Trapped in the Strait of Hormuz

0:05Before the U.S. and Israel launched attacks on Iran, about 130 cargo ships would pass through the Strait of Hormuz every day. But according to one shipping tracker, less than half of that went through the Strait all last week. The Iran war has all but closed off a vital waterway for oil exports from the Middle East. It is essential to the entire world economy, and it has been more or less shut down entirely. The slowdown in the Strait has already had serious economic consequences around the world. And getting ships moving again has become a major strategic focus for the U.S. The pressure to reopen the Strait of Hormuz is intensifying, as well as the rhetoric around it.

0:51Some 2 ,000 ships wait to transport a variety of essential goods around the world. But also at stake are the fates of the sailors and crew trapped on those ships right now. There are 20 ,000 seafarers stuck on cargo ships and oil tankers in the Persian Gulf. Our colleague Drew Henshaw has been talking to some of those sailors for weeks. Many of these are low-wage workers from some of the world's poor countries, countries that have little, if anything, to do with this conflict. They've kind of become collateral damage in this standoff. Their only crime was to go work on a boat that happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

1:38Drew says for some of the people on these ships, life has become a kind of purgatory.

1:47Many of them are effectively pinned in. They were meant to leave the Persian Gulf weeks or months ago and can't leave. And now they've been running out of food, water, basic provisions, even as they sit on ships that are loaded with millions and millions of dollars worth of cargo.

2:10Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Jessica Mendoza. It's Tuesday, May 19th.

2:23Coming up on the show, the thousands of seafarers stuck in the Strait of Hormuz and why it's so hard to get them out.

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4:15Before the Strait of Hormuz closed, there were roughly 800 trade ships at various stages of transit through the waterway. Some of them are loaded up with cargo or crude oil and they have deliveries. They're supposed to be delivering their cargo to some other port somewhere else in the world. and many of them loaded up with a few weeks' worth of food, thinking, oh, in a few weeks we'll be in Rotterdam or Houston or wherever they were supposed to sail. What about the sailors? Where are they from? They hail from countries with little voice in the conflict between Tehran and Washington, places like Syria, Indonesia, the Philippines.

4:56They're not trained for war. These guys are trained to pick up cargo at one peaceful port, sail to another, and unload. They're not trained for naval battles of these 21st century sea battles where there are Iranian drones and missiles flying overhead. Yet that's the situation many of these sailors suddenly found themselves in when the war began, caught in the crossfire. Sailors were witnessing missiles flying, drones flying overhead, missiles striking ports. They saw ships consumed by fire. Missiles fly above cargo ships. In the Strait of Hormuz, thousands of vessels are at a standstill. Since the beginning of the war, more than 30 ships have been directly hit with missiles or drones.

5:44And at least 10 sailors have died. And then we had this kind of ceasefire take hold. But what didn't change is that the Iranians weren't allowing ships to leave through the Strait of Hormuz. And then soon after, the U.S. erected its own blockade.

6:03Now, with a stalemate on the strait, the situation for the seafarers is becoming increasingly dire. Some of them continue to get paid. They continue to have supplies, food, water, fuel, internet. Others lack some or even all of those things. We spoke to one Russian crew member who said his crew was down to rice and water. He has severe hypertension and lacked the medicine that he needs for that. Others are trying to make things like weeks-old cabbage stretch. which what all of them share is a complete uncertainty over when they are going home. And just to be clear here, the people or the companies who own these ships, what is the calculus for them?

6:52What are they doing to try to deal with this situation? The problem that the ship owners are having is that the costs of this crisis are really adding up and they're bearing the burden of that. Some ships have owners with enough money to say, okay, it's all right, just return to port, get more food, get more whatever you need. Others, the owners are going into bankruptcy or facing that. And naturally, when those guys run out of cash, that affects the crew whose wages and supplies and food and fuel all come from the ship owner who was counting on delivering a cargo and making money. Some crews say their ship owners have stopped responding to them altogether.

7:35For other crews, resupplying is just too dangerous. You have ships that are afraid to move because there's mines in their area, or at least the threat of sea mines. Others have this idea that if they move, they lose their place in line, and they think, maybe if I just wait a couple more days, we'll go home. What have these sailors been telling you about what they're doing day to day, how they're getting by? You know, some have supplies, So they're doing things like celebrating birthdays. Some are playing games, board games, if they have them on board. We talked to one captain who makes his crew do squats and burpees and jog on deck.

8:16Anything to keep their state of mind steady, because what a lot of them are suffering from are things like depression or just sort of like, when am I going home, kind of. Some sailors pass the time, ironically, watching Hollywood nautical thrillers like Captain Phillips, The Admiral, even Titanic. Have they been able to talk to families or communicate with their home countries at all? The cell service where many of these ships are is extraordinarily bad. It goes out for days, it comes for a few minutes, it goes away again, which means they can't contact their family reliably. But also they can't talk to their employers or their governments to say, hey, look, this is what I'm going through.

8:56You know, this is what we need. When Drew and other reporters are able to connect with the sailors, they try to trade information. But it's often the sailors who are asking for the latest news, not the other way around. It's kind of ironic because all of us are like bombarded with the information about this Strait of Hormuz and everything going on there. But the people on there are kind of lacking a steady enough internet connection, many of them, to understand what is going on. Like, why am I not allowed to leave? What's happening? And us reporters are getting calls and texts from them at all hours asking us, is there any change?

9:34You know, what's going on? But we don't know either. You know, we have to be straight with them. Like, look, this is what the Iranians have said. This is what the U.S. has said. we can't tell you, you know, when it's safe to go home.

9:50So it doesn't sound like it's even clear who these ships ought to be taking directions from. That's 100 % right. Like they're getting kind of conflicting orders. Yes, there's conflicting information. And these sailors are like, who do I listen to? The Iranians or the U.S.? We spoke to one crew that had received a message from the U.S. military saying, it's safe to go, you can come out. They discussed it with the owner and amongst themselves, and they all came to the conclusion that, you know, as the chief officer of the ship put it, the Iranians have guns. They're waiting there. The situation's not safe.

10:26So they stayed put, and they went back to jogging and working out on the deck of a cargo ship that's just moored in the Persian Gulf right now. Drew says the current conflict has made the already dangerous jobs of these crew members even riskier. This is now the third crisis over the past five years that's seriously disrupted shipping. So some of these sailors that we've spoken to, they had lived through missile strikes and drone strikes in the Black Sea, in the Russian-Ukraine conflict, or even had also been on ships that had had some confrontation with the Houthis in the Red Sea. And I think for many of these workers, this is this big opportunity.

11:07And you're feeding your family back home and your country, and you are the provider. And now you're in a situation where you're in danger and your family's worried about you, and you might not be getting paid because your owner has gone bankrupt or has in some way walked away from his ship because of this conflict. And this crisis may prove to be one of the most difficult for sailors to get out of. After the break, how the U.S. tried and failed to get ships moving again, and what options might be left.

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12:55When the war began, Iran effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz almost immediately. And even after Iran and the U.S. agreed to a ceasefire, they could not agree on how to reopen the strait. Our colleague Jared Malson has been following the deadlock. So earlier in May, the Trump administration announced what it called Project Freedom. Project Freedom was a military plan to open up a path through the strait. Breaking news from President Trump putting this out on Truth Social, announcing that the U.S. will help to escort ships. The idea was that the military would send two U.S. Navy warships, a pair of guided missile destroyers into the strait to do that and then scramble aircraft overhead, including drones, helicopters and fighter aircraft, as well as jammers to prevent Iran from seeing into the strait and to create this kind of defensive shield.

14:00And it was designed to clear a new channel that they would create a shield around and push back on Iran's control over the strait. The U.S. government said it would create a lane that ships could use through the strait. And this was kind of what one former Pentagon official said was sort of doing it on the cheap, where they wanted to do it in a way that would potentially lower the risk of escalation. And what it resulted in was, I think from the perspective of the shipping industry, was a little bit of a confusing message.

14:46But less than 36 hours after it launched, Project Freedom was called off. This is a stunning reversal from the president. Operation Freedom, where U.S. Navy ships escorted commercial vessels through the strait, would now be paused. Why did Project Freedom fall apart? Because Iran retaliated. They launched a series of attacks on commercial ships. They attacked the U.S. Navy. Rockets firing warning shots at American destroyers attempting to enter the strait of Hormuz. more drones and several small boats to target American commercial vessels that were attempting to transit the waterway. And they also launched a missile and drone attack on a very important oil terminal in the United Arab Emirates, which raised the specter of a return to war, essentially.

15:39This was really the worst escalation in the war since the de facto ceasefire that came into being in April. Project Freedom resulted in just two ships passing out of the strait. Jared says even though that was something of a tactical success, the operation was a strategic failure for the U.S. overall. When the time came to do this, essentially, you know, the first trial run of this to establish proof of concept, bullets started flying. Iran was able to reassert its control over the strait, and there was a risk of wider escalation in the war itself, which is obviously something the administration is making clear it doesn't want right now.

16:20Right. The U.S. basically wasn't able to show that it could guarantee that safety that they said that they could. Precisely. It showed that even though they got a couple of ships out, they could not force the Iranians to pull back from their attacks, which is what is scaring away ship owners from sending oil and other vital resources through the strait. It was an important illustration of what the U.S. military can and can't accomplish in the Persian Gulf right now. Iran has also tried its own strategy to get ships moving by creating a kind of toll booth. The toll booth idea is still a live issue.

17:04Iran, as far as we know, is continuing to attempt to charge tolls from some ships, and they are continuing to try to institutionalize their control over the strait. As far as we know, it's a small number of ships that have been paying the toll. It's a small number of ships that are passing through, just in general. Iran has created the Persian Gulf Strait Authority, a signal that the country doesn't plan to give up what control it has of Hormuz anytime soon. I think they are serious about maintaining their most important source of leverage over the U.S. and the world, which is why this is going to be a very difficult issue to untangle in any negotiations with the Iranians.

17:55So what options are left? Well, I think what a lot of military analysts are saying is that they have a lot of bad options remaining in front of them. They can negotiate with the Iranian regime, which is what they are currently doing through intermediaries. Trump obviously has threatened to return to bombing, which is another option that they have in front of them. or they can try these other kinds of military options like they did with Project Freedom, which didn't end very well. As the stalemate continues, oil prices have gone up and countries reliant on oil from the Gulf have been rationing fuel and instituting blackouts.

18:43And the longer the strait remains closed, the worse the energy shock will get. There's this new acronym that's being thrown around, nacho, which stands for not a chance Hormuz opens. And it's this idea that the strait will stay closed until like the economic consequences become more severe. Is that the new reality? I would say that is the new reality. Since the imposition of the blockade by the U.S., there has been this test of which side can withstand economic pain longer. So it is really a question of whether the administration or the Iranian regime buckles first. And when we think about the strait, right, we think about these oil tankers, we think about the oil that's stuck there.

19:32But we talked to our colleague Drew Hinshaw about all the people, like the sailors who have been stuck there for months because the strait has been closed. Jared, what do you make of all those people who are stuck there and what it means, what they mean for the status of this conflict? Well, they're hostages of this insane situation in the Gulf. I mean, it's thousands of sailors on board these ships for now months at a time. And it's one pressing reason that there needs to be a solution to this problem as soon as possible.

20:08But our colleague Drew says hostages might not be the right word. We were talking to officials about like, do you consider these people hostages, right? Because in some ways, they are stuck in the Persian Gulf. Iran is not letting them go home. Aren't they kind of like hostages in a way? And the way one person pushed back was to say, no, hostages are valuable. Governments want to get hostages back. Nobody is really putting a priority on these people. We talk a lot about the oil, like when is the oil going to start flowing to the strait again so that we can go back to paying lower gas prices. But there's also like a human issue here, which is that the people who make our modern way of life possible, these seafarers who bring us our oil and our goods, they are forgotten and they're left there.

20:56And in the conversation, they're not even as important as the oil or whatever other commodity we're hoping to get out of the Strait of Hormuz.

21:13That's all for today, Tuesday, May 19th. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. Additional reporting in this episode by Milan Czerny, Rebecca Fung, Shelby Holliday, Costas Paris, and Joe Parkinson. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.