The Hormuz gamble: Trump’s coalition dream and its hard realities

THE Strait of Hormuz blockade is now the most urgent and revealing test of US President Donald Trump’s foreign policy in his second term.

Since Iran effectively closed the strait in response to US and Israeli strikes, a blockade that has sent oil prices soaring past US$100 a barrel, the Trump administration has scrambled to respond. The strategy has taken a familiar shape: maximalist rhetoric, bilateral pressure and an appeal for a grand multilateral coalition. Whether it can work is another matter entirely.

The coalition gambit

Trump posted on Truth Social that “many countries, especially those affected by Iran’s attempted closure of the Hormuz Strait, will be sending warships”, listing China, France, Japan, South Korea, the UK and “others” among the nations he hoped would contribute.

The logic is straightforward – if the countries that depend most on Gulf oil bear the burden of securing the strait, the US need not carry the load alone.

It is a reasonable argument in principle. More than 14 million barrels per day of crude passed through the strait in 2025, roughly a third of all ship-exported oil worldwide. The economic stakes are global, not purely American. Why should Washington alone foot the security bill?

The problem, as with so many of Trump’s coalition-building efforts, is the execution. No country has so far publicly agreed to send warships.

The UK said it is examining options, but ruled out being drawn into the wider war. France has kept its ships in a “defensive” posture. Japan cited domestic legal constraints on overseas military deployments. Australia said it had not even been asked, and would not be sending ships.

The China problem

Perhaps the most striking dimension of Trump’s push is the appeal to China, a country he has spent years framing as a strategic adversary. He claimed aboard Air Force One that China sourced about 90 per cent of its oil through the strait, framing Beijing’s cooperation as a matter of self-interest.

But the numbers tell a more complicated story. Analysts at Nomura estimated that oil flows through Hormuz represent just 6.6 per cent of China’s total energy consumption, and satellite imagery shows that Iranian crude has continued flowing to China unimpeded since the war began.

Iran, it turns out, has been selectively enforcing the blockade, allowing tankers picking up Iranian crude to pass freely while blocking shipments from countries affiliated with the US and Israel. China, in other words, has little practical incentive to help reopen a strait that is currently hurting its rivals more than itself.

The deeper problem: being the main character

Beyond the coalition-building difficulties lies a more fundamental strategic contradiction.

While the US did provide naval escort services for tankers during the Iran-Iraq war, the Americans were not the active combatant then. Now, they are the main characters in this conflict. It is exceedingly difficult to simultaneously wage war against a country and ask allies to help you manage the consequences, especially when those allies had reservations about the conflict from the start.

A key question then is whether there are enough navy assets to both escort ships and continue operations against Iran – two missions that may, at times, be in direct tension with each other.

Escalation on the horizon

With the coalition slow to materialise and the blockade continuing, the Trump administration has begun floating more dramatic options.

Trump is reportedly weighing a seizure of Iran’s critical oil depot on Kharg Island, a move that would require US boots on the ground if tankers remain bottled up in the Persian Gulf. The logic is that controlling Kharg Island would constitute an economic knockout of sorts to the regime.

But the move carries serious risks, including potential Iranian retaliatory strikes against oil infrastructure across Gulf countries, particularly Saudi Arabia.

Iran has already warned that any attack on its oil and gas infrastructure would be met with reciprocal attacks on Gulf allies, threatening to set all oil and gas infrastructure in the region on fire.

The threat of a broader regional energy war, one that could spike Brent crude well past US$120 per barrel and tip the global economy into recession, is not a hypothetical. It is a live possibility.

An accountability gap

What is most striking about the Trump administration’s Hormuz strategy is the absence of a clear endgame. As Democratic Senator Chris Murphy pointed out, there appears to be “no plan”.

The White House press secretary confirmed the administration has no timeline for when the strait will be safe for commercial shipping again.

A president who entered the Iran conflict with promises of swift and decisive victory now finds himself managing a protracted economic crisis with no clear off-ramp. The Hormuz Coalition may yet materialise; diplomacy can surprise.

But as of today, the gap between Trump’s confident proclamations and the reluctant silence of the countries he is counting on speaks volumes about the limits of pressure-based multilateralism, when one’s own credibility as an honest broker has been compromised by the act of starting the war in the first place.

The strait is 34 km wide. The distance between Trump’s ambitions and the coalition’s willingness to follow may be wider still.