US Defense Secretary Hegseth Says US Controls Strait of Hormuz

Hegseth's claim reframes the Strait of Hormuz from a point of Iranian leverage into an assertion of US control, which matters less as a military fact than as a signal about risk perception around the world's most critical oil chokepoint. For energy and shipping markets, the relevant question is whether that framing holds if tensions escalate, since any disruption there transmits quickly into freight, insurance and crude pricing. Whether the rhetoric is matched by a durable change in the security posture is the open question.