Iran Finds Its Leverage

National Review Online

Monday, March 16, 2026

 

‘You start something,” Napoleon said, “then see what happens.”

 

Our improvisational commander in chief is often inclined the same way, as we are witnessing in the Iran war. There is a lively debate over critical pieces in the media (although that’s a redundancy) reporting that the administration didn’t plan for the possibility of an Iranian closure of the Strait of Hormuz. The administration and its defenders counter that of course there was planning around this well-known and much-feared contingency. Indeed, Secretary of State Marco Rubio warned Iran last June against a possible effort to close the strait, and the administration has cited as a war aim the degradation of Iran’s capacity to do so. But there has been a notable scramble for options as the strait has been effectively closed since the war began, and the Wall Street Journal is reporting that Trump was extensively briefed about the possibility, but thought the Iranians would capitulate before it became an issue and the U.S. military could handle it regardless.

 

Now, the effective closure of the strait is threatening the world economy and giving the Iranians leverage it was hard to imagine when they lost their top leaders in the war’s initial strike. The result is an object lesson in why geography still matters, why it was always folly to treat Iran as some distant place unconnected to our national interests, and why control of the seas is as important as it ever was.

 

About 20 percent of the world’s oil passes through the strait. With traffic slowing to a trickle, the price of oil is up about 40 percent since the beginning of the war. The oil that transits the strait overwhelmingly goes to Asia, but there is obviously a global price that affects the U.S. regardless. The average price of a gallon of gasoline has increased to about $3.70, whereas it was about $2.90 weeks ago. None of this is catastrophic. The price of Brent crude settled above $100 a barrel on Friday. That’s the highest in four years, not in, say, 60 years. But the clock is ticking. If the strait were to remain effectively closed for months rather than a few more weeks, the economic damage could become truly disastrous.

 

This is an enormous strategic advantage to Iran. If the war ends with the regime still in power, which seems likely, and in de facto control of the strait, that will give it a major deterrent to ward off future attacks on its nuclear and missile programs. It will be seen to have fought the Great Satan and not just survived but imposed a significant cost on its more powerful enemy. Trump’s biggest and riskiest military operation as president might end up eroding American deterrent power rather than enhancing it.

 

All of this means that there has to be urgency about reopening the strait, and the administration clearly feels it. Trump is threatening Iran’s crucial oil facilities on Kharg Island as a way to try to scare the regime out of menacing shipping in the strait, and he’s talking about a multinational naval escort force. Escorts worked during the “tanker war” between Iran and Iraq in the 1980s and would be effective again, assuming that military vessels themselves wouldn’t be vulnerable to missile and drone attack. The U.S. military is hoping to keep degrading the ability of Iran to launch attacks and to create the conditions for escorts. We’ve had considerable success in diminishing the regime’s capabilities already, but the Iranians only need to hit the occasional tanker to disrupt traffic, and geography in and around the strait favors the attackers.

 

Much of the press wants to preemptively declare Operation Epic Fury a fiasco. We are well on the way, though, to fundamentally weakening a dangerous, long-standing enemy of the United States — provided that the tankers soon again begin to sail.