President Trump either cannot or will not force open the Strait of Hormuz. And once Iran's ability to close the Strait of Hormuz is established, that ability will surely be employed again, even if the current leadership agrees to reopen the Strait of Hormuz at present in return for a package of goodies from the United States, including sanctions relief.
Iranian experts Eric S. Edelman, Reuel Marc Gerecht, and Ray Takeyh write in the Dispatch: "Freedom of navigation ends unless Washington can find the military means and the will necessary to sustain convoys, even under hostile fire." And that would require, minimally, maintaining the large US armada in the Persian Gulf.
With Trump appearing desperate to negotiate an end to the war, despite the heavy damage inflicted on Iran and its economy, Ali Nikzad, the deputy speaker of the Iranian parliament, had a point when he declared, "The Strait of Hormuz is Iran's atomic bomb." While Iran's nuclear program has likely been set back a decade at least by the American bombing of the Fordow reactor last July and Israel's elimination of leading Iranian nuclear scientists, control over the Strait of Hormuz offers immediate and much simpler power.
THERE ARE A NUMBER of possible explanations for the American failure to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. The first is that the US military had no plan for doing so. President Trump thought — wrongly — that the decapitation of Iran's leadership at the outset of the war and the large-scale bombing that followed would either force the remaining leadership to capitulate to his demands or would result in a popular revolt that would seize the reins of power. That confidence was misplaced: Air power alone has never won a war, with the possible exception of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And when neither of the hoped-for outcomes came about, there simply was no Plan B.
To many, myself included, the possibility that there was no Plan B seemed far-fetched in the extreme. After all, the United States has been dealing with the possibility of Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz ever since the so-called Tanker War, a sub-theater of the larger Iraq-Iran war between 1981 and 1988, during the Reagan presidency. Surely, the US military had on hand multiple plans for assuring freedom of navigation in the Persian Gulf through the Strait of Hormuz.
Not until Trump announced a naval blockade of Iranian oil shipments many weeks into the war did it dawn on the "there is a plan" school that just maybe there wasn't. That blockade was designed to further cripple the Iranian economy by reducing revenues by $400 million dollars a day and to force Iran to eventually close down its oil production, for want of storage facilities. But if there were a plan to prevent Iran from closing the Strait of Hormuz, wouldn't that blockade have been instituted at the outset?
Even if there was a plan to maintain freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz, Edward Luttwak, an internationally recognized expert in military strategy, suggests another reason why it was not acted upon: the fear of incurring military casualties. In his essay in the online journal UnHerd on May 8, "America has lost the will to fight: Its heroic age is over," Luttwak argues that an American operation to take control of the Strait of Hormuz required capturing a series of small islands in the Persian Gulf in order to deny those islands to Iranian anti-ship missile teams.
Why, then, were the islands not captured? Luttwak's answer has grave implications far beyond the contours of the present war: "The historically unprecedented but now widespread refusal to accepts the risk of casualties, even if very few, even if warranted by the most important interests."
Luttwak terms this refusal the United States' "post-heroic" syndrome, and he attributes it to the rapid decline in female fertility. "When mothers habitually had three or more children, one might be lost in combat but the family lived on. Now, few women had two children, let alone three.... [Therefore] most combat losses result in the extinction of a family."
Whatever the explanation for that "post-heroic" syndrome, it clearly affects both American political parties, and is no less strong among Republicans than among Democrats. Trump campaigned against "forever wars" and mocked the democracy-building of George W. Bush in Iraq. Those campaign promises are not synonymous with classical American isolationism, but they have been understood as such by many on the right, not the least of them being Vice President J.D. Vance.
A third possibility: Trump may have decided that the cost of forcing open the Strait and keeping it open are simply prohibitive. Or perhaps the United States lacks the military means to do so, at least without dangerously drawing down its stockpiles of weapons that may yet be needed if China moves to take over Taiwan.
Eli Lake in the Free Press ("The Real Reason Trump Needs a Deal with Iran," May 25) suggests that the United States has found itself lacking some of the crucial military assets that it would need to capture the Strait of Hormuz, or having done so, to hold them. Lake states as fact, not speculation, that the military is running low on precision munitions and missile interceptors, and does not have enough to defend its Gulf allies and American bases in the region. An Iranian attack drone recently struck the outer edge of a nuclear power plant in the United Arab Emirates.
In addition, America may lack the offensive weapons needed, such as the Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS), which could target Iran's military facilities along the shore of the Strait, while remaining out of range of Iranian missile defenses. The US still has plenty of Joint Direct Attack Munitions, which are of shorter range and usually fired from low-flying aircraft. While Iranian air defenses have proven incapable of reaching high-flying aircraft, they have been able to hit lower-flying aircraft, as they did in April. Approximately forty manned and unmanned American aircraft have been damaged or destroyed by Iran.
Finally, the drones, short-range missiles, and speedboats used to harass shipping are all stored in underground bunkers. (Apparently, the entire Iranian navy was not sunk, as Trump claimed early on.) While the United States, according to Lake, has about 1,000 bunker-busters at its disposal, Lake speculates that they may being hoarded in case they are needed at some future point for possible use against China. He notes that the head of Central Command, Admiral Bradley Cooper, testified before Congress that such weapons are needed in an era when "everybody is going underground."
At the very least, one has to wonder why such weapons were not deployed against Iran's coastal facilities, of which 30 out of 33 remain active.
OVER MEMORIAL DAY WEEKEND, after a number of ceasefires, President Trump announced that a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Iran was imminent. That announcement followed warnings by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent of the global economic damage caused by the prolonged closure of Strait of Hormuz and from numerous GOP politicos that the Republicans were headed for a shellacking in the midterm elections, at least in part due to high gas prices.
What was included in that MOU remains somewhat murky, but numerous leaked versions point to a restoration of free transport in the Strait of Hormuz and removal by Iran of mines previously laid, in return for the lifting of the American blockade of Iran's oil shipments. Iran was also said to have agreed to the removal of its weapons-grade nuclear fuel by a mechanism to be worked out by the parties over 60 days following the signing of the MOU. Such Iranian promises to foreswear nuclear enrichment are worthless, based on long experience.
By the next day, the president was not so sure about the likelihood of the deal, particularly as the Iranians contradicted virtually everything Trump said. Trump insisted that sanctions relief would only commence as the Iranian nuclear fuel is turned to dust, and only to that extent. The Iranians insisted on immediate sanctions relief.
The negotiations began to resemble those over the JCPOA, during which the Americans repeatedly announced various "red lines," followed by Iranian rejection of those terms, and concluding with American agreement to the Iranian position. Though Trump long ago denounced the JCPOA as the worst deal ever negotiated, it is far from clear that the supposed author of The Art of the Deal is doing much better.
Daniel Pomerantz of Reality Check neatly summarizes the pattern of the negotiations:
1) Iran makes impossible demands;
2) President Trump blusters about an impending attack and moves military assets into position;
3) after some delay, Pakistani mediators implore Trump to wait a little while longer, and promise the Iran is desperate to make a deal;
4) After even more delay, Iranian officials verbally convey exactly what Trump wants to hear, such as giving up their nuclear program;
5) After even more delay, Iran presents a document that completely contradicts their verbal promises;
6) rinse and repeat.
But each time the cycle repeats, Iran gains more time, the American midterms draw closer, and the strain on the US and global markets grow.
Even the terms of the MOU as leaked have raised great concern, especially in Israel, where Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is reported to have told his closest advisors that he has little or no ability to influence Trump's negotiating posture. Nowhere in the various leaked versions of the MOU is there any mention of Iran agreeing to limit its ballistic missile program in any fashion, or of restrictions on the billions of dollars of likely sanctions relief going to its regional proxies — Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Hamas. Moreover, American negotiators have agreed to link Israel to the 60-day ceasefire agreement, though it does appear that Trump will be tolerant of Israeli responses to the continual drone attacks on Israeli soldiers and on northern communities.
Equally displeased with the leaked version of the MOU were the so-called Iran hawks. Mike Pompeo, secretary of state in Trump's first term, described early reports of the MOU as "straight out of the Wendy Sherman–Robert Malley–Ben Rhodes playbook," referring to the senior Obama administration officials who helped to craft the 2015 JCPOA with Iran. Senator Ted Cruz posted on X that it would be a "disastrous mistake," if it ended with "an Iranian regime — still run by Islamists who chant 'death to America' — now receiving billions of dollars, being able to enrich uranium and develop nuclear weapons, and having effective control over the Strait of Hormuz."
His Senate colleague Lindsay Graham warned repeatedly over the Memorial Day weekend that ending the war now would grant Iran a victory it did not earn on the battlefield. Trump's first choice for national security advisor, Michael Flynn, posted on X that nothing the Iranian regime says about limiting its nuclear program can be trusted, and that the $25 billion in likely sanctions relief and unfrozen assets would constitute "tribute" to a terrorist regime. Senator Roger Wicker, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, posted, "The rumored 60-day ceasefire — with the belief that Iran will negotiate in good faith — would be a disaster." (All quotes from Eli Lake's May 25 column in the Free Press.)
Meanwhile, the Gulf states only started pressing Trump for a diplomatic reopening of the Strait when they lost faith in his willingness to achieve anything by military means, despite the repeated threats to destroy Iran. Those doubts were no doubt bolstered by the US inability to protect the Gulf states oil infrastructure or even its own military bases on their soil from Iranian missiles. The estimated damage to American bases ranges as high as $15 billion. With little to look for in terms of American protection or its ability to neuter Iran, the chances that additional Gulf states will acquiesce to Trump's face-saving attempts to get them to sign on to the Abraham Accords are approximately zero, in the estimation of Tablet's Park MacDougald.
WHERE DOES THIS leave us, with the final results of negotiations yet to be determined? Let us just hope that the Chinese have not been led to believe that the United States lacks the necessary will or capabilities to confront them should they move to seize Taiwan. On the other hand, perhaps America's inability to open the Strait of Hormuz will convince the Chinese how vulnerable they are to the closure of the Taiwan Strait, through which almost all their oil shipments pass.