US CENTCOM says Iran “has no navy” after US forces sank it and denies that Iran controls the Strait of Hormuz

The relevant distinction for oil pricing is between capability and intent: past episodes of Gulf escalation have shown that tanker traffic, war-risk insurance premia and freight rates react less to claims about naval attrition than to actual interdictions, mine incidents or seizures, which are the events that have previously transmitted into crude benchmarks and the prompt spread. Iran's leverage over Hormuz has never rested primarily on conventional naval tonnage but on asymmetric assets, fast attack craft, mines, coastal missiles and drones, so a claim centred on the regular navy leaves the principal closure risk unaddressed. Watch the operational follow-ons rather than the rhetoric: tanker transits through the strait, insurance repricing at Gulf loadings, any IRGC navy response, and whether the exchange remains verbal or produces an incident at sea. Statements of this nature without an accompanying kinetic event have tended to fade from pricing within sessions.