By Daniel Michaels
Two weeks in, the war in the Persian Gulf has become an asymmetric contest, pitting the unrivaled conventional military might of the U.S. and Israel against an Iranian government waging a guerrilla fight to block oil shipments and upend the global economy.
The Americans and Israelis quickly took control of Iran's skies and have used thousands of airstrikes to pummel the country's leadership and its armed forces -- destroying much of the navy and its ability to launch long-range missiles.
But the past century has shown that even the world's largest and most modern militaries can be humbled when attacking tenacious adversaries willing to endure more pain to defend their territory despite overwhelming odds.
Tehran has taken control of the Strait of Hormuz using far less sophisticated weaponry than the U.S. has unleashed and can now choke energy supplies and commercial shipping through the vital waterway. The goal: to drag the U.S. into a war of economic attrition, inflicting pain on America and its allies around the world.
Iranian forces have struck at least 16 commercial ships since the war began, sending oil prices above $100 a barrel and prompting predictions of longer-term dislocations as a significant chunk of the world's oil and natural gas comes off the market.
Tehran's vast arsenal of drones, short-range rockets, sea mines and other arms makes it easy to attack ships in the narrow strait. And shipping lines and mariners have largely decided not to risk death or financial loss by running the gantlet.
Whether U.S. forces can protect international commerce and whether President Trump and his team can take other steps to cushion the blow to the global economy will likely shape public views of his presidency and the war.
Trump on Friday said on social media that the U.S. had hit military targets on Kharg Island, Iran's main oil export terminal, seeking to pressure it into reopening the strait.
He said also that he hoped other countries would send warships to work with the U.S. to open the strait. On Friday, Trump said the U.S. Navy would start escorting oil tankers through the strait "very soon."
The U.S. has been wary of sending warships into the strait -- which is just 21 miles wide at its narrowest point -- with Navy officers warning that Iranian drones and antiship missiles could turn the area into a "kill box" for American sailors.
It is unclear whether U.S. air power, used to scour the Iranian coastline along the strait, would be enough to provide relief. Iranians are using mobile antiship missiles to mount hit-and-run attacks and rely on what is known as a mosquito fleet of small vessels to attack tankers.
The Pentagon is also sending more Marines to the region, officials said. The forces being dispatched are able to conduct air attacks, sea-based amphibious assaults and special operations.
For Iran, long fearful of an American attack, the struggle is an existential one that it has spent decades preparing for. It shows no sign of relenting despite Trump's recent comments that strikes are progressing well and the U.S. is on course to prevail.
"Simply because one side declares a war is over does not eliminate the inconvenient truth that the enemy always gets a vote in when a war ends, " said retired U.S. Navy Admiral James Stavridis. Americans "might be losing interest in the war, but the war may continue to be interested in us."
U.S. and Israeli air power has reshaped politics in the Middle East and far beyond during the war. Iran's fledgling nuclear-weapons program, already bludgeoned by U.S. and Israeli strikes last year, is now even further from producing a viable bomb. Tehran's arsenal of missiles and rockets able to hit distant targets is in tatters. Iran's air defenses lie in ruin.
"Stopping the Iranians from getting a nuclear weapon is a more important goal than maintaining oil prices at the previous level," said Michael O'Hanlon, a foreign-policy and defense specialist at the Brookings Institution.
But it was "somewhere between extremely optimistic and delusional" of Trump and Israel to think air attacks alone would cause the regime to collapse, he said.
Unintended consequences are mounting. To offset Iran's impact on fuel flows, Trump pushed for the release of international oil reserves and the lifting of sanctions on Russian crude.
The move will help Russian President Vladimir Putin fund his war in Ukraine. Kyiv, which has watched the munitions it wanted from the U.S. explode in the skies over the Middle East, stands to suffer even more. In China, political and military leaders have an opportunity to watch their prime adversary burn through much of its arsenal and show its playbook.
The ability of Iran's proxy in Lebanon, Hezbollah, to fire some 200 rockets into Israel this week -- less than two years after Israel claimed victory in crushing the militant organization -- also offers a reminder of Tehran's ability to keep fighting despite relentless pressure. Built on a glorification of martyrdom and loathed by many of its own citizens, the regime's appetite for risk has skyrocketed.
Trump's advisers are already sweating over rising prices for gas and consumer goods as midterm elections loom in November. Public-opinion polls indicate voters are wary of an extended conflict, which recent experience suggests could lead to pressure to wind down U.S. attacks -- though war is a genie that is hard to put back in the bottle.
Also weighing on markets and U.S. allies is uncertainty about Trump's objectives. His quick strikes on Iran last year and Venezuela in January were self-explanatory, especially since they hit their targets. In the past two weeks, Trump and administration officials have offered a changing string of rationales for the latest war and definitions of success.
In Iran, the U.S. is encountering familiar problems. The Persian Gulf since the 1980s has repeatedly become a tanker turkey shoot and Somali pirates nearly paralyzed Indian Ocean seaborne traffic a generation ago. A decade of drone wars in the Mideast, Ukraine and Africa has shown what cheap, expendable munitions can do against what militaries call exquisite systems, which cost millions of dollars and were designed for an earlier era.
While drones menace U.S. forces and allies, Iran's threat to tankers remains its greatest leverage -- and an area where Trump may be forced into more concessions than legalizing Russian fuel exports. Protecting ships through the narrow strait would require cooperation with other countries because the U.S. lacks the number or type of ships needed to sweep mines and conduct escorts.
European allies own dozens of mine-countermeasure ships, said Mark Kimmitt, a retired U.S. Army brigadier general who held senior roles in the Defense and State Departments under previous administrations.
Kimmitt said that Europeans and others may be reluctant to help Washington in a fight that many of them at most only thinly support, but he said doing so could be in their interests.
The Tanker Wars of the 1980s, during the Iran-Iraq War, may offer a model, he said. Then, the U.S., Europe and even the Soviet Union sailed more than 80 warships and minesweepers to escort tankers. That operation was a collection of countries working independently, rather than a coordinated coalition, he said.
"It seems reasonable that allies might help keep the strait open," he said. But now, like in the 1980s, "they may do it independently rather than join a U.S.-led coalition."
Write to Daniel Michaels at Dan.Michaels@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
March 14, 2026 21:00 ET (01:00 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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