On Tuesday, Oman's defense ministry pulled ten crew members off a burning tanker called On Peace. It was one of nine attacks that British maritime monitors have logged in the Strait of Hormuz in the first week of October. That is already half of September's count for the strait and the Persian Gulf together, and September's figure was swollen by four attacks in its last two days.

Read those numbers beside a second set and the picture becomes strange.

Oil is moving. Commodity traders meeting in London this week estimated Middle East flows at around 80 percent of what they were before the war, and some banks put the figure higher. Tankers keep to a corridor along the Omani coast, often with their tracking signals switched off, and most of them arrive.

Yet the cost of chartering a tanker from inside the Gulf to China reached $1.3 million a day on Monday, a record, according to the Baltic Exchange. Last year the same voyage averaged close to $60,000 a day. Brent crude, which had slipped under $100 as flows recovered, went back above $101.

Most of the oil gets through. The price behaves as though it might not.

In July I wrote in these pages that economic power belongs to whoever controls the step everyone else depends on, and I used oil refining and rare earth processing as the examples. Hormuz is the same lesson in its plainest form. Iran cannot own its neighbors' oil, and it does not have to. It controls the confidence of the people who must carry that oil through a passage about twenty-one miles wide at its narrowest.

Dimitris Maniatis, who runs the maritime risk firm Marisks, made the point directly this week. Tehran does not need to stop every ship. It needs the industry to believe that any ship could be next. Nine attacks are a small share of the traffic. For an owner deciding whether to send a vessel and its crew, they are enough.

The consequences travel. Several importing nations announced last week that they would release millions of barrels from emergency reserves. In Washington, President Trump is reported to be studying ways to hold down fuel prices before the November midterms. A reserve release adds barrels to a market whose trouble is fear. It may help at the margin. It does not address the cause.

The diplomacy is no clearer. Vice President JD Vance told Reuters that any agreement to reopen the strait and end the war would require Iran to reduce its capacity to enrich uranium, and that promises about the future would not suffice. He also said Washington is talking to Iran's president and foreign minister without being certain who in Tehran actually decides. That admission deserves more attention than it received. A negotiation in which one side is unsure who holds authority on the other can be undone by people who were never at the table.

What is not yet known matters as much. Shipping executives say they cannot tell whether this escalation will cut volumes or simply raise the toll. Gas shipments, carried by a far smaller fleet of specialized vessels, have recovered more slowly than oil.

Americans will meet this story at the pump and assume it is about supply. It is about leverage. A government at war has found an instrument that reaches every economy on earth, and it costs very little to use.