For decades, American military planners have operated on a simple assumption: that overwhelming force, applied decisively, could resolve almost any crisis in the Persian Gulf. Iran, it turns out, has spent years making that assumption obsolete — not by building a navy capable of matching America’s, but by turning a narrow strip of water into the world’s most expensive dare.

What Iranian commanders have constructed in and around the Strait of Hormuz — the 21-mile-wide chokepoint through which roughly a quarter of the world’s seaborne oil passes each day — is not a conventional defense.

It is an economic booby trap, engineered less to defeat the United States Navy than to make the cost of confrontation appear greater than the cost of concession.

It is an economic booby trap, engineered less to defeat the United States Navy than to make the cost of confrontation appear greater than the cost of concession.

The distinction matters enormously, and Washington is paying a great deal of attention to Iran’s calculations. 

The threat’s architecture is instructive. From the disputed islands of Abu Musa and the islands of Tunbs — seized from the United Arab Emirates in 1971 and never returned — Tehran has positioned drone swarms capable of reaching targets within minutes, a fleet of more than twenty mini-submarines, and an estimated stockpile of 6,000 naval mines. Chinese surveillance vessels operating nearby provide real-time targeting data, closing the intelligence gap that American forces have historically enjoyed and exploited. None of this is........

© Middle East Monitor