Trump’s options for reopening the Strait of Hormuz from boots on the ground to naval escorts and holding Iranian ‘oil island’ to ransom as tank blockade continues

Over the past fortnight, fighter jets, drones and cruise missiles have become a familiar sight for sailors stranded on oil tankers in the Gulf, after Tehran threatened to open fire on vessels trying to traverse the all-important Strait of Hormuz.

The crucial strait – a passageway between the Persian and Oman gulfs – is a channel for 20 per cent of the world’s oil and gas but has been effectively shut down by Iran as retaliation against the joint US-Israeli attacks launched on February 28.

The de facto closure of the waterway for most of the world’s tanker traffic has proved disastrous for global energy and trade flows, triggering the largest oil supply shock in history and surging global oil prices.

Donald Trump has vowed to reopen the vital oil-shipping lane, but executives at Middle Eastern companies and their Western peers warn it will require ​more than just US assurances of safety to restart shipping traffic and production.

The US President is set to unveil a coalition of nations willing to send ships to help reopen the strait later this week, after publicly urging specific US allies – France, Japan, South Korea and the UK – and China to join a ‘team effort’.

But despite Trump’s call to action, several countries are unwilling to commit their vessels to the operation, with France, Japan and Australia refusing to deploy their ships as international concern grows that the conflict is being prolonged indefinitely.

In fact, American officials have themselves issued a chilling warning that the Strait of Hormuz could transform into a deadly ‘kill box’ zone for the US Navy, if Trump decides to send warships to the troubled waterway.

UK ministers are considering sending mine-hunting drones but are reluctant to commit any vessels, while South Korea said it was ‘closely monitoring the situation’ and consulting allies.

It definitely won’t be easy to reopen the strait, but the White House has a number of options – including using naval vessels to escort tankers, holding Iran’s Kharg Island to ransom, and a ground invasion – all of which are still on the table, and present their own distinctive risks.

Escort operations

Donald Trump has warned that Nato faces a ‘very bad’ future if allies refuse to help secure the Strait of Hormuz, declaring that nations which rely heavily on oil from the Gulf have a responsibility to help protect the waterway.

‘I’m demanding that these countries come in and protect their own territory, because it is their territory,’ he told reporters on his way back to Washington from Florida aboard Air Force One last night.

‘It’s the place from which they get their energy,’ Trump said.

He appears to be pushing the idea of an escort operation – involving US warships in conjunction with allied navies – travelling through the strait alongside oil tankers, to clear mines and defend against aerial Iranian attacks.

Such a mission – involving British, French, Japanese, Chinese and South Korean warships – would also fend off Tehran’s ‘mosquito fleet’ of small, fast-attack boats, preventing them from targetting container ships.

According to experts, it would take two ships per tanker, or a dozen vessels to guard convoys of five to 10 tankers, to provide adequate air defence.

But the short distances involved make gunning down drones and missiles all the more difficult.

Deploying vessels as tanker escorts also means taking them out of offensive operations, or broader missile defence, rendering the US and its allies more vulnerable to Iranian attacks.

Such an option is militarily feasible, but expensive, and still may not be enough to convince insurance companies their containers are safe. 

Two weeks of US and Israeli bombardment has decimated Iran’s navy and military capabilities, but the regime is still demonstrating offensive strength.

Tehran retains anti-ship missiles which continue to inflict severe damage, having hit 20 container ships in total since the outbreak of war on February 28.

The regime utilises truck-mounted launchers to fire them, which are mobile and can be moved around quickly for hit-and-run attacks, presenting US forces with a difficult game of whack-a-mole.

It also has a large supply of cheap Shahed drones in its arsenal, costing as little as $35,000 each.

‘We have already destroyed 100 per cent of Iran’s Military capability, but it’s easy for them to send a drone or two, drop a mine, or deliver a close range missile somewhere along, or in, this Waterway, no matter how badly defeated they are,’ Trump wrote on Truth Social.

‘Hopefully China, France, Japan, South Korea, the UK, and others, that are affected by this artificial constraint, will send Ships to the area so that the Hormuz Strait will no longer be a threat by a Nation that has been totally decapitated.’

He added: ‘One way or the other, we will soon get the Hormuz Strait OPEN, SAFE, and FREE!’

Japan’s prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, said she has no plans to send her nation’s maritime self-defence forces to support tanker traffic in the strait.

She told MPs on Monday: ‘We have not made any decisions whatsoever about dispatching escort ships. We are continuing to examine what Japan can do independently and what can be done ⁠within the legal framework.’

Even before Trump’s comments,  France was abundantly clear about maintaining its ‘purely defensive position’ as the war continues to escalate.

Speaking on Thursday, the French defence minister, Catherine Vautrin, said: ‘I’m very clear and firm on this topic; at this point, there is no question of sending any vessels to the strait of Hormuz.’

She added that there were no current plans to transfer the French navy’s Charles de Gaulle aircraft carrier out of the eastern Mediterranean. 

The American president has accused Tehran of using artificial intelligence as a ‘disinformation weapon’ to misrepresent its wartime successes and support.

Speaking to reporters, he said Iran’s so-called ‘kamikaze boats’, explosive-laden vessels disguised as fishing vessels, were fake and didn’t ‘exist’.

He also stated that Iran used ‌AI ⁠to falsely depict a successful attack on the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier, adding publications that propagated the news should be charged with treason. 

Ground invasion 

Another option would be to raid or seize control of a section of southern Iran, ensuring the regime’s forces were unable to target ships in the strait.

Such a manoeuvre would likely involve thousands of troops on the ground and a commitment to a months-long operation, during which US soldiers would be exposed to attacks from Iranian forces as they destroyed missile and drone stockpiles at source.

At the end of last week, America announced the deployment of up to 5,000 marines and sailors, as well as USS Tripoli, an amphibious assault ship, to the Middle East, signalling the possibility of a ground operation.

The mission would likely begin with extensive airstrikes along the coastline, before American forces land in southern Iran where the marines would launch an amphibious assault in an area of mountainous terrain.

While Washington would attempt to suppress Iranian ground forces with airstrikes, maintaining control of the area would require an invasion, according to analysts, likely involving direct combat between warring sides.

Moreover, experts have said restricting the ground invasion to the southern coastline of the country may not be sufficient. 

With a range of more than 200 miles, Iran’s anti-ship missiles would force US troops to venture further inland to be certain they had located and destroyed all the launchers.

On top of that, the Shahed-136 has an estimated range of up to 1,500 miles, meaning a drone could be fired from anywhere in the country and still reach the waterway.

This means America might need to occupy the entirety of Iran in order to eliminate the threat. 

The US President may be reluctant to deploy soldiers with all-important midterm elections approaching in November, however. 

They would have to confront the 190,000 troops strong Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and its elite Quds Force, which specialise in asymmetric warfare.

Such groups have spent decades supporting insurgents throughout the region, including in neighbouring Iraq, where they backed militants in their deadly attacks on American troops following the 2003 invasion.

‘If you start with limited numbers of special-operations forces, do you need more forces to protect them?’ Daniel Byman, a former senior adviser to the State Department and US intelligence official, told the Wall Street Journal.

‘You have to kind of decide whether to accept gains or double down,’ he said.

Holding Kharg Island ransom

On Friday, Trump ordered the bombing of Iran’s Kharg Island, the central organ of the country’s oil industry, storing and loading the majority of its crude exports.

The island in the northern Persian Gulf, about 20 miles off the coast of Iran, is Tehran’s most important economic asset and is the launch point of 90 per cent of its oil exports.

The US President said he refrained from hitting the export hub’s oil infrastructure, however, and that the bombardment was limited to military targets only.

He warned he would contemplate expanding the offensive to the island’s all-important oil facilities if Iran didn’t open the Strait of Hormuz to international shipping traffic.

‘For reasons of decency, I have chosen NOT to wipe out the Oil Infrastructure on the Island,’ Trump wrote on social media. 

‘However, should Iran, or anyone else, do anything to interfere with the Free and Safe Passage of Ships through the strait of Hormuz, I will immediately reconsider this decision.’

The deployment of 5,000 US troops may not be enough for a major invasion, but such a force could potentially seize control of Kharg Island, forcing Iran to halt its attacks on oil tankers in the strait.

‘We could use the leverage of owning it,’ Admiral James Stavridis, Nato’s former supreme allied commander in Europe, said in an interview with CNN.

‘Go in there, take it. You don’t have to destroy the infrastructure. In fact, you hold it hostage.’  

If the island’s oil infrastructure was targetted, Tehran would be forced to cut production at its oil fields, potentially taking another one million barrels of production away from global markets, in addition to cuts implemented by Iraq, Kuwait and Bahrain.

The Islamic regime has warned Persian Gulf states that an attack on Kharg Island would be considered a red line, and would trigger a wave of retaliatory strikes on the energy infrastructure of its Arab neighbours.

The oil and energy infrastructure of US allies ‘will be immediately destroyed and reduced to ashes’ if there is an attack on Tehran’s energy assets, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said on Saturday.

Centcom said US forces struck ‘more than 90 Iranian military targets on Kharg Island, while preserving the oil infrastructure’, as Trump described the island’s military facilities as ‘totally obliterated’.