Trump Flips the Script in the Strait of Hormuz

What a difference a week makes. Last Tuesday, Donald Trump’s critics were crowing that Iran had achieved a strategic victory in its war with the United States, leveraging control of the Strait of Hormuz to force the president to accept a ceasefire and return to the negotiating table. Now Trump has flipped the script — by using the ceasefire to seize control of the Strait of Hormuz.

While the U.S. was meeting with Iranian officials in Islamabad, Trump ordered U.S. destroyers to travel through the strait into the Persian Gulf to help enforce a military blockade of all traffic entering and exiting Iranian ports. Before, Iran had been allowing its own ships to pass through the narrow waterway while preventing U.S. and allied vessels from transiting.

The brilliance of this plan is hard to overstate: The blockade accomplishes virtually the same thing as would a military operation to seize Kharg Island (through which almost all of Iran’s oil passes) without the risks involved in deploying U.S. ground forces — effectively shutting down Iran’s oil exports and cutting off its energy revenue. That will place an economic stranglehold on Iran. The U.S. quarantine of Iran’s ports will cost Iran about $435 million a day in economic damage, according to an analysis by Miad Maleki, a former official with the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control.

The blockade allows the president to twist Iran’s arm to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Moreover, because he is now blocking Iran’s energy exports to China, which gets 45 to 50 percent of its crude oil and 30 percent of its liquefied natural gas imports through the strait, Trump can give Beijing incentive to join him in that pressure campaign.

Meanwhile, Trump is preparing for Phase II of his operation: a U.S.-led international escort mission. He is using the ceasefire to clear mines Iran laid (and then lost track of), allowing the U.S. Navy to establish a safe route through the waterway. Once this work is finished, Trump can give Iran’s leaders an ultimatum: If they do not reopen the strait to all shipping, then the U.S. will open it by military force — and allow passage of all commercial ships except those from Iran.

Think of what that means. Before, Iran was allowing its own ships to pass through the strait, but not those of the U.S. and its allies. Trump’s plan would reverse that: U.S. and allied ships would be permitted to pass, but Iranian ships would not. Instead of running a highly profitable protection racket — collecting up to $2 million per ship “tolls” for safe passage — Iran would lose hundreds of millions a day in forgone trade and revenue.

And Iran would be powerless to do anything about it.

If Iran fires on U.S.-escorted ships, it will be responsible for breaking the ceasefire and thus unleashing the U.S. military to rain hell on the regime once again. Moreover, Iran’s leaders can have no confidence that any attacks they launch on ships passing through the strait will succeed. Adm. Brad Cooper, the head of U.S. Central Command, has a plan to defeat Iranian attacks on commercial ships using a combination of military strikes, anti-drone technology and electronic warfare.

In other words, Trump is turning Iran’s strategy to leverage the strait completely on its head. He has also utterly embarrassed his critics, who were praising Iran’s brilliance in leveraging control of the strait to deliver Trump a strategic defeat. Suddenly, Iran doesn’t look so brilliant or victorious after all.

The idea that Iran was winning was absurd even before Trump’s blockade. Since the beginning of major combat operations, Centcom reports, the United States and Israel have destroyed: 80 percent of Iran’s air defense systems, more than 450 ballistic missile storage facilities, more than 800 Shahed attack drone storage facilities, more than 2,000 command-and-control nodes, over 90 percent of Iran’s navy, 95 percent of its mines, 90 percent of its weapons factories (including every factory that produced Shahed attack drones and drone guidance systems), 80 percent of Iran’s missile facilities and solid rocket motor production capability, and 80 percent of its nuclear industrial base.

And when the ceasefire is over, the combined force will destroy what remains. Iran is suffering what Cooper calls a “generational military defeat” — losing, in less than 40 days, a military it had built over 40 years. Its only card was its control of the Strait of Hormuz, and now Trump has taken that away, too.

What’s left to do? U.S. military commanders had about two weeks’ worth of targets left when the ceasefire took effect; for Iran to be fully crippled militarily, those targets must be destroyed before the war concludes. When the ceasefire is scheduled to end in a week’s time, Trump should direct Cooper to eliminate what remains of Iran’s battered forces and defense industrial capacity. He should then either seize Kharg Island or blockade it — and use it as leverage to get Iran to hand over what the president calls its nuclear “dust.” If Iran refuses, Trump should destroy Kharg, so that the regime has no resources to rebuild with, and launch an operation to seize or otherwise establish control of the nuclear material ourselves.

With these final steps, the president can bring the war to a final and decisive conclusion — and a victory even the most die-hard Trump critic cannot deny.