Arizona television channel 12News rarely has much of a role in momentous world events. But this week, Mark Curtis, with the Phoenix-based NBC outlet, scored a major global scoop.

Interviewing Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, he managed to secure the first admission by a senior Trump administration official that the Strait of Hormuz is never returning to the status quo that existed before Donald Trump ignited his war on Iran.

For months, Bessent has echoed Trump’s insistence that the world simply needs to remain patient, and that negotiations with Iran will eventually bear fruit so that the Strait can reopen and – in the president’s words – the price of oil will “drop like a rock”.

On Friday, whether by intention or by accident, Bessent indicated none of that is ever going to happen.

“Some have speculated that the Strait will never go back to being the way it was before. What would you say to that?” asked Curtis.

“I think they’re saying that in a Doomsday sort of way,” Bessent said, which sounded like the precursor to his usual argument that everyone should chill out and wait for negotiations to succeed. But for reasons unknown, he then chose to reveal that things have now dramatically changed.

“The Strait is never going back to the way it was”, Bessent admitted, “because the Iranians have…tried to use it as a chokepoint. What we are going to see over the next two years, is the Strait is going to become irrelevant. It is going to become just another body of water, and I would say that more than 50 or 70 per cent of the energy that moves through the Strait right now is going to go through underground pipelines.”

Bessent’s motive for suddenly levelling with the American people is unclear, but his belief that it will take at least two years for normal oil flows to be restored via yet-to-be constructed underground pipelines means that there is no prayer that stability will be restored to oil markets for the rest of Trump’s presidency.

For America’s allies, including the UK, Bessent’s revelation confirms everybody’s worst fears: that the Trump administration now recognises it has no capacity to force Iran to reopen the strait, and that oil, fertiliser and all the other products that were transiting the strategic waterway before the conflict began must now find other routes to market.

For Andy Burnham and his Chancellor John Healey, the news is potentially devastating. With Healey preparing for an all-important Budget speech on 28 October, previous assumptions about the strait reopening must now be scrapped. Only last week, accounting giant EY (formerly Ernst and Young) projected that Hormuz’s prolonged closure would rapidly tilt the UK into recession.

EY projected that were the strait to be shut for the rest of this year, inflation in the UK would reach 6.4 per cent just in time for Christmas. Continued restrictions on traffic through the waterway by the middle of 2027 would force the British economy into negative territory, contracting GDP by 0.2 per cent at exactly the moment Burnham would urgently need economic growth.

Every one of Trump’s allies in Europe will be facing the same stark consequences of a war waged without any strategic plan, and with no apparent off-ramp. American motorists and truckers will need to become accustomed to petrol prices that have already passed $4 (£2.97) a gallon, while US oil giants score record profits thanks to Trump’s geostrategic carelessness.

Making America even less of a reliable ally, the news comes just as the scale of the US military’s depleted weapons stockpile is becoming apparent. On Sunday, reported that both China and Russia are acutely aware of the shortfall in American munitions, with one top Washington analyst accusing the White House of a “generational annihilation of the means of conventional deterrence”.

For the UK and all of America’s European allies, the confluence of events raises major questions. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz is threatening their own national economic security, while the depletion of American weaponry may limit Washington’s practical ability to come to the aid of any Nato country that faces an attack.

Bessent said the quiet part out loud. We will all be paying the price for Trump’s irresponsibility for years to come.