The Pentagon is looking at ways to escort ships safely through the Strait of Hormuz, US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine said on Tuesday.
About a fifth of global oil and liquefied natural gas normally passes through the strait but Iran, which lies on its northern coast, has effectively closed it. Traffic through the strait has dropped by 97 per cent since the US-Israeli war against Iran began on February 28, according to United Nations data.
The US is seeking to calm oil markets concerned that a protracted war could cause a global energy crisis.
The Strait of Hormuz, a narrow passage of water between Iran and Oman that links the Persian Gulf with the Gulf of Oman, is the only sea exit for oil- and gas-producing countries such as Kuwait, Iran, Iraq, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.
Oil prices briefly climbed to their highest level since 2022 on Monday. High oil prices could trigger another cost-of-living crisis, as happened after Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, according to the United Nations.
A prolonged conflict could also cause a fertiliser shock, risking global food security. About 33 per cent of the world’s fertilisers, including sulphur and ammonia, pass through the strait, according to analytics firm Kpler.
An extended war could fuel fears of a global economic crisis similar to those that followed the Middle East oil shocks of the 1970s.
Iran's Revolutionary Guards have warned that any ship passing through the strait will be fired on.
At least 11 ships have been attacked since the conflict began.
But most of the traffic has halted, partly out of caution and also because insurance companies have raised premiums by as much as 300 per cent.
President Donald Trump said on March 3 that the US would provide protection through the strait for oil tankers.
He also said he had ordered the United States Development Finance Corporation to provide insurance and guarantees for shipping companies.
French President Emmanuel Macron said several European countries, India and other Asian states were planning a joint mission to provide protection. But he said such an operation could happen only once the conflict ends.
France is deploying about a dozen naval vessels, including its aircraft carrier strike group, to the eastern Mediterranean, Red Sea and potentially the Strait of Hormuz.
"We're looking at a range of options there," General Caine told reporters at the Pentagon on Tuesday without providing details.
The Strait of Hormuz is a difficult stretch of water to defend. Shipping lanes are just two nautical miles wide and ships must make a turn opposite Iranian islands and a mountainous coast that provides cover for Iranian forces, according to shipping broker SSY Global.
Iran's conventional navy has largely been destroyed but the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps still has plenty of weapons in its arsenal to cause damage, including fast attack craft, uncrewed surface vessels, speedboats, mini submarines, mines and even jet skis packed with explosives, said Tom Sharpe, a retired Royal Navy commander.
Pre-war, Tehran had the capacity to produce around 10,000 drones a month, according to the Centre for Information Resilience, a non-profit research group.
Escorting three or four ships a day through the strait would be feasible in the short-term using seven or eight destroyers providing air cover, and would depend on whether the risk from mini submarines has been reduced, but doing so sustainably for months would require more resources, Sharpe said.
Even if Iran's capacity to deploy ballistic missiles, drones and floating mines were destroyed, ships would still face a threat from suicide operations, said Adel Bakawan, Director of the European Institute for Middle East and North African Studies.
If the war does continue for weeks, some kind of escort will come together, said Kevin Rowlands, Editor of the RUSI Journal at the Royal United Services Institute.
"The world needs oil to flow through from the gulf, and so there is planning ongoing to put protection measures in place,” he said.
Yemen's Houthis, a terrorist group allied with Tehran but with a far smaller military arsenal at their disposal than Iran, managed to shut down most traffic passing through the Red Sea and the Bab al-Mandab Strait on its way to the Suez Canal for more than two years despite protection provided by US and European Union-led forces.
Most shipping companies are still using a far longer route via the southern tip of Africa. Danish shipping company Maersk had said it would begin a staggered return to the Suez route from January.
An EU-led force has been more successful at countering piracy off Somalia's coast, but that has been against forces far less well equipped than Iran's Revolutionary Guards.
The UAE and Saudi Arabia have sought to find ways to bypass the strait by building more oil pipelines.
But those are not currently operational and an attack on an east-west Saudi pipeline by Houthi militia in 2019 showed those alternatives were also vulnerable.
(Additional reporting by Renee Maltezou and Kate Holton, Writing by Charlie Devereux, Editing by Timothy Heritage)
