Nearly two weeks after the United States and Israel attacked Iran with an extraordinary display of firepower, Iran has found a way to inflict pain back on its enemies by strangling one of the world’s most vital waterways.
By threatening shipping traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, attacking tankers in an Iraqi port and beginning to lay mines in the strait, Iran has sent oil prices surging and slowed global trade. It has also made clear that it is intent on using what advantages it has to sap the will of the United States to sustain the war.
The Iranian tactics have forced the United States to prepare to provide naval escorts for shipping traffic through the strait and to plan for anti-mine operations even as American forces target what is left of the Iranian navy, including Iranian mine-laying vessels.
On Thursday, Mojtaba Khamenei, the new supreme leader of Iran, sent the regime’s clearest signal yet that it would continue to endanger commercial shipping in the strait, through which a fifth of the world’s oil was passing before the war began.
“Certainly, the lever of closing the Strait of Hormuz must continue to be used,” Mr. Khamenei said in his first statement since being chosen to succeed his father, who was killed in an airstrike at the start of the war.
Iran, analysts say, is demonstrating that even in a weakened state, it can inflict significant economic and military damage on the United States. That further complicates President Trump’s calculations about how and when to end the war and how to deal with a post-conflict Iran.
“This war isn’t only about what happens in the current cycle,” said Caitlin Talmadge, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has long studied security issues in the Persian Gulf. “It is about re-establishing Iranian deterrence for the next war.”
Asymmetric Warfare
Geography makes the Strait of Hormuz well suited for Iran’s asymmetric warfare — its effort to impose costs on a more powerful foe. The main route for exports from the Persian Gulf, the strait is roughly 20 miles wide at its narrowest point and skirts Iran’s southern border. That allows Iran to combine tactics to stop traffic in the strait, using small boats and submarines, unmanned watercraft, an array of naval mines and the ability to fire from land.
American military planners have prepared for decades for the possibility that Iran could try to close the strait. The Houthis, a Yemeni group backed by Iran, used missiles and drones to disrupt maritime commerce in the Red Sea after the start of Israel’s war in Gaza. The costly U.S. military campaign last year to try to stop those attacks was a harbinger of the challenge in relying on air and naval power to secure waterways in the Middle East.
“The Strait of Hormuz is a difficult, almost impossible, problem to solve through military means alone,” said retired Air Force Lt. Gen. S. Clinton Hinote, who served as a senior air strategist in the Middle East in the 2000s.
At the time, General Hinote was asked to study military approaches to Iranian aggression, including a scenario in which Iran attacked shipping in the strait. His team concluded that while the United States could use advanced sensors and precision strikes to mitigate Iranian attacks, they could not stop them completely. The shipping lanes are too narrow, and the vessels are too vulnerable to a mix of rockets, missiles and swarms of small craft.
The only way militarily to guarantee the waterway is open — to move from mitigation to control — would be to take and hold the Iranian territory bordering the strait, he said.
“It would require large numbers of ground forces to seize the coast,” General Hinote said. “Short of that, the only lasting solution to the strait is a diplomatic one.”
Mr. Trump said last week that the Navy could escort tankers through the strait. But Chris Wright, the energy secretary, told CNBC on Thursday that the Navy was not yet ready to carry out such an operation.
“It’ll happen relatively soon, but it can’t happen now,” Mr. Wright said. “We’re simply not ready.” He added that “all of our military assets right now are focused on destroying” Iran’s military resources and its ability to manufacture them in the future.
Before any escort operation, the United States would need at least several more days of an air campaign against Iran’s military assets threatening the strait, including minelayers, the regular Iranian navy, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps’s fast boats, short-range missiles and mobile missiles and launchers, a senior U.S. military official said.
And even after that, the official warned, it is likely to be challenging to coax shipping companies to resume their operations if Iranians still threaten to shoot at commercial ships.
Markets in Turmoil
Iran’s strategy shows signs of careful planning.
For years, the common wisdom among military analysts was that Iran would not close the strait because it needed it open to export its own oil. But shipping analysts say that in recent days, Iran has been loading oil and exporting it through the strait. Since March 1, at least 10 tankers and gas carriers have left Iran and gone through the strait, according to Lloyd’s List Intelligence, a shipping analysis firm. All of them were loaded, said Tomer Raanan, a maritime risk analyst at Lloyd’s List.
“Iran is still getting its oil and gas out to market through Hormuz,” he said.
More than 80 percent of oil and gas exports through the strait go to Asia, threatening severe supply shocks for many countries there. But Iran’s most important customer, China, protected itself before the conflict by increasing its oil stockpile. China imported 15.8 percent more oil in January and February than in the same period last year, according to customs data the country released on Tuesday.
China’s strategic stockpile contains roughly 1.2 billion barrels, or about 115 days of its seaborne crude imports, according to Kpler, a global ship tracking firm.
The United States and Israel, meanwhile, are dominating Iran’s airspace. It is possible that their attacks pressure Iran to stop its threats on shipping and seek a truce. Mr. Trump has predicted that oil prices “will drop rapidly when the destruction of the Iran nuclear threat is over,” and argued that higher energy prices are “a very small price to pay for U.S.A., and World, Safety and Peace.”
Oil futures on Thursday settled above $100 a barrel for the first time since 2022. That was up from about $70 before the start of the war, and Mr. Wright, in a television interview, did not rule out the possibility of $200 oil.
Mining the Strait
Iran’s decision to start mining the strait injects yet another risk. The United States Central Command said Thursday that the number of mine-laying vessels it had attacked was up to 30. But on Thursday, Iran began using smaller boats — of which the I.R.G.C. has hundreds, if not thousands — for its mining operation, according to a U.S. official briefed on the intelligence.
It could be hugely expensive, and dangerous, for the U.S. Navy to have to conduct what would most likely be a weekslong mine-clearing operation in the Strait of Hormuz, according to military officials. They said that clearing the strait could also put American sailors directly in harm’s way. And the military would need to make difficult choices about sending warships into the strait that are now being used to support the offensive mission against Iran.
The Strait of Hormuz has been a flashpoint before, including in 1988 during Iran’s war with Iraq, when Iran planted mines in the strait. The Reagan administration offered protection to Kuwaiti tankers by registering them in the United States, providing the legal justification to protect them with military assets like Navy warships.
But analysts say that conditions in the current war are different. Ship operators appear more cautious these days, said Rosemary Kelanic, a director at Defense Priorities, a research organization that favors restraint in foreign policy. “I do get the sense that norms have changed just in terms of what companies are willing to do, what they’re willing to risk,” she said.
And others who have studied the attacks on tankers in the Persian Gulf during the 1980s say Iran is far more dangerous now than it was then. “You cannot extrapolate from that war to this war,” said Martin Navias, the co-author of “Tanker Wars: The Assault on Merchant Shipping During the Iran-Iraq Crisis.”
For American foreign policy, one of the biggest casualties of the Strait of Hormuz crisis could be the strength of the alliance with Gulf Arab states like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The geopolitical aftershocks could prompt Gulf countries to seek to rebuild ties with Iran even if it remains adversarial to the United States.
“The big conclusion from some of our Gulf allies, once they’re out of this, is that they need a more permanent arrangement for the Strait of Hormuz,” said Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute. The countries would seek to reduce their dependence in the strait on security provided by the United States, he predicted, “a country that has so much military power but sometimes doesn’t have the strategic focus and reliability that they wish.”
Helene Cooper, John Ismay, Eric Schmitt and Megan Mineiro contributed reporting.
Anton Troianovski writes about American foreign policy and national security for The Times from Washington. He was previously a foreign correspondent based in Moscow and Berlin.
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