Trump wants U.S. Navy to escort tankers through the Gulf. Why that plan may not work

President Donald Trump is ready to use the U.S. Navy to escort oil tankers through the Strait of Hormuz as the war against Iran rages, but providing safe passage to the volume of traffic that typically passes through the waterway will prove challenging.

U.S. oil prices have surged 28% to above $86 a barrel this week as Iran attacks tankers, effectively bringing ship traffic through the Strait to a standstill. Brent crude is up 22% this week to $89 a barrel.

Global benchmark Brent would shoot above $100 per barrel if the waterway is closed for a prolonged period, Wall Street analysts say. At that level, oil prices could tip the global economy into a recession, they say.

The narrow Strait is the only way for tankers to enter and exit the Persian Gulf. More than 14 million barrels per day of crude passed through the Strait in 2025, about a third of all the oil that is exported by ship worldwide, according to energy consulting firm Kpler.

100 a day

About 100 tankers and cargo vessels pass through the Strait daily under normal conditions, said Matt Smith, an oil analyst at Kpler, and about 400 tankers are currently stuck in the Gulf due to the war.

“There’s hundreds and hundreds of vessels still in the Mideast Gulf,” said Matt Wright, a senior freight analyst, also at Kpler. The U.S. Navy would take “an inordinate amount of time to escort them even a few at a time.”

Trump’s promise to escort tankers if necessary, and provide political risk insurance to their owners, helped calm the oil market Tuesday and Wednesday.

But prices surged Thursday after Iran said it attacked a tanker with a missile. The British Navy, meanwhile, reported a large explosion at a tanker anchored in Iraqi territorial waters.

Enough ships

“A key question will be whether there are enough Navy assets to both escort ships as well as continue operations against Iran,” Helima Croft, head of global commodity strategy at RBC Capital Markets, told clients in a Tuesday note.

Insurance isn’t really the issue for ship owners, Wright at Kpler said. Tankers are not moving because they are worried about their physical security, he said, and ship owners will need to a see a sustained period without attacks to venture through the Strait again.

The urgency to recover oil flows from the Gulf is high, Wright said. But “there needs to be some confidence that Iran’s ability to continue to wage war has diminished,” the analyst said.

Houthi militants in Yemen disrupted Red Sea traffic with missile attacks for more than a year, starting in late 2023. “They’re nothing compared to the sophistication of the Iranians, so it is a very different, threat,” Wright said.

U.S. naval escorts help at the margin but by themselves will not re-open the Strait, Rapidan Energy analysts said in a note on Wednesday. Instead, the U.S. needs to systematically degrade Iran’s military capabilities, which takes time, they said.

1980s war

The U.S. Navy escorted tankers through the Strait in 1987 when commercial vessels became targets during the Iran-Iraq war, said Croft. But the U.S. military at that time was not simultaneously waging war against the regime in Tehran and guaranteeing safe passage to ships, she said.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright said Wednesday that the Trump administration will provide naval escorts “as soon as we can.”

“Right now our Navy and our military is focused on other things, which is disarming this Iranian regime that’s been striking out at all of its neighbors and Americans in every way it can,” Wright told Fox News.

“In the not too distant future, we’ll be able to use the Navy to get energy flowing again, but in the meantime markets are very well supplied,” he said.

No timeline

The Trump administration does not have a timeline for when the Strait will be safe for commercial shipping again, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters Wednesday.

“I don’t want to commit to a timeline, but certainly it’s something that is being calculated actively by both the Department of War and the Department of Energy,” Leavitt said during a briefing.

The longer tankers are penned into the Gulf, the bigger the problem becomes for the global oil market, according to analysts.

The Gulf countries could exhaust their storage capacity as barrels build up with nowhere to go, said Natasha Kaneva, head of global commodities research at JPMorgan. That will force them to shut down production, potentially spiking Brent to $120 per barrel, Kaneva said in a Sunday note.

Iraqi officials told Reuters on Tuesday that Iraq has already cut production by 1.5 million barrels per day as it runs out of storage due to the Hormuz closure. Production shutdowns could double in four days, Kaneva said Tuesday.

“With the Strait of Hormuz still inactive, the clock is ticking,” Kaneva said.