US officials said that the US successfully helped 40 vessels through the Strait of Hormuz on a single day. An international shipping tracking agency did not record a single vessel exiting the waterway.
Axios’ Barak Ravid reported speaking with three US officials who said that dozens of tankers carrying 16 million barrels of oil safely exited the Strait of Hormuz on Friday. Kpler, a global data and analytics platform that tracks physical commodity markets and shipping in real time, recorded zero barrels of oil exiting the Strait on that day.
The US officials speaking with Ravid said the oil left the waterway through the “southern corridor.” Last week, Axios reported speaking with two US officials who explained that over the past several weeks, the military has helped 15 to 20 vessels per day enter or exit the Persian Gulf by transiting the Strait of Hormuz near the Omani coast. One official claimed that the covert operations have increased the flow of oil out of the Gulf to half of the pre-war level, about ten million barrels per day.
“We have been controlling the southern lane of the Strait of Hormuz for two months now. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps can be a nuisance, but they don’t control the strait. We do,” one official said.
The US strategy has tankers move in bulk with US fighter jets escorting the vessels and shooting down Iranian missiles and drones. The official said the operations were made possible by the US taking out Iranian radars.
The scheme to escort tankers through the Strait is part of President Donald Trump’s new Iran war strategy. The President believes that it can apply significant economic pressure on Iran without damaging the world economy.
The strategy assumes that Tehran will not respond to economic war with military escalation. Last week, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the ramped-up economic warfare made restarting the war between the US and Iran less likely. “If we are doing the maximum economic pressure, then that means that likely there will not be a large-scale kinetic restart,” he said.
However, Responsible Statecraft vice president Trita Parsi argued Iran is likely to escalate the conflict in response to economic pain. “Tehran does not appear overly concerned—for now. But that could change. If Trump refuses to return to the MOU, or succeeds in turning the balance of economic pain against Iran, Tehran will face a far harsher reality,” he wrote at Substack on Wednesday. “Between surrender or escalation, Iran will almost certainly choose escalation. Even if Trump has gained the economic upper hand, Tehran still believes it holds a military advantage.”
