Donald Trump has instructed the United States Navy to open fire without warning on any vessel caught laying mines in the Strait of Hormuz, dramatically escalating Washington’s posture in a waterway that has been effectively closed to commercial traffic since the spring. The order, issued on Thursday morning via a statement on the president’s Truth Social network, was accompanied by a pledge to triple the pace of American minesweeping operations already under way in the strait.
What Trump’s order actually says — and what it changes
“I have ordered the United States Navy to shoot and kill any boat, small boats though they may be … that is putting mines in the waters of the Strait of Hormuz,” the president wrote. “There is to be no hesitation.” In a pointed aside he added that Iran’s larger naval fleet — which he numbered at 159 vessels — was “ALL at the bottom of the sea”, a reference to the heavy losses the Iranian navy sustained during the opening weeks of the war that began with US and Israeli strikes on 28 February. He said American minesweepers were already clearing the strait and confirmed that effort would be sharply intensified.
The shift is significant because it authorises US naval commanders to engage small craft on sight, rather than requiring them to first demonstrate hostile intent. American officials assessed roughly a month ago that Iran had probably laid at least a dozen sea mines in the strait, using small boats capable of carrying two or three devices apiece. A Pentagon intelligence estimate briefed to lawmakers this week suggested that fully clearing the waterway could take up to six months once hostilities cease — a timeline that underscores how difficult the minesweeping task will be even without active Iranian resistance.
The order follows an unusually turbulent week even by the standards of this conflict. On Wednesday, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps attacked three commercial vessels in the strait and seized two container ships, actions Tehran claimed were responses to maritime violations. On Sunday, US forces had already intercepted and boarded the Iranian-flagged tanker M/T Tifani in the Indian Ocean, and a second vessel, the Majestic X, was seized this week. Trump on Tuesday extended the fragile US–Iran ceasefire indefinitely while keeping the American blockade of Iranian ports fully in place — a combination that Iranian officials have called a breach of the truce. Separately, Navy Secretary John Phelan was removed from his post this week, with the Pentagon announcing his departure “effective immediately” as the blockade operation widened.
Why the strait matters more than almost any other stretch of water
The Strait of Hormuz is only 21 miles wide at its narrowest, yet in peacetime it carries roughly a fifth of the world’s seaborne oil and a comparable share of liquefied natural gas, with traffic running at something in the order of 20 million barrels per day. Before the war, 84 per cent of crude and condensate shipments through the strait were bound for Asian markets; China alone drew about a third of its oil through the channel. Its closure has pushed global energy markets into what the International Energy Agency’s chief this month described as the most serious security threat in the industry’s history.
The practical effects are already visible far beyond the Gulf. Lufthansa announced this week that it would cut 20,000 flights through October to conserve fuel, after jet kerosene prices doubled since the outbreak of the conflict. United Airlines has warned its profits will fall short of Wall Street forecasts. British polling this month found that roughly one in ten consumers had begun stockpiling fuel, and shipping giants including Maersk, CMA CGM and Hapag-Lloyd long ago suspended transits through the strait and rerouted traffic around the Cape of Good Hope, adding weeks to delivery times and sharply raising freight costs.
The maritime consequences have been equally stark. The International Maritime Organization estimates that about 20,000 seafarers and 2,000 vessels are now stranded in the Persian Gulf, unable to leave. IMO secretary-general Arsenio Dominguez told a conference in Singapore this week that crews were suffering acute stress and fatigue, rationing food and living under the constant risk of missile strikes and falling debris. The International Transport Workers’ Federation says it has logged 1,900 requests for help from stranded crew and their families since the war began. The Philippine government confirmed on Thursday that 15 Filipino seafarers were among those on the two container ships seized by Iranian forces this week.
A fragile ceasefire, a blockade, and a widening allied response
The diplomatic architecture around the conflict has visibly weakened. Talks hosted by Pakistan in Islamabad earlier this month failed to produce a breakthrough, and a proposed second round involving Vice-President J.D. Vance has been put on hold. Iranian negotiators have signalled they will not attend further talks while the US blockade remains in force. Reports suggest that hardline elements of the Iranian military leadership have overridden more dovish political figures in Tehran, sealing the decision to suspend negotiations.
Iran has, meanwhile, begun to extract revenue from its control of the strait. The country’s deputy parliament speaker, Hamid Reza Haji Babaei, confirmed on Thursday that the first tranche of transit tolls — levied at rates reportedly exceeding $1 million per ship — had been deposited with the central bank. The European Union’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, described Tehran’s “daily U-turns” on whether the strait was open or closed as “reckless” and said the bloc would widen its sanctions regime, insisting that transit through the waterway must remain free of charge. The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which Iran has signed but never ratified, does not permit a riparian state to levy tolls on transit passage through an international strait.
Britain and France have taken a leading role in assembling an allied response. UK Defence Secretary John Healey and his French counterpart Catherine Vautrin are hosting military planners from more than 30 countries at a Royal Air Force base north of London this week to design a multinational mission to safeguard the strait once conditions allow. British defence officials have previously floated the deployment of autonomous mine-hunting systems launched from mother ships, though they caution that any such plan will only be activated after a sustained ceasefire. Since the war began on 28 February, more than 30 ships have been attacked in the waters of the Gulf, the strait and the Gulf of Oman.
For now, the strait remains one of the most closely watched — and most dangerous — stretches of sea in the world. Trump’s order tightens the American rules of engagement sharply, but it does nothing on its own to resolve the underlying standoff: an indefinite ceasefire that neither side fully honours, a naval blockade that Iran refuses to accept, and a waterway whose reopening may, by the Pentagon’s own estimate, still be half a year away.
