The Persian Gulf. July 24, 1987. Two in the morning.
A supertanker the length of four football fields moves through darkness. 414,000 tons. Kuwaiti oil in her belly, the freshly painted flag of the United States on her hull. Her name is the Bridgeton, and flanking her in the black water are five warships of the most powerful navy on earth — a destroyer, frigates, cruisers — sent to make sure she arrives.
Iran has been laying mines in these waters for months. US planners have the intelligence reports. They have chosen, for reasons that remain difficult to explain at this distance, not to deploy minesweepers in advance.
At two in the morning, the Bridgeton hits one.
The explosion opens a hole in her hull twelve meters wide. She does not sink — she is too massive, too stubborn. She keeps moving. And behind her, in what becomes one of the quieter humiliations in the history of American naval power, the five warships sent to protect her fall into line astern — using the crippled tanker as their minesweeper. Admiral William Crowe, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, halts all convoy operations immediately. No more escorts until minesweepers arrive.
The problem: the United States does not have enough of them.
What happened next
Washington calls its allies. France answers. The United Kingdom answers. Italy answers. The Netherlands answers. Belgium answers. Within weeks, European warships are sailing into an active combat zone. Not a ceasefire zone. Not a post-conflict stabilisation operation. An active war between Iraq and Iran that has already killed hundreds of thousands, in waters where an Iraqi Exocet missile killed 37 American sailors on the USS Stark two months earlier. The Western European Union coordinates the effort. Seven European minesweepers enter the Gulf.
They did not wait for a peace agreement. They did not request clarity on strategic goals. They did not ask, publicly, what Washington expected from a handful of European ships to accomplish what the powerful US Navy could not manage on its own.
They sent ships. Because the oil was theirs. The trade was theirs. The industry that depended on it was theirs.
In the following fourteen months, Operation Earnest Will becomes the largest naval convoy operation since the Second World War. Thirty US warships rotate through the region. Special operations forces run a classified programme from unmarked barges — Operation Prime Chance — hunting Iranian speedboat crews at night with early-generation night vision that turns everything green and grainy. On September 21, 1987, US Army helicopters catch the Iranian minelayer Iran Ajr in the act, in international waters. They engage it, board it, seize it. Ten mines still on deck.
The response to the mines is not a committee. It is not a statement of concern. It is operational — immediate, precise, and effective.
When the USS Samuel B. Roberts strikes an Iranian mine in April 1988 and nearly breaks in half, ten sailors wounded, the answer comes four days later. Operation Praying Mantis. In a single day, the United States destroys half of Iran’s operational naval force. Oil platforms used as military bases obliterated. Iranian frigates sunk. The mine threat answered. The message delivered.
The Strait stays open. The oil flows. The technology available for all of it: radar that cannot see over the horizon, communications that jam themselves, helicopters whose maintenance logs read like accident reports. No satellite tracking every vessel on earth in real time. No AI targeting. No precision munitions guided from forty kilometres away.
The will existed. The Strait stayed open.
What is said now
Europe has between 150 and 170 active minesweepers and minehunters in 2026. Trained crews. Operational vessels. France and the Netherlands operate historically among the finest minehunting technologies in the world. NATO conducts regular mine countermeasures exercises — in the Baltic, in the Black Sea, against what European governments openly describe as their primary adversary. The capability is not theoretical. It is practiced, funded, and ready.
The Strait of Hormuz is closed.
Twenty percent of the world’s oil supply sits on the wrong side of a waterway thirty-three kilometres wide. LNG prices in Europe spike by the hour. The Eurogroup — the assembled finance ministers of the European Union, not a fringe voice — formally warns of the greatest energy crisis in history. German industry, already weakened since Nord Stream was destroyed in 2022, absorbs another shock it cannot fully survive. The Mittelstand — the family manufacturers who carry no state backstop and no margin left, the businesses examined in Progress Is the Wrong Word — begins another round of closures.
German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius speaks from Berlin: “This is not our war. We have not started it.” He adds: “What does Donald Trump expect from a handful of European frigates in the Strait of Hormuz to accomplish what the powerful US Navy cannot manage there on its own?”
French President Emmanuel Macron: “We are not a party to the conflict. France will never take part in operations to open or liberate the Strait of Hormuz in the current context.”
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Join Now →British Prime Minister Keir Starmer says the UK will not be drawn into the wider war. He acknowledges the UK has minesweeping capability. He commits no ships and no timeline. The Royal Navy’s last forward-deployed minesweepers in the Gulf were withdrawn in January 2026 — worn out, not replaced, brought home as deck cargo.
EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas: “Nobody is ready to put their people in harm’s way in the Strait of Hormuz.”
The 150 minesweepers sit in European ports.
The counterargument, stated fairly
A serious defender of the European position would say: in 1987 it was a regional war between Iraq and Iran — Europe had no hand in starting it and no obligation to either side. In 2026, the United States and Israel launched the war. Choosing not to follow them into its consequences is not cowardice. It is principle.
That is a coherent position. It earns its hearing.
It fails on one point only.
Europe is not choosing principle over prosperity. It is claiming both simultaneously — refusing military engagement while describing the energy consequences as the greatest crisis in its history. These two positions cannot occupy the same sentence. Either the consequences are a price worth paying for non-involvement, in which case pay it quietly and stop calling it a crisis. Or the consequences are existential, in which case the question of who started the fire becomes secondary to the question of whether the house is still standing when the argument ends.
A house fire started by the neighbour’s carelessness still burns your house down. The question of fault matters enormously for the insurance claim. It matters very little while the house is burning and 150 minesweepers sit unused in port.
The fork in the road
Two explanations exist for what Europe is doing. Both deserve to be placed in front of the reader without decoration.
The first: this is deliberate. The energy crisis is a managed condition. Existing currency arrangements are mathematically unsustainable — anyone who runs the numbers honestly knows this. A reset of the monetary architecture requires a moment of sufficient chaos that populations stop asking who controls the fire brigade and start begging for anyone to extinguish the flames. The Mittelstand — independent, generational, answering to no shareholder, carrying knowledge that cannot be centralised — is not collateral damage in this scenario. It is a specific outcome. What survives is what can be controlled: multinationals, state enterprises, platform dependencies, central digital infrastructure. The vocabulary for this in certain circles is resilience and stakeholder capitalism. The plain vocabulary is that everything once owned by people who could tell a bank to go to hell will be owned, after the reset, by people who cannot. As these pages have noted before — the king always needs another dragon, and the crisis is the dragon that clears the board.
The second: this is not deliberate. The people making these decisions genuinely believe what they say. They have spent decades inside institutions that reward the performance of values over the exercise of judgment. They have promoted each other, applauded each other at conferences in places with good catering, and constructed a worldview so sealed that the burning house is less real to them than the moral satisfaction of not being associated with the neighbour who started it. They will watch the Mittelstand close and call it a transition. They will watch energy prices destroy working families on May Day and call it the cost of principle. They are not malicious. They are, in the most precise sense of the word, unserious — and unseriousness at the level of civilisational decision-making produces the same rubble as malice, with considerably cleaner consciences.
The same destination
Here is what makes the fork almost academic.
Both paths lead to identical ground. The independent business closes either way. The nuclear plant stays dark either way. The minesweepers remain in port either way. The centralisation of energy, currency, ownership and control proceeds either way. Whether the architecture is designed or merely permitted, the structure rising on top of the rubble looks the same from the outside.
In 1987, with worse tools, against the same enemy, in the same strait, the will existed and the passage stayed open.
In 2026, the tools are vastly superior. The minesweepers number in the hundreds. The capability is not in question.
At what point does it stop mattering which explanation is correct?
“You will own nothing and be happy.”
Davos, 2020.
Related reading: Progress Is the Wrong Word — Case Closed — Why the King Always Needs Another Dragon — Why Cash Is Quietly Disappearing
