US President Donald Trump has demanded help from allies to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. But even if he can assemble a major coalition it could prove very hard to end Iran’s blockade.
Iran lies along one side of the narrow strait and has responded to the US-Israeli attack by using drones, missiles and mines to make the vital waterway unsafe.
When a commander in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) warned in 2011 that cutting off the strait would be “easier than drinking a glass of water”, the threat to the strait had already been made many times before. Analysts have always regarded the closure of the strait as a measure of last resort because the move hasthe potential for retaliation against its own energy sector.
The killing of Iran’s supreme leader has changed that equation. Iranian officials describe the war as existential.
The Hormuz Strait is a narrow passage of water between Iran and Oman. Shipping lanes are just two nautical miles wide and ships must make a turn opposite Iranian islands and a mountainous coast that provides cover for Iranian forces, according to shipping broker SSY Global. Iran’s conventional navy has largely been destroyed but the IRGC still have plenty of options including fast-attack craft, mini submarines, mines and even jet skis packed with explosives, said Tom Sharpe, a retired Royal Navy commander.
Tehran has the capacity to produce around 10,000 drones a month, according to Centre for Information Resilience, a research group.
Escorting three or four ships a day through the Strait would be feasible in the shortterm using seven or eight destroyers providing air cover, but doing so for months would require more resources, Sharpe said. Even if Iran’s capacity to deploy ballistic missiles, drones and floating mines were destroyed, ships would still face a threat from suicide operations, said Adel Bakawan, director of European Institute for Middle East and North African Studies.
Trump said on Sunday he expected many countries would send warships and demanded that they do so, adding that his administration was in touch with seven countries about helping. That step came a week after he ordered the US International Development Finance Corporation to provide insurance and guarantees for shipping companies.
Yemen’s Houthis, a group allied with Iran but with a far smaller military arsenal at their disposal, shut down most traffic passing through the Red Sea for more than two years despite US and EU naval efforts. Most shipping companies are still using a far longer route via the southern tip of Africa. An EU-led force has been more successful at countering piracy off Somalia’s coast, but that has been against forces far less well-equipped than IRGC.
The UAE and Saudi Arabia have sought to find ways to bypass the strait by building more oil pipelines. But those are not currently operational and an attack on an east-west Saudi pipeline by Houthi militia in 2019 showed those alternatives were also vulnerable.
