelude to its annihilation, can now be counted on to stand by when the blockader is a regime that massacred its own people as they demanded liberty and bread.
A mad gamble that can only end in defeat
In this political sense, then, Iran’s blockade makes sense. However, militarily and economically it does not make sense, and – like Iran’s entire imperial project – it’s a mad gamble that will end in defeat.
MILITARILY, IRAN’S blockade challenges the US to a gloveless naval war.
The American navy is, by far, the world’s most formidable seaborne war machine. No one comes near it, whether in terms of size, technology, personnel, training, or reach. Deploying 11 aircraft carriers, 300 warships, 70 submarines, 3,700 aircraft, and more than half a million people, it can seize the entire Strait of Hormuz in one day.
Worse, from Iran’s viewpoint, the US Navy can seize Iran’s entire coastline, and then invert Tehran’s plot, blockading all Iranian exports and imports. And that, to be sure, may well happen should the mullahs uphold the provocation they seem to mistake for a stroke of genius.
Still, the Iranian blockade’s greatest weakness lies not in its naval layer, but in its economic rationale.
Yes, the markets have been initially unsettled. A barrel of Brent crude is trading at this writing at $108, 50% more than its prewar price. However, judging by previous jolts that the energy markets sustained, this one’s impact can only last that long and go that far.
For one thing, the blockade’s initial shock was much milder than what happened in 1974, when the Arab oil embargo spiked prices not by 50%, but by 300%. Even the much softer impact of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 was harsher than the current turbulence, as oil prices that summer doubled overnight.
The Iranian blockade’s impact is so much weaker because, unlike 1974’s embargo, which involved most of the world’s oil supplies, this one involves only 15% of global production. And unlike last century, when oil fueled most power stations, today’s power stations have shifted to non-oil alternatives, while oil is used mainly for vehicles and industrial plants.
And the impetus for oil’s economic decline has been its very usage as a political weapon. That is what made the free world shrink its cars, shift from oil to coal, invest in conservation, develop solar and wind power, and find oil fields of its own, all of which led a barrel’s price from $35 in 1979 to less than $10 in 1986.
Iran’s blackmail can end no better. Blockades can work when the blockaded is as poor as the American Confederacy, the blockader is as rich as the Union, and its leader is as gifted as Abraham Lincoln. When the blockader is economically inferior, it will lose, whether its leader is Napoleon Bonaparte or Mojtaba Khamenei.
www.MiddleIsrael.net
The writer, a Hartman Institute fellow, is author of Ha’Sfar Ha’Yehudi Ha’Aharon (The Last Jewish Frontier, Yediot Sefarim 2025), a sequel to Theodor Herzl’s The Old New Land.