France's aircraft carrier strike group is moving south of the Suez Canal and into the Red Sea in preparation for a potential French-British mission in the Strait of Hormuz, French President Emmanuel Macron said Wednesday.

The deployment puts Europe's most powerful warship closer to the strait whose effective closure has come to epitomize the war in Iran, stranding hundreds of ships and triggering what the International Energy Agency calls the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market.