When a president declares war and then asks others to finish the job, the request tests not only military capacity but political legitimacy. Donald Trump’s public push to assemble a multinational force to reopen the Strait of Hormuz — demanding that “about seven” oil-dependent countries join a mission to police the world’s most consequential maritime chokepoint — has stalled. Key NATO and Asian partners have declined to commit. The United States now faces a narrowing set of options, none of them clean, all of them costly, and each carrying the real possibility of either a prolonged stalemate or a wider war.

The administration’s public posture has been characteristically twofold: loudly demand allied participation while simultaneously asserting that the United States can act alone if necessary. That posture has produced predictable friction. Several European and Asian governments have publicly declined to send warships or signaled deep reluctance, citing escalation risk and domestic political costs. The refusal of key partners to sign on has transformed what was intended as a legitimizing coalition into a diplomatic liability — and has left Washington holding a military operation whose costs are already falling on allies who were never consulted about whether to start it.

The options that remain are three, and each involves a distinct trade-off between speed and legitimacy that the administration has shown little appetite for acknowledging publicly.

The first is a narrow regional coalition assembled from Gulf states and, potentially, Israel. This option is considerably less available than it appears on paper. Gulf states are not simply reluctant partners weighing abstract political costs — they are active targets of Iranian retaliation who gave Tehran explicit public assurances that their territory would not be used against Iran, assurances Iran has already violated regardless. Any visible Gulf participation in a Hormuz reopening coalition, even a verbal endorsement, hands Iran a justification for escalating strikes on infrastructure that is already burning. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar are absorbing between $700 million and $1.2 billion in daily export losses. A further escalation targeting Ras Tanura, Fujairah, or Ras Laffan’s LNG facilities could be economically catastrophic in ways the current losses, severe as they are, have not yet been. Visible alignment is not a political calculation they can afford to make. It is an existential risk they cannot. In any case Gulf naval capabilities are limited and would be more symbolic than tactical.

The second option is unilateral military pressure: targeted strikes, vessel seizures, or US-escorted convoys forcing passage through contested waters. This potentially could reopen shipping lanes more quickly than diplomacy and would project the image of decisive action the administration clearly prefers. But it risks even more devastating Iranian retaliation against Gulf infrastructure that is already burning, further activation of proxy networks across the region, and the kind of sustained market shock that transforms a military operation into a domestic economic crisis. It also places high-value US warships inside a mine threat envelope that pre-war assessments warned carried significant operational risk given munitions shortfalls and limited allied support — constraints that have not been resolved by the conflict’s opening phase. It would also likely require ground troops to secure the adjacent Iranian coastline to prevent drone, missile and other attacks on warships and tankers.

The third path is a diplomatic campaign built around back-channel pressure through Oman and Qatar toward a negotiated framework, combined with insurance guarantees and alternative routing incentives for commercial operators to reduce the economic bleeding while talks proceed. Sanctions as a coercive instrument have effectively been superseded by events — Iran was already operating under near-maximum sanctions pressure before the first bomb fell, and a regime that has absorbed leadership decapitation, infrastructure destruction, and the compounding economic effects of Hormuz closure on its own export revenues is not one that will be moved by additional financial pressure. What remains is diplomacy — and diplomacy requires an interlocutor with something to gain from de-escalation. This option buys time and reduces immediate escalation risk. It also concedes the political narrative of decisive victory, requires patience this administration has not demonstrated, and operates against a backdrop in which the newly installed Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei — whose legitimacy Washington has already publicly rejected — has no obvious incentive to offer the United States an exit that validates the operation’s strategic logic.

The deeper problem running beneath all three options is the erosion of the alliance architecture that would make any of them more manageable. Publicly shaming partners for declining to join an operation they were not consulted about, treating NATO as a transactional instrument to be leveraged rather than an alliance to be maintained, and characterizing allied reluctance as disloyalty rather than legitimate strategic disagreement — all of this corrodes the trust that future cooperation depends upon. The partners whose participation would most legitimize a Hormuz reopening mission are precisely the partners who have most reason to question whether Washington’s current strategic judgment warrants their political exposure – especially in the wake of the US threatening to invade a NATO country.

The question the title poses is not merely rhetorical. It asks whether the United States can convert unilateral will into multilateral legitimacy without triggering a wider catastrophe — and whether the political costs of the available paths can be absorbed by an administration whose domestic support for the conflict was already well below 50 percent before the economic pain was felt and casualties began to mount. The credibility on the war’s core justifications has been publicly undermined by its own intelligence agencies, and Gulf partners are absorbing billions of dollars in daily losses from a conflict they explicitly tried to prevent.

The evidence so far suggests that the Gulf of Hormuz can only be reopened with great difficulty and at great cost. A quick, visible victory requires narrower partners and higher escalation risk. A stable, legitimate outcome requires a slower, more diplomatic path and the political consequences that come with accepting one. Either way, the Strait of Hormuz will be the measure of whether power without partners can truly finish what a unilateral decision started — and the world, including Washington’s closest allies, is watching the answer take shape in real time. The stakes could not be higher.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)