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, the French armed forces said Wednesday. The deployment puts Europe’s most powerful warship within reach of a strait whose closure has come to epitomize the war in Iran — choking a fifth of the world’s oil and triggering what the International Energy Agency calls the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market. The southward repositioning of the nuclear-powered Charles de Gaulle and its escorts is the latest stage of a Middle East deployment first announced by French President Emmanuel Macron in a televised address on March 3, the day before Iran closed the strait. The move south of Suez puts France’s only carrier — the only nuclear-powered aircraft carrier outside the U.S. Navy — closer to the Persian Gulf chokepoint of Hormuz than at any point since the war began. “Going south of Suez is new for us,” Col.…