April 24, 2026: The Western allies trying to negotiate a way to protect the Strait of Hormuz for oil and natural gas shipping face an unambiguous reality: a similar effort in the Red Sea that started years earlier cost billions of dollars and ultimately failed against Yemen’s Houthis. The recent collapse of Iranian resistance and request for more negotiations has largely removed Iran from any involvement in the Red Sea or anywhere else.

Meanwhile, the costly Red Sea experience, with four ships sunk, more than $1 billion in weapons expended, and a route that the shipping industry until recently avoided, displays the more complex Strait of Hormuz situation. This shipping route is used by about 20 percent of the global oil and liquefied natural gas supply, and is now blocked by Iran, a more frightening adversary than the Houthis.

Iran’s threats to the strait and its attacks on energy infrastructure in nearby Gulf nations sent oil prices soaring in the worst interruption to oil and gas supplies in history. Without the strait’s reopening, shortages will become more dire, threatening higher costs for energy, food and numerous other products worldwide.

There is no substitute for the Strait of Hormuz. It is the world’s strait, under international law and realistic certainty.

U.N. Security Council members were recently negotiating resolutions for protecting the strait, with some nations, such as Bahrain, taking an influential stance that would authorize the use of all means necessary to protect the strait, including use of force when needed.

Security and maritime experts described the numerous challenges facing the Americans and its allies in protecting the strait. Iran has more advanced military forces than the Houthis, with their arsenal of inexpensive drones, floating mines, and missiles, and easy access from its steep mountainous coast to the narrow waterway. Defending convoy operations in the Strait of Hormuz is substantially more difficult than in the Red Sea.

That was a big concern for the American President as he sought to justify the Iran war ahead of the November midterm elections to inflation-weary American voters now facing gasoline at nearly $4 a gallon. The spike in energy prices is not expected to fully reverse until the waterway opens. Now the situation has been resolved.

Trump has been noncommittal about U.S. involvement, first saying the American Navy would escort ships when needed, then more recently saying other nations should lead the effort. Iran tried and failed to block most ships from the maritime choke point since joint U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iran began February 28. Iran is no longer considering a proposal to levy fees on vessels that want to use the strait.

The American mission to protect Red Sea shipping from the Houthis launched in December 2023, with European nations joining in with their own operation a few months later. The allies shot down hundreds of drones and missiles, but the Houthis still sank four ships between 2024 and 2025. Shippers no longer avoid the passageway, once home to 12 percent of world trade, and no longer choose the much longer voyage around the Horn of Africa.

The danger zone around the Strait of Hormuz is up to five times larger than the Houthis’ attack area around the Bab el-Mandeb Strait that flows into the Red Sea. Unlike the Houthis, Iran’s IRGC/Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is a professional military with access to its own weapons factories and access to funding.

Providing escorts for the strait would require as many as a dozen large warships such as destroyers, backed up by jets, drones and helicopters to account for the limitations created by the lack of space to maneuver, some military experts said. Overhead air cover would be critical to protect against flying drones as well as explosive-laden manned or unmanned vessels that can easily blend into sea traffic.

Observers believe Iran’s IRGC fighters no longer have missile and drone stockpiles hidden in buildings and caves along the hundreds of miles of steep and mountainous coastline. In some places, the shore comes so close to ships that drones could swarm a vessel in as little as five to 10 minutes.

Sea mines and heavily armed mini submarines are no longer the threat the Americans encountered in the Red Sea. There is no evidence that Iran mined the strait and no remaining Iranian presence in the area. The Strait is open and traffic is moving slowly, at least until the Iranians commence more UAV and cruise missile attacks on shipping.