The week of September 28 to October 5 was the worst for tankers in the Strait of Hormuz since the war began on February 28. Tracking sources counted at least 12 attacks on oil, LPG and LNG carriers in those seven days. The IMO, which is slower to verify, had confirmed nine. The previous worst week, in mid-July, had eight.

Where the ships were hit matters more than how many. Almost every strike in that stretch landed in the southern channel, a few miles off Oman’s coast. That is the lane shipowners moved to in June, when Muscat’s corridor offered a way past Iran’s tolled northern route. It was supposed to be the workaround. Iran is now treating it as a firing range.

Washington identified the attacker within hours. A Singapore-flagged cargo ship, the Ever Lovely, took an Iranian drone to the bridge on Thursday as it exited the Strait of Hormuz, several miles off the coast of Oman. US officials named the perpetrator without hedging: the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Then, asked what the United States intended to do about it, an official said only that the government was aware of the reports and looking into them.

The United States has stopped arguing with Iran over who controls the Strait of Hormuz and started prosecuting the transaction itself. On May 27, the Treasury Department added Iran’s Persian Gulf Strait Authority to the Specially Designated Nationals list under Executive Order 13224, the counterterrorism authority reserved for entities that finance terror. The designation does not contest Tehran’s claim to administer the strait. It renders the act of buying passage a sanctionable offense, and in doing so it inverts the entire logic of the toll regime.

Operation Earnest Will, the 1987-1988 American escort operation for reflagged Kuwaiti tankers, cost the United States approximately five billion dollars in 1987 currency — a figure that, adjusted for inflation and accounting for the expansion of the threat environment since then, understates what a comparable operation would cost today. The escort problem in the modern strait is harder, not easier, than it was during the Tanker Wars. More threats, more capable threats, more vessels requiring protection, and a global economy that is more exposed to disruption than it was forty years ago. The numbers for a sustained escort operation in the contemporary Gulf are large enough that the economics of protection become a strategic variable independent of the purely military calculations.