Trump Confronts Limits to US Power to Secure Strait of Hormuz

gCaptain reports that the Trump administration is running into the practical limits of what U.S. military and diplomatic power can actually guarantee in the Strait of Hormuz -- the narrow chokepoint through which a huge share of the world's seaborne oil and gas moves. The piece frames this as a confrontation between political rhetoric about "securing" the strait and the operational reality on the water.

This is a pattern that repeats every time a U.S. administration leans hard on naval presence as a substitute for actual control of a contested chokepoint. Since the tanker wars of the 1980s, Washington has kept a carrier group and the Fifth Fleet in the region precisely because the strait has never been "securable" in the way a press conference implies -- mines, small-boat harass