A forgotten crisis explains today’s oil shock

A JAPANESE oil tanker slips through the Strait of Hormuz in the dead of night, radio silenced to conceal its position. Iran secures a market for its crude in defiance of Western sanctions. The balance of the world’s energy trade switches from incumbent hegemons towards emerging powers.

If that feels like a description of current events in the Middle East, you might need to go back to the history books.

The 1953 Nissho Maru incident is largely forgotten, but prefigured the great geopolitical emergencies of subsequent decades: the 1956 Suez Crisis, the 1960 founding of Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec), and the 1973 Arab oil embargo.