The Hormuz blockade has produced not one commodity shock but many — oil, gas, urea, ammonia, phosphate, sulfur, helium — each molecule trapped behind 21 miles of water, each with its own cascade into the real economy. Markets are treating this as an oil story. It is not. Oil has a strategic reserve. None of the others do. The world’s two largest fertilizer supply sources — the Gulf and Russia — are simultaneously constrained from two entirely separate conflicts, at the start of the Northern Hemisphere planting season. This time, there is no backstop and no Russia to call.

The globalised world was built for efficiency, not resilience. The assumption that underpinned six decades of globalisation was deceptively simple: the world’s critical systems — energy supply, food production, financial flows, maritime trade, military alliances — were robust enough to absorb shocks. They were not. Operation Epic Fury has not created new vulnerabilities. It has illuminated ones that were always there, hiding beneath a veneer of institutional order that turned out to be far thinner than anyone wanted to admit.