Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth brushed aside concerns Friday that the actual closure of the Strait of Hormuz would continue to be a problem for the U.S. and the world for much longer because of the Iran war, which has driven up oil prices.
Iran “exercised pure desperation in the Strait of Hormuz,” Hegseth said at a press conference at the Pentagon.
“We’ve dealt with it and we don’t need to worry about it,” he said.
The Price of West Texas Intermediate crude oil On Friday morning, oil prices were around $93 a barrel. A day before the war began, on February 28, a barrel of WTI was sold for about $67.
Hegseth criticized media reports that the U.S. military had no plan to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, the world’s most critical oil shipping chokepoint, before the attack on Iran.
“Of course, Iran has been threatening shipping in the Strait of Hormuz for decades. They always do that by holding the strait hostage,” he said.
“We planned it. We recognize it,” Hegseth told a reporter who asked him why the Pentagon had not planned to close the strait to traffic.
“Ultimately, we want to do it in the order that makes the most sense for what we want to achieve,” he said, without mentioning specific plans.
Neither Hegseth nor Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Dan Caine said how the U.S. would open the strait to traffic from oil tankers and other ships. Uncertainty over oil shipments from the region has shaken markets and led to supply problems, particularly in Asia.
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On Thursday morning, Energy Secretary Chris Wright told CNBC that the U.S. Navy was not prepared to escort oil tankers through the strait. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Sky News hours later that the US Navy and possibly an international coalition would begin escorting ships through the strait as soon as it was “militarily possible.”
Asked how soon the Strait of Hormuz would be opened to traffic, Hegseth said Friday: “The only thing that prohibits transit in the strait right now is Iran shooting at ships.”
“We have a plan for every option here,” he said. “We are working with our interagency partners. We will not allow the situation to remain contentious, nor is this a lack of international flow of goods.”
When asked about removing mines planted by Iran in the Strait of Hormuz, Caine said: “We have a number of options to address a whole range of problems.”
Hegseth again predicted that “soon, very soon, all Iranian defense companies will be destroyed.” He said that for two days, every company that produces components for Iranian ballistic missiles has been “functionally defeated.”
The defense minister speculated that Iran’s “new so-called not-so-supreme leader,” Mojtaba Khamenei, was “wounded and probably disfigured,” noting that Khamenei began posting messages on X on Thursday that contained only text and no video or voice.
Hegseth and Caine’s vagueness in offering either details of a possible solution to the strait closure or a timeline for such a solution was expressed when RBC Capital Markets said in a note on Friday: “There is significant skepticism that a robust U.S. Navy tanker escort service will be operational soon.”
RBC said the skepticism was “due to capacity constraints as well as the fact that Iran’s expanded military capabilities will pose a greater challenge than the US faced during the tanker wars of the 1980s.”
The statement also states that a U.S.-based International Development Finance Corp. The proposed $20 billion insurance program to encourage oil tankers and other commercial vessels to begin transiting the Strait “is also generating little enthusiasm because it only covers the approximately 22 miles of sea lanes in the Strait, not the surrounding waterways, and does not provide accident or environmental insurance.”
“We are particularly impressed by the fact that a number of Washington-based security analysts appear to be working on longer schedules than market participants outside the Beltway,” wrote Helima Croft, RBC head of global commodity strategy and research in the Middle East and North Africa.
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