WASHINGTON — In a surprising shift in US policy framing around the ongoing US-Israeli conflict with Iran, former president and current White House incumbent Donald Trump has privately told his senior aides he is prepared to conclude the military campaign even if the Strait of Hormuz, the world’s most critical chokepoint for global energy trade, remains mostly closed to commercial shipping, multiple senior Trump administration sources told The Wall Street Journal in a report published Monday evening.
The report, which carried a publication date aligned with the March 31, 2026 update of the original Xinhua News Agency item, outlines that Trump and his inner circle recently completed a strategic assessment of military options. That evaluation found that a large-scale dedicated military mission to fully reopen the strategic waterway would extend the duration of the conflict well beyond the four-to-six week timeline Trump has publicly and privately committed to for the campaign. The need to stick to that truncated timeline has overridden the longstanding US policy priority of keeping Hormuz open to all commercial traffic, according to the sources cited by the Journal.
The Strait of Hormuz, which sits between the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman, carries roughly one-fifth of the world’s daily crude oil and natural gas shipments, making its continued operation a core pillar of global energy market stability. A prolonged partial closure would likely put sustained upward pressure on global energy prices, raising inflationary pressures across major economies worldwide. This new reported position from Trump marks a notable departure from decades of US foreign policy that has treated unimpeded access to the strait as a non-negotiable national security interest.