The New York Times reports:

For two months, under a quiet arrangement with the U.S. Navy, commercial tankers turned off their transponders to avoid detection by Iran as they crossed the perilous Strait of Hormuz to carry oil and gas out to the world.

The military offered some air cover in case Iran attacked, as naval officers directed the vessels over the radio to hug Oman’s coast, opposite Iran’s shore. That enabled a steady increase in traffic through the strait from May to June, during a tentative cease-fire in the war.

But a framework deal that President Trump signed with Iran last month helped bring that effort to a fiery end because of its language giving Iran official power in the strait and its vagueness in important phrases.

Mr. Trump celebrated the agreement, reached on June 14, as the reopening of the strait. “Ships of the World, start your engines,” he wrote on social media. “Let the oil flow!”

But critics say it actually formalized a reality that Iranian officials have made clear throughout the war: They now control the strait.

Iran’s missile and drone attacks on commercial ships in the strait essentially shut it down soon after the United States and Israel started the war. Then weeks after the United States and Iran entered a tentative and informal cease-fire in early April, some tankers began taking a southern route through the strait, farther from Iran’s coast.

Now, by striking last week in that area, Iran is trying to force ships to travel through its territorial waters on the strait’s northern side, where Tehran can try to justify charging tolls or fees.

Iranian units attacked three ships on Tuesday along the southern route, the U.S. military said. Mr. Trump responded by ordering airstrikes in Iran. The tensions escalated in an announcement this weekend by Iran’s Navy that it had fired on another vessel in the strait and was closing the waterway “until the end of U.S. interference in the region.”

U.S. Central Command said it hit about 140 Iranian military targets in response, for a total of 310 American strikes over the last week.

With Mr. Trump warning that he thinks the June agreement is “over,” global energy prices are surging again, along with fears of a return to all-out war. Before the war, a fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas passed through the strait from producers in the Middle East.

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The latest crisis is an all-too-predictable result of the June agreement, former American officials and analysts say. [Continue reading…]