Forgot Your Password?

New to The Nation? Subscribe

Print subscriber? Activate your online access

.nation-small__b{fill:#fff;}

The GOP Sells the Mirage of a Hormuz Victory

The American action in the contested strait isn’t sustainable—and won’t alter the economic and political fallout from its closure.

An Iranian flag flutters in front of a cargo ship in the Strait of Hormuz.

Over the past week, the Trump administration has issued a coordinated flurry of claims about how oil flows out of the Strait of Hormuz are close to prewar levels. According to White House communications flacks, this sharp reversal of the long-standing stalemate in the strait is thanks to US military operations carried out in conjunction with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

In this instance, the White House party line claims at least partial confirmation from the well-regarded maritime intelligence firm Kpler, which wouldn’t risk its reputation by faking data. But even assuming that we can take these claims at face value, they do not relieve the growing strategic and political pressure on President Donald Trump and the GOP. Nor does this wildly expensive and unsustainable work-around represent anything resembling “victory” in this increasingly strange “war.”

That hasn’t stopped various characters in the MAGA cinematic universe, desperate for any faint semblance of good news, from proclaiming, in essence, that war is peace—and peace of the gloating American variety. victory. CNN’s GOP lackey Scott Jennings took to X to declare, “We won. Iran lost. Period.” A Fox headline blared, “Iran Loses Grip on Strait of Hormuz.” And Trump himself is back to issuing bizarre predictions about the war’s imminent end.

But these sweeping pronouncements don’t stand up to scrutiny. One issue is that the return to prewar levels claimed by Kpler for the combined total of crude oil and refined products is not actually 100 percent of the former total; it doesn’t factor in the loss of Iranian oil supplies, which the firm acknowledges. The Kpler assessment also doesn’t account for an ongoing collapse in refined products, including diesel, whose US price will remain dramatically elevated into 2027 even in a best-case scenario. And temporarily goosing up oil flows out of Hormuz doesn’t address other economic bottlenecks caused by the ongoing, Trump-instigated crisis, including the strains on the supply and cost of fertilizer.

Then there’s the military side of the conflict, which remains grim for the United States. A situation that has the US Navy running a daily operation with the US Marines seemingly posted (and getting injured) on foreign-owned vessels is not sustainable in the long run. Likewise, the underlying crisis of commercially unacceptable risk in the Strait isn’t anywhere close to being resolved. All the breathless announcements of a new status quo in........

© The Nation