The Strait Is ¨Open¨... Except for the Missiles

Recently, the U.S. Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth, made a statement about the crisis in the Strait of Hormuz that would be funny if it weren’t so revealing.

He said the strait is “open for business,” except that Iran keeps shooting at ships passing through.

Pause for a moment and let that sentence breathe.

The strait is open… except for the missiles.

That’s a little like saying the highway is open except for the sniper on the overpass. Or the airport is open except for the bombs on the runway. Technically, perhaps, nothing is “closed.” But the reality is obvious to everyone except, apparently, the person responsible for the military policy surrounding it.

And that’s what makes the comment so disturbing. The issue isn’t simply that it sounds ridiculous. It’s what the statement reveals about the mindset of the people currently running the most powerful military on Earth. Because the obvious follow-up question, one so simple that a teenager might ask it, is this:

Why are ships being shot at in the first place?

The tension in the Persian Gulf didn’t appear out of thin air. It escalated after the United States and its ally struck targets inside Iran. Whether one believes those strikes were justified or not, pretending that retaliation is some mysterious, unrelated event is a denial of the highest order.

When someone in charge of war policy describes a crisis this way, it reveals something deeper than a clumsy sentence. It shows a habit of thinking where cause and effect disappear.

In that version of reality, events simply happen. Ships are attacked. Markets panic. Oil prices jump.

And the only explanation offered is that the other side is irrational.

But geopolitics rarely works that way. Every escalation has a chain of decisions behind it. Ignoring that chain might be politically convenient, but it’s intellectually dishonest and strategically dangerous.

What makes the moment even more unsettling is that this isn’t just a random commentator on television. This is the Secretary of Defense of the United States, serving under President Donald Trump. These are the people responsible for decisions that can determine whether a regional conflict stays contained or expands into something far worse.

When officials talk this way, it suggests a style of leadership built less on careful analysis and more on slogans. Complex geopolitical realities get reduced to sound bites that might work on cable news but collapse under the slightest scrutiny.

And that raises a larger question about how power works in modern politics. How do people who speak this way end up running the machinery of global military power?

Part of the answer is structural. Modern media rewards confidence over nuance. A bold statement travels further than a careful explanation. The person who sounds certain often defeats the person who is actually thinking.

Part of it is political theater. Leaders speak not just to explain reality but to control the narrative. If the strait is described as “closed,” that sounds like a strategic failure. If it’s described as “open,” then the problem becomes someone else’s aggression.

But there is also a deeper issue: many voters and political movements have begun to value identity and loyalty over competence. The result is a strange paradox. The same civilization capable of building satellites, global supply chains, and nuclear submarines sometimes places astonishingly unserious people in charge of the institutions that control them.

When that happens, moments like this become windows into something larger than a single quote. They show a gap between the complexity of the world and the simplicity of the thinking guiding it. And that gap is where danger lives. Because the Strait of Hormuz is not just another shipping lane. It is one of the most fragile choke points in the global economy. A large portion of the world’s oil passes through that narrow stretch of water. A miscalculation there doesn’t stay local, it ripples across the entire planet.

So when the person overseeing the world’s most powerful military shrugs and says the strait is open, except for the missiles flying through it, the real concern isn’t the awkward phrasing. The concern is what that phrasing reveals. It suggests that the people steering the ship of state may not fully understand the storm they are sailing into.

And if that’s true, then the feeling many people have right now - the uneasy sense that the adults might not actually be in the room - starts to feel less like cynicism and more like a sober reading of the moment.

Thanks for reading. Abrazos.

Diego Rojas