U.S. President Donald Trump speaks as he meets with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz (not pictured) in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., March 3, 2026. REUTERS Jonathan Ernst
A New York Times op-ed by a military expert argues that blockades don’t work the way President Trump thinks — and that his blockade of Iran is “unlikely” to succeed.
Jennifer Kavanagh, director of military analysis at Defense Priorities, a foreign policy think tank, explains that Trump’s blockade should not have come as a surprise — he’s used them already against Venezuela and Cuba.
While the Strait of Hormuz was open before Trump started his war against Iran, Iran chose to close it. Trump’s response was to launch a blockade of Iranian ports, to force a deal.
“But Tehran’s effective closure of the strait since the United States and Israel attacked two months ago has emerged as the war’s most bedeviling problem and one Mr. Trump is desperate to fix,” Kavanagh writes. Trump’s goal is to “choke Iran’s economy and force the country’s leaders to reopen the strait and accept Washington’s terms of surrender.”
That tactic is “unlikely to work for the same reasons the United States finds itself facing strategic defeat by a weaker adversary: a mismatch of stakes and time horizons.”
Kavanagh explains that the way blockades work is an equation of time and will. And Iran has both. Trump, she suggests, does not.
“While Iran has gained the upper hand in this conflict by extending and surviving what it considers an existential war,” Kavanagh writes, “Mr. Trump wants a fast and decisive victory, something a blockade cannot deliver.”
She points to President Abraham Lincoln’s blockade against the Confederacy during the Civil War. The war lasted four more years. And she points to the British naval blockade of Germany in World War I. That war also lasted another four years. Today, “Iran can likely endure the U.S. blockade for months without facing economic collapse.”
For Trump, “this timeline is likely to be unacceptable. His impatience with the war is evident in his increasingly erratic Truth Social posts and near-constant assertions that the war is already over,” Kavanagh says. “In a test of wills, Tehran has the advantage and a higher pain tolerance. With their survival on the line, Iran’s leaders can afford to be patient.”