War In The Strait Of Hormuz Has Landed On A Tawa In Mumbai

The LPG squeeze on India's restaurant sector is the quotidian face of a deeper crisis.
Prem Panicker continues his must read daily blog on the Gulf War.

Given his wild rhetorical swings, it is a wonder that Donald Trump doesn't suffer from chronic whiplash.

Earlier this week, he filled Truth Social with dire predictions (external link) of what the United States would do to Iran if that country did not immediately open the Strait of Hormuz.

The 'obliteration' of all power, oil and desalination infrastructure was promised.

In a little over 48 hours, his rhetoric has swung from threat to shrug.

Hormuz, he said (external link) on his favorite platform yesterday, is not our problem -- if you want the oil, go take it yourself. (Predictably, Trump's tough-talking secretary of war, who lately was boasting that the US could open Hormuz on its own and needed no external help, was quick to echo his leader (external link) and suggest that NATO 'might want to start learning how to fight for yourself'.)

Trump's Rhetoric Swings

Trump is either oblivious of, or uncaring of, the fact that if he hadn't bought into Benjamin Netanyahu's fantasies and launched a war with no clear strategy, there would have been no need for anyone to "go take it" -- Hormuz was wide open till February 28, when Israel and the US abruptly launched a war against Iran.

But then, Trump doesn't do irony.

Further, the man who constantly talked of the 'great deal' he is in the process of concluding with Iran now says the US will end the war, with or without a deal (external link).

His latest pivot is striking not merely for its tone but equally for the intent behind it.

Because the question it raises is not whether the United States can escalate, but whether it knows how to stop.

• WAR IN THE GULF

NATO Allies Draw Red Lines

The NATO allies have noticed. Even as US Secretary of State Marco Rubio continues to diss NATO nations for not joining the war effort, even as Washington continues to lean on its partners to sustain military operations, those partners are beginning to draw hard red lines.

Britain has categorically refused to contribute troops. France closing its airspace to US military traffic.

Italy and Spain have closed their airspaces and curtailed access to bases. Poland has refused the US request to transfer additional missile batteries.

You could explain each individual decision as tactical caution but taken together, they point to something more structural: A growing unwillingness to be sucked into a quagmire of the US's making.

Europe Hardens Against War

In Europe, the language is hardening. Earlier this week, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said Britain will not send its young men to fight and die in a war not of its choosing.

Italy's Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, a hard-right war hawk, has now publicly condemned (external link) the killing of civilians, from the strike on a school in Minab, where scores of girls were killed, to the broader toll in Gaza.

She went even further, signaling her support (external link) for European sanctions against Israel.

Analysts point out that Meloni is merely heeding the voice of her people and ventriloquizing the widespread opposition in Italy to the war.

Whatever the impetus, Meloni's stance taken together with that of other NATO nations marks a hardening political line within a bloc that has, until recently, struggled to speak with clarity on the conflict.

Throughout his second term, Trump has consistently dissed NATO, calling them a bunch of freeloaders.

Signals now emerging indicate that his NATO allies have had enough; that they are willing to face a future without the US.

This matters beyond the immediate theatre of war. NATO as designed is way more than a military alliance; it has long functioned as an assurance that American power would operate within a shared strategic logic. What happens when that logic frays?

A gap has opened up. But to understand what it is and what it means, it is necessary to be precise about what kind of gap it is.

US Loses Strategic Credibility

The United States has not lost its military dominance. Its carrier groups still move through contested waters; its aircraft still control the skies over the theatre of war.

What it has lost or, more accurately, what Trump has spent his second term systematically squandering, is something that is arguably more important: The sense, held by allies and adversaries alike, that American power operates according to some comprehensible internal logic; that a threat issued today will be consistent with a position taken tomorrow; that Washington can be read, and therefore planned around.

That is clearly no longer true. And what is opening up as a result is not a military gap that a rival power can fill with troops and hardware.

It is a perceptual gap -- a vacancy in the role of the predictable, rational actor.

Others are moving to fill that gap. Not with bluster and aircraft carriers, but with something that in the long run could be more consequential: reasonableness.

China-Pakistan Diplomatic Move

In Beijing, China and Pakistan have jointly put forward a five-point initiative (external link) calling for an immediate cessation of hostilities, the protection of civilian and energy infrastructure, and the restoration of security in the Strait of Hormuz.

On paper, this is a familiar diplomatic template. The language is that of every UN resolution that was never implemented.

But its significance lies in its choreography -- in who is saying it, to whom, and at precisely what moment.

China is not positioning itself as a military counterweight to the United States.

Rather, it is positioning itself as the responsible adult in the room, the power that, while Washington oscillates between threats of obliteration and shrugs of indifference, stands up and says calmly, here is a framework.

Here is a process. Here is what responsible statecraft looks like.

Pakistan's presence alongside China in this initiative is not accidental.

Beijing could have issued this call alone -- it has the heft.

It chose not to, and it included Islamabad because Pakistan carries credibility in the Muslim world, in Gulf diplomacy, in the corridors of the OIC.

Its co-sponsorship of the initiative, thus, is a signal amplifier; Pakistan is telling the Gulf nations that this is not merely a Chinese ploy to upstage America, but something with broader Islamic-world legitimacy.

This is what calibrated intent looks like in practice: The quiet accumulation of positional advantage in the space that American incoherence has vacated. China is seizing the moment to be seen as more serious, more consistent, more willing to engage with the architecture of resolution, than Washington is.

Taken together, the hardening of the NATO stance, and the entry of China onto the diplomatic stage, do not yet amount to a new world order.

But they do suggest the early contours of a world in which the management of crisis is no longer anchored solely in Washington.

This is how systems shift, not always through a single rupture but through accumulation: a threat issued without a plan; a partner who hesitates; a rival who steps forward and a crisis that, once set in motion, no one can fully control.

Why the US navy is parked outside the Strait: The question that puzzles ordinary Americans is, why can't the world's most powerful navy blast its way through and reopen Hormuz.

There is a technical answer, and James Russell at Responsible Statecraft provides it.

The short version: Iran spent the 1990s quietly fortifying Abu Musa and the Tunbs islands with anti-ship missiles in reinforced bunkers, and the US Navy quietly stopped sending carriers through the Strait in response.

What we are watching now is not a new crisis but the public revelation of a strategic reality that has been building for thirty years.

The cost-exchange asymmetry is brutal: Iran threatens billion-dollar ships with fraction-of-the-cost drones and missiles, and the US shipbuilding base is too depleted to absorb losses easily.

The Ukraine precedent is instructive: Kyiv drove Russia's Black Sea Fleet from its shores not with a superior navy but with cheap missiles and unmanned systems.

Tehran has been paying attention. [Responsible Statecraft (external link)]

The Gallipoli lesson, and what comes after: If forcing Hormuz militarily is off the table, what are the options?

Asli Aydintasbas at the New York Times reaches back to the 1936 Montreux Convention (external link) -- the agreement that resolved the decades-long great-power struggle over the Turkish Straits -- as a template for a negotiated maritime framework.

The parallel isn't perfect: Turkey in 1936 was revising an existing regime in peacetime, while Hormuz sits inside an active war.

But the underlying logic holds: strategic choke points are governed not by force alone but by rules and compromises that emerge from the balance of power.

A Hormuz convention would need to give Iran something it values -- recognition of its sovereignty concerns -- in exchange for legally binding, verifiable commitments on commercial passage.

The alternative is Churchill's Gallipoli: a superpower that mistakes a narrow waterway for a technical problem and discovers, too late, that it is a test of sovereignty and will. [New York Times (external link)]

Pakistan: flattery as foreign policy: The China-Pakistan five-point initiative didn't emerge from nowhere.

Aqil Shah, interviewed in the New Yorker, traces how Pakistan's army chief Asim Munir has systematically cultivated Trump through what Shah drily calls 'flattery as foreign policy' -- publicly nominating Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize, calling him a global peacemaker, literally bringing a suitcase of mineral samples to the White House.

The India-Pakistan crisis of May 2025 was the inflection point: Pakistan embraced Trump's mediation while Modi bristled at outside involvement, and Islamabad has been cashing in the goodwill ever since.

The Pakistan-Saudi defense pact adds a further layer of complexity -- Islamabad has effectively extended a nuclear umbrella to Riyadh, which means it has a powerful incentive to prevent the war from escalating to a point where that guarantee is tested.

Pakistan's role in negotiations is strategic and geopolitical, but it is also, Shah notes, nakedly economic: the country nearly defaulted on its debt a few years ago and is almost entirely dependent on Gulf energy.

Munir is playing a weak hand with considerable skill, but Shah is unsentimental about what it amounts to: opportunity seized, not strategy rethought. [New Yorker (external link)]

Inside the regime: Who runs Iran now This Foreign Affairs piece by Afshon Ostovar is the most analytically substantial account I've read of what the war has done to Iran's internal power dynamics.

The central paradox is this: The IRGC has gained relative power within the regime since Khamenei's death, but its absolute power has been diminished because it was the IRGC's strategy that led Iran to the brink of disaster and bankrupted its economy.

The reform-minded figures -- Pezeshkian, Rouhani, Khatami -- were largely spared by the strikes that decimated the hardliner ranks. Whether they can exploit that opening is the question.

The most vivid moment in the piece is a reported exchange between Pezeshkian and a young IRGC officer who suggested that a perpetual state of emergency would be useful because it would ensure no Iranian 'dares to voice dissatisfaction'.

The president's response: 'Does it mean that once the war is over, we must kill another round of protesters? Is this what you call planning?'

Iran's most likely trajectory, Ostovar concludes, is a military-controlled authoritarian state with a theocratic figurehead, but that outcome is not foreordained. [Foreign Affairs (external link)]

The view from Tehran: Day 30: Amwaj Media's daily sitrep, produced with Iranian academic Hamidreza Azizi, flags the emergence of a concept Iranian planners are calling 'preemptive destruction' -- continuous targeting of US bases and logistics hubs in Bahrain and Kuwait to disrupt any ground operation before it can be executed.

This is a meaningful doctrinal shift, from absorbing strikes to shaping the battlefield in advance.

Parliament Speaker Qalibaf has framed Iran's integrated strategy around three levers: Missiles, the Strait, and the streets -- this last referring to nightly mobilisation of regime supporters to project internal cohesion and deny the opposition any space to organise under wartime conditions.

The Houthi entry into the conflict, with explicit threats to Bab al-Mandab, is the next choke point to watch. If that activates, the shipping disruption compounds substantially. [Amwaj (external link)]

Winning battles, losing wars: Two pieces this week anatomise the larger American strategic pathology of which this war is the latest expression.

Philip Blood on Substack is the broader view -- sweeping, polemical, and most useful for its Hannibal complex passage: Generations of US generals in search of their own Cannae, a decisive battle of encirclement and annihilation, deploying that template against insurgents who simply refuse to show up for the grand finale.

Yonatan Touval's in the New York Times is the more precise and lasting piece.

His argument is that the war represents not a failure of intelligence -- the spycraft was extraordinary -- but a failure of literacy.

AI-powered targeting systems can tell you where a man is; they cannot tell you what his death will mean for a nation.

The Macbeth parallel is genuinely illuminating: Modern targeting collapses the interval between seeing and striking, eliminating the pause in which judgment might enter.

'Must be acted ere they may be scanned.'

Bombing a founding myth, Touval observes, is more likely to consecrate it than to dissolve it. [Philip Blood Substack (external link); New York Times (external link)]

The rogue superpower and the law of balancing: Robert Kagan in The Atlantic provides the most panoramic strategic account of what the war is doing to America's position in the world -- and it is worth reading even if, especially if, you are sceptical of Kagan's liberal internationalist framework.

The Kenneth Waltz observation is the key: Unbalanced power is normally a danger that other states coalesce to resist, yet America uniquely escaped that law for eight decades by being seen as a partner rather than a predator.

Trump has now triggered exactly the balancing dynamic America spent eight decades avoiding.

The polling numbers are striking -- 57% of Canadians, 40% of Germans, 42% of Britons now rate China as more dependable than the US.

Senator Lindsey Graham's line -- 'They say if you break it, you own it. I don't buy that' -- may be the most honest summary of the administration's strategic philosophy yet uttered.

One caveat: Kagan doesn't seriously reckon with the argument that the American order he mourns was always more coercive than consensual for much of the non-Western world.

That doesn't invalidate his analysis of the current rupture, but it is worth holding in mind. [The Atlantic (external link)]

The war in your kitchen, your car, your phone: The ripple effects of Hormuz's closure continue to widen in ways that defy easy summary.

Indranil Ghosh at Rest of World reports that Gulf aluminum smelters supplying Toyota, Nissan, BMW and hundreds of other automotive customers are defaulting on contracts or shutting down entirely, with the specific twist that EVs, built to bypass oil dependency, need 40% more aluminum than combustion cars, and the Gulf's solar-certified low-carbon aluminum grades cannot simply be swapped for any alternative off the market.

Recertification of a new source takes months.

The war is making EVs harder to build and more expensive to produce though, as the piece's kicker notes, higher pump prices may make them easier to sell.

Closer to home, LiveMint reports that India's restaurant sector is in crisis: The country imports 60% of its LPG from the Gulf, commercial allocations have been cut to 20% of normal, and formats that require continuous flame -- South Indian chains running dosa bhatties chief among them -- simply cannot replicate their core product on induction.

The war in the Strait of Hormuz has landed on a tawa in Mumbai. [Rest of World (external link); LiveMint (external link)]

Photo-ops don't put the dosa on your plate: The LPG squeeze on India's restaurant sector is the quotidian face of a deeper crisis.

Sushant Singh in The Caravan provides the structural diagnosis: The war has not created India's vulnerabilities so much as it has exposed them.

A decade of Modi's foreign policy, built on leader-centric spectacle rather than institutionalised strategy, has left India in a condition Singh calls strategic loneliness -- close enough to Washington and Tel Aviv to antagonise Tehran, Beijing and much of the Global South, but not deep enough into the US alliance system to secure the guarantees and market access that genuine alignment would bring.

The result is a half-alignment that offers the costs of dependence without its benefits.

With 60% of its LPG, a significant share of its crude, and the livelihoods of millions of Gulf workers all running through the same choke point, India is discovering that muscular nationalism and photo-opportunity diplomacy are poor substitutes for strategic depth. [The Caravan (external link)]

What we can no longer feel: Jay Caspian Kang in the New Yorker closes the week's reading on a different register entirely.

His line is media criticism, and it is unsettling.

His argument, routed through Guy Debord's concept of the spectacle (book recommendation (external link)), is that two-and-a-half years of Gaza footage may have built a public immunity to images of smashed concrete and blown-up humans.

Social media has shifted from showing the war to showing people talking about the war, marking a further step of dissociation from reality.

The No Kings protests that swept across America last weekend are real, the impulse genuine, but Debord's formulation haunts the observation: the spectacle 'reunites the separate, but reunites it as separate'.

We march under a widely acceptable slogan and discover that years of being online have given us an image of political protest, but little more than that.

In the piece linked above, Touval had asked what war planners could no longer read.

Here, Kang asks what the public can no longer feel. Between them, they cover the two ends of the same empathy deficit. [The New Yorker (external link)]

In passing...

Thirty days into a war that was supposed to be swift and decisive, the tilt is visible.

Not in military balance -- the United States retains overwhelming firepower, and Iran is badly degraded.

The tilt is in perception. In Trump's whiplash between threatened obliteration and stated indifference, NATO's hardening refusal to be conscripted into a quagmire not of its making, China's quiet positioning as the responsible adult in the room...

This is the early evidence of a world recalibrating around American unpredictability.

The question is no longer whether Washington can escalate. It is whether anyone, including Washington, knows how to stop.

• Must Read! Prem Panicker's Earlier Blogs On The Gulf War

Photographs curated by Manisha Kotian/Rediff
Feature Presentation: Ashish Narsale/Rediff