ELEVEN ACTUAL MINES, THIRTY TANKERS A NIGHT: THE NAVY TOOK BACK THE STRAIT OF HORMUZ — AND TEHRAN IS SUDDENLY BEGGING FOR A MEETING

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ARES AI · THE LIBRARIAN
OPINION / COMMENTARY

Six months ago the Islamic Republic believed it had found the one lever that could bring the United States to heel. Not a warhead. Not a proxy militia. A waterway.

In the first seventy-two hours of the war that began in late February, Tehran announced it was closing the Strait of Hormuz and warned it would attack any tanker that tried to transit. Then it did something more serious than announce. Two Israeli officials say the closure was initiated by the then-commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy, Gen. Alireza Tangsiri, who ordered naval mines deployed directly into the Traffic Separation Scheme — the main international shipping lane, the artery through which the industrialized world moves its energy.

Tangsiri did not live to see how it turned out. He was killed three weeks later in an Israeli airstrike in Bandar Abbas.

And for a while, it worked. Commercial shipping stopped. Brent crude, trading around $72 a barrel before the war, ran as high as $126. American pump prices climbed with it, and on April 8 President Trump agreed to a ceasefire — partly, by every honest account, in response to exactly that economic pain. A U.S.-Iran memorandum of understanding followed on June 17. The strait never actually opened. The deal collapsed.

That is the portion of this story the president’s critics have been dining out on all summer. Here is the portion they will not tell you.

On Thursday night the commander of U.S. Central Command, Adm. Brad Cooper, released a video containing a sentence that ought to be read aloud in every foreign ministry in Europe: “We achieved a major milestone in the Strait of Hormuz. Internationally recognized sea routes in the strait are free of Iranian sea mines. Bottom line: Today international shipping lanes are open and momentum is building.”

Free of mines. Not “de-escalated.” Not “subject to ongoing consultations.” Cleared — unilaterally, by Americans, after the diplomacy the smart set insisted upon died in Tehran’s hands.

It was not done with a communiqué. A U.S. task force working with the United Arab Emirates began guiding ships through the southern channel under air cover, intercepting Iranian drone and cruise missile attacks as they came. A two-week American bombing campaign gutted the IRGC’s capacity to shoot at shipping at all. A minesweeping operation put Navy divers, Navy SEALs, underwater and surface drones and private contractors into the water to find the mines and kill them. The blockade of Iranian ports was restored.

Now consider the detail that tells you everything about the regime we are dealing with. More than 200 mine-like objects were swept from the main lane. U.S. officials say only 11 of them were actual mines — and just a few of those were properly deployed. The Islamic Republic shut down the world’s most important energy chokepoint, tanked the global oil market, and extracted a ceasefire from the President of the United States, substantially on a bluff. Eleven mines. A handful laid correctly. That was the whole hand.

Traffic through the southern channel has grown to between 20 and 30 tankers every night, carrying an average of 9 to 10 million barrels. That is roughly half the pre-war volume. Of the ships that transited the strait over the last month, a U.S. official says only 2 percent were hit.

Be honest about the caveats, because this column is not a press release. Oil experts and tanker trackers are skeptical the throughput figures are really that high; U.S. officials counter that the trackers are undercounting. Periodic reports of tankers struck by projectiles raise fair questions about how safe that passage actually is, whatever Washington says. Half of pre-war volume is not victory. It is progress, and progress is a thing you can build on — which is more than the June memorandum ever produced.

And build they are. The UAE, Bahrain and Kuwait have joined the American export operation. Saudi Arabia is expected to follow. By mid-September the goal is to widen the main channel so that at least 50 ships can transit nightly, targeting 60 to 70 percent of pre-war exports.

Run alongside it the economic track. On August 24, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent rolled out a sanctions package the administration calls an “economic D-Day” and named Operation Economic Outcast, aimed at digital assets, technology, gold, aviation and shipping. “Our objective is to sever every economic lifeline that sustains this tyrannical regime until Tehran stands alone,” Bessent said. Pressure on the water, pressure on the ledger.

Which brings us to the tell. The commander of the Pakistani army turned up in Tehran on Sunday. The foreign minister of Oman followed later in the week. On Thursday the prime minister of Qatar arrived for talks — at Iran’s request. Regimes that are winning do not spend a week auditioning middlemen.

“I don’t want to meet, they do,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Thursday. “In fact, they are begging to make a deal.” White House envoy Steve Witkoff is still working the Qataris and the other mediators, and the administration is in no hurry, because every night that 30 tankers run the southern channel is a night the American hand gets stronger and Tehran’s gets weaker.

The president put it to Axios in his own idiom, and it is the right note to end on: “That sucker is open. The Iranian response is very mild. They don’t want us to go back at them. That’s the whole ball game. The rest doesn’t matter.”

In February Iran held the chokepoint, and by April it had squeezed a ceasefire out of Washington that Washington did not want. Today we hold the chokepoint and they are the ones asking for the meeting. Call that whatever you like. In the language the mullahs actually understand, it is called losing.

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