Iraq is the second-largest producer in OPEC and the country most completely helpless in a Hormuz closure scenario. Nearly all of its oil exports — the revenue that funds approximately 90 percent of the government’s budget — move through terminals near Basra in the far south of the country, load onto tankers in the northern Gulf, and transit the strait to reach their buyers. Iraq has no bypass pipeline capacity of consequence, no alternative export route, and no political influence over the parties whose conflict would cause the closure. It is a bystander to its own financial ruin.

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.