April 08, 2026
Continuing Crisis in Strait of Hormuz: Why Iran’s Hold is Illegal and U.S. Military Force Alone Fails
This article was originally published in Just Security.
Over a month into the conflict between Israel, Iran, and the United States, Iran has shown no sign of losing its capacity to control the Strait of Hormuz. Although the United States has agreed to a two-week suspension of strikes against Iran, Tehran continues to exercise de facto control over the Strait of Hormuz. Iran’s Foreign Minister has declared that vessels seeking to transit the Strait must coordinate directly with Iranian armed forces, subject to unspecified “technical limitations”—a posture that amounts to a unilateral assertion of sovereign authority over one of the world’s most critical maritime chokepoints. Meanwhile, President Trump has pledged that the United States “will be helping with traffic buildup in the Strait,” but that commitment remains undefined, and it is far from certain whether U.S. naval forces will play any role. Since the conflict started, Iran has rerouted commercial shipping through Iranian territorial waters and imposed a $2 million transit fee—an illegal “Tehran toll booth.” The fragile ceasefire does not appear to dismantle that arrangement.
Iran has drawn explicit lessons from this disruption and is now seeking to institutionalize its control.
At the outset of the conflict, I analyzed the key legal and operational issues in the Strait of Hormuz, assessing that the Strait’s closure would provide Iran with enormous strategic leverage. One month in, that assessment has grown considerably darker. Iran has proven it can deny transit at an acceptable cost to itself—and no plausible U.S. military option can reliably reverse that in the near term. Iran has been weakened militarily, but remains far from defeated. Indeed, Iran has demonstrated the capacity to launch strikes hundreds of miles from its territory while shooting down a U.S. F-15E Strike Eagle, one of the most sophisticated aircraft in the American arsenal.
Read the full article in Just Security.
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