The USS McFaul, an Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyer, passes through the Strait of Hormuz in July 2023. By closing Hormuz and other critical waterways at will, Iran has attempted to coerce the United States into agreeing to its demands, and degrade America’s credibility as a security guarantor. (US Navy/Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Kerri Kline)

The Strait of Hormuz Closure Is Only the Beginning

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If the United States fails to keep Hormuz and the Bab el-Mandeb open, it proves to the world—and its allies in the Middle East—that it cannot be relied upon.

For four decades, American war planners have rehearsed the same nightmare scenario in the Strait of Hormuz: Iranian mines, missiles, and fast-attack boats closing off the strait to commercial traffic, cutting off one-fifth of the world’s oil supply and sending a shock through every economy on Earth.

It is difficult to overstate the impact this scenario has had on American strategic planning. War games have been built around such a crisis, and US aircraft carriers have been repeatedly dispatched to the Middle East to head it off. Preventing an Iranian closure of the strait became the single most important organizing principle of US naval strategy in the Middle East.

That scenario is now in need of an update—not merely because Iran’s ability to close the strait is now clear to all, but because Tehran has developed a strategy that is even more effective. Aided by allied proxy groups elsewhere in the region, Iranian leaders are no longer thinking about Hormuz in isolation. They have concluded that a Hormuz closure could be supercharged by pressure on other notable choke points—most notably the Bab el-Mandeb at the southern terminus of the Red Sea, which can be closed at will by the Iran-allied Houthis in Yemen. Iran is constructing a maritime strategy that binds Hormuz and the Bab el-Mandeb into a single pressure system, in which the disruption of global commerce could become a regular instrument of statecraft rather than a distant doomsday option.

Can Iran Actually Shut Down the Strait of Hormuz? It Doesn’t Matter

The danger was never Iran’s ability to shut down both straits outright. Against the US Navy and its partners, full-on closure for long periods of time is probably not sustainable. The danger, rather, is in Iran’s ability to make passage through those waters persistently and unpredictably unsafe.

In a globalized economy, Iran does not need to close the waterway in order to win; it only needs to prohibitively raise the cost of using it. A naval mine or drone costing tens of thousands of dollars can........

© The National Interest