Two Straits, One Bill
Jérôme Denariez’s analysis and Admiral Christian Girard’s, published two days earlier on Bab-el-Mandeb, complement each other more than they overlap. Both describe the same war spilling beyond its initial military boundaries — into budgets on one side, into a second strait on the other — but they point to an asymmetry the hurried reader might miss: Hormuz offers no maritime escape route, while Bab-el-Mandeb can still be bypassed via the Cape of Good Hope, a route already carrying a large share of traffic since 2024.

The risk, then, is not of the same nature: at Hormuz, it is a risk of price and availability that directly hits the barrel and, in turn, European companies’ 2027 budgets; at Bab-el-Mandeb, it is above all a risk of delay and logistical surcharge — more absorbable, but one that adds to the first rather than replacing it.

It is precisely this addition that sets the European position apart from the American position described by Jérôme Denariez. Washington is managing a domestic political dilemma — inflation, rates, the electoral calendar. Europe, “for its part,” has no lever over the military conduct of the conflict, but it already has, contrary to what one might assume, assets on the ground: Operation ASPIDES since February 2024, backed by ATALANTE and by the bases in Djibouti. This paradox — militarily present at Bab-el-Mandeb, diplomatically absent, and absorbing without any say the budgetary shock coming from Hormuz — is perhaps the real question raised by the two texts together: how long can a Europe that has the means but not the political will content itself with doing its cash-flow math while others, in Washington as in Beijing, redraw the balance of the Gulf?