To borrow from William Congreve’s 1697 play The Mourning Bride, “Heaven has no rage, like love to hatred turned, / Nor hell a fury, like a woman scorned”. This predicament explains the uncontrollable rage of the US President Donald Trump, a megalomaniac with an Amazonian ego, when belatedly he came to know that the Strait of Hormuz was not just one waterway amongst the 8 in the world. 

By then Trump had already washed his hands off Iran’s move to shut down the Hormuz saying it was none of his concern, and left it the Europeans and the Gulf Arab sheikhs. Now he is staging a comeback and the turnaround is a wild swing, as he realises that if Iran is allowed to preside over the strait of Hormuz, it would have profound implications for “de-dollarisation.”  Iran’s Majlis is already seized with legislation introducing a toll system to regulate the use of the waterway by foreign ships. 

By a rough estimate, the revenue from the toll system will amount to something like one billion dollar or so annually by a conservative count. Iran and Iran-friendly Oman in whose territorial waters lies the Strait of Hormuz will jointly operate the new regime. 

The mystique of the Strait of Hormuz is that regional states who know that the income generated out of the oil flow is the lifeblood of petrodollar cycling, which fuels the western banking system and gives the status of “world currency” to American dollar, will not talk about it or that it gives the US the unique privilege of printing paper currency freely to finance America’s interventionist projects in faraway lands........

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