If you read John Helmer on his own site, you not only get to enjoy his delightfully idiosyncratic and old school web design but you can also find his newer articles before they get reposted to places like Naked Capitalism. I say this because I think his later update on the marine shipping crisis is even more interesting than this one, as he expands on the possibility (that I've started to see discussed elsewhere too) that the crisis could escalate to affect the Mediterranean as well.

TradeWinds has reported the target strategy under a headline indicating that Iran may expand the war to threaten shipping moving through the Gibraltar Strait towards Israel’s Mediterranean ports, Ashdod and Haifa. The Iranian statement on the Gibraltar Strait has been reported in the western press with the qualification that “Iran has no direct access to the Mediterranean itself and it was not clear how the Guards could attempt to close it off” and that “the only groups backed by Iran on the Mediterranean are Lebanon’s Hezbollah and allied militia in Syria, at the far end of the sea from Gibraltar.”

The western news agencies and the Anglo-American maritime media appear not to be aware of the capabilities of Algeria, whose parliament has authorized the government to take unspecified military measures against Israel. Algeria’s military is also collaborating closely and recently with the Russian Navy.

The possibility of a drone attack on an Israeli vessel near the Gibraltar Strait has not yet dawned publicly, not at least in the mainstream and maritime industry media. More than 100,000 vessels transit through the Gibraltar Strait each year. If Israeli-owned and international shipping are now blocked from reaching either Eilat or Haifa and Ashdod from the east through the Red Sea and the Suez Canal, the Gibraltar Strait in the west is the gateway remaining. This is acknowledged by Israeli experts. “According to Dr. Elyakim BenHakoun from the Industrial Engineering and Management Faculty at the Technion Institute of Technology, about 99% of goods (in terms of cargo volume) reach Israel by sea, and around 40% of the cargo arriving in Israel passes through the Suez Canal…the consequence of stopping ship traffic in the Red Sea is to circumnavigate Africa, leading to an extension of shipping times by approximately two weeks to a month, depending on the destination region, vessel speed, and ship category. This roughly translates to an additional cost of $400,0000-$1 million per ship.”