What ‘Winning the Battle of Hormuz’ Got Wrong
The American Conservative · R · trust 43/100
The Strait was open before the war began.
Loading the Elevenlabs Text to Speech AudioNative Player... Repeat after me: The Strait of Hormuz was open before the Iran War began. Sing it, shout it, say it three more times—you might even record yourself whispering the phrase then listen to the softly spoken words of wisdom as you fall asleep.
I doubt the architects and supporters of this big dumb war will take this advice, but if they did, they might finally get the message. For now, they’re still boasting that the U.S. is winning “the battle of Hormuz”—hardly a stupendous accomplishment given the fact which you are, once more, implored to recite:
The Strait of Hormuz was open before the Iran War began.
The “battle of Hormuz” phrase, as best I can tell, was coined by Mark Dubowitz of the uber-hawkish Foundation for Defense of Democracies. I first heard him use it in late March during a podcast conversation he had with Ross Douthat, at the time a New York Times opinion writer.
Back then—as it was becoming obvious that the American-Israeli strikes were not about to topple the Islamic Republic—Dubowitz argued the U.S. should prepare for a fierce battle to wrest control of the Hormuz from Iran, which effectively closed the waterway within days of the war starting. More recently, he’s taken to arguing that Iran has already lost the battle.
Senior White House officials too have emphasized American achievements in the Hormuz. “The Straits of Hormuz are open,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Wednesday. “There’s almost as much oil flowing out now as there was before this conflict began, so they’ve lost complete control of the Straits.”
To be sure, more tankers have been getting through and more oil has been getting out, while Iran struggles to ship its own exports because of a U.S. blockade. But contra Dubowitz, the battle isn’t yet won, as events of the last two weeks have made clear. In that time, Iran has escalated its attacks on Hormuz shipping—striking a dozen or so vessels—and at least one ship has turned tail on orders from Iran’s Revolutionary Guards.
The escalation vindicates Middle East experts who have been offering a much less optimistic assessment than Dubowitz. “I don’t think you can win a battle until the battle is over,” Rosemary Kelanic of Defense Priorities told The American Conservative . “And I think we can continue to fight this battle for a long period of time.”
A prolonged battle would be costly. The U.S. is spending an estimated $42 million per day, or around $1.3 billion per month, enforcing its blockade on Iranian maritime exports. Some additional resources are needed to help other countries move their oil through the waterway—surveillance, air support, guiding vessels through the darkness of night—though reliable figures are hard to come by and to disaggregate from the blockade.
Under the memorandum of understanding signed in June by President Donald Trump and Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian, the Islamic Republic was empowered to administer the strait and perhaps, eventually, charge fees for passage. But the MOU broke down after the U.S. tried to set up a new shipping corridor near the Omani coastline, outside Iranian control.
“We have something like a third of deployed U.S. naval assets in the world working on this mission to blockade Iran and get oil through the Strait of Hormuz, so it’s highly resource-intensive,” said Kelanic. “The American taxpayer is footing the bill instead of having the world pay tolls.”
And the costs transcend U.S. government spending. The price of Brent crude, an international benchmark, lately hovers around $100 per barrel, up from around $70 just before the war. Some commentators have asked why global oil prices remain so stubbornly elevated even as exports via the Strait of Hormuz approach pre-war levels.
Kelanic suggested the question evinces a fundamental misunderstanding (somewhat embarrassing for me, since I asked it). “It’s moving through the Strait because prices are a hundred dollars a barrel, right?” Kelanic said. “That’s the price the market will bear to deal with the risk from Iran, because the U.S. evidently cannot prevent Iran from attacking over and over and over again.”
That’s bad news for Trump—and for Republican candidates in this year’s midterms, for whom elevated prices at the pump have created powerful headwinds. Catch-22: Getting more oil through the Strait of Hormuz doesn’t translate into lower prices, since higher prices are needed to incentivize captains and sailors, carriers and insurers, to brave the sea passage.
And there’s another problem: “Ships are ferrying almost as much crude oil out of the Strait of Hormuz as they were before the Iran war,” the Wall Street Journal reported Monday. “But they are barely moving any barrels of the fuel the world needs most: diesel.”
As if all that wasn’t enough cold water to pour on Dubowitz’s grand pronouncements, top experts have been speculating that some countries are covertly paying tolls for passage (a proposition Kelanic considered unlikely).
And Trita Parsi of the Quincy Institute, based on his conversations with Iranian insiders, suspects Tehran is allowing the strait to stabilize—to maximize the shock to energy markets when it initiates a new round of hostilities.
We shall see. In any case, it’s clear by now that “winning the battle of Hormuz” was a myopic framing that conveniently enabled supporters of this catastrophic war to argue for its continuation, and to claim some kind of victory. The rhetoric, evidently, failed to move American voters: Opposition to the consistently unpopular war just hit an all-time high.
Perhaps Americans never lost sight of a fact most inconvenient for the war hawks: The Strait of Hormuz was open before the Iran War began.
Andrew Day is the senior editor of The American Conservative . He has a PhD in political science from Northwestern University. You can follow him on X @AKDay89 .
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