The Trump administration is leaning on the U.S. Navy’s ability to interdict maritime trade as it pressures Iran, extending a strategy President Donald Trump has also favored toward Venezuela and Cuba. But analysts said the Middle East’s geography and the character of Iran’s leverage make the Strait of Hormuz campaign harder to treat as a copy of past Caribbean pressure efforts.
Several experts said the core difference is that Iran can choke a critical energy corridor, meaning the longer the standoff lasts the more the global economy can suffer. They said the Strait of Hormuz, where Iran can affect traffic, creates an economic feedback loop that is distinct from the dynamics analysts associate with blockades or sanctions aimed at Cuba and Venezuela.
Max Boot, a military historian and senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, framed the conflict as a contest of endurance. “It’s really a question now of which country, the U.S. or Iran, has a greater pain tolerance,” Boot said.
Analysts also described the military and political context as less comparable. Unlike the Caribbean scenarios, they said Iran poses a broader and more sustained military threat that can require the United States to maintain operations far from U.S. shores, rather than a short, geographically contained campaign.
As the pressure campaign has escalated, the U.S. has highlighted interdictions in the strait. On Thursday, the U.S. military announced the seizure of another tanker associated with smuggling Iranian oil, a day after Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guards took control of two vessels in the waterway. Trump also announced he had ordered U.S. forces to “shoot and kill” Iranian small boats laying sea mines in the strait.
Even so, several analysts and shipping-focused monitoring firms said the blockade is not sealing off trade in the way officials suggested. Adm. Brad Cooper, who heads U.S. Central Command, claimed last week that “no ship has evaded U.S. forces,” and the command said it directed 31 ships to turn around or return to port as of Wednesday. But merchant shipping groups and maritime intelligence firms argued that Iranian traffic has continued through the Persian Gulf and into and out of the region.
Lloyd’s List Intelligence said “a steady flow of shadow fleet traffic” had passed in and out of the Persian Gulf, including 11 tankers carrying Iranian cargo that left the Gulf of Oman outside the strait since April 13. Windward said this week that Iranian traffic continues to flow “via deception.” Mercogliano, a maritime history professor at Campbell University in North Carolina, said Iranian ships can use methods such as spoofing location tracking data or moving through Pakistani territorial waters, while noting the military has the challenging task of screening large volumes of shipping.
While analysts said Iran has rejected Trump’s demands to reopen the strait and has continued firing on ships, they also said the blockade’s economic effect can create political pressure in Washington. They pointed to stalled shipments through the strait sending gasoline prices higher and raising the costs of food and a wide array of other products, creating an election-year problem for Trump before November’s elections.
Salvatore Mercogliano described blockades as one instrument within a broader conflict toolkit rather than a stand-alone political lever. “Blockades are usually just one tool of a mechanism used in a conflict,” Mercogliano said. “They can be important. But it’s only one element. And I don’t think it’s going to be enough to convince the Iranians.”
Experts said history suggests blockades tend to require time. Todd Huntley, director of Georgetown University’s National Security Law Program, said the last U.S. blockade-like action similar to the one focused on Iranian ships was during the Kennedy administration in the early 1960s, when it was “called quarantine.” He also said the difference with Trump’s approach matters, noting that some U.S. strategies are built for short-term results.
Boot added that the Biden-era comparisons people drew from Venezuela may not translate directly to Iran. He said Trump likely saw the Venezuela campaign as evidence that the blockade-style approach could force leadership change, but he argued the Venezuela outcome was tied to other factors, including a U.S. military raid that captured Nicolás Maduro and later cooperation from his vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, who became acting president. “There is no Delcy Rodríguez in Cuba or Iran,” Boot said. “I think his success in Venezuela led him astray, thinking that this was a template that could be replicated elsewhere. He sees it as a huge success at little cost. And, in fact, it turns out to be a unique set of circumstances.”