Deadline passes for U.S. to begin blockade of Strait of Hormuz for ships that use Iranian ports
A blockade is a high-risk gamble for high reward
Trump has a track record for using high-risk pressure to seek a desired outcome. With the blockade, he hopes Iran will buckle to the U.S.’s demands in now-stalled truce talks. Once enacted, the blockade seeks to starve Iran of $200 million US in daily oil revenues.
But it’s also very risky. Let’s imagine some scenarios:
Iran could strike a U.S. warship
Most of the U.S. naval presence is out in the Gulf of Oman and Arabian Sea, further away from Iran’s coastline. That makes them safer from any Iranian attack. But it also puts them in a much wider and busier body of water where interdicting ships will be harder than in the narrow Strait of Hormuz.
Two U.S. destroyers have moved through the Strait of Hormuz and are now in the Persian Gulf. But they are most at risk because of how close they are to Iran. Were a missile to be fired at the ships from the coastline, the ship would have just seconds to respond with countermeasures.
What if a ship refuses to stop?
The U.S. navy rehearses forced boardings — often by inserting soldiers by helicopter to seize a vessel. Doing so in international waters comes very close to the line where it can be considered an act of war.
Warships will typically demand information from a ship’s master (the person in charge) over the radio. If there is no response, or the answer is unsatisfactory, the warship may escalate to the point of firing warning shots. But doing that — or even trying to physically block the path of a flammable oil-laden supertanker — is very risky.
“It’s not like you’re going to put a destroyer, necessarily, in front of a 200,000-tonne oil tanker,” Mark Norman told us. He’s the former commander of the Royal Canadian Navy. “You [are] certainly not going to shoot at it with the missiles or guns or anything like that.”
Some shipping companies will keep their vessels out of the region altogether. And all of this serves to increase the price of oil, which is no good for the Trump administration either.
