Trump Urged to Surrender Quickly in Hormuz Before Success Becomes an Option

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, August 25, 2026

 

Conditions in the Strait of Hormuz are coming unstuck in ways that advance American interests, although the situation remains stalemated.

 

CNN reported late last week that “Iran is losing much of its control over the critical waterway” as the U.S. Navy quietly but effectively transits oil-laden tankers out of the strait under Iranian noses. In concert with the oil and petroleum products escaping the region via overland pipelines, Donald Trump’s energy secretary indicated that energy exports from the region are now approaching pre-war levels.

 

CNN couldn’t independently verify the administration’s figures. Nor could the Wall Street Journal. But to a certain extent, that is to be expected from a covert operation like the one the U.S. is engaged in. “Many ships are crossing the strait at night with their transponders off, making them hard to track by radio signal or satellite imagery,” the Journal reported Monday. The report’s headline warns that industry trackers “can’t find” the exports the White House touts, but the body of the article notes that some of those trackers’ estimates about what could be coming online run “closer to the administration’s numbers,” albeit only recently.

 

Even if it only backed into the policy of economic strangulation that it’s applying to the Islamic Republic, the Trump administration is finally seeing it produce some positive results. Naturally, then, it’s incumbent on the president to surrender to the Iranians while he still can. At least, that’s the argument Rosemary Kelanic brought to the pages of the New York Times.

 

Kelanic, the director of Defense Priorities’ Middle East program and a contributor to the Quincy Institute’s “Responsible Statecraft” blog, contends at the outset of her Monday op-ed that “defeat” is now America’s “least bad option.” The U.S. has little choice but to quit the field, allowing Iran to control and toll an international waterway. But it’s not clear why America must give up now.

 

As Kelanic admits, the war has shown that, even if the U.S. “cannot completely open” the strait, Iran “cannot completely close” it either. Why should they be bequeathed an unprecedented level of sovereignty over an international maritime chokepoint that they could not capture on their own? Kelanic doesn’t say. She does, however, dwell on America’s challenges.

 

The geography of the strait ensures that it is “impossible to decisively defeat” Iranian harassment initiatives. Modern technology, like cheap missiles and drones, creates “endemic risk of crossing Hormuz that even a negotiated deal with Tehran would not eliminate.” That sounds like a rationale for abandoning the negotiations that will, by Kelanic’s own admission, fail to produce a durable (much less desirable) outcome.

 

Indeed, the author doesn’t even attempt to strike a more-in-sorrow tone when arguing for America’s capitulation. The United States is struggling with an irreparable shortage of munitions, she suggests. And even if America’s ordnance stocks were brimming, its people have no stomach for a long-duration mission to “sneak oil through Hormuz.” In fact, the voting public may even resent the political class’s resistance to an Iranian tolling regime that extracts funds primarily from foreign pockets. After all, “those countries could pay their own way.”

 

The U.S., Kelanic adds, has little slack in its economy — quite unlike the less “oil-intensive” economies of China and Russia. That’s a kick that Kelanic has been on for some time. And she has a point when it comes to China, albeit one that was overstated at the outset of Operation Epic Fury; China’s energy position today is sustained by its consumption restrictions, its oil reserves, and its “shift toward coal.” By contrast, the argument that Russia can easily absorb a fuel shock is betrayed by the evidence of your own eyes.

 

At no point does Kelanic acknowledge the buffers in the American economy. The “shale revolution,” the Journal’s Greg Ip observed, “has turned the U.S. into a net exporter of petroleum and major exporter of liquefied natural gas.” That might account for some of “the recent resilience of world oil markets,” which Kelanic admits “surprised many.”

 

None of these complications deter Kelanic from her defeatist convictions. Indeed, American surrender may even be a rare species of victory. Its “custodianship” of the strait, along with Oman, “could foster regional cooperation” and “spur Iran to demonstrate responsibility by mellowing its rhetoric and behavior.” Maybe Tehran will even abandon its quest for nuclear weapons. After all, Iran’s nuclear ambitions were only an outgrowth of its pursuit of “an alternative source of prestige.”

 

It is quaint to encounter a version of the Obama-era delusion that ceding ever more ground to the Islamist radicals in Tehran will make them more sober and rational actors on the world stage. As if there’s a normal country somewhere in there struggling to get out, and the Islamic Republic’s half century history of sponsoring terrorism was a youthful dalliance that the weight of responsibility will supplant. The dream never dies.

 

And sure, Kelanic concedes that it might set a “bad precedent” if America gives up its role guaranteeing free navigation of the seas and allows a sphere of influence to arise over what was once an uncontested shipping lane. But why would anyone else test it, she asks.

 

Sidestepping the Chinese threat to the Taiwan Strait, Kelanic focuses on Yemen’s Houthi militia. She notes that the terrorist group lacks Iran’s capabilities (though it is wholly financed and supported by Iran) and writes that it has caused “little to no damage.” Further, shipping interests had a “viable workaround”: rerouting vessels around the African continent, adding “only about $1 million per vessel” to operating costs. Although this isn’t perfectly consistent with her July analysis of the “substantial” (and ultimately unrealized) “leverage” the Houthis had over Trump, it sounds like Kelanic believes the U.S. should have washed its hands of the fight against the Houthis, too.

 

That’s an oddly revisionist take on the efficacy of the Houthis’ effort to throttle traffic that flowed through the Bab el-Mandeb Strait into the Red Sea and toward the Suez Canal. “It’s been reduced, on any given day, sometimes 40 percent,” Admiral Brad Cooper said of commercial traffic in the region in early 2024. The naval and air campaign Joe Biden reluctantly approved featured some of the most sustained high-intensity combat operations American sailors had experienced since World War II. Those operations continued into the second Trump era, culminating in Operation Rough Rider and, ultimately, concessions from the Houthis related to the free flow of maritime traffic off Yemen’s coast.

 

With her confused op-ed approaching a climax, Kelanic takes a strange turn toward maximalist libertarianism. “All taxation is a protection racket, according to prominent social scientists,” she declared (citation needed). Even if all her conjectural assertions about the benefits America will enjoy in humiliating defeat are open for debate, she closes with one that is not. “Perhaps the consequences of lasting Iranian authority over the Strait of Hormuz will even dissuade future U.S. presidents — or Mr. Trump — from launching risky and unnecessary wars,” the author concludes.

 

Finally, we get to the real meat of the argument the Times laundered into the discourse. If nothing else, at least America’s mortifying experience in the strait will chasten the president and constrain the United States. And Trump is running out of time. If he doesn’t surrender soon, he may somehow engineer a success for himself and the United States. And that might be the worst outcome of all.