The war began on February 28, when the United States and Israel launched coordinated strikes on Iran under Operation Epic Fury. Iran’s response was swift — missile and drone attacks on US bases and Gulf states, and an effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz to commercial shipping from March 1.
What followed did not unfold as Washington and Tel Aviv had envisioned. The strikes were widely understood to have been premised on an expectation of rapid regime collapse or swift capitulation on the nuclear question. Neither happened. Iran absorbed the strikes, maintained the closure, and began selectively permitting passage only to vessels from countries it deemed friendly.
What emerged is not a victory, not a ceasefire, and not a clean disengagement — it is a war now in its sixth week that the United States entered without Congressional authorisation and appears unable to either win or exit on terms it can articulate.
Trump has declared Iran “beaten and completely decimated” while his military loses aircraft to Iranian fire and searches for missing crew members in Iranian mountain ranges. He sets 48-hour ultimatums, lets them pass, issues new ones.
He threatens to obliterate Iranian power plants while Pakistan, Turkey and Egypt quietly attempt to broker talks his administration has not formally sanctioned. Reports of ground troop deployments circulate alongside signals of disengagement.
The result is that no party — not Iran, not US allies, not the shipping industry, not energy markets — can read Washington’s intent with any confidence. And in that vacuum, the strait stays closed, the clock runs, and the supply chain consequences compound with no resolution horizon in sight.
It is in this context that three ministers have spoken.
Prime Minister Lawrence Wong addressed the nation. Coordinating Minister K Shanmugam faced the press. Minister Tan See Leng appeared on CNA’s Deep Dive on March 11 to address energy concerns directly.
Their statements are on the public record and Singaporeans are encouraged to read them in full. What follows is not a rebuttal. It is additional context that TOC readers should be considering alongside what has been said.
On the supply timeline
The Strait of Hormuz closed to normal commercial traffic on March 1. But the geography of the crisis is expanding. Iran’s parliamentary speaker has now issued a veiled threat to the Bab el-Mandeb — the 32-kilometre passage linking the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden through which more than a tenth of seaborne global oil and a quarter of container ships pass.
If both straits are simultaneously constrained, the Cape of Good Hope becomes the only viable route for Gulf energy exports, adding weeks to every voyage and permanently repricing global freight.
The Hormuz closure alone is already reshaping regional supply in ways not yet fully visible. Tankers already at sea on March 1 have been delivering their cargoes throughout March and into this week.
A Very Large Crude Carrier — a vessel the length of four football fields carrying two million barrels of crude — travels at roughly 12 to 15 knots, about the speed of a slow bicycle. At that pace, one departing the Persian Gulf on February 28 takes roughly seven to ten days to reach India, twenty to twenty-five days to reach China or Japan, and up to five weeks to reach Europe. The last of those deliveries are completing now.
Based on these transit cycles, the physical buffer from pre-closure tanker deliveries across Asian import markets appears to be entering its most constrained phase now, in early April. Publicly available shipping data from maritime intelligence sources suggests only around 21 tankers have transited since the war began, against a pre-war average of over a hundred daily.
Live vessel tracking data observed on VesselFinder on April 5 tells its own story. Inside the Persian Gulf, dense clusters of stationary vessels — shown as anchored dots rather than moving arrows — are visible around Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, and the UAE coast. These are loaded tankers that cannot exit.
At the strait itself, around Bandar Abbas, vessels bunch at the chokepoint. In the Gulf of Oman outside the strait, hundreds of ships scatter in multiple directions — some dispersing toward alternative ports at Fujairah, Sohar, and Duqm, others simply waiting. The global tanker traffic map, normally a dense web of movement across every ocean, shows a visible dead zone where the Persian Gulf meets the strait. The pipeline is not slowing. It has stopped.
This matters for how we read Minister Tan’s March 11 statement. He told CNA that Singapore’s LNG and diesel stockpiles were sufficient to last months, and that the government had the nimbleness to respond once conditions worsened — “it hasn’t happened yet,” he said.
