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The Hormuz blockade is a throwdown the US can’t win

Energy blockades are acts of war. If in doubt, recall Pearl Harbor, which took place roughly six months after the US imposed a total oil embargo on Japan. They also take time to work.

For a man who understands the power of leverage, Donald Trump is being remarkably slow to recognize the influence Iran has gained in the Strait of Hormuz. The US president’s threat to complete its closure by blocking Iranian exports through it, too, is far more likely to drag him deeper into a politically damaging war than to force Tehran’s capitulation.

Energy blockades are acts of war. If in doubt, recall Pearl Harbor, which took place roughly six months after the US imposed a total oil embargo on Japan. They also take time to work. So the already fragile two-week Gulf ceasefire is in trouble and all that’s clear is that the blockade itself is a throwdown the US can’t win.

Stopping Iranian and other countries’ oil exports through Hormuz — a waterway for about a fifth of the world’s oil supply — makes a kind of sense. Iran’s economy depends heavily on revenue from trade via the passage, and it was always extraordinary that the US had got itself into a position in which only Iranian crude and other goods were being let through. In theory, a blockade could increase pressure on Tehran without forcing a major war escalation.

But this works only if you believe the Islamic Republic won’t respond by hitting more energy assets around the Gulf, and will fold under the resulting pressure before Trump does. Both propositions seem so vanishingly unlikely that it’s hard to understand what it is the White House hopes to gain by trying.

Trump went........

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