On Saturday night, Senator Lindsey Graham — the most effective Republican voice for international alliances — died suddenly at 71. Forty-eight hours earlier, Iran declared the Strait of Hormuz closed to all shipping. Between those two events, the United States struck 140 Iranian military targets, Iran attacked five allied Gulf nations, and the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market entered a new and dangerous phase.
If you wanted a single weekend to illustrate why alliances matter and why unilateral military action has consequences that extend far beyond the battlefield, this was it.
What Is Happening in the Strait of Hormuz
For anyone who hasn't been following the crisis closely — and the domestic news cycle has been crowded — here is where things stand.
The Strait of Hormuz is a narrow waterway between Iran and Oman, roughly 21 miles wide at its narrowest point. Approximately 20 million barrels of oil pass through it every day — about 20 percent of the world's total oil trade. It is, by any measure, one of the most strategically important pieces of water on the planet.
On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel initiated military operations against Iran. The stated objectives involved Iran's nuclear program and its support for proxy forces across the Middle East. Whatever the merits of those objectives, the execution has produced a cascading crisis that now threatens the global economy and the security architecture of the entire Persian Gulf region.
Iran's response was predictable to anyone who has studied the region: it targeted the Strait. Starting in early March, Iranian forces declared the waterway closed and began attacking commercial shipping. By April, approximately 20,000 mariners and 2,000 ships were stranded in the Persian Gulf. The International Energy Agency has called it the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market.
After a brief period of de-escalation, the crisis reignited in early July. On July 7, Iran attacked a tanker from Qatar near the Strait. On July 11, Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps declared the Strait officially closed and fired on a Cyprus-flagged container ship, with one crew member still missing. The United States responded with its third round of strikes that week, hitting approximately 140 Iranian military targets.
Then, on July 12 — the day Graham died — Iran launched attacks against five Gulf nations: Bahrain, Kuwait, Jordan, Qatar, and Oman. Sirens blared across the region. Governments ordered residents indoors.
This is where we are.
The Alliance Problem
Here is what makes this crisis different from previous confrontations with Iran — and far more dangerous.
In past decades, American military action in the Persian Gulf was conducted within a coalition framework. The 1991 Gulf War assembled 35 nations. Operations in the region throughout the 2000s and 2010s, whatever their other flaws, generally involved NATO allies, Gulf Cooperation Council partners, and multilateral security arrangements. The Combined Maritime Forces — a naval partnership of 44 nations — has patrolled these waters for decades, sharing the burden and the risk.
This time, the United States went in with Israel. The broader coalition framework that has historically underpinned American power projection in the region has been strained to its breaking point by years of transactional diplomacy, alliance skepticism, and the explicit "America First" posture that treats multilateral commitments as liabilities rather than force multipliers.
The result is what we're seeing now. Iran isn't just striking at the United States. It's striking at the Gulf states — the very allies whose cooperation the United States needs for basing, overflight rights, intelligence sharing, and the economic stability of the global energy market. And those allies are being attacked in part because the military action that provoked Iran's response was not conducted through the kind of broad coalition that would have given it legitimacy and shared the strategic risk.
Bahrain, Kuwait, Jordan, Qatar, and Oman did not sign up for this. They are being hit because they are geographically proximate to a conflict they did not initiate and had limited input into. That is what happens when you conduct major military operations with a narrow coalition and assume that allies will absorb the consequences without being consulted about the strategy.
The Economic Impact on Americans
This is not an abstract foreign policy debate. It hits Americans in the wallet, immediately and directly.
When 20 million barrels of oil per day stop flowing through the Strait of Hormuz, global energy markets respond. Brent crude prices have surged. Every dollar increase in the price of a barrel of oil translates to roughly 2.5 cents per gallon at the gas pump. For a country where the average household drives 24,000 miles per year, sustained oil price increases add hundreds or thousands of dollars in annual costs — hitting working families and rural Americans hardest.
Beyond gas prices, energy costs flow through the entire economy. Manufacturing costs rise. Shipping costs rise. Food prices rise, because everything from fertilizer to refrigerated transport depends on fuel. The inflationary pressure from an extended Strait closure doesn't stay in the energy sector. It spreads everywhere.
The United States produces more oil domestically than it did a decade ago. But oil is a global commodity. When supply is disrupted anywhere, prices rise everywhere. American energy independence — to the extent it exists — does not insulate American consumers from a major disruption to global supply. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either uninformed or lying.
What Graham Understood
This brings us back to Lindsey Graham, whose death we wrote about yesterday.
Graham was a hawk. He supported military action against Iran. We did not agree with him on every use-of-force decision, and we've said so. But Graham understood something that the current approach appears to have abandoned: military action is more effective, more sustainable, and less likely to produce catastrophic unintended consequences when it is conducted within a robust alliance framework.
Graham spent twenty years building relationships with Gulf leaders, European defense ministers, and NATO commanders. He attended the Munich Security Conference annually. He visited conflict zones not for photo ops but to maintain the personal relationships that make coalition operations possible. He understood that the phone calls you make before the shooting starts are more important than the ones you make after.
The Three Amigos — Graham, McCain, and Lieberman — represented a bipartisan consensus that American military power is most effective when it is legitimized by broad international support and constrained by the accountability that comes from coalition operations. Not because they were soft on defense. Because they understood strategy.
With Graham gone, the most effective voice for that approach within the Republican majority is silent. And the Strait of Hormuz crisis is demonstrating, in real time, what happens when military action proceeds without the alliance infrastructure that previous generations of leaders — in both parties — spent decades building.
The Common Sense Position
We believe in a strong national defense. We are not pacifists. We understand that there are genuine threats in the world — Iran's nuclear ambitions among them — that may ultimately require military responses.
But we also believe the following:
Military action should be the last resort, not the first impulse. Diplomacy is slower, messier, and less dramatic than airstrikes. It is also cheaper in blood and treasure, and it produces more durable outcomes. The Iran nuclear deal (JCPOA), whatever its imperfections, constrained Iran's nuclear program through verification and negotiation. Walking away from that framework without a better alternative has contributed directly to the crisis we face today.
Coalitions are force multipliers, not constraints. When you have 35 nations behind a military operation, you have shared logistics, shared intelligence, shared basing, shared political risk, and shared legitimacy. When you have two, you have a conflict that your adversary can reframe as regional aggression — and that your allies can distance themselves from when the costs mount.
The economic consequences of military action are not someone else's problem. When policy decisions disrupt global energy markets and raise prices for American families, those costs need to be weighed against the strategic objectives. The Strait of Hormuz crisis is costing American consumers right now. That doesn't mean military action is never justified. It means the bar should be high, the objectives should be clear, and the strategy should include minimizing economic blowback — not ignoring it.
Alliance maintenance is not weakness. Consulting with allies before launching military operations, listening to their concerns, incorporating their capabilities, and sharing the burden is not a sign of indecision. It is strategic competence. The Gulf states being bombed right now are not adversaries. They are partners whose cooperation we need for basing, overflight, intelligence, and energy stability. Subjecting them to retaliation for operations they had limited input into damages those partnerships in ways that will take years to repair.
The Strait of Hormuz has been a chokepoint for global commerce for as long as oil has mattered. Every American president since Carter has recognized that keeping it open is a vital national interest. The question has never been whether it matters. The question is how you protect it — through broad alliances and shared deterrence, or through narrow coalitions and escalatory cycles.
We know which approach history favors. We're watching, in real time, what the alternative looks like.
The ships are stopped. The oil isn't flowing. The allies are being bombed. And the gas prices are rising.
This is what happens when strategy is replaced by impulse, and when alliances are treated as optional.