“Open the Strait of Hormuz — or there will be consequences unlike anything seen before.”

That was, in essence, the message from the President of the United States on April 5, 2026, delivered bluntly and unfiltered through Truth Social. Two days later, he escalated the pressure, warning that if no agreement was reached, “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”

This harsh, maximalist language reflected a deep frustration in Washington: even the most powerful military on the planet found itself unable to quickly reopen a strait barely 39 kilometers wide, controlled by a regime it had been bombing for over 40 days. It may also have been pure pressure rhetoric, part of a negotiating style that seeks to force outcomes through overwhelming threats. On April 7, Trump accepted a Pakistan-brokered ceasefire. Iran celebrated “victory” on state television. The Strait of Hormuz was supposed to reopen. It did, briefly. Two tankers passed. Then, on April 8, Tehran closed it again in response to Israeli strikes on Lebanon. The White House called the re-closure “completely unacceptable.”

Unacceptable. But unstoppable.

On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury against Iran. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was killed in the opening strikes. The world expected a swift collapse. Within hours, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps issued VHF radio transmissions prohibiting all navigation through the Strait of Hormuz. On March 2, the IRGC officially confirmed the closure and threatened to set on fire any ship that entered the waterway.

It was the first complete closure of the Strait of Hormuz in history.

The numbers are staggering. Before the war, 135 vessels transited Hormuz daily. Between March 1 and March 25, only 116 total crossings were recorded.  A reduction of over 90 percent. Brent crude oil surged from a pre-war price of roughly $65 per barrel to a peak of $126.  More than 800 freighters remain stuck inside the Persian Gulf.  The International Energy Agency launched the largest emergency reserve release in its history.

This is not just about oil. Twenty percent of the world’s liquefied natural gas passes through Hormuz. Thirty percent of globally traded fertilizers. Twenty percent of aluminum exports. One third of the world’s helium.  The closure has been described as the largest disruption to the energy supply since the 1973 oil crisis, and the largest in the history of the global oil market.

They Told Us. We Didn’t Listen

Iran had been threatening to close Hormuz for decades. In 2011-2012, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad threatened closure in response to Western sanctions over Iran’s nuclear program. In 2018, after Trump withdrew from the nuclear deal, President Hassan Rouhani threatened to shut the waterway. In 2019, amid escalating sanctions, Iran warned it would block maritime traffic if barred from using the strait itself.

None of them followed through. So the world decided it was a permanent bluff.

It was not a bluff. It was a plan waiting for the right trigger. When the United States and Israel killed Khamenei and bombed 6,000 targets across Iran, the trigger arrived.

Even academic experts pointed to this failure of appreciation. Professor Arshin Adib-Moghaddam of the SOAS University of London wrote shortly after the closure: “It is astonishing that US and Israeli strategists were seemingly unaware of this history. They should have known how central the Strait of Hormuz has been to Iran’s strategic calculations.”

The Consensus That Failed

Prior to the onset of conflict, the Congressional Research Service reported what it called a “consensus among analysts” that the US military had the capacity to counter Iran’s forces and restore the flow of shipping if necessary.

That consensus was catastrophically wrong.

The evidence of its wrongness existed within the Pentagon’s own archives. In 2002, the US military conducted the Millennium Challenge, a massive war game simulating an attempt by a country, widely understood to be Iran, to close the Strait of Hormuz. The retired general playing the Iranian side, Paul Van Riper, used fast-attack boats, swarm tactics, and asymmetric warfare to sink much of the US fleet in the opening minutes. The Pentagon’s response was not to adapt its doctrine. It was to restart the simulation and change the rules to guarantee an American victory.

Twenty-four years later, Iran executed a version very close to what Van Riper had simulated. And it worked.

Why Hormuz Cannot Be Taken by Force

The geography is merciless. The Strait is approximately 39 kilometers wide, but the navigable channel for supertankers consists of just two lanes of 3.7 kilometers each, separated by a buffer zone. Eleven kilometers sustaining the global energy economy, pressed against the Iranian coastline.

Iran has nearly 1,600 kilometers of coastline along the Persian Gulf and Gulf of Oman. Mobile anti-ship missile batteries are hidden in hills, mountains, valleys, and offshore islands. The terrain makes detection of incoming threats extremely difficult.  The Revolutionary Guard has spent decades fortifying islands at the mouth of the Gulf. Qeshm Island, the largest in the Persian Gulf with 148,000 residents, houses underground “missile cities” excavated deep into the island’s rock formations, designed to survive aerial bombardment and maintain control of the Strait even under sustained attack.

Iran has also deployed advanced electronic warfare capabilities, including GPS spoofing: the transmission of false satellite signals that cause ship navigation systems to display entirely wrong positions. Since March, more than 1,100 vessels have been affected, suddenly appearing inside Iranian territorial waters, at airports, or even on dry land. This tactic does not sink ships, but it generates enough confusion and perceived risk to drive insurers away and halt traffic on its own.  Iran also possesses 5,000 to 6,000 naval mines that can be floated into shipping lanes from any point along its coast.

And Iran does not need to sink a single ship. It only needs to hit a few tankers to force insurers to withdraw coverage. Without insurance, no shipowner sends a vessel. The strait closes itself through perceived risk.

The Australian Strategic Policy Institute drew a devastating historical parallel. In 1915, during the First World War, the most powerful navies of the era, British and French, sent a fleet of 18 battleships to force passage through the narrow Dardanelles, controlled by Ottoman defenses on both shores. Despite their overwhelming naval superiority, the combination of mobile coastal artillery and minefields stopped the advance. Three battleships were sunk in a single day and several more were severely damaged. The naval failure forced a ground invasion at Gallipoli, which became one of the great military disasters of the twentieth century: hundreds of thousands of casualties to gain very little ground. Their conclusion on Hormuz was blunt: the Strait will reopen only with the consent of the Iranian government. No amount of US naval power can force passage or safeguard transit.

This is also why Trump’s threat to destroy Iran’s bridges and power plants had limited direct impact on reopening the Strait. None of Iran’s Hormuz capabilities depend on civilian infrastructure. The mobile missile batteries run independently of the national power grid. The naval mines need no electricity. The drones are autonomous. The underground missile cities beneath Qeshm have their own systems. Destroying bridges and power plants punishes 88 million civilians but does not open the Strait by a single nautical mile if the regime chooses not to yield. The extreme pressure may have contributed to forcing a temporary ceasefire, but as events of recent days have shown, Iran retains the ability to open or close the strait, or impose restrictions and tolls, at its convenience.

This is also the reason why, despite its technological superiority and intensive bombing campaign, the United States has not launched a massive naval operation to force the strait open. The Millennium Challenge had already warned that in a narrow strait dominated by mobile coastal defenses and electronic warfare, asymmetry strongly favors the defender. Forcing the strait open would require far more than destroying platforms: it would mean controlling the Iranian shoreline, a scenario far more costly in lives, time, and resources than anyone appears willing to undertake at this moment.

The Failure That Belongs to All of Us

Here is where honesty demands something uncomfortable.

I have written extensively about Iran’s nuclear program, about its 440.9 kilograms of enriched uranium, about its ballistic missile doctrine. I did not write about this. Not with the urgency it deserved. Not before the war. Not before the closure. I focused, like virtually every analyst covering this conflict, on centrifuges and warheads while Iran’s most effective weapon was sitting in plain sight on the map.

The intelligence community knew Iran could close Hormuz. The insurance markets knew, as premiums doubled in the days before the strikes. Iran itself signaled it, tripling its oil exports between February 15 and 20 to reduce its own exposure.  The analytical establishment treated it as a manageable side effect of a war they believed would be short and decisive.

The war was not short. The regime did not collapse as expected. And Hormuz became the defining battlefield of the entire conflict — not because Isfahan, Natanz, or Fordow were unimportant, but because the initial calculation in Washington and Jerusalem was that heavy strikes, the killing of Khamenei, and the rapid fall of the regime would automatically end the blockade of the strait.

No published analysis I have found, from any major think tank, intelligence service, or independent analyst, predicted before February 28 that Iran would hold the global economy hostage through Hormuz for over a month and that the United States military would be unable to break that hold. None. The discussion centered on Iran’s missiles, its nuclear breakout timeline, its proxy networks. Not on its capacity to weaponize geography against the entire world economy.

What happened on February 28 cannot be undone. Before that date, closing Hormuz was a theoretical threat. A bluff played every few years when Iran was under pressure. Now it is a demonstrated capability. Iran proved it can shut down 20 percent of the world’s oil supply, tank the global economy, and force the most powerful military coalition in history to accept a ceasefire on terms that leave the regime intact.

While this regime remains in power, it can play this card again. And again. And again. The next time will not require a war as provocation. A new round of sanctions, a targeted assassination, a nuclear standoff. Anything will do. The precedent is set. The world knows Iran can do it. Iran knows the world knows. That is leverage no amount of diplomacy can erase.

Not the Civilization. The Regime.

The solution to Hormuz is not the destruction of Iranian civilization. It is not the obliteration of bridges, power plants, and water systems that sustain 88 million people. It is not turning Iran into, as the President phrased it, the Stone Age.

The solution is the removal of the regime that weaponized the Strait. A government that did not define itself by confrontation with the West would have every incentive to keep the sea lanes open. An Iran integrated into the global economy would profit far more from open Hormuz than from closing it. The problem is not Iran. The problem is what governs Iran.

How to achieve regime change without destroying the country and its people beneath it — that is the hard question the CIA, Mossad, CENTCOM, and every intelligence agency involved in this war should now be answering. Given their track record on predicting Hormuz, one hopes they do better this time.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)