The palaces on this stretch of water were paid for by a rent extracted from geography. Venice sat where the Levant trade entered Europe, taxed what passed, and converted the proceeds into a navy that protected the arrangement. For roughly four centuries this worked better than almost any other business model available to a European state. Then it stopped working, and the reasons it stopped are directly relevant to every state whose strategic position rests on a strait.

Kuwait remembers. Of all the Gulf states whose oil revenues depend on Hormuz transit, Kuwait is the one with the most direct experience of what it looks like when a regional power decides that its neighbors’ sovereignty and economic interests are subordinate to its own strategic ambitions. The Iraqi invasion of August 1990 and the seven-month occupation that followed were not a Hormuz closure, but they were something equivalent in economic and political terms: the abrupt elimination of Kuwait’s ability to govern itself and export its oil. The institutional memory of that period shapes Kuwaiti foreign policy in ways that are distinct from the other Gulf states that have not experienced occupation.

Between 1984 and 1988, Iranian and Iraqi forces attacked approximately 500 commercial vessels in the Persian Gulf. The Tanker Wars — that portion of the Iran-Iraq conflict that spilled into the maritime domain — were the most sustained campaign of attacks on commercial shipping since the Second World War. They established the template for how straits and sea lanes become instruments of war, how insurance markets respond to sustained maritime threats, and how major powers calculate the costs and limits of intervention in Gulf conflicts. The lessons were not adequately remembered in subsequent decades.