The dual-blockade has revealed the shape of 21st-century great-power war

The US and Iran have produced something novel: a mutual blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, where neither side controls passage and both sides prevent it. Twenty percent of the world's crude has been locked behind competing cordons for over two months. The war began with assassination; it escalated to mutual strangulation; it has settled into a standoff the global economy cannot escape and cannot resolve. This is not World War III. It is something structurally new — a mode of great-power conflict ...