US military action cannot loosen Iran's grip on the strait of Hormuz, and Iranian proxies are stepping up attacks, write Haik Gugarats and Charlotte Bawol
US-Iranian clashes resumed this week after a four-day pause that the White House attributed to attempts at renewed diplomacy. But elsewhere in the Middle East, the conflict continued unabated, and even spread north beyond the Red Sea.
US forces carried out heavy strikes against targets in Iran's coastal and urban areas overnight on 29-30 July, following an Iranian strike against a US base in Jordan. The US targeted Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) facilities, according to US Central Command (Centcom), which oversees the country's Middle East-based forces. Centcom said the strikes were in retaliation against what it called an "attempted surprise attack" on US forces on 28 July. The IRGC, in response, claimed missile strikes on US bases in Jordan and Kuwait.
Meanwhile, Iranian proxies focused their strikes on the region's energy infrastructure. Saudi Arabia came under drone attack from Yemen and Iraq on 25-27 July. US and Saudi forces on 28 July carried out strikes in eastern Iraq against what they described as facilities used by Iran-backed Iraqi militias. A drone strike damaged two LNG vessels in Egypt's Mediterranean port of Damietta on 29 July, Cairo said, without assigning responsibility for the attack.
President Donald Trump on 29 July described the drone strike in Damietta as "a little more of the same". He had previewed the Centcom strikes the same day by saying "we're going to be hitting them very hard because it's our turn to hit them". Trump has gone back and forth between vowing to compel Iran to reopen the strait of Hormuz by military means and teasing out a potential diplomatic outcome. The White House has not explained how Iran retains the ability to attempt or to carry out "surprise attacks" against US bases, since Trump has routinely described the country's military capacity as "obliterated".
But Iran's ability to control commercial traffic through the strait of Hormuz is unlikely to be diminished by US military operations, given the effectiveness of Tehran's asymmetrical warfare tactics, analysts say. The amount of firepower that Iran needs to disrupt commercial shipping through the strait is quite small, the Center for Naval Analyses (CNA) research programme director Joshua Tallis tells Argus. This makes it very difficult for the US to degrade Iranian capabilities to a point where they pose no threat to commercial shipping.
"I do not believe, short of a massive ground invasion, that there is a military solution to the Iranians' ability to disrupt and coerce commercial traffic moving through the strait," Tallis says. "The only solution is ultimately a diplomatic negotiated solution." CNA is an independent, not-for-profit organisation funded by the US government to advise its military forces.
Ends and means
Using diplomatic means to reduce Iran's motivation to attack may prove easier than reducing its ability to attack. Iran has retained its ability to inflict severe damage on commercial shipping using unconventional tactics. Its asymmetric capabilities include fast attack craft, cruise missiles and drones.
Vessel traffic through the strait of Hormuz has increasingly been concentrated along the northern lanes that Iran controls, suggesting that its attacks on commercial shipping using other routes have paid off. The northern lane was used by 88-100pc of Hormuz traffic over 20-24 July, according to data from Maritime security company Windward. All of the vessels that transited the strait on 24 July did so using the northern route, according to Windward. But commercial traffic through the strait is moving at a fraction of pre-war levels, with only 12 vessels transiting the waterway on 24 July, around 9pc of pre-war levels, Windward data show.
