U.S. President Donald Trump has increasingly leaned on naval blockades as a core coercive tool to force policy changes from adversarial governments, first targeting Venezuela and Cuba, and now bringing the tactic to the Middle East against Iran. However, national security experts warn that the Iran confrontation carries vastly different strategic and economic risks that set it apart from the administration’s previous blockade efforts in the Caribbean.
Unlike the Western Hemisphere targets Cuba and Venezuela, Iran controls direct access to the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world’s most critical energy chokepoints through which roughly 20% of global oil shipments pass on a normal basis. A prolonged standoff over the waterway creates immediate, far-reaching spillover effects that threaten to drag down the entire global economy, a risk that did not exist in the Caribbean blockades. Additionally, Iran maintains a far more capable conventional military force than either Venezuela or Cuba, and any sustained naval pressure requires a large, permanent U.S. military deployment thousands of miles from American shores, a far costlier and more complex commitment.
Security analysts note that Iran’s geographic leverage gives it significant upper hand during the current shaky ceasefire. With the United States facing an upcoming midterm election cycle, rising domestic gasoline prices and broader economic disruption from blocked shipments could create enough political pressure to force the Trump administration to roll back its port and coastal blockade of Iran before Tehran meets its demands. “It’s really a question now of which country, the U.S. or Iran, has a greater pain tolerance,” explained Max Boot, a military historian and senior fellow for national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.
The overall effectiveness of Trump’s pressure-by-blockade strategy remains a hotly debated topic among experts. Many argue that the perceived success of pressure efforts in Venezuela had far less to do with naval interdiction of sanctioned oil tankers and far more to do with a direct U.S. military raid that led to the ousting of former president Nicolás Maduro. For Cuba, meanwhile, a years-long U.S. oil embargo has gutted the island nation’s economy, pushing it into its most severe financial crisis in decades. Despite this extreme economic pressure, the tactic has failed to deliver the Trump administration’s stated goal of forcing a leadership change in Havana, even after recent rare bilateral talks between U.S. and Cuban officials on the island.
Todd Huntley, director of Georgetown University’s National Security Law Program and a retired U.S. Navy captain and judge advocate general, notes that the visible outcome in Venezuela likely emboldened Trump to expand the blockade tactic. But he stresses that the two scenarios are fundamentally unalike across geographic, military, and political lines.
While the U.S. blockade has certainly dealt a major blow to Iran’s economy, restricting imports of critical goods and limiting oil export revenue, ship tracking and maritime intelligence firms confirm that Tehran has still managed to move a substantial amount of sanctioned oil through the region despite the naval presence. Iran has rejected U.S. demands to reopen full transit through the Strait of Hormuz, and has resumed firing on commercial shipping in the area this week. Prolonged disruptions to Hormuz traffic have driven global gasoline prices sharply higher, pushed up costs for food and a vast range of other consumer goods worldwide, and created a major domestic political vulnerability for Trump ahead of November’s midterm elections.
“Blockades are usually just one tool of a mechanism used in a conflict,” said Salvatore Mercogliano, a maritime history professor at Campbell University in North Carolina. “They can be important. But it’s only one element. And I don’t think it’s going to be enough to convince the Iranians.”
U.S. Central Command head Adm. Brad Cooper claimed last week that “no ship has evaded U.S. forces,” noting that as of the prior Wednesday, the command had ordered 31 vessels to turn around or return to port. But global merchant shipping groups and intelligence firms contradict that assessment. Lloyd’s List Intelligence reports that a “steady flow of shadow fleet traffic” has continued moving in and out of the Persian Gulf, with 11 tankers carrying Iranian cargo departing the Gulf of Oman outside the strait since April 13. Another maritime analytics firm, Windward, confirmed this week that Iranian shipping traffic continues to move “via deception.”
Mercogliano explains that Iranian vessels use multiple tactics to evade the blockade, including spoofing their automatic identification system location data and routing through Pakistani territorial waters. He adds that the sheer volume of commercial traffic passing through the region makes full screening an enormous logistical challenge for U.S. naval forces.
The last comparable U.S. naval blockade of an adversary took place in the early 1960s, when the Kennedy administration implemented a quarantine of Soviet shipments to Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis — a measure deliberately not labeled a blockade for political and legal reasons, Huntley notes.
History shows that blockades can produce strategic effects: Britain’s World War I blockade of Germany is a prominent example of a successful large-scale maritime interdiction campaign. But Boot points out that successful historical blockades generate results over years or decades, while the Trump administration is seeking quick, short-term policy changes ahead of elections.
Boot argues that Trump misattributed the outcome in Venezuela to the blockade, when the successful leadership change actually stemmed from the direct military ousting of Maduro and subsequent cooperation from his former vice president Delcy Rodríguez. “There is no Delcy Rodríguez in Cuba or Iran,” Boot explained. “I think his success in Venezuela led him astray, thinking that this was a template that could be replicated elsewhere. He sees it as a huge success at little cost. And, in fact, it turns out to be a unique set of circumstances.”