Trump leans on naval blockade, sanctions to force Iran’s hand

President Trump’s efforts to bring the Iran war to an end have faltered several times.

The U.S. military’s limited airstrike campaign did not move the needle. Trump’s threats to wipe Iran off the face of the earth didn’t either.

Every time there appears to be a breakthrough in diplomatic talks, a wrench gets thrown in the mix, halting progress. 

Now the president is turning his focus on economic warfare, leaning on crippling sanctions and a U.S. naval blockade to force Iranians to the table in hopes of reopening the Strait of Hormuz. 

Regional experts who spoke with The Hill said the Trump administration might not get what it wants out of the efforts, some panning the strategy, while others argued it is the only hand Washington has left to play.

William Wechsler, the former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Combating Terrorism, said the U.S. going back to war with Iran would have “significant risks,” but also doing any deal along the lines of the memorandum of understanding that the two sides signed in June would be a “disaster.” 

“The only option that the president has now is to do the option that he’s done, which is just to try to buy time on this,” Wechsler said Wednesday. 

Wechsler, who is now a senior director of the Rafik Hariri Center and Middle East Programs at the Atlantic Council, said despite the U.S. naval blockade, Iranians are asserting their control over the Strait of Hormuz to eventually start charging tolls to generate revenue, believing they can outlast the U.S. since they are fundamentally not a democracy and Trump is under more pressure because of upcoming elections.

Still, the White House believes that Iran’s economy is severely damaged with rising inflation, reduced energy revenues, an uptick in poverty and limited access to foreign currencies. 

The naval blockade has produced results. During its first iteration, which lasted from April 13 to June 18, the U.S. blockade has cost Iran around $4.8 billion in oil revenue, a Pentagon assessment found, The Hill reported in May. 

Wechsler said his concern about the administration’s strategy is that Trump succeeds if he can win domestic battles with the “art of persuasion,” while the regime led by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has another tool in the tool shed apart from “persuasion.” 

“They have guns that they can use against their people, and typically, people who have guns and are willing to use them against their people, it takes a longer time for them to lose,” he said. 

Janatan Sayeh, a research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), said the administration is being “reactive,” while earlier in the war it was being “proactive.” 

“Now, the mindset here is one way or another, building leverage or pressure is going to get behavior change, and that in itself I think might be a miscalculation, given that we’ve seen how the Islamic Republic works. They would sabotage the entire country before compromising,” Sayeh said. 

But Sayeh noted that additional pressure from the U.S. creates avenues that could allow openings for a two-track strategy: one targeting Iranian regime insiders who are unhappy with leadership and another spurring massive protests inside the country.

“If there’s going to be uprisings again, what is the strategy to one way or another support this momentum that would be as a direct consequence of the maximum pressure campaign and the economy building up? So if you’re really pushing the country towards that avenue, how are you going to react to it would be two pillars, and I currently don’t see an avenue for him to capitalize on each,” he said in an interview with The Hill on Wednesday.

Jonathan Ruhe, a Jewish Institute for National Security of America’s (JINSA) Fellow for American Strategy, argued the U.S. is going with the strategy to strangle the Iranian economy, depriving it of funds to pay soldiers and keeping the repressive apparatus of the regime alive, because the administration has “run out of other options” and it marks “an admission of failure” that does not have “any real prospects for success.” 

“The Iranian regime is more than happy for Trump to focus just on sanctions and blockade. They certainly feel they can ride that out, and their clock in that sense, has more time on it than Trump’s own clock,” Ruhe said in an interview.

Sayeh, an FDD analyst who was born in Iran, said blockades and sanctions take time to set in, and it will be up to the administration to outlast the economic impact that Tehran is going to impose on the president politically. 

“It’s more so the Islamic Republic retaliating by throttling the Strait of Hormuz in response to the blockade, and therefore raising oil prices once again,” he said.

Trump claimed on Wednesday that the U.S. has “total control” over the Strait of Hormuz, adding, “I THINK WE WILL KEEP IT!” 

“Our Naval Blockade is being called, by everyone, ‘A WALL OF STEEL,’ and there is nothing Iran can do about it. They have no Navy, they have no Air Force, their remaining soldiers are unpaid, the IRGC is decimated and fleeing, and their ‘Leadership’ is uncertain, at best,” the president wrote in a post on Truth Social. 

“They have No Money – Their country is ‘shot.’ All they have is FAKE NEWS and 300 percent INFLATION, and getting worse! Iran is all talk and no action, the Bully of the Middle East No Longer,” Trump said. “Praise be to Allah!” 

Iran’s Persian Gulf Strait Authority fired back on Wednesday, saying claims and posts by U.S. officials that the waterway is “no longer blocked do not change the reality: the Strait of Hormuz remains blocked and will not be reopened until Iran’s conditions are accepted.” 

The maritime traffic in the Strait of Hormuz has increased slightly this week, with 14 successful crossings on Tuesday, according to maritime trafficking firm Kpler. Eleven of the 14 ships used the route closer to Iran’s coast. But the figures are far below the pre-war numbers, which average north of 100 ship crossings a day. 

Iran is choking off traffic in the waterway, through which around one-fifth of the world’s oil and gas flow during peacetime, through occasional use of missiles and one-way attack drones to hit transiting ships in the strait, making captains and shipping companies second-guess their decisions to transit through. 

Ruhe, of JINSA, said reopening the Strait of Hormuz militarily is what the U.S. might have to do at this point, noting that Trump has been reluctant to run those risks, sticking with the approach of issuing new sanctions, enforcing the blockade and U.S. Central Command (Centcom) conducting airstrikes in recent weeks. 

“I talked to a lot of U.S. Navy guys, and including people whose job it was to think about what to do in this scenario and carry it out, and they say you know the U.S. has to be willing to run some risks to deal with this problem, given that you know the current costs of having Iran close the Strait and think that it’s ultimately up to Tehran whether the Strait is open or closed,” Ruhe said. 

The fragile ceasefire fizzled out in early July with Iran striking commercial vessels in and around the strait. The president then authorized airstrikes that targeted Iranian military command centers, missile and drone facilities, coastal surveillance and defense sites and maritime capabilities in the southern part of the country.

After those U.S. strikes, Iran retaliated against U.S. allies in the Gulf, which indicates that Tehran thinks it can absorb damage, believing it is more expensive for Centcom to conduct the strikes than for the regime to rebuild the damaged sites, according to Sayeh. 

“They don’t mind losing lower-level personnel. They redeploy them,” he said, adding that he can see Trump going back to those types of attacks as a “tit-for-tat measure, just to maintain the dynamic as it is, so Iran doesn’t think it has the upper hand.” 

The U.S. military has continued to enforce the blockade in the Arabian Sea. The U.S. Navy MH-60 helicopter fired two Hellfire missiles into the steering area of a Panama-flagged M/V Vela Nova, disabling the vessel that attempted to transit the Gulf of Oman in violation of the blockade after its civilian crew ignored repeated warnings from U.S. forces.

The U.S. forces in the region have redirected 59 commercial ships that have attempted to run the blockade, disabled three and boarded another two vessels since resuming the blockade in mid-July, U.S. Central Command said in an update on Wednesday. 

The blockade is enforced by more than 20 Navy ships and the U.S. has far more than 50,000 service members stationed in the Centcom theater. 

Wechsler, of the Atlantic Council, said that Trump, going forward, should do three things: First, say he will keep at least one aircraft carrier strike group and all of the assorted weaponry in the region for the remainder of his term. Then, declare that all of the U.S. military outposts in the Gulf, including in Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and others, which have sustained damage, should be fully restaffed, rebuilt, hardened, and rearmed.

The third thing would be for the U.S. and all of its allies and partners that are arms exporters to figure out how to accelerate arms shipments to U.S. friends in the Gulf. 

“If he does all three of these things, then he’s starting to get down to the turns,” Wechsler said. “But the fascinating thing to me is he’s done none of these things.”