Iran Names the Strait Its Own as Two Carriers Sit Offshore

Trump says he will soon declare the Strait of Hormuz US territory. Iran and the US are making competing sovereignty claims over the same twenty-mile channel, not competing tactical claims, a category jump this column had missed in the tanker-and-blockade read of the past two weeks. Two UAE tankers were hit transiting the strait overnight, and Washington signals it can sustain the naval blockade indefinitely while widening sanctions rather than striking again, confirming Sunday's read that Washington had shifted from strikes to economic pressure. The Abraham Lincoln has now been deployed nine months with families describing conditions Trump dismissed outright, a second carrier group already inbound. On the desk that matters more this morning: Iranian state hackers have breached multiple US water utility systems, the same actor class that beat Microsoft to its own Windows patch this week. A tanker seizure is a blockade Washington can see and counter; a water utility SCADA breach means the attacker is already inside operational technology, undetected until it acts. A HK-licensed bank's third-party risk team now has to ask whether any vendor touching municipal water contracts in the US also serves clients here. Watch whether Iran's water-sector intrusion escalates to an actual disruption event by Monday, which would move Hormuz from a shipping story to a critical infrastructure one.