What happens when the war really ends | CNN Business

President Donald Trump on Saturday said that peace with Iran is at hand and the Strait of Hormuz will reopen. We’ll see. Trump has become the president who cried peace. After repeated fakeouts over the past three months, the market has begun to ignore Trump’s play-by-play. Instead, it is awaiting tangible signs of an agreement with Iran. Iran has played hardball on fully reopening the strait — its main piece of leverage throughout a war in which it was overwhelmed, militarily. But Iran has used speed boats, mines and improved drones to block the strait to tankers, starving the global economy of a fifth of its oil. But if this really, truly is the end of the war and the strait is about to reopen, what happens next? When will prices return to where they were before the war? Not anytime soon. Almost certainly not this year. Maybe never. Once the strait has truly reopened, a logistical nightmare is about to unfold. Step one: Clearing the strait’s bottlenecks. That’s going to take a long time, since tankers move about as fast as you can ride a bicycle. First, the 166 or so tankers stuck in the Persian Gulf that need to clear out, carrying around 170 million barrels of oil with