The Iranian seizure of a tanker earlier today has sparked much conjecture, but actually its not hard to work out why at all. Right, so Iran hasn’t touched a tanker in months, hasn’t so much as nudged the Strait of Hormuz while the Houthis turned the Red Sea into a scrapyard, hasn’t taken the bait as the United States shuffled ships around the Gulf pretending it still runs the place. Then an Azerbaijani-linked vessel rolls out of Ajman with thirty thousand tonnes of petrochemicals, flying a Marshall Islands flag that tells you nothing except the owners don’t want you to know who they are, heading for Singapore like every other quietly inconvenient cargo in this region, and suddenly Iran has a court order in its hand and the ship is seized. And you don’t need a conspiracy theory to see the pressure point. Azerbaijan supplies Israel with a big old chunk of its oil. The United States just moved into the Caucasus as Azerbaijan opened the door, to now sit on Iran’s northern border. Iran can count. So is this about Azerbaijan? About Israel and its oil supply? Or is it a bit of both? Right, so Iran has spent months sitting on its hands in the Strait of Hormuz, the tiny passage out of the Arabian Gulf, that sees a fifth of all global oil transfers pass through it, even as half the region burned, even as the United States moved forces around the Gulf, even as the Houthis shut down the Red Sea shipping lane with more success than any Western naval coalition wants to admit, and even as Israel leaned harder than usual on its friends in the Caucasus and the Gulf to keep its logistics stable. Keep that oil flowing from Azerbaijan, through Georgia and Turkey to the port of Ashkelon. Iran kept quiet, which is unusual, because the one thing Iran never does lightly is let foreign ships sail through the narrowest choke point on its coastline without reminding the world that it can flick the lane open or shut whenever it feels the need. Then this ship in question comes through. The Talara. One tanker. Marshall Islands flagged. Carrying petrochemicals, high-sulfur gas oil to be exact, used in power plants and boilers. It had departed from the port of Ajman in the UAE. Bound for Singapore. Registered through the usual offshore shells. And Iranian forces diverted it into their waters under a court order. That court order matters, because Iran only bothers with domestic legal cover when it plans to hold something.