Donald Trump has offered many justifications for his decision to go to war with Iran. In his Truth Social video announcing the first air strikes in the early hours of 28 February, the US president listed the Iranian regime’s near-half-century of hostility towards the US, the attacks by its proxies on US forces across the region, the regime’s violent suppression of its own citizens, Iran’s nuclear programme, and its formidable arsenal of ballistic missiles. Unmentioned – and apparently an afterthought for much of the Trump administration – was the narrow body of water that is now at the heart of this conflict: the Strait of Hormuz.
Roughly a quarter of seaborne crude oil and 20 per cent of the world’s liquefied natural gas (LNG) export shipments passed through the strait before the war. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have pipelines that can reroute some of that oil to ports on the Red Sea and the Gulf of Oman, respectively, though the Red Sea is vulnerable if the Iranian-backed Houthis in Yemen enter the war, and neither port can fully compensate for the disruption. As Ed Conway detailed in these pages last week, the Iranian regime has demonstrated its willingness to use this formidable “oil weapon” and broaden the conflict to the global economy by leveraging our continuing dependence on oil and gas.
The Trump administration’s efforts to defuse this crisis do not inspire confidence. On 10 March, the US energy secretary Chris Wright’s X account said that the navy had “successfully escorted an oil tanker through the Strait of Hormuz”, causing oil and gas prices to fall and stock markets to rally. Minutes later the post disappeared and the White House subsequently clarified that, in fact, there had been no tanker escorts. An energy department spokesperson later said the post had been “incorrectly captioned” by a member of staff.
Then, the defence secretary Pete Hegseth stepped up to reassure global markets that the US was “dealing with” the situation in the Strait of Hormuz, and that they “don’t need to worry about it”. In case anyone was still worrying about it, however, he felt it was important to clarify one key point. “The only thing prohibiting transit in the straits right now is Iran shooting at shipping,” Hegseth explained. “It is open for transit, should Iran not do that.”
For his part, Trump has veered between urging tanker captains to “show some guts” and make a run for it through the strait, to appealing to US allies and rivals to send their own warships to the Gulf to participate in a “team effort” to protect the strategic waterway. “It’s only appropriate that people who are the beneficiaries of the strait will help to make sure that nothing bad happens there,” Trump reasoned in an interview with the Financial Times on 15 March. He has previously called for the UK, along with China, France, Japan and South Korea, to get involved, warning that “if there is no response or if it’s a negative response, I think it will be very bad for the future of Nato”.
Yet there has been no collective rush to join the US in its battle for the Strait of Hormuz. The UK has offered to send minesweeping drones, but Keir Starmer stressed that the country would not be “drawn into wider war”. France was non-committal, indicating that it might consider an international mission when “the circumstances permit”, while South Korea’s foreign ministry merely ventured that it would “carefully review the situation”. Japan’s prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, said her country had no plans to send ships to the region, while Germany’s defence minister, Boris Pistorius, put it more bluntly: “This is not our war; we have not started it.”
Beijing looks similarly unlikely to join a multinational coalition under Trump, who had been due to travel to China for a summit with Xi Jinping in late March. Trump has since requested that they delay the meeting for “a month or so” as he has to remain in Washington “because of the war”. The plaintive tone of Trump’s appeals for assistance was captured in an AI-generated video posted on X, which depicted the president holding up a cardboard sign that read, “Help me! Open Hormuz!” as a succession of world leaders drive by. First Starmer and Emmanuel Macron speed past, then Takaichi and South Korea’s Lee Jae-myung, followed by Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un, laughing at the stranded American president. The video was viewed more than two million times in the first 24 hours after it was posted. Trump insisted on 16 March that “numerous countries” had told him they were “on the way”, but when asked which these were, he said he would “rather not say yet”.
The problem, as Trump has acknowledged in recent days, is that despite the US’s formidable military capabilities, “It only takes a couple of people to screw up the strait.” According to the New York Times, Trump questioned the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Dan Caine, as to why the US could not simply use its considerable firepower in the region to forcibly reopen the shipping channel. Caine explained that the Iranian military only needed a single soldier with a missile on a speedboat to be able to target a passing tanker, or lay mines in the water around it. Iran’s geographical proximity to the strait means that, unlike in other parts of the region, where air defences might have minutes, perhaps longer, to track and intercept an incoming missile or drone, a crew protecting a tanker would have just seconds to respond. The Iranian regime has a long history of engaging in asymmetric warfare against the US and its allies, often through the use of proxy forces across the region: the Pentagon blames Iran for the deaths of at least 603 American personnel in Iraq between 2003-11. The Iranians could apply the same approach to disrupting the region’s energy exports.
Tehran does not have to hit many vessels to make this strategy effective. It just needs to maintain a sufficiently credible threat to target ships such that their operators, and crucially, insurers, decide the journey is not worth the risk. The immediate consequences are already being felt in sharply rising energy and fuel costs, which will continue to reverberate across the global economy. The Iranian regime has discovered a powerful new form of deterrence that could prove more potent than even its missile and nuclear programmes, which most non-proliferation experts agree had stopped just short of the threshold required to develop nuclear weapons. As long as some variant of the previous revolutionary leadership remains in power, it can threaten to halt shipping again, at any time, through the strait, effectively holding a Sword of Damocles over global energy prices.
That threat, in turn, creates its own logic for the US – perhaps quietly supported by many of its regional partners – to continue this war. Now that the regime has shown its readiness to disrupt one of the world’s most important waterways, and to target civilian infrastructure across the Gulf, Trump might well assess that it is even more imperative to dismantle the country’s deeply embedded power structures in the hope that a fundamentally different Iran emerges.
Securing the Strait of Hormuz militarily would be a colossal undertaking, requiring large numbers of American ground troops to seize – and hold – Iranian territory along the coast for an indefinite period of time. Beyond the fact that this would be a clear breach of international law and unlikely to be supported by many of the US’s allies, such a ground invasion would also carry significant economic and political risks for Trump and the Republican Party at home ahead of the midterm elections this November. Even among his Maga base, there are presumably many voters who would struggle to reconcile this conflict with a president who returned to power last year promising to bring prices down, and to measure his success “by the wars that we end – and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into”.
Trump’s approach to the use of military force during his presidency to date has generally been confined to limited interventions that have delivered swift results, from the assassination of the Iranian general Qasem Soleimani in 2020, to the B-2 bombing raid on Iran’s nuclear sites last year, and the capture of Venezuela’s leader, Nicolás Maduro, in January. Afterwards, Trump described watching a live feed of the Maduro raid, which he compared, admiringly, to “watching a television show”, marvelling at “the speed, the violence”.
He has now embarked on a qualitatively different form of conflict, which has succeeded in killing Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, along with many other senior officials – and at least 1,200 civilians – but appears to have left much of the rest of the regime intact. It is still unclear what the US hopes to achieve, and what Trump might consider a sufficiently impressive victory, or a sufficient threat to the American economy, to persuade him to declare an end to the war. And, indeed, whether Tehran will agree to cease hostilities. What is clear is that the Strait of Hormuz will play a much bigger role in this war, and its outcome, that anybody in Washington appears to have envisaged.
Iran’s geography hasn’t changed. The regime has long had the capability to disrupt shipping along its coast. The difference this time is the leadership’s apparent calculus that it is engaged in an existential struggle for survival, and so all options, including the strategic waterway, are in play. The US finds itself in a war for the Strait of Hormuz, whether it wanted to be or not.
[Further reading: The new world war]
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This article appears in the 18 Mar 2026 issue of the New Statesman, The new world war
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