War games and warnings on Strait of Hormuz went unheeded by Trump

WASHINGTON — In mid-February, shortly before President Donald Trump launched the war on Iran, the country’s Revolutionary Guard conducted live-fire drills in its coastal waters. Iranian state media publicized the exercise, whose official name made its purpose clear: “Smart Control of the Strait of Hormuz.”

The exercise amounted to a flashing red warning light to the Trump administration — one that, for reasons that are still not fully clear, went largely unheeded.

Within days of the war’s start, Iran’s military exerted control over the strait, menacing commercial tankers with boats, missiles, and drones. Shipping ground to a halt. Energy prices soared. And Trump was backed into a strategic corner.

Three months later, Iran’s control of the strait has become its most powerful weapon, a source of huge leverage in negotiations with Trump over the country’s nuclear program.

A president used to bending opponents to his will has struggled to conceal his exasperation. In an April social media post, Trump profanely demanded that the “crazy bastards” leading Iran open the strait, “or you’ll be living in Hell.” Iran’s military mocked Trump’s threat as a sign of helplessness.

But Iran’s response has been neither crazy nor surprising, say numerous former U.S. officials who spent hours war-gaming Iran’s likely response to a major U.S. attack.

For years, the U.S. government has conducted war games dealing with potential conflicts with Iran, including ones at the Pentagon attended by dozens of military officials and policymakers. Over and over, participants say, they concluded that Iran would respond to a major U.S. attack by closing the Strait of Hormuz.

“Every single time, the first thing we focused on was the strait — without exception,” said Dennis B. Ross, a senior national security official in the Obama White House. “We assumed that if you go to war with Iran, this was their counterpoint.”

Trump has been aware of that risk since at least his first term as president. John Bolton, who served as national security adviser to Trump in his first term, recalled trying in vain to persuade the president to launch a regime-change war against Tehran, Iran’s capital. The Strait of Hormuz was always central to those discussions, Bolton said.

“It is impossible to believe that Trump was surprised by the closing of the strait,” Bolton said. The real question, he added, was why the Trump administration seemed so unprepared for that outcome.

Olivia Wales, a White House spokesperson, said that thanks to detailed planning, “the entire administration was prepared for any action taken by the Iranian regime.”

“President Trump knew that Iran would try to stop the freedom of navigation and free flow of energy, and he took action to destroy numerous mines and over 40 mine-laying vessels,” she added.

But a look back at the run-up to the war makes clear that Trump both underestimated Iran’s ability to shut down the strait and overestimated America’s ability to reopen it if necessary. While the White House has not disclosed the details of its planning, experts and former officials said the publicly available evidence suggests several likely culprits.

One simple explanation is that Trump may have expected Iran’s government to fall before it could close the strait. Some Trump officials also believed — mistakenly — that Iran could not close the waterway without sacrificing its own oil exports and would not commit “economic suicide,” as one called it.

Trump and his top officials also appeared to believe that if Iran did try to seize the strait, American allies would help U.S. forces regain control of the waterway. That, too, was a miscalculation.

Iran’s tactics may have surprised the U.S. military. Pentagon planning focused on the assumption that Iran would heavily mine the waterway. Iran has instead relied mainly on shore-based missiles and its relatively new arsenal of cheap drones to attack and menace ships.

Trump inherited a geographic problem that has worried U.S. strategists since the early Cold War, when they feared that the Soviet Union might try to control the channel through which roughly 20% of global oil supplies now flow.

Over the last two decades, amid rising tensions over its nuclear program, Iran has often harassed traffic in the strait and even threatened to close down the waterway.

After one round of such threats, in late 2011, President Barack Obama sent a secret message to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, warning that interference with the strait was a U.S. “red line” that would draw a severe military response. Iran backed down. The lesson, Ross said, was that Iran would not risk its leadership’s survival for the strait.

But Trump’s attack at the end of February reversed that calculus, launching airstrikes that killed Khamenei and other Iranian officials, and calling for the fall of Iran’s government.

“We were going for regime change,” said Kenneth M. Pollack, a former CIA intelligence analyst and vice president for policy at the Middle East Institute. “That’s the key — that’s why the Iranians closed the strait.”

Trump may have expected — or at least hoped for — a quick change in government that would preclude action by Iran in the strait. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu assured Trump that Iran’s government could be toppled. And Trump was still riding the high of a January commando raid that captured President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela.

At least some Trump officials doubted that Iran would even want to close the strait, presuming that such a move would bring an end to the country’s lucrative oil revenues. Iran has long evaded heavy U.S. sanctions by illicitly exporting oil through the strait.

“It’s economic suicide for them if they do it,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Fox Business last June. “And we retain options to deal with that.”

But Rubio’s “economic suicide” scenario also hung on another mistaken assumption: that Iran could not halt most traffic through the strait without giving up its own oil exports.

At a Senate hearing Tuesday, angry Democratic senators pressed Rubio to assure them that Trump would not make concessions to Iran simply for restoring the strait to its prewar status.

Most analysts have long assumed that Iran would make the waterway impassable by laying dozens or even hundreds of mines in its waters. That would make the strait too dangerous even for its own tankers to navigate.

The fact that Iran did not try to close the strait after a wave of U.S. airstrikes, known as Operation Midnight Hammer, against its key nuclear facilities a year ago may have supported Rubio’s view.

But Iran sidestepped that problem by using fewer mines than expected — perhaps thanks to U.S. attacks on its mining boats — and relying on missiles and drones to terrorize shipping. Ships carrying Iranian oil, which were not subject to missile or drone attacks, continued to traverse the strait for weeks, until Trump imposed a counter-blockade on Iranian shipping traffic in April.

During a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing last June, lawmakers questioned Adm. Brad Cooper, who would become the head of U.S. Central Command, about the Iranian threat to the strait and the military’s ability to counter it. Cooper referred to “mine warfare” and U.S. minesweeping abilities, but did not mention drones.

Acknowledging that such a scenario would be “complex,” he indicated that the military could handle it in a matter of “weeks and months.”

A unilateral U.S. military operation to open the strait would involve major risk for a president already facing anger from supporters who believed his past vows to avoid messy Middle Eastern wars.

Pollack, who has run or participated in several simulated U.S.-Iran conflicts, said that such an operation would require deploying at least one Army division on Iran’s coast to hunt down its full arsenal of boats, mines, missiles, and drones. “You have to go almost door to door on the northern shore of the strait to do this,” he said.

“It’s always been a very difficult problem,” he added. “I have not been surprised by anything the Iranians did.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.