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Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/03/16/strait-of-hormuz-opening-iran-trump/
How to Solve the Hormuz Crisis
(Washington Post) Editorial - The U.S. Navy describes the Strait of Hormuz as an Iranian "kill box" that's too dangerous for escorts. The U.S. owns the skies over Iran, and reconnaissance drones can easily loiter over the coastline around the clock. But air supremacy is not the same as sea control. Iran's mobile anti-ship missiles are hidden in mountainous coastal terrain, designed to "shoot and scoot." The cheap Shahed drones it uses are easy to launch from almost anywhere. The Pentagon's own assessment is that escorts won't be feasible any time soon. Iran doesn't even need to hit a ship to keep the strait closed. The mere suspicion of mines or surviving missile launchers is enough to make insurers pull coverage or make its cost prohibitive, which halts commercial traffic as surely as any weapon. Declaring victory would not be stretching the truth. Trump has indeed extracted an enormous cost on Iran's regime. By stopping the bombing without agreeing to any formal peace, Trump keeps his options open for future strikes. And in doing so, he also hands the regime a catastrophe. The clerics will emerge to face a shattered military, a wrecked economy and, most important, a population that will ask: What was all this for? Air campaigns do not produce regime change on their own. NATO's 78-day bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 did not dislodge Slobodan Milosevic. But it weakened him enough that, little more than a year later, a popular revolution drove him from power. The same logic could hold for Iran. A regime that has just been as humiliated as this one is a regime living on borrowed time.