In the long and uneasy relationship between geopolitical ambition and the arteries of global commerce, the renewed US-Iran military exchange has reminded markets that the world's most vital energy corridors remain hostage to human conflict. Through six consecutive nights of American strikes and Iranian countermeasures, oil climbed past $85 a barrel — not in a single dramatic lurch, but through the steady accumulation of dread. The Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea, two passages through which civilization's industrial metabolism flows, now face simultaneous threat, and the world's foremost energ