Iran’s blockade fight around the Strait of Hormuz is emerging as a test case for President Donald Trump’s preferred coercive tool: using the U.S. Navy and related military actions to pressure adversaries. While Trump has previously pursued blockades and maritime pressure against Venezuela and Cuba, experts say the Middle East conflict differs in the geography, the military threat Iran poses, and the economics of what happens if the standoff drags on.
They point first to Hormuz’s strategic leverage. The AP reported that unlike the Caribbean situations, Iran “choked off a crucial trade route for energy shipments,” and experts said that makes the longer dispute run more likely to impose wide global economic costs. The coverage also said Tehran’s leverage over Hormuz matters politically for Trump, including because rising costs for U.S. drivers and households could complicate the president’s ability to sustain the effort into an election year. Max Boot, a military historian and senior fellow for national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, framed the standoff in terms of endurance.
“It’s really a question now of which country, the U.S. or Iran, has a greater pain tolerance,” Boot said, according to the report. The article said that the U.S. has continued to raise the intensity of its pressure in the strait, including actions that escalate at sea as the war grinds on.
On April 23, the AP reported that the U.S. military announced the seizure of another tanker associated with the smuggling of Iranian oil, a day after Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guards took control of two vessels in the waterway. The article also said Trump ordered the U.S. military to “shoot and kill” Iranian small boats laying sea mines in the strait. Still, experts told AP that the situation is not directly analogous to how maritime pressure played out in Venezuela and Cuba.
Todd Huntley, director of Georgetown University’s National Security Law Program, said Venezuela’s outcome was shaped by a different driver than ships seized at sea. The AP report said Huntley pointed to the U.S. raid that captured Nicolás Maduro as having more to do with the Venezuela success than blockading or seizing tanker cargo alone. Huntley also argued that the differences across the conflicts are major enough that the Iran case is not a simple template.
Huntley said “There are some major differences,” according to the report. He described those differences as geographic, military and political, while also acknowledging that the blockade against Iran has delivered a severe economic blow, including by stopping some freighters from importing supplies. Still, the same reporting said Iran has continued to move some sanctioned oil, citing ship-tracking companies.
The AP said Iran rejected Trump’s demands to reopen the strait and has continued firing on ships “again this week.” It also reported that stalled shipments through Hormuz sent gasoline prices higher “far beyond the region,” while raising the cost of food and other goods. In that context, Salvatore Mercogliano, a maritime history professor at Campbell University in North Carolina, warned that blockades are usually not a stand-alone solution.
“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,” the AP report said.
The effectiveness question has also landed on competing assessments of whether the U.S. is fully controlling the flow of traffic. Adm. Brad Cooper, who heads U.S. Central Command, claimed last week that “no ship has evaded U.S. forces,” according to AP. The command overseeing the Middle East said it directed 31 ships to turn around or return to port as of Wednesday.
Merchant shipping groups, however, have been skeptical. The AP report said Lloyd’s List Intelligence described a “steady flow of shadow fleet traffic” passing in and out of the Persian Gulf, including 11 tankers with Iranian cargo that left the Gulf of Oman outside the strait since April 13. Windward, another maritime intelligence firm, told AP that Iranian traffic continues “via deception,” and Mercogliano said ships have multiple options, including spoofing location tracking data or traveling through Pakistani territorial waters, while the military faces the challenge of screening a high volume of shipping traffic.
Mercogliano and other experts also pointed to time horizons. Huntley said the last time the U.S. mounted a blockade similar to the one aimed at Iran was during the Kennedy administration in the early 1960s against Cuba, noting that it “wasn’t even called a blockade” at the time. “We called it quarantine,” he said, according to AP.
Boot added that historically, blockades tend to require long-term impacts rather than quick results. “But they tend to be very long-term impacts, whereas Trump is looking for short-term, quick results,” Boot said, according to the report. Boot also said Trump may have drawn the wrong lesson from Venezuela, telling AP that there was “no Delcy Rodríguez in Cuba or Iran,” and that the Venezuela case reflected a “unique set of circumstances” rather than a generalizable blockade strategy.
He said, “There is no Delcy Rodríguez in Cuba or Iran,” according to AP. “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,” Boot said, as reported by AP.