On the War Against Iran, the Closure of Hormuz, and a Mechanism That Could End Both
by Khannea Sun’Tzu — April 2026
I write this without optimism. I write it because the logic demands it, and because nobody with institutional affiliations can write it cleanly. I have no institution. I have no career to protect. I have only an argument, and the argument is this:
The United States is making a catastrophic strategic error in Iran — not merely a moral one, not merely a costly one, but a structurally incoherent one. And there exists a non-military mechanism, available to three countries, that could help stop it. That mechanism involves sulfur and phosphate. I will explain both claims in full.
The Error
The United States is a society of extraordinary capability operating under extraordinary internal stress. It carries a debt load that would be unsustainable for almost any other nation on Earth, sustained partly by the structural privilege of dollar hegemony. Its political class has entered what I can only describe as a collective epistemic crisis — a hall of mirrors in which affirming verifiable facts, sound strategy, or basic geopolitical reality has become institutionally difficult to sustain. This is not unique to one administration. It is a systemic condition. But the current administration expresses it in unusually acute form.
Iran is, by any objective measure, a brutal theocratic state. Its governing elite has inflicted enormous suffering on its own population and destabilized its region for decades. I have no sympathy for that elite. None.
But brutality is not the same as vulnerability. And hating a regime is not the same as having a viable path to its defeat.
The Iranian state has spent decades preparing specifically for a confrontation with the United States. It has built hardened infrastructure across a geography of extraordinary defensive depth — vast mountainous terrain, sprawling cities integrated into mountain systems, cave complexes, and distributed command structures continuously upgraded with exactly this scenario in mind. It has developed asymmetric retaliatory capacity across multiple vectors: missile arsenals, drone swarms, naval denial systems in the Gulf, and proxy networks across Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen. It has studied American military doctrine exhaustively and built its deterrence around the specific vulnerabilities of that doctrine.
The Iranian state cannot be cleanly conquered. It cannot be reorganized from outside. It cannot be pacified by bombing. This is not a political opinion. It is a structural assessment based on geography, state capacity, ideological entrenchment, and decades of deliberate preparation. Military punishment is possible. Political subjugation is not. Any campaign that fails to distinguish between these two things is not a strategy. It is a fantasy with a very large budget.
The closure of the Strait of Hormuz is the consequence of this fantasy meeting reality.
What the Closure Actually Means
Most coverage of this crisis has focused on energy. The energy disruption is real and serious.
The agricultural disruption is potentially catastrophic.
The Gulf region supplies a large share of global urea exports — the world’s most widely used nitrogen fertilizer. It also supplies a major share of global seaborne sulfur trade. Sulfur is not a peripheral input. It is a critical precursor for phosphate fertilizer production, because sulfur is converted into sulfuric acid, and sulfuric acid is what makes phosphate rock industrially usable at scale. There are no satisfactory substitutes for phosphorus in agriculture. It is not negotiable at the molecular level: every cell in every crop on Earth requires it for DNA synthesis, energy transfer, and membrane formation. Since February 28th, US and Israeli strikes on Iran have killed civilians including children, destroyed energy infrastructure across a nation of ninety million people, and triggered retaliatory Iranian drone and missile strikes reaching Gulf states hosting American forces — with reported casualties and infrastructure damage across the region. The Strait of Hormuz, through which passes one-fifth of global LNG, around twenty million barrels of oil daily, and nearly a third of internationally traded fertilizer, has seen tanker traffic collapse by over ninety percent. Urea prices have risen twenty-eight percent in three weeks. Sulfur and phosphate supply chains are fracturing during the precise weeks when Northern Hemisphere farmers must apply fertilizer or lose their planting window entirely — a window that does not reopen. The FAO has stated formally that a disruption exceeding three months will reduce yields of wheat, rice, and maize in the world’s most food-insecure regions. We are already past one month with no ceasefire framework visible. If this continues through May, the 2026 harvest in sub-Saharan Africa, Yemen, Sudan, and Bangladesh will be measurably smaller than it would otherwise have been. The people who will go hungry as a result will never appear in any casualty count from this war. They will simply be quietly, invisibly hungrier than they needed to be — because two states, both operating well below their own stated values, could not find an off-ramp in time.
The United States produces much of its own nitrogen fertilizer domestically, thanks to abundant natural gas. It is therefore tempting to assume America is insulated from this crisis.
It is not.
American domestic phosphate fertilizer production depends in part on sulfur that it cannot fully source at home. Domestic sulfur output covers a substantial share of US consumption, but not all of it, leaving the system dependent on imports. That import dependence exposes American phosphate production to severe disruptions in global sulfur trade, including disruptions linked to the Gulf.
This is happening during spring planting season. The window for corn and wheat planting does not pause for geopolitical crises. Miss the window, miss the harvest. The loss is not merely a percentage. It is the year.
Urea prices have already risen sharply. The American Farm Bureau has written to the White House in terms that do not suggest confidence in the administration’s grasp of the situation, explicitly warning that corn and grain production faces severe conditions as diesel costs rise and fertilizer inputs become less available and less affordable.
The people who will suffer most are not American farmers. They are the populations at the end of the global food supply chain who have no buffer stocks, no strategic reserves, and no leverage: Sub-Saharan Africa, Yemen, Sudan, Bangladesh, and others like them. If this disruption persists beyond the near term, it is these regions that will first feel the yield losses and food insecurity.
The Mechanism
There exists a non-military, entirely legal, geopolitically coherent pressure mechanism that could help resolve this crisis. It is available to three countries: Morocco, China, and Canada.
Morocco sits on approximately seventy percent of the world’s known phosphate rock reserves according to estimates compiled from USGS data. There is no strategic phosphate reserve anywhere on Earth. Phosphate cannot be synthesized. It cannot be rapidly sourced elsewhere. Morocco’s Office Chérifien des Phosphates is, in agricultural-input terms, what OPEC is for energy.
China is a dominant force in global fertilizer markets and has repeatedly restricted fertilizer exports during periods of domestic stress or international disruption in order to protect internal supply. Its leverage over global agricultural input availability is immediate and substantial.
Canada is a major global sulfur exporter, with production concentrated in Alberta’s oil sands and western natural gas fields. It is a meaningful swing supplier in international sulfur markets, a G7 nation, a NATO ally, and a country that has recently been subjected to annexation rhetoric and punitive tariffs by the current US administration.
The mechanism does not require military action. It does not require sanctions. It requires these three countries to invoke emergency export licensing reviews for fertilizer-related exports, citing the humanitarian consequences of the Hormuz closure — a closure they did not cause and are not responsible for.
No formal ultimatum need be issued. No visible coordination is necessary. The agricultural calendar provides the timeline. The pressure would build from within the American domestic political system, where farm-state senators represent an important part of the congressional coalition that keeps the Iran operation politically viable.
The critical insight is that the leverage is multiplicative rather than additive when exercised simultaneously. Each country acting alone creates manageable pressure that Washington can hedge against or absorb. All three acting in parallel could create a pressure for which there is no obvious rapid domestic relief valve during an active planting window, and no alternative supply arrangement that can be scaled in time.
This is not without cost or risk. Countries that restrict exports during a global food crisis invite accusations of weaponizing food security, and Washington retains economic tools that could be deployed in retaliation. Morocco, China, and Canada would be making a calculated political bet, not pulling a consequence-free lever. That calculation is theirs to make. I am describing the geometry, not issuing instructions.
The Destination
What follows is a second-order proposal — more architectural, and more speculative, than the mechanism above. I separate it clearly because the fertilizer-leverage argument stands on its own evidence. The governance proposal is where I am reasoning further ahead.
The resolution of this crisis should include the establishment of a United Nations Maritime Safe Passage Authority for the Strait of Hormuz, operating under a mandate that bypasses Security Council veto paralysis through the Uniting for Peace mechanism — General Assembly Resolution 377, designed precisely for situations of this kind.
The composition of this Authority should exclude direct P5 naval command if it is to establish credibility with all parties. Candidate contributors with immediate legitimacy might include India, Brazil, South Africa, Indonesia, and Norway — nations with serious maritime capacity, non-aligned credibility, and comparatively limited imperial baggage in the region.
This framing serves Iranian interests: it removes the strait from unilateral American military dominance without requiring Tehran to describe the outcome as defeat.
This framing serves American institutional interests: the State Department’s long investment in rules-based international order is not inherently at odds with permanent multilateral governance of critical maritime chokepoints.
This framing serves the world’s interests, because the world should not be one miscalculation away from a fertilizer shock every time two nuclear-adjacent states have a bad year.
I am aware that this proposal carries implications for one of the structural supports of petrodollar hegemony. The dollar’s special role in the global system rests partly on the implicit guarantee that American naval power underwrites oil flows through Hormuz. Institutionalizing that flow under international governance would complicate that guarantee. I raise this not as a prediction of dollar collapse, but as an honest accounting of one strategic consequence that decision-makers in Washington would recognize immediately. The timeline of any such consequence would be long. The timeline of the current agricultural crisis is weeks.
A Final Observation
The United States is, I believe, in a state of temporary collective impairment. The hall of mirrors is real. This is a diagnosis, not a condemnation. Impairment can lift. Clarity can return.
I would find this easier to write if I could say the same with confidence about Iran’s governing elite. I cannot, quite. But I note that Iran’s actual national interests — distinct from the regime’s theological self-image — are served by a Hormuz settlement that institutionalizes the strait’s status as global commons. Somewhere in the Persian strategic tradition is the calculation that permanent leverage is worth more than permanent closure.
The Strait of Hormuz is not Iranian. It is not American. It is part of the circulatory system of a planet of eight billion people whose food, energy, and survival pass through it.
It is time it was governed accordingly.