Mother Jones
Trump: Fine, We’ll Blockade the Strait Too
Unable to quickly remove Iranian mines from the Strait of Hormuz—the world’s most important oil transit corridor—with its current equipment, the US is switching tack: President Trump announced Sunday in two Truth Social posts that the Navy will launch its own blockade of “any and all Ships trying to enter, or leave” the passage, and intercept those that have paid Iran’s tolls to cross.
The announcement will almost certainly mean a further spike in oil prices when markets open on Monday, and it’s a move that does little to help Trump’s sagging domestic approval, leaving much of Iran’s hold on the global oil supply intactGasoline costs will keep rising. Military commitments and expenses, will keep growing. The MAGA coalition will continue to crack.
Meanwhile, Trump’s two main promises on Hormuz this weekend, to clear Iranian sea mines from the strait—efforts he said were “starting” in another Truth Social post Saturday—and to detain “every vessel in International Waters that has paid a toll to Iran,” are dubious.
That’s first and foremost because the US doesn’t have the resources to get rid of the sea mines. State-of-the-art demining vessels, if left alone by Iran, could clear the strait in a matter of weeks or months. But the Navy has no “significant mine clearing capability,” the Wall Street Journal reported in March, and its unmanned anti-mine vessels are unreliable even in clear waters that pose far less of a challenge than Hormuz.
Detaining the ships that pay Iran’s tolls also seems pretty unlikely. To pull it off, Trump seems poised to try to open his own safe channel across the strait, competing with the route Iran has set up to guide ships through the mine-filled waters: Two US destroyers apparently crossed Hormuz on Saturday “to demonstrate to commercial tankers that the waterway could be transited safely.”
A safe alternate path under American management would force oil buyers to pick a side: Iran or the US.
Among the problems with that plan: First, China buys most of Iran’s oil. Will the US actually detain those tankers if they pay Iran’s tolls, and risk escalating a series of showdowns with China that have so far not gone well for Trump? Second, many ships on the Iranian route do not pay tolls. How will Washington check which ones did pay in order to detain them? And what will it do with the ships: fine them, effectively charging a second toll?
Given those realities, it seems that all Trump did on Sunday was announce changes that make an already volatile situation more difficult. Trump’s blockade makes safe transit across the waterway even more confusing and uncertain—raising questions of whether deadly mines will still linger in the strait, of how to safely move oil, and virtually ensuring that crude prices will remain damagingly high for months to come.