The bigger issue is the tankers. The US Navy isn't going to be happy patrolling the strait sure, but even if they did they wouldn't be able to protect the tankers enough for it to make sense for tankers to take the risk.

The last time this happened the US opened the strait by accidentally shooting down an Iranian passenger plane after sinking a large chunk of Iranian navy. The Iranians assumed the US shoot the passenger plane down on intentionally as a war crime and assumed the US would was planning to escalate the conflict. This fear deterred further Iranian attacks on tankers.

This isn't going to work this time because the US started the war by performing of the most serious escalations possible, a decapitation strike against top Iranian leadership in a surprise attack using a diplomatic negotiation as cover. The US did this while the strait was open and Iran was considering a peace deal.

Threats of escalation are no longer effective at deterring Iran because Iran now believes the US will take such actions regardless of what Iran does. What does Iranian leadership have to lose by staying the course? Very little. On the other hand if Iranian leadership back down, they loose all their leverage, they look weak internally, they look weak externally and the US might decide to attack them out of the blue again.

This is why decapitation strikes are generally not done. They remove options and they undermine deterrence and paint belligerents into a corner.

Modern US surface warships such as the DDG-52 Arleigh Burke class are pretty survivable. The Iranians (and their Houthi proxies) have made sustained attacks on them and don't seem to have hit anything. And a single hit would be highly unlikely to sink such as vessel: we're not talking about something like the Russian Moskva cruiser that was crewed by drunks and had inoperative defensive systems.

The real problem is that there are too few such vessels to sustain convoy escort operations. Each destroyer can only provide area air defense for a handful of merchant vessels, and they can only stay on station for a few days at a time before they have to cycle out to refuel, rearm, and conduct critical maintenance. Some of the key munitions also appear to running low. And it appears that the other Gulf states are refusing to allow use of their facilities over fears of Iranian retaliation.

Other countries generally aren't really in a position to assist as part of a coalition either. They either don't have sufficiently capable warships at all, or lack the logistics train to sustain them in the Persian Gulf / Gulf of Oman region. After the Cold War a lot of countries like the UK and Germany essentially dismantled their navies so that they now exist only as government jobs programs.

> I don't know enough about the current state of naval warfare but I've assumed this is related to the asymmetry that's emerged around protecting capital warships, especially in the scenario of a very narrow strait and a long enemy-controlled coastline.

It's not the billion-dollar warships that transport oil, it's the much more fragile and unarmed tankers.

Even if the US Navy begins full escort duty, it can't remain on-station forever. What are shippers to do afterwards? One drone strike might cause a tanker to have a very bad day, yet it's extremely difficult to so permanently degrade an entire country that they become incapable of launching sporadic attacks.

Ultimately, the status of the Strait must be settled diplomatically, and the US and Iran are each betting that the other side will blink first.

All of this was well known before the war though. The idea that navy is incredibly vulnerable modern anti-ship defenses has been a major consideration in the Taiwan situation for at least a decade (mostly in relation to the ability of the US navy to even operate in the area in a war). More recently, Ukraine has made a great show of sinking navy ships with cheap unmanned surface vehicles

Back in WWII you could sail your navy up a river and expect positive results. In the 21st century, the idea of attacking an enemy-held strait with navy doesn't work

Cheap drones taking out an AWACS is a great example of this. The US has only 16 of these and it will cost $700 million to replace, and was taken out by a drone that probably cost less than your car.

The US military is also just less powerful than it was at its peak at the end of the Cold War as well.

Still the most powerful navy in the world, but spread increasingly thin (turns out "the whole world" is quite a big place).

This is no longer Reagan's (almost) 600 ship navy, and projecting power halfway round the world is no mean feat when your opponent can lob missiles and drones at you from their back garden

suppose one has N independently developed interception systems (from detection till physical interception attempt), each with an intercept success rate of 90%.

a rudimentary calculation then gives the probability of hitting (not sinking) the ship as 0.1^N per launched missile; so it seems that given enough budget to spend on independently developed missile interception systems allows to drive down the penetration success rate arbitrarily.

Multi-billion sounds like $ 10^10; so assuming an attacker can launch say a million missile attempts then the statistical loss would be 0.1^N * 10^10 * 10^6; so the statistical loss can be driven down arbitrarily say to $ 1 by developing ~ 16 independent interception systems.

16 independently developed intercept systems doesn't sound like unobtainium for a vested nuclear power.

furthermore, the development cost of 16 independent intercept systems can be amortized over many more installations than a single ship, it can be amortized over multiple ships, multiple bases, multiple strategic assets across the globe.

> Even if a warship stops the vast majority of them, only one has to get through to sink a multi-billion dollar ship that takes a decade to replace.

Even worse. They don't need to attack _warships_. They can just attack civilian vessels, especially tanker ships, that don't have any defenses.

A hit on a tanker and the subsequent oil spill would be catastrophic.

> It’s territorial waters belonging to Iran and Oman.

The trick is that it's still an 'international strait', or a segment of water that forms the only connection between two areas of high seas -- in this case the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman. The principle of freedom of navigation establishes that innocent traffic (civilian traffic, and even warships in peacetime) have a right to use the strait to go from one body of international water to the other.

Iran may claim that it doesn't have to abide by that right, but international law is never self-executing. One question to be resolved by this war is whether Iran will ultimately recognize the right to navigation in any settlement (and then choose to abide by said settlement).

If Iran doesn't want to observe the terms of the UNCLOS (regardless of whether they have ratified it or not) then their territorial waters claims revert to the older 3NM limit. They can't have it both ways. Of course, in practice those legalisms don't matter without a means of enforcement.

> Iran hasn’t ratified UNCLOS either, and claims it is not subject to it.

Which isn't unique. Bunch of countries haven't ratified it and aren't legally bound by it but do follow it in spirit. US, Turkey, UAE, Israel etc.

It's prohibited under international law to attack a sovereign nation, like the US has done to Iran, so the point of Iran closing the Strait in response to this is very much moot.

All straits other than the Bosporus (which has some additional rights to Turkey given the proximity to a major city) are international waters for the purposes of free transit, under the Montreux Convention.

No, the Strait is international waters and always have been.

Not necessarily. It's a matter of risk. How many resources do we want to commit? Are we comfortable putting a large number of troops in Iran? Are we comfortable with major losses as we try to enforce against drones and mines?

It's not that I think any of these things are wise, but this is part of the risk calculus you make when you decide to wage war. It's more like a debate: if you don't have a plan for uncomfortable questions you're a poor debater. The US has the physical means to prevent the closure, but I think it's quite clear that this administration ignored known risks and acted recklessly. And more importantly, apparently had very little contingency planning if things didn't go their way.

> The actual blunder was exposing that weakness to the world.

The world already knew.

The real strength of the prior admins was in simply not needing the military force. The 2015 Iran nuclear deal is a relevant example here. It didn't cost the US anything.

> It's all the same capital and resources that prior administrations had.

Is it? Depending on how far back into "prior administrations" you go, the modern US Navy is a shadow of itself.

The power is there, they just don't want to pay the cost in terms of money, lives, and polling popularity. This was done on the whim of a man-child throwing a tantrum, backed by his deeply racist hatred towards Obama. There was no plan other than his usual bullying tactics. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad we are not investing insane amounts of money and large lives into this, but we absolutely could win this if we wanted to pay the cost.

> somali terrorists

Pirates are many things, maybe even criminals under international law, but terrorists they are certainly not.

I mean that is ignoring the American military experience with Islamic pirates and Islamic slavers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbary_corsairs

No one owns anything or has the right to anything.

Everything is either what you hold by force, or have a friend who holds it by force for you.

The original ship channel was in Omani waters, not Iranian. It is entirely unreasonable to consider it reasonable for Iran to mine Omani waters.

[dead]

> Frankly it's a bit absurd to complain that your ships can't transit a country's waters while you bomb them.

The issue is they block all non-Iranian ships, not just American ships. Basically nobody would have complained if they only blocked American ships.

> what appeared to be a moderate-low risk attempt.

It looks like it appeared that way to Trump. But you make it sound like it appeared that way to most people. As one of those "most people", I can say that's wrong. The reaction of most people was "WTF is Trump thinking?".

It's been clear he's not the sharpest tool in the shed for a while. But he should be surrounded by very bright people for are able to provide frank and fearless advice. Looks like he fired most of those people, and whats left have been cowered into sycophants.

>left the problem for our children to work out

What problem? Most of the 'problems' Americans talk about when referring to Iran is just the justifications fed to them by Israel.

>Britain is on the brink of falling to hostile Islamists

Ahh, I think I see where you're coming from.

>Congratulations. Free Palestine.

There it is!

Am Yisrael Lie!

The US has killed a lot of people, but it seems like everything gets much much worse every time Trump intervenes. Iran had agreed to not build nuclear weapons. Trump just didn't like that it was work done by Obama, and—in a typical act of petty spite—withdrew. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_withdrawal_from_...

Fast forward to today and the US has sustained billions and billions of dollars costs. To still not have any clear success, or to even have any promise of success possible. Nothing seems like it will be better in the end. Freedom of Navigation (Carter, 1979) seems off the table for the world now. Oil production facilities in the region have been massively impacted. The US doesn't seem able to deal with mines. And with US intelligence saying there's still vast reserves of Iranian drones and missiles to cause ongoing problems. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/05/07/...

The tough talk perspective would be vaguely endurable if there were any signs of planning or competency, if there were any possible actual ways things were going to get better here. It just looks like more blustering bullying, but there was no plan, and no objectives ever get met, have any chance to get met. Trump threw away peace long ago, sat around doing nothing while protesters were getting slaughtered, and then engaged in a very pointless act that by all indicators he thought would be a clear victory like Venezuela. Tough or not, it's ridiculously frelling stupid.

Meanwhile the US continues to itself engage in lawless international savagery on the high seas, blowing up boats at a steady pace in the Caribbean. And starving Cuba & denying them electricity. All this anti-woke anti-"mollycoddling" looks deranged, and has been actively terrible for the world, achieving nothing, and is empty fury bearing nothing.

1 - A win for the shareholders of U.S. oil companies, close to half of which aren’t even Americans, but not a win for Americans even on a purely financial basis given that they are paying more for gas and food. 2 - China hasn’t lost its source of gas and oil. They have more reserves than the rest of the world put together and can outlast every other country, and they’re still getting shipments. 3 - The exact opposite of reality. Iran’s potential to acquire nuclear weapons was one of their biggest dangers for the rest of the world. But with this the U.S. has given Iran a new actual power that had been conjectured but never realized. Control over 20% of the world’s fuel supply and large percentages of other critical raw materials.

People can try to come up with 4D chess explanations for the Trump admin's actions here all they want, but the truth is this is 0D chess.

Just a massive strategic blunder, one for the history books.

Any minor damage to China is tiny compared to the strategic loss America has undergone here

Even if this analysis were accurate, I would feel much better if the administration had intentionally gone this route rather than accidentally blundering into it.

You don’t permanently remove 20% of the worlds oil, 30% of the fertilizer while having a incredibly financialized economy and somehow get on the other side of it healthy and rich.

For one, this would be the end of the Petrodollar and with it the ability to have huge trade deficits siphoning more than 1 trillion in goods and services from the rest of the world in exchange for fancy green paper.

3 - Iran moderates are neutralized, so hardcore fanatics from IRGC take over. Loss for literally everybody.

Otherwise, 1) and 2) are true, Europe is bleeding through the nose with buying US oil and depending on its current antagonist, not smart long term situation that we need to move away asap.

Somebody in US government is making literal billions on shorts and various trade deals just before major announcements keep happening, those are not that hard to see in markets. Current top public bet on this is trumps family and his close coworkers, and their families. If you ever want a witch hunt on traitors and collaborators against US citizens and society, smart up, forget Wall street and just follow those money very directly to culprits.