Hormuz

For nearly eighty years, the modern world rested on a simple assumption. The strongest military power on Earth could guarantee the outcomes it desired. Oil flowed. Trade moved. Currencies held their value. The global order endured because someone possessed the power to enforce it. Then came Hormuz. In a narrow stretch of water barely twenty-one miles wide, a conflict emerged that challenged some of the deepest assumptions of the modern age. Cheap drones confronted billion-dollar weapons systems. Geography became a weapon. Energy markets shook. Global supply chains strained. The foundations of economic and military power were tested in ways few believed possible. This book is not about the destruction of a superpower. It is about the discovery that overwhelming strength does not always produce control. Through history, strategy, economics, and geopolitics, I. N. Paradise explores the crisis that exposed the vulnerabilities of the international system and raised a question that remains unanswered: What happens when a power can still destroy almost anything, but can no longer decide everything? Written while the consequences are still unfolding, HORMUZ: Where the Old Order Went Under is a dispatch from a turning point in history—a moment when the road that had guided the world for generations began to bend. The old order did not disappear overnight. But in Hormuz, it began to go under. I. N. Paradise