WASHINGTON (AP) — For months, President Donald Trump has pursued every available option to force Iran to fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz — launching airstrikes, imposing naval blockades, conducting negotiations, and even threatening to destroy a “whole civilization.” But so far, none of it has been enough.
According to defense and foreign policy experts, restoring the flow of oil tankers through this critical Middle East shipping lane to prewar levels would likely demand a far larger fleet of U.S. warships — or possibly tens of thousands of American troops deployed on Iranian soil. Even with ongoing military exchanges, Iran retains the ability to strike ships in the narrow Persian Gulf corridor using drones and missiles concealed across a country roughly one-third the size of the continental United States.
“Iran has been preparing for this type of asymmetric conflict for decades now,” said Jason H. Campbell, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute and a former Pentagon official. “I think they’re starting to demonstrate why no other U.S. president since Reagan has elected to engage at this level of conflict with Iran, because they have that ability to completely disrupt the Strait of Hormuz.”
On Monday, Trump announced that the U.S. is reinstating its blockade of Iranian ports and will require other ships to pay for safe passage through the strait. Iran has claimed authority over the waterway, which under normal circumstances carries roughly 20% of the world’s oil supply. Both sides have traded fire over the past week in a series of clashes that raise fears of a return to full-scale war.
The situation highlights the difficult position Trump finds himself in: commercial shipping through the strait remains choked off, oil prices are on the rise again, and Iran has given no indication it plans to back down. The conflict has grown unpopular with many Americans and could become a factor in the upcoming midterm elections, particularly as fuel prices climb.
“They thought the situation was under control, and now they’re seeing renewed escalations, and the markets responding negatively to this,” said Eric Lob, a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Middle East program and a professor of politics and international relations at Florida International University.
“It’s really a kind of test of wills to see how much economic pain the Iranians are willing to absorb and then how much economic pain and even political liability this could be for Trump and the Republicans heading into November,” Lob added.
Before joining the Middle East Institute in Washington, Campbell worked as a researcher at RAND, where he helped the U.S. military run simulated war-game scenarios involving Iran.
“The things they’re doing now are precisely the types of things that were discussed and came up in really all of these types of situational scenarios,” Campbell said.
He explained that Iran manufactures components for its weapons at multiple dispersed facilities to lower the risk of losing them in an attack. Iranian military units frequently act on their own initiative without waiting for direction from Tehran, and they avoid concentrating in one location — which limits the effectiveness of airstrikes.
“It’s very difficult to envision any scenario where you could satisfactorily secure the Strait of Hormuz absent ground forces,” Campbell said.
He estimated that securing the strait would require tens of thousands of troops — not just to destroy Iran’s concealed weapons stockpiles, but also to take control of hundreds of miles of coastline and large areas of inland territory. Those troops would almost certainly face insurgent-style attacks, and assembling such a force would take several months and come with “very high costs,” Campbell said.
Trump pushed back Monday evening, insisting that “the strait is open. It will be open,” and claiming the U.S. has made meaningful progress in weakening Iran’s military capabilities over the past few months. Iran, for its part, vowed to resist any American interference in the strait.
Experts say another possible approach would be expanding the U.S. naval escort program — having warships guide civilian vessels through the strait — though that option also carries significant challenges and expenses.
The U.S. ran a similar escort operation during the 1980s, when Iran targeted commercial shipping during its war with neighboring Iraq. At the time, the U.S. — which had been backing Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein with intelligence, weapons, and other support — escorted Kuwaiti oil tankers that had been reflagged as American vessels.
Replicating that effort today would demand a large number of warships at a time when the U.S. fleet is considerably smaller than it was four decades ago, said Michael Eisenstadt, a former U.S. military analyst who now leads the Military and Security Studies Program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
“You’d still need a very large chunk of the U.S. fleet being dedicated to this on an open-ended basis,” Eisenstadt said. He noted that the environment today is far more complex, given Iran’s expanded arsenal of advanced drones and missiles.
“If we were to do what we need to do in order to make this work, which might involve putting people ashore in order to clear anti-cruise missile and drone launch sites, the losses of U.S. service members can go up, and if you’re going to do an escort operation also, the losses can potentially go up,” Eisenstadt said.
Commercial ships have been steering clear of the strait’s traditional routes due to fears about Iranian mines. Iran has demanded that vessels travel along a path near its own coastline and has suggested it could collect fees under a potential interim agreement to end the conflict. Increasingly, ships have been taking a southern route along Oman’s coast, guided by U.S. drones and aircraft as part of an overwatch operation.
Capt. Tim Hawkins, a spokesman for U.S. Central Command, said mine-clearing operations are continuing along some of the traditional routes through the strait, but noted that “alternative pathways have been open.”
Even the southern route has not been enough to stop Iranian attacks on ships, prompting the U.S. military to strike Iranian air defense systems, radar installations, missile and drone equipment, and small boats.
But according to Noam Raydan, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy who focuses on energy and maritime risks in the Middle East, Iran doesn’t even need to fire a single weapon to disrupt commerce in the strait.
“They don’t need to launch drones and missiles — they can just use the marine radio channel to make some threats,” Raydan said. “And this in itself is enough to scare off a lot of seafarers.”
Clayton Seigle, a nonresident scholar in energy security at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, argued that the Trump administration has failed to follow through on early promises to use military force to protect shipping — commitments that later became a liability.
“Those naval escorts, U.S. warships, larger commitments like boots on the ground never came because I think that the rhetoric got a little ahead of our risk tolerance,” Seigle said. “And when push came to shove, the United States was not ready to deploy its Navy, to deploy its other military forces in the capacity that would be needed to even have a shot at neutralizing those threats.”
