US President Donald Trump’s threat to blockade the Strait of Hormuz will only affect a small handful of vessels that are still navigating the waterway, shipping expert Lars Jensen says.
“If this is actually done by the Americans, it will halt a very tiny trickle of vessels. In the greater scheme of things, it doesn’t really change anything,” he says.
Jensen, chief executive of Vespucci Maritime, says Trump’s threat of preventing safe passage for any ships paying tolls to Iran would also have little impact, as any company doing so would already face sanctions for paying the regime.
“First of all, there’s very few ships that pass. There’s even fewer of those that pay, and those that pay will already be subject to American sanctions,” he says.
Most shipping companies will continue to wait and see if there is a tentative peace agreement and whether that might hold, Jensen says, and if that occurs, a slow ramping up of shipping may resume.
As for what it would take shipping lines to decide whether it was safe to transit the strait again, he says the honest answer from those firms would be that they don’t know.
“Because at the end of it, it boils down to trust: trust that any agreement between the US and Iranians will hold for a significant portion of time, and that’s a subjective feeling, there is nothing hard and tangible you can point to,” he says.