One of the most persistent critiques of the U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran’s nuclear program is that Washington overlooked the issue of the Strait of Hormuz. Planners supposedly failed to anticipate Iran’s ability to disrupt one of the world’s most critical shipping lanes and had no real contingency plan when Tehran made the move.
The record shows otherwise: The blockade of Iranian ports that followed the disruption of the Strait was not an improvised reaction. It was a pre-planned option, ready when needed. Iran moved against the Strait on March 4. The United States imposed a naval blockade on April 13. A Memorandum of Understanding signed in mid-June tried to create a diplomatic off-ramp. When that collapsed in early July, the blockade returned immediately. This was deliberate sequencing, not panic.
Pre-strike warnings made the risk clear. According to The Wall Street Journal, Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, briefed U.S. President Donald Trump multiple times that Iran could try to close or harass the Strait. Trump proceeded anyway, judging that the nuclear threat outweighed the danger. Long-standing Pentagon planning and war-gaming, including a dedicated task force for keeping the waterway open, further underscore that Hormuz was a known vulnerability, not a surprise. Retired U.S. Army Maj. John Spencer, chair of Urban Warfare Studies at the Modern War Institute, has noted that this scenario had been studied for years.
That said, legitimate issues remain: Economic modeling from the Energy and Treasury Departments was reportedly underemphasized in the tight circle dedicated to war planning. The short-lived 20% U.S. shipping toll proposal showed improvisation under pressure. The repeated return to the blockade raises fair concerns about overreliance on a single tool and possible underestimation of Iranian resilience.
The deeper issue is what realistic alternatives existed before the initial strikes.
A more aggressive preemptive campaign against Iran’s naval and missile assets might have lessened the Hormuz threat, but it would have further amplified an already-detectable signal past the point of useful ambiguity; risked Gulf-state opposition; and expanded the war’s scope without necessarily making the threat of the move against the Strait less likely. Furthermore, an automatic military trigger if Iran moved on the Strait would presumably have needed advance buy-in from regional partners who may have been wary of escalation.
That said, doing nothing also seemed like a suboptimal option, given that it would have left Iran, per some assessments, mere months from nuclear breakout—a risk that former International Atomic Energy Agency inspector David Albright described as severe.
It should also be noted that Gulf partners faced their own tightrope, and the constraints they operated under were societal as much as diplomatic. Their leaderships largely oppose Iran’s nuclear ambitions, yet they govern populations to whom cooperation with Israel remains close to unthinkable. The 2024-25 Arab Opinion Index, which surveyed some 40,000 respondents across 15 Arab countries between late 2024 and August 2025, found that 87% opposed to recognizing Israel versus 6% in favor, and half of that 6% conditioned recognition on Palestinian statehood. Saudi Arabia registered the lowest opposition at 61%.
That is a very telling figure. It means that even the Gulf states’ most permissive public opposed recognition by roughly 2-1. Normalization between Israel and the Gulf states was always an arrangement between governments, not a reconciliation between publics. The index is careful on one point: Respondents framed their opposition in political terms—occupation and expansionism—rather than religious ones. But stated reasons and circulating discourse are different registers, and the discourse has moved. Arabic-language media and social platforms have increasingly cast the conflict as a Jewish or Zionist project, with the United Arab Emirates attacked as an “Arab Zionist” state for its ties to Jerusalem.
Underlying all of this is the rentier structure of the Gulf political economy. These are states whose domestic legitimacy rests on distributing hydrocarbon revenue rather than taxing citizens, which means a Hormuz disruption does not merely raise prices at the pump; it strains the fiscal basis of the ruling bargain itself.
That said, this exposure is uneven. Saudi Arabia and the UAE can route some volume around the strait by pipeline. Kuwait and Qatar are far more exposed, and Qatar’s massive liquid natural gas exports are entirely captive to it. Kuwait and Qatar are notable, considering that their publics are most opposed to recognition of Israel, at 94% and 89%, according to the index.
Even the Gulf states’ most permissive public opposed recognition of Israel by roughly two to one.
Thus, maximum economic exposure was exacerbated further by maximum public hostility, and any leadership weighing cooperation in the Iran war had to price in both at once. The binding constraint was never whether Gulf leaderships wanted the operation (many quietly did), but how large it could grow before their publics made cooperation unaffordable. Support was available; it was simply capped; and the operation had to be sized to fit beneath that ceiling.
On a related note, we now know what that constraint could have looked like in practice. When the United States announced “Project Freedom,” an operation to escort shipping through the Strait, Saudi Arabia reportedly denied the United States the use of Prince Sultan Air Base and its national airspace. Reporting indicates that Saudi leader Mohammed bin Salman told Trump directly that the operation risked making Saudi Arabia the target of further, and perhaps heightened, retaliation. The escort mission was halted within days.
Iran did not need to re-mine the Strait; the withdrawal of regional access accomplished what mines would have. That is a useful proxy for where the ceiling sat. Still, the episode ultimately does not settle how Riyadh would have responded. By May, the nuclear rationale had largely been spent, and Saudi interest had presumably shifted toward ending the war rather than extending it. Refusal of cooperation under those conditions is close to what one would predict, although Iranian strikes on Gulf territory may well have cut the other way.
The episode proves a narrower but sufficient point: Gulf access was never guaranteed, it could be withdrawn quickly, and it rested on a threshold low enough to stop even a limited escort mission. That was a constraint any pre-strike plan had to account for, whatever weight planners ultimately gave it.
Washington and Jerusalem accepted a calibrated risk on Hormuz not because they overlooked it, but because intervention would have a serious downside. The timelines reinforce this picture of calculated tradeoffs, rather than oversight. The June MoU sought to reopen the Strait without tolls or mines; its failure activated the standing contingency. Imperfect adjustments are inevitable in war. They do not represent a failure to plan.
Iran’s continued insistence on sovereignty over the Strait as a condition for peace—dismissed by Trump as “totally unacceptable”—keeps the issue central. The recurring blockade has become the main lever of pressure in a multiphase conflict.
Critics are rightly examining whether the resulting economic costs were fully anticipated and whether better options existed. Yet the evidence—Caine’s explicit warnings, established Pentagon planning, rapid reuse of the blockade and consistent public statements—shows that Hormuz was treated as a serious, if imperfectly managed risk. It was a tradeoff. The harder question is whether it was the right one and whether sustained pressure can deliver lasting results without broader fallout.
In the end, Middle East strategy rarely offers clean choices. The repeated use of the Hormuz blockade highlights the Strait’s enduring importance to global energy security, but also something less often acknowledged: The binding limit on American options was never military. It was the political tolerance of allied publics, a currency no force posture can purchase and for which no carrier group can substitute. Future leaders will study this not as a failure of foresight, but as a case study in hard strategic tradeoffs.
