President Trump said Tuesday that the U.S. Navy has swept the entire Strait of Hormuz for mines and now holds "100% control" of the waterway, even as he opened a new front in the standoff with Iran by demanding Tehran pay reparations for what he called five decades of damage — a claim that lands just days after Iran renewed its own demand that Washington pay for the war.
"The only one that has control of the Strait of Hormuz right now is the United States Navy," Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. "We've mine swept the entire strait." Shipping data has not caught up with the claim: according to the tracking platform MarineTraffic, only eight to 15 vessels a day passed through the strait in the days before Trump's remarks, a fraction of the roughly 130 daily transits recorded before the war. The strait normally carries about a fifth of the world's seaborne oil and liquefied natural gas.
Trump's reparations demand, posted to Truth Social, seeks payment for what he described as 52,000 people killed in Iran over the past four months and for the 17 sailors killed in the 2000 USS Cole bombing, an attack the U.S. has long attributed to al-Qaeda rather than Iran. The move came days after Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, said the strait would not reopen until Washington lifts its naval blockade and sanctions, withdraws forces from the region, pays its own war reparations and releases frozen Iranian assets. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi has separately said Tehran and Oman are close to agreement on a shipping-lane arrangement, but that the waterway stays shut until the U.S. meets Iran's conditions.
How the standoff got here
The current crisis traces to Feb. 28, when the United States and Israel launched what Trump called "major combat operations" against Iran, strikes that killed Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei along with senior military commanders and prompted Tehran to close Hormuz. The U.S. Navy blockade that followed began April 13; by mid-May the Pentagon estimated Iran had lost $4.8 billion in oil revenue, and CENTCOM said it had turned back 94 vessels. A June 14 agreement to end the war, formalized in a memorandum signed at Versailles three days later, briefly lifted the blockade on June 18 — only for Trump to reinstate it July 14 after talks stalled. The U.S. has since rerouted 55 more vessels, officials said this week.
Iran's Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei, who succeeded his father after the February strikes, has used the pause to rebuild his military's command structure. In a series of decrees, he named Ali Abdollahi as armed forces chief of staff, Ahmad Vahidi as commander-in-chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Ali Azmaei as commander of the IRGC Navy, along with several other senior appointments. The decrees called for stronger deterrence and readiness for "powerful offensive operations," coming months after the IRGC's previous chief, Mohammad Pakpour, and armed forces chief Abdolrahim Mousavi were killed in the February strikes.
Markets watch, mines linger
Oil traders are pricing in prolonged uncertainty. Brent crude climbed above $89 a barrel this week, roughly 24 percent higher than before the war began, as traders weighed dimming prospects for a quick resolution. Shipping insurers and some carriers have begun rerouting cargo around the Cape of Good Hope or through the Panama Canal at substantial added cost. On the mine-clearing effort Trump cited, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth would not confirm a Pentagon estimate — described in a classified congressional briefing — that fully clearing the strait could take six months; two Navy littoral combat ships and two Japanese Avenger-class minesweepers are working the strait with sonar, divers and remotely piloted vehicles. "You don't even have to have laid mines," Foreign Policy Research Institute analyst Emma Salisbury told PBS NewsHour, "you just have to make people believe that you've laid mines."
Markets have not completely lost hope for a deal, but confidence is clearly eroding. The longer talks drag on without visible progress, and the more complex the reported demands become, the greater the scepticism that a workable agreement can be reached quickly.
— Tim Waterer, chief market analyst, KCM Trade
Not every voice sees the exchange as fatal to diplomacy. Charles Kupchan, a former Obama administration adviser, described the dueling reparations demands as "banter" between two sides that both have incentives to settle: Iran depends on oil exports for economic survival, Trump faces midterm election pressure over gasoline prices, and the Pentagon's munitions stockpiles are reportedly thin after months of enforcement operations. Qatari officials mediating side talks have called negotiations over a narrower shipping-lane arrangement a "critical juncture," and a senior Pakistani minister said this week the two sides were close to "some sort of arrangement" on that narrower question, even as the broader reparations dispute hardens.
For now, both sides are staking out maximalist positions in public while smaller-scale technical talks over shipping routes continue in the background. Whether that produces an opening or simply hardens the stalemate is likely to become clearer in the coming days, as mine-clearing crews report progress and shipping firms decide whether to test the route Trump says is now secure.
