Captain Phillips is shaking in his boots because piracy is returning to the high seas, specifically in the Red Sea and off the Horn of Africa. Somali pirates have already attacked multiple ships.
With a large share of the global oil supply offline, the U.S. preoccupied with the Iran war, and nobody else able to step in, I would expect things to worsen quickly. The Red Sea will quickly become a no-go zone.
This would disrupt a major global shipping route and force vessels to reroute (which isn’t an option for everyone). So, the already strained global system will face even more shortages and disruptions.
Hey all, Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Colorado. Today we’re going to talk about piracy because it is back in the off the horn of Africa and the Red sea. We have seen Somali pirates active again with at least three ships being attacked. This is a direct outcome of the Iran war, and we should expect a lot more in the days and weeks to come.
So very, very short version. In case you haven’t been paying attention, the Strait of Hormuz. is offline. And that means roughly three quarters of a billion barrels of crude haven’t made it to the market. That’s roughly equivalent of 10 to 15% of global supply is just gone. Probably not coming back. And the United States has this largest concentration of naval forces in the area, really in the history of the region.
So those two things, make it almost impossible for people to patrol countries that might be a little hostile to the United States, say, China. They’re not going to put any of their naval vessels in the In an area with so much American military ordnance running around. And number two. The oil shortages means that more conventional navies, because most navies in the world are not nuclear powered, can’t actually get the fuel to keep their economies running.
So the idea of doing a long range projection force into a war zone to fight pirates? No. So what we basically have is the United States concentrated on Iran the Strait of Hormuz It no longer has the bandwidth to patrol the Red sea and the coalition of forces from ten, 15 years ago that did it can’t function in this environment.
What it basically means is, as this ramps up, not only is the Strait of Hormuz a no go zone, the Red sea will once again become a no go zone that will also hit energy prices, because a lot of stuff is currently being exported through the Red sea and then up through Suez. That’s going to not work anymore.
You’re going to have to go all the way around Africa. And for shuttle tankers that are coming in from, say, the Russian space and the Baltic or the black, they originally would go through Suez and the Red sea. Now, if they can’t arrange some sort of ransom system or a prepayment system to Somali pirates, which don’t exactly have crypto accounts like the Yemenis or the Iranians do, those ships simply can’t sail the distances necessary to get them all the way around to. So this is going from bad to worse in a very short period of time. Everybody enjoy your 2026.