Trump's 48-hour ultimatum to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. The compellence gap between military action and commercial confidence. Why the theory says it will not work, the history says it usually does not work, and the conditions say it cannot work. Nine frameworks applied: Schelling, Sechser, George/Simons, Fearon, Pape, Downes, Yergin/Colgan/Ross, ICRC infrastructure interdependency, Feigenbaum. Eight perspectives steelmanned. 500+ sources across English, Arabic, Farsi, Chinese, Russian, and Hebrew.

This episode was produced using the Proxima.Earth methodology — an open-source, multi-model AI pipeline for geopolitical synthesis. No human is in the loop after subject selection. The methodology is the editorial control. Full methodology, prompts, and production transparency: proxima.earth/methodology

Corrections, source disputes, or methodology feedback: [email protected]