WASHINGTON—President Trump told aides he’s willing to end the U.S. military campaign against Iran even if the Strait of Hormuz remains largely closed, administration officials said, likely extending Tehran’s firm grip on the waterway and leaving a complex operation to reopen it for a later date.
In recent days, Trump and his aides assessed that a mission to pry open the chokepoint would push the conflict beyond his timeline of four to six weeks. He decided that the U.S. should achieve its main goals of hobbling Iran’s navy and its missile stocks and wind down current hostilities while pressuring Tehran diplomatically to resume the free flow of trade. If that fails, Washington would press allies in Europe and the Gulf to take the lead on reopening the strait, the officials said.
There are also military options the president could decide on, but they are not his immediate priority, they said.
Over the past month, Trump has expressed various opinions in public on how to handle the strait, part of a larger pattern of giving conflicting goals and objectives of the war overall. He has at times threatened to bomb civilian energy infrastructure if the waterway isn’t reopened by a certain date. On other occasions, he has played down the importance of the strait to the U.S. and said its closure is a problem for other nations to solve.
The longer the strait remains closed, the more it will roil the global economy and boost gas prices. Multiple countries, including U.S. allies, are reeling from the downturn in energy supply that once flowed freely through the chokepoint. Industries that rely on items such as fertilizer to grow food or helium to make computer chips are suffering from shortages.
Without a swift return to safe passages, Tehran will continue to threaten world trade until the U.S. and its partners either negotiate a deal or forcibly end the crisis, analysts say.
Suzanne Maloney, an Iran expert and vice president at the Brookings Institution in Washington, called ending military operations before the strait is open “unbelievably irresponsible.”
The U.S. and Israel started the war together and can’t walk away from the fallout, Maloney said. “Energy markets are inherently global, and there is no possibility of insulating the U.S. from the economic damage that is already occurring and will become exponentially worse if the closure of the strait continues.”
Trump’s desire to end the war quickly is at odds with other moves he is planning to make. This weekend, the USS Tripoli and the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit entered the region. Trump has also ordered elements of the 82nd Airborne and is considering sending another 10,000 ground troops to the Middle East, The Wall Street Journal reported. Meanwhile, he has referred to the war as “an excursion” and “a lovely stay,” yet he is also weighing a complex and risky mission to seize the regime’s uranium, the Journal reported.
On Monday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters that the U.S. was “working towards” normal operations in the strait, but didn’t list it among the core military objectives of targeting Iran’s navy, missiles, defense industry and ability to make a nuclear weapon.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, speaking Monday to Al Jazeera, said the current campaign to complete U.S. military objectives will be finished within weeks.
“Then we’ll be confronted with this issue of the Straits of Hormuz, and it will be up to Iran to decide,” said Rubio, who is also Trump’s national security adviser, “or a coalition of nations from around the world and the region, with the participation of the United States, we’ll make sure that it’s open, one way or the other.”
The Trump administration had planned for the possibility of Iran closing the strait after the first bombs dropped. But once Iran placed mines in the water and threatened to strike tankers, traffic slowed to a trickle.
Senior officials repeatedly waved the problem away as pressure mounted on Washington to handle the situation. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on March 13 told reporters Iran’s actions were a sign of “sheer desperation” and was “something we’re dealing with, we have been dealing with it and don’t need to worry about it.”
To circumvent the problem, Trump increasingly called on shipping companies to take the risk of sailing through the waterway. When that didn’t work, he switched to issuing threats directly at Tehran. Trump last week interpreted Iran’s leadership allowing some ships through as a concession, kick-starting the latest round of diplomacy he hopes could end the war.
But after saying Monday on social media that Iran was now led by a “more reasonable” regime, he threatened to target the country’s electric plants and oil sites—including oil-export hub Kharg Island—“if the Hormuz Strait is not immediately ‘Open for Business.’”
“President Trump is going to move forward unabated, and he expects the Iranian regime to make a deal with the administration,” Leavitt told reporters.
Current and former officials say they believe the ability of Iran to control the passageway will be blunted as its military assets are diminished.
“Once you’ve once you’ve achieved those strategic objectives, it naturally follows,” said Rich Goldberg, a former Trump National Security Council official now at Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington think tank. “That is when you would focus on the Strait of Hormuz, because you would have done so much damage to their external threat, and you would have reallocated your military resources to that mission.”
Despite his threats to reopen the waterway, Trump and his team say the strait matters far more to countries in Europe, the Middle East and Asia than to the U.S., insisting it is not vital to America’s energy needs. Top aides in Washington have spent weeks asking allies and partners to plan for negotiations or operations to ensure a fifth of the world’s oil and gas can travel through the strait.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent suggested Monday in a Fox News interview that the U.S. or a multinational group could escort tankers. His comments didn’t signal any urgency to reopen the strait immediately.
“The market is well-supplied, and we are seeing more and more ships go through on a daily basis as individual countries cut deals with the Iranian regime for the time being,” Bessent said. “But over time, the U.S. is going to retake control of the straits, and there will be freedom of navigation, whether it is through U.S. escorts or a multinational escort.”
This month, nearly 40 countries—including the United Kingdom, France and Canada—pledged “our readiness to contribute to appropriate efforts to ensure safe passage through the Strait.”
Around 20% of the world’s oil supply is transported through the strait, and in 2024, 84% of crude oil and 83% of liquid natural gas shipped through the strait was bound for Asian markets, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
Iran’s grip on the strait led the benchmark price of U.S. oil to close Monday at over $100 a barrel for the first time since 2022, and some financial analysts project it could surge to $200 a barrel if the war causes sustained disruption. to the waterway.
Write to Alexander Ward at alex.ward@wsj.com and Meridith McGraw at Meridith.McGraw@WSJ.com
