Trump seems to have burned all his foreign bridges.
Strategically, the Strait of Hormuz is the perfect place for Iran to hold the world economy hostage—something understood by every previous president who refrained from starting wars against Iran’s repressive, hostile, and expansionist regime. That is obviously not the case with President Donald Trump.
At its narrowest point, the strait is around 21 miles wide. But the actual shipping lanes are far narrower—just two miles for inbound traffic and two miles for outbound. Tankers move through single file, with almost no room to maneuver.
“World on fire’ By Nick Anderson
In that narrow corridor, tankers—and any naval vessels escorting them—become easy targets. Warships rely heavily on maneuverability, distance, and layered defenses to survive modern combat. The Strait of Hormuz strips away most of those advantages. Ships moving through the channel cannot spread out or maneuver freely, and have only seconds to react to threats launched from Iran’s nearby coastline.
And those threats are plentiful. Iran has invested heavily in shore-based anti-ship missiles, rocket batteries, naval drones, and swarms of cheap attack craft designed specifically for this kind of confined waterway. A tanker convoy moving slowly through a two-mile lane becomes a predictable target.
Even modern warships would be under severe pressure. Missile defense systems can intercept incoming threats, but they are designed to handle limited salvos—not waves of drones, rockets, and missiles launched simultaneously from multiple locations along the coast. Reaction times would be measured in seconds.
We’ve already seen how vulnerable naval vessels can be in the age of cheap drone warfare. Ukraine managed to cripple Russia’s Black Sea fleet without possessing a traditional navy of its own, even sinking the Moskva, Russia’s flagship cruiser. Small, relatively inexpensive drones and missiles forced Russia’s fleet to retreat from large portions of the Black Sea, defeating their effort to blockade Ukraine’s port of Odesa.
Now imagine that kind of threat environment squeezed into a narrow sea lane bordering hostile territory.
Mines add another layer of danger. Iran can quickly seed the strait with naval mines, forcing minesweepers to clear the route before commercial traffic could pass. But minesweepers are slow, lightly armed vessels—yet more easy targets in that same confined waterway.
Protecting shipping would also require constant air cover to detect launch signatures and intercept incoming missiles or drones. But aircraft operating overhead would be flying within range of Iranian air defenses and anti-aircraft systems. Everything involved in such an operation—ships, aircraft, and minesweepers—would be operating inside what the military guys would call a “kill zone.”
The U.S. Navy can manage those risks in open water, where ships have space to maneuver and time to respond. In the Strait of Hormuz, those advantages disappear. There’s a reason the U.S. Navy hasn’t attempted escort operations there so far.
What makes this even more absurd is that the United States currently has access to some of the most advanced anti-drone combat experience in the world—Ukraine’s.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Trump talk as they attend the funeral of Pope Francis in Vatican, on April 26, 2025.
Ukrainian forces have spent the past three years fighting one of the most drone-saturated wars in modern history. They’ve pioneered tactics, detection systems, and layered defenses specifically designed to counter drone swarms and missile attacks. Countries across the Gulf region have been eager to learn from that experience.
But Trump has refused Ukrainian offers to share anti-drone technology and battlefield lessons with the United States. “We don't need their help in drone defense,” Trump told Fox News. “We know more about drones than anybody. We have the best drones in the world, actually.” On “Meet the Press,” he was even more obnoxious, “[The] last person we need help from is Zelenskyy.”
What’s his problem? Acknowledging Ukrainian expertise would require acknowledging that President Volodymyr Zelenskyy actually does hold some cards—a fact Trump has spent over a year denying out of sheer personal pettiness and bizarre fealty to Russian dictator Vladimir Putin.
It is deeply ironic that Trump, with no sense of shame or self-awareness, is now demanding that allies send warships to patrol the strait. All the problems above would be just as applicable to any other nation’s vessels, of course, and no one is interested in putting their own forces at risk to bail out Trump from his own idiotic war of choice.
Furthermore, several European vessels are already patrolling the Red Sea, keeping shipping lanes open from the threat of Houthi rebels in Yemen. No one needed to add the Strait of Hormuz to the list.
Jared Kushner
It’s clear that whatever it was that happened in Venezuela (given the same government is still in charge) made Trump think that Iran would offer similar satisfaction. He was somehow convinced by son-in-law Jared Kushner, seemingly under Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s tutelage, that a few days of aerial bombardment would somehow lead to the emergence of a pluralistic, secular, modern Iran. Or something.
It’s not clear what Trump thought was going to happen given that the story changes every day. It certainly couldn’t have been about an Iranian nuclear program that Trump declared “obliterated” multiple times after an attack last year.
But you could almost sense the smug satisfaction from ally after ally telling Trump (diplomatically) to fuck off. After a year of threatening friends with tariffs, threatening to invade both Canada and Greenland—to the point that European nations had to land troops in the latter country in a symbolic show of force, and threatening to pull out of NATO, you have to wonder how Trump could demand assistance with a straight face.
It’s not the first time he’s done so in the last few weeks. After the UK refused American permission to launch attacks on Iran from air bases on its territories, Trump haughtily posted on his Truth Social, “That’s OK, Prime Minister Starmer, we don’t need [help] any longer…We don’t need people that join Wars after we’ve already won!”
That was on March 7, a week and a half ago.
Who needs help? The war is over! Just don’t call it a war.
