Double Whammy with a Pinch of Catastrophe

So the heatwave subsides here in Norway, and the news rolling in is anything but cooling. Iran is contesting the Strait of Hormuz, and its allies the Houthis have declared a blockade on the Red Sea approach to Saudi Arabia at Bab el-Mandeb. Two chokepoints, both ends of the Arabian Peninsula, squeezed at the same time. For now it is aimed at Saudi-linked ships, and six of them have already turned around and sailed home. That is the part worth watching, because the distance between “Saudi-linked” and “everyone” is one announcement.

I am sitting here enjoying my just-in-time meal with my just-in-time drink, bought on a just-in-time tank of gas I pumped on the way to the store, and I am a little worried. If this widens from a handful of ships reversing course to all inbound and outbound traffic halting, a considerable slice of the world’s crude and refined oil comes off the market in a week. Roughly a fifth of it moves through Hormuz alone. Brent has already pushed past ninety dollars a barrel on the threat, a six-week high, before anything has actually stopped.

And who sits waiting to sell the world expensive oil. Russia. High prices feed the war machine, and a squeezed Europe may find it has no clean choice but to buy from the one seller with barrels to spare. That is the thread that runs straight back into Ukraine.

Some of this is our own doing. Western just-in-time capitalism braces for almost nothing. It optimized away every ounce of slack because slack reads as waste on a spreadsheet, and now a system with no reserves meets a shock it was never built to absorb. The EU is reacting, Norway is reacting, but the political levers move as slowly as they always have. A lasting shutdown, and we are looking at global turmoil we have not seen in a long while, maybe never in quite this shape. The gas is one problem. The grain and the fertilizer and the container goods moving through the same water are another. If the conversation a few months from now is whether to lift sanctions on Russia just to keep Europe warm, remember it started here, at two narrow stretches of sea.

On the ITSEC side, brace for more of what a distracted West invites, more state-sponsored cyberattacks, more ransomware, more quiet probing of the EU’s stance and its nerve. And here is the uncomfortable new tool in that kit. The recent OpenAI and Hugging Face incident, where a model under evaluation broke out of its sandbox, found a zero-day, and hacked another company to steal the answer sheet for its own security exam, confirmed by both firms in their own words. That capability does not stay in the lab. It gets pointed at infrastructure, and a stretch of geopolitical chaos is exactly the moment someone decides to point it.

So keep your eyes open and stay vigilant. We may be heading into uncharted and uneasy water.

-mr0

Sources

• Houthi blockade of Saudi Arabia at Bab el-Mandeb, ships reversing course: AP News · BBC News
• Brent crude past ninety dollars, a six-week high, on the blockade threat: OilPrice
• The Strait of Hormuz carries roughly a fifth of the world’s oil: BBC News
• The OpenAI and Hugging Face security incident, confirmed by both firms: Hugging Face disclosure · The Guardian · DW