1.6 The Hormuz Syndrome

Hack: March 2026, Strait of Hormuz, Point of No Return

The maritime records of the International Maritime Organization registered an event initially dismissed as a routine episode of escalation, worthy at most of a military summary in the morning news. On 3 March 2026, the Bahrain control centre received a signal that placed operators in a situation which naval terminology describes as a "status of uncertainty": why did a tanker flying the Panamanian flag, en route from Ras Tanura to Yokohama, suddenly go adrift in neutral waters, although its Automatic Identification System showed standard operating conditions?
The situation, however, proved deeper than an ordinary military incident. The tanker was not attacked. It did not run aground. Its engines did not fail. It simply ceased to exist in its former capacity — as an element of global logistics, as a link in the chain connecting Saudi oil to Japanese refineries. Iran announced the blocking of the Strait of Hormuz for vessels bound for ports of "countries participating in aggression." The tanker, formally belonging to a UAE-based company, chartered by the Japanese, sailing under the Panamanian flag, found itself in an ontological trap: it existed, but its being-in-world-trade had ceased.
For the philosophical gaze, whose tuning fork is set to detect ontological shifts, this incident signified something more than another turn in the Middle Eastern conflict. At this point, in this frozen tanker, in this exchange of signals between the control centre, the captain, Iranian patrol boats, and headquarters in Washington and Tehran, a drama worthy of Heidegger or perhaps Foucault was unfolding: oil was ceasing to be oil. The substance whose chemical formula remained unchanged had acquired a new ontological modality. It had become not a commodity but a weapon; not a resource but a relation; not a substance but a sign in a new system of world order.

The Anatomy of Blockade: From Logistics to Ontology

Philosophical reflection on the phenomenon of contemporary warfare initially developed along the lines of the critical metaphor proposed by Carl Schmitt in his theory of the nomos of the earth. In his programmatic 1950 work, he defined world order as a fundamental spatial distinction, as "the totality of relations arising from the appropriation of land and sea, from the establishment of boundaries and rules of exchange" (Schmitt, 2003: 13). According to this model, war is an instrument of redistribution, but the redistribution itself is conducted in the categories of territory, sovereignty, boundaries.
However, as the very course of events in March 2026 convincingly demonstrates, the Schmittian optics proves epistemologically insufficient precisely because it underestimates the ontological transformation of the very object of struggle. For the Iranian patrol boat commander, for the tanker operators, for the entire system of global energy, it was irrelevant to whom the water in the Strait of Hormuz formally belonged. What mattered was that the very possibility of oil's movement had become a function of a new order, in which substance had yielded to relation.
This circumstance compels us radically to reconsider our ontological optics. Contemporary warfare is not a conflict for the possession of resources in the classical, materialist sense — as a struggle for access to substance. Neither is it a war of ideas or civilisations. It represents something third, for which classical categorical apparatus simply has no place: a conflict of orders, in which the resources themselves become functions of these orders, rather than their substrate. Their productivity does not mean the emergence of a new substance. Nothing arises ex nihilo. What emerges is merely a new configuration of already existing forces — geological, economic, military. Oil is not created anew. Only the possibility of disposing of it is redistributed.
It is here that philosophical thought enters territory first mapped by Michel Foucault in his theory of biopolitics, but requiring radical expansion. In Security, Territory, Population (1978), Foucault distinguishes three historical orders of governance: from sovereignty (power over territory) through discipline (power over bodies) to security (power over circulation) (Foucault, 2007). However, as the situation in the Strait of Hormuz shows, we are entering an era of a fourth order — power over connectivity, where the object of governance becomes not people, not territories, not even flows, but the very possibility of connection between elements of the system.

The Collapse of Substantial Ontology

The event that occurred in March 2026 in the Strait of Hormuz may and must be understood as an empirical refutation (or, at the very least, a radical limitation of the applicability) of that ontology which dominated Western philosophical tradition for more than two millennia.
Aristotle, in the Categories, gave the classical formulation of the substantial approach: "Substance, in the truest and primary and most definite sense of the word, is that which is neither predicable of a subject nor present in a subject; for instance, the individual man or the individual horse" (Aristotle, 1963: 2a 10). Being, according to this paradigm, is a property of substance, of a thing possessing independent existence. Oil is such a substance — a material with certain properties, existing independently of our relations to it.
Karl Marx, in the nineteenth century, radicalised this intuition, showing that in capitalist production, things acquire a second, social being — value, which is not reducible to their physical properties (Marx, 1976: 56). But Marx also retained the substantial core: value is a "congealed mass of abstract human labour," it possesses a substance, albeit a social one.
What happens to this theory when we encounter a situation where Saudi oil, chemically identical to itself, ceases to be oil in the economic sense because it cannot be exported from the Strait of Hormuz? The oil "is" — in the Aristotelian sense of primary substance. But its "is" no longer coincides with its being-in-the-world, with its functioning, with its place in the system of global exchange.
We find ourselves in a situation that Jacques Derrida described as différance: substance is endlessly deferred, reference escapes, yet relations continue to produce effects (Derrida, 1982). The oil exists, but its oil-ness — its capacity to be fuel, commodity, source of wealth — turns out to be a function of order, not a property of substance.
The philosophical challenge posed by this incident may be formulated as follows: classical ontology possessed a single category for evaluating existence — "to be." The situation in the Strait of Hormuz demonstrates the necessity of introducing a categorical distinction: to-be-substance and to-be-in-order. Saudi oil exists as a substance, but it has ceased to exist in the order of the global oil market. And this "has ceased to exist" has ontological, not merely epistemological or economic, meaning.

The Autonomy of Order: From Substance to Relation and Back Again

For millennia, Western metaphysics thought of relation as secondary to substance. First there is the thing, then its connections to other things. First substance, then accidents. This hierarchy — ontology primary, relations secondary — remained unquestioned from Aristotle to Husserl.
The situation with the blockage of the Strait of Hormuz marks a rupture with this tradition. Order acquires a relative autonomy of functioning. It produces a reality to which nothing in the substantial world corresponds, yet this reality begins to determine the fate of substances. The tanker carrying Saudi oil exists physically, but its existence in the mode of "goods in transit" is annulled by Iranian patrol boats. Venezuelan oil, which the United States "liberated" from Maduro a month before the events, acquires a new being — not as raw material, but as raw material for American refineries, which will turn it into gasoline and sell it to Japan across the Pacific, while Japanese tankers sit in the Strait of Hormuz waiting for Iran to allow them passage.
This phenomenon requires philosophical interpretation that goes beyond Marxist political economy or realist geopolitics. It is not a matter of "the base determining the superstructure" nor of "geopolitics as a struggle for resources." It is a matter of orders (military, political, logistical, financial) producing new ontological statuses of things, which are neither physical properties nor social constructs in the usual sense. They are statuses of a purely relational nature that nevertheless possess the capacity to intervene in the causal chains of the physical world.
In terms of the ontology that we only adumbrate in this book, one might say: the blockage of the Strait of Hormuz demonstrates the emergent power of order. Order ceases to be a medium, a transparent milieu through which we know the world of substances. It becomes an autonomous agent, a producer of reality. And this shift has fundamental consequences for understanding what it means "to exist."
To exist means to be included in a network of causal interactions. In this sense, existence is not a property of a thing but an effect of its stabilisation within an order. That which is not stabilised dissolves into noise and ceases to be discernible. Being is not a substrate but a stabilisation.
Saudi oil, stuck in tankers off the Strait of Hormuz, has been excluded from the network of global exchange. It exists physically, but its economic being — its capacity to be exchanged for money, to generate income, to finance social contracts — is annulled. And this measure of being, it turns out, is more important for the Gulf monarchies than the measure of physical presence.

Being as Order

Here we approach the threshold beyond which the epistemological problem transforms into an ontological one. The question is no longer "how can we predict oil prices in an era of blocked straits?" The question is: what is oil, if its being is determined not by chemical composition but by its capacity to be included in global exchange?
Classical ontology, from Parmenides to twentieth-century analytic philosophy, operated with the categories of substance, quality, relation, causality. Its world is populated by things, properties, and events. But blocked oil is neither a thing, nor a property, nor an event in this classical sense. It is order, pure structure, organised according to the laws of logistics, yet capable of projecting itself into the world and modifying it. By order we do not understand an ideal form or a Platonic essence. We speak of a material configuration of distinctions — a way in which forces interlock and hold each other in place. Order is immanent to matter, not imposed upon it from without.
This intuition resonates with the Platonic distinction between being and becoming, but in a substantially transformed form. Plato held ideas (eidē) to be eternal and unchanging patterns according to which the world of sensible things is ordered (Plato, 1997). In our situation, we are dealing with the reverse movement: it is not ideas serving as patterns for things, but logistical constructions — temporary, situational, conflictual — beginning to serve as patterns for what oil is, what a commodity is, what wealth is. The ēthos does not descend from the heavens but is generated by patrol boats and diplomatic notes.
For the philosophical tradition toward which our project gravitates, the key question is how order constitutes reality. The blockage of the Strait of Hormuz provides unique material for investigating this process, for here order (military, political, logistical) appears in its pure form, without admixture of substantiality.
What is "Saudi oil of March 2026" from an ontological point of view? It is not a physical object (it physically exists) nor an ideal entity. It is a node in a network of relations: relations of property, logistics, international law, military force, financial contracts. Its being is exhausted by its place in this network: it has a price, a buyer, a delivery route, insurance; it is connected to other market elements through futures contracts; it functions in the global economy as a potential source of energy. All these relations are purely relational; they do not abolish the physical presence of the substance. And yet, when Iranian boats block the strait, these relations cease to function, and oil ceases to be oil precisely because it has fallen out of order, not because its chemical composition has changed.
Here we encounter a fundamental principle that will be unfolded in subsequent chapters but must be indicated already now: reality is the result of ordering, not a substance. What we call "existence" is an effect of inclusion in some system of order. Oil exists as a commodity because it is included in the system of global oil trade. When Iran blocks the strait, it does not physically destroy the oil — it excludes it from order, and in this exclusion it acquires a new ontological modality: oil-as-trap, oil-as-hostage, oil-as-weapon.
In contemporary philosophical literature, two main strategies for understanding such phenomena have emerged, both of which, from our perspective, miss their genuine ontological novelty.
The first strategy — realist — insists on the primacy of physical reality. According to this logic, oil is a substance, and everything else is superstructure. The blockage of the strait is a temporary obstacle that will be overcome, and oil will return to its normal being. This approach implicitly assumes that order is secondary, that the true being of things lies in their physical substance.
But such a view ignores a fundamental circumstance: for Saudi Arabia, whose budget consists of 70% oil revenues, oil that cannot be sold is ontologically equivalent to the absence of oil. The social contract built on the distribution of petrodollars collapses not when oil physically runs out, but when the flow of income ceases. Order here is primary relative to substance.
The second strategy — constructivist — sees in the blockage of the strait a purely discursive phenomenon, a play of signifiers where "oil" is merely a word whose meaning is determined by context. Proponents of this approach speak of the "social construction of reality," of "oil being what we have agreed to call oil."
But this position, too, misses something essential: tankers, missiles, patrol boats, cargoes frozen in anticipation — these are not discourse. They are material forces acting in the material world. The blockage produces real consequences — hunger, unemployment, death — not through a change of meanings but through a change in the configurations of the material world.
A third, less widespread but theoretically more interesting position is represented by works attempting to think such phenomena in the categories of actor-network theory (Latour, 2005). According to this logic, oil, tankers, Iranian boats, insurance companies, futures contracts — all are actors forming a network, and reality is distributed among them.
This approach is valuable in that it does not avoid complexity but attempts to conceptualise it. Yet even it, from our perspective, remains within the descriptive paradigm, whereas the events demand an exit into normative ontology. The question is not how the network is structured, but what exists when the network ceases to function.

From Binary Ontology to the Experience of Living in Ungovernable Conflict

The event of March 2026 in the Strait of Hormuz exposed a fault line that cannot be adequately described in the categories of classical philosophy. Substantial ontology collapses not because the world has become more complex, but because a new type of entity has appeared — relational objects whose being is entirely determined by their place in an order and can be annulled by a change in that order without any change in physical substance.
This places thought before a fundamental aporia. The entire arsenal of Western ontology, from Aristotle to Heidegger, is calibrated for an operation of distinction: to draw the boundary between being and non-being. But here the boundary cannot be drawn, because the object lies exactly on it. Oil both is and is not simultaneously. It is a hybrid whose nature hacks the binary logic of evaluation itself.
One could, of course, declare the situation in the Strait of Hormuz a temporary glitch and demand a military solution — break the blockade, ensure the passage of tankers. But that would be to close one's eyes to the symptom. The blockage is not a glitch but a manifestation of a fundamental property: order, having reached a certain level of complexity, acquires autonomy from substances. It begins to produce ontological statuses to which nothing in the physical world corresponds, but which, being incorporated into human practices, begin to determine the fate of millions.
Here we enter a domain where the old optics is powerless.
If this is so, then the Hormuz syndrome is not an exception or a glitch, but a particular case of a more general law: every being arises where conflicting orders temporarily stabilise. Where tension is held, a world emerges. Where it disappears, what remains is either chaos or dead ideal stillness.
In Tristasis, conflict is primary and ungovernable in a global sense. No one stands above the fray with a control panel regulating the tension. And any attempt to speak of "governance" risks imperceptibly substituting the essence: creating the illusion that somewhere there is a subject who knows how things should be and can manipulate this conflict.
But no such subject exists. The United States does not "govern" Iran. Iran does not "govern" the situation in the strait. There is only a clash of forces, each pursuing its own ends, but none controlling the outcome. The outcome is an emergent property of the system, not someone's plan.
And when we encounter the blockage of the Strait of Hormuz, we encounter not an external problem that can be "solved," but our own splitteness, projected outward.
We want the oil to flow because we ourselves are crushed between the thirst for stability and the experience of its absence. We want to punish Iran because we do not know what to do with our own dependence on a resource that has suddenly found itself hostage to conflict.
And here the true horizon opens. Not the horizon of "conflict governance," but the horizon of the experience of living in conflict.

What does this mean for our case study?

It means recognising: the conflict between the global market and regional geopolitics is irresolvable. We will never return world trade to the position of a calm, predictable exchange. We will never obtain a final criterion enabling us to distinguish once and for all between the "normal" state of the market and the "crisis" state. This boundary will always be shifting, always a matter of negotiation, always contextual.
And the question that confronts us is not "how to govern this conflict?" (that question already presupposes the existence of an external position, which does not exist), but: how are we to exist in this conflict, being ourselves this very conflict?
How are we to build an economy that will not naively believe in the possibility of eternal stability, yet will not fall into paralysis at every escalation?
How are we to establish relations with resources, understanding that their being is determined not only by their chemistry but by their place in the conflict of orders?
How are we to hold the tension between the necessity of the resource and the reality of its vulnerability, without allowing this tension either to paralyse us or to tear us apart?
Answers to these questions cannot be given once and for all. They will be born in each concrete situation, in each concrete act of encountering a blocked strait, a stuck tanker, an altered order.
In this sense, the case of the Strait of Hormuz is not an invitation to a new geopolitics of governance, but an invitation to ontological sobriety. It exposes that we live in a world where the old supports have collapsed and the new ones are not yet built. Where oil is not given but problematic. Where order speaks not only ours, but its own.
And in this world, victory belongs not to him who has more oil, nor even to him who has more missiles. But to him who is capable of holding the tension between substance and relation, between substrate and order, between taxis and hysis.
America, as we have seen in the preceding analysis, has proved capable of this. It does not attempt to "resolve" the conflict. It makes it an instrument. It does not fight Iran — it uses Iran as a battering ram against its competitors. It does not save the Gulf monarchies — it watches as their oil becomes a hostage and their future becomes a return to camels and tents.
America does not win the war. America exists in the conflict, extracting from this existence an ontological rent.
The question is who next will be able likewise to hold the tension. Or whether the world will finally fragment into isolated orders, each speaking its own language, unable to hear the other.