Earlier this year the Daily Mail took a boat out on to the Strait of Hormuz to report on the growing unrest inside Iran. The day was cold and sunny, the water azure blue and beautiful.
On the horizon was the coastline of Iran, at once beautiful, hostile and threatening. This was just days after the regime’s stormtroopers had scythed through crowds of protesters slaughtering tens of thousands of their own people, and maiming and torturing even more.
At the time US President Donald Trump warned there would be retribution.
And now, weeks on, the US and Israel are at war with the Islamic Republic. They have already snuffed out large parts of its leadership. They are relentlessly pounding regime facilities in key locations throughout the country.
But Iran’s rulers are pathologically determined to resist the Big and Little Satans at all cost – and they are ruthless and cynical.
Almost as soon as the strikes began, Tehran threatened to close the strait. Now, they have effectively done so.
Roughly 20 million barrels of oil a day – about a fifth of the world’s supply – normally pass through this stretch of water, which at its narrowest point is barely 24 miles wide. It is one of the world’s most important economic waterways – and chokepoints.
And while Iran hasn’t blockaded it with its ships or laid mines across it, the country has made a public declaration that the Strait of Hormuz is closed.
It has also conducted attacks on commercial ships in the region – nine at the latest count, two of them in the strait itself – that are severe enough to make markets behave as though the route is indeed shut. At least 200 ships are currently anchored and stranded outside the strait and in nearby Gulf waters. Be in no doubt: if the strait remains closed for any length of time, the economic consequences will be catastrophic.
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While Iran hasn’t blockaded it with its ships or laid mines across it, the country has made a public declaration that the Strait of Hormuz is closed
Qatar’s energy minister, Saad al-Kaabi, has warned that if it is unable to function the war ‘will bring down the economies of the world’.
Washington had promised a short, decisive campaign. Instead, the situation in the strait looks likely to present it with the kind of grinding conflict from which great powers struggle to escape.
One that could prove to be Mr Trump’s Vietnam.
Already the effects of its closure are huge. Shipping costs have soared, insurers have either hiked premiums by as much as 100 per cent or just cancelled cover, while shipping companies and seafarers’ unions are expected to formally classify the strait as a war zone at an emergency meeting this week.
The market impact is no less profound. The price of Brent crude is up 16 per cent since the war began, US crude has surged nearly 21 per cent, and European natural gas prices jumped roughly 50 to 60 per cent over the past week. Oil prices are soon to hit $100 a barrel, which could rise to $150 within days.
Meanwhile, it was reported yesterday that Britain has just two days’ worth of gas in storage, compared to many weeks’ worth in most European countries. It means that the UK is spectacularly vulnerable as the Middle East crisis hits global supplies – in addition to the problems of the strait, production at the world’s largest gas facility, Ras Laffan in Qatar, has been suspended after a missile bombardment from Iran.
Traders have been exploiting our vulnerability by charging Britain a premium for gas supplies – we are now paying the highest wholesale price in Europe. And the repercussions of all this on household budgets and the national economy cannot be overstated.
As Qatar’s minister al-Kaabi made clear. ‘If this war continues for a few weeks,’ he said, ‘GDP growth around the world will be impacted. Everybody’s energy price is going to go higher. There will be shortages of some products and there will be a chain reaction of factories that cannot supply.’
The message out of Doha could not be clearer: End this war now. The pressure on the US to protect ships passing through the strait could not be greater.
Trump has already proposed offering US naval escorts for commercial vessels with the US government also stepping in as insurer of last resort. The idea is simple. If hostile forces threaten vessels, the US navy guards them; if the market is spooked, Washington absorbs the financial risk.
But in making the offer, the US President may have sailed into a trap. For although Iran’s regular navy suffered heavy losses in the first wave of US attacks, the country’s second navy run by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, (IRGC) which is responsible for the strait, is thought to be largely intact.
The IRGC’s navy specialises in asymmetric warfare: avoiding a more dominant opponent’s strengths and instead focusing on weaknesses using unconventional strategies and tactics.
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Should Britain do more to protect its energy supply from threats like Iran’s control of key waterways?
A fiery plume of smoke rises over Tehran as Israel and the US launched another wave of devastating strikes
Donald Trump has proposed offering US naval escorts for commercial vessels passing through the strait
A 2020 report by Farzin Nadimi, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute, outlined how this might play out in the strait.
It said: ‘Iran could theoretically launch a coordinated attack involving explosives-laden remote-controlled boats and remotely operated underwater vehicles, swarming speedboats, semi-submersible torpedo boats, kamikaze [drones], midget attack submarines, and shore-based antiship missile and artillery fire.
Firepower at the IRGC’s disposal includes armed replicas of the British-built Bladerunner 51, hailed among the fastest speedboats the world.
A senior IRGC commander said when it was launched: ‘The Bladerunner is a British ship that holds the world speed record. [80mph] We got a copy [on which] we made some changes so it can launch missiles and torpedoes.’
The Washington Institute report says such ‘fast-attack craft’ are essential in controlling the strait. ‘The IRGC navy uses these boats for maritime patrol and ultimately swarming and sneak missile attacks.’
It adds: ‘A key feature of the IRGC’s rocket-firing swarm boats is their survivability, achieved by designing the boats to have a lower profile paired with high speed and manoeuvrability. For a similar reason, Iran has been working on unmanned surface vessels since the late 1980s, specifically through the development and fielding of remote-controlled suicide drone boats packed with explosives.
‘Iran has positioned no fewer than 1,500 of them, each armed with 500 kilograms of explosives, along key Persian Gulf coastal areas. Originally designed to destroy warships, these drone boats have progressively been made more sophisticated with the provision of various sensors and data links.’
The regime is estimated to have 17 submarines garrisoned at Bandar Abbas, which sits on the northern bend of the strait. US forces appear to have only disabled one of them since the attacks began last week.
That submarine – a 500-ton Fateh-class vessel with at least four 533mm torpedo tubes – was Iran’s ‘most operational’ subsurface boat, according to US military officials.
What’s left could still inflict significant damage, however. Sending ships to escort commercial vessels – as many as 80 tankers per day – will pitch US troops perilously close to Iran’s crude but lethal arsenal.
Ryan Ramsey, a former captain of the Royal Navy submarine HMS Turbulent told the Daily Mail: ‘Having operated submarines in the Gulf region, the Iranian submarine force should be taken seriously.
‘Iran also operates [Russian-made] Kilo-class submarines, which are larger, longer-range boats and bring greater endurance and firepower. In the confined waters of the region, even a small number of submarines can create real uncertainty for surface commanders.
‘That said, against capable anti-submarine forces the balance shifts. US and UK submarines and maritime patrol assets are extremely proficient at finding and tracking these boats.’
The Washington Institute report said Iran has at least 12 sonar-equipped Ghadir-class midget submarines which are ‘very manoeuvrable and can sit silently submerged while waiting for its prey. It can then attack using homing torpedoes or antiship missiles’.
Tehran has previously claimed that ‘on several occasions’ Ghadir submarines ‘caught US navy vessels off guard by surfacing unexpectedly near them’.
According to the report the IRGC considers sea mines essential to what it calls its ‘smart control’ of the Strait of Hormuz.
To that end, it is said to have acquired some of the world’s deadliest, including ‘influence’ mines which rest on the seabed. Triggered not by physical contact, they instead use sensors to detect when a vessel is nearby.
Magnetic limpet mines are also favoured. The report says they are ‘deployed by speedboats or divers, as demonstrated…in 2019 when just south of the Strait of Hormuz, two transiting tankers were attacked by speeding boats attaching limpet mines to their target hulls’.
Iran’s network of islands, inlets and coves along the strait provide ‘excellent hiding places’ and, allow for ‘staging precision mining operations, sneak missile and swarming attacks’.
The report says Iran has also bored tunnels into rocky islands ‘from where boats can launch directly into shipping lanes’.
It adds: ‘Speedboats can rush out of covered locks and concrete pens, or can be launched from flatbed trucks under cover of darkness during high tide without any special accommodations. These capabilities can increase surprise and reduce transit time to the points of contact.’
Iran has also dispersed missile launchers and drone systems along the southern coast overlooking the strait; these are small, mobile, and difficult to eliminate completely. Each surviving launcher represents yet one more threat to a passing tanker or the destroyer assigned to protect it.
Then there’s the fact that the threat does not end at the strait itself. Further south, Iranian-backed Houthi forces in Yemen – already responsible for chaos in the Red Sea during 2023 and 2024 – remain Tehran’s most capable proxy force. Their missiles and drones have demonstrated the reach to threaten vessels across a wide arc of regional waters, extending the shadow over global shipping far beyond Hormuz.
Destroying every launcher, every drone depot, every submarine pen would demand a campaign measured not in days but in months, perhaps years. Iran is a vast country, and it is mountainous and heavily fortified. Its military, especially the IRGC, is designed to survive and resist until the end.
And as we know from the way it rapidly replenished its missile stock following the 12-day war last year, in which Israel conducted surgical strikes across the country, and from its decades-long semi-covert nuclear programme, Iran is a master of hiding, dispersing and rebuilding in the face of attack.
History offers a chilling precedent here. The US entered Vietnam convinced that its technological, financial and numerical superiority would bring quick victory.
Instead it spent a decade fighting an adversary that absorbed punishment without collapsing.
Iran, which is far larger, geographically more challenging, and driven in part by a hard ideological core steeped in apocalyptic theology, would likely prove an even more stubborn battlefield.
That is the danger. War in the strait might seem like the type of decisive action we need, but it risks opening the door to a protracted conflict with no clear endpoint. Once open, it becomes very difficult to close.
And there are many inside Iran who are counting on exactly this.
The Strait of Hormuz is merely one part of a much larger picture. But we must internalise a singular fact about it: far more than a vital economic waterway, it is the physical manifestation of a perennial geopolitical truth – wars in the Gulf never stay in the Gulf. They ripple outward through shipping lanes and financial markets until they reach our homes, schools and factories.
Be in no doubt: the war in Iran affects us all. We must hope that it ends cleanly and quickly. Our future stability depends on it.
