Hormuz in the Crosshairs
Is the Iranian blockade of the Strait of Hormuz on or off? Is the parallel U.S. blockade of Iranian ports off or on? And why do we care about the @#$!& Strait anyway?
Ok, let’s get a few things straight, which is going to take a while because both the U.S. and Iran have been spreading the fog of war to the best of our (and their) ability.
On Friday, President Trump said that the Iranians had agreed to all of his demands including the surrender of their highly-enriched uranium. Also on Friday, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said that the Strait of Hormuz was open to all shipping. That was then. This is now.
The Iranians have denied that they have made any agreements with Mr. Trump and, moreover, they have gone back on their word by closing the Strait of Hormuz. They attacked an Indian ship in the Strait effectively closing it again.
As this column has said, probably too often, there can be no peace with Iran unless the ayatollahs’ regime is overthrown.
So now we have both the Iranian blockage of the Strait and the U.S. blockade of Iranian ports in or around the Strait. The attack on the Indian ship was by elements of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) which is the terrorist arm of the ayatollahs’ regime. The IRGC also controls about 20 percent of Iran’s economy. It is a force unto itself, answerable only to the ayatollahs.
None of this should be a surprise to anyone, but it apparently took the ridiculous UK Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, and his French counterpart, Emmanuel Macron, entirely by surprise. The two of them held a meeting on Friday to supposedly manage the reopening of the Strait without U.S. assistance. In truth they were simply trying to recover their relevance in world affairs. They can do nothing without the U.S. clearing the Strait of Iranian threats.
As I wrote last week, we shouldn’t be concerned with the Strait of Hormuz but on winning the war against Iran. Mr. Trump continues to play at peacemaking by telling the world that the ayatollahs’ regime wants to make a deal with him. There may even be another round of negotiations in Islamabad, Pakistan this week. But as in the last session, no agreements can be reached and nothing the Iranian regime says or does can be relied on.
Given that fact — proven again and again in the Tehran regime’s existence for 47 years — we cannot rely on anything that the regime says. Any diplomatic agreement will be violated at the ayatollahs’ pleasure.
One of the bigger questions is where do the ayatollahs keep their highly-enriched uranium (HEU)? It may be in the ruins of their Fordow and Natanz underground nuclear facilities that we bombed in June 2025. Or it can be elsewhere. Iran is a large country, about two and a half times the size of Texas, with a total area of approximately 636,371 square miles.
If we went into, say, Fordow and Natanz to recover the HEU, that would require special operations forces as well as a Marine ground force to both dig out the HEU and recover it by flying it out of Iran. That is a huge and extended operation that would be fought against by whatever is left of the IRGC and remains of the Iranian missiles and drone forces. It’s too much for us to bite off now.
We cannot, as the president also said, go and get it if we don’t have the precise location (or locations) of it.
The Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20 percent of the world’s oil supply flowed until recently, is irrelevant to whether we win or lose this war. Its only relevance is to Europe’s oil supply. To relieve this pressure on Europe, Mr. Trump has said that he was relaxing sanctions on Russian oil (!) to make it easier on the European Union’s EUnuchs. That won’t make the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine any easier to deal with.
Moreover, the Saudis — with, presumably the help of its oil cartel neighbors — are in the midst of constructing one or more pipelines to ship oil from Yanbu on the Red Sea, bypassing Hormuz. The new pipeline is already pumping about seven million barrels a day and other pipelines may increase that capacity.
We have yet to hear from the Yemeni Houthis, another Iranian proxy, about whether they’ll interfere with those shipments. The Saudis — and we — should be totally intolerant of any such interference. We and the Israelis have bombed the Houthis. We must do it again with the Saudis’ help if they’re willing to give it. They may not be. If they aren’t willing to help bomb the Houthis to defend their pipeline and the ships carrying their oil we should leave them to their fate.
As this column has said, probably too often, there can be no peace with Iran unless the ayatollahs’ regime is overthrown. If we make “peace” with the regime, we will have to go and bomb them again. But any Democrat president won’t do that and some Republicans might not. One way or another, it will come down to more rounds of war with Iran or the overthrow of the ayatollahs’ regime or allowing Iran to be nuclear-armed.
READ MORE from Jed Babbin:
The Limits of the Bombing Pause
The Illusion of Victory: Trump, Iran, and the Limits of Military Power
Cortes’s Misread of the Ukrainian Conflict
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