Dubai – After President Trump backed off his threat to “obliterate” Iran’s energy infrastructure if it refused to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, the vital shipping lane remains effectively closed to vessels not granted explicit permission by Tehran.
As the U.S. and its allies weigh how to get oil and other critical supplies moving through the strait again, there’s a growing question: Even with thousands more U.S. forces heading for the region, can any military force do the job?
The four-year war still raging in Ukraine suggests the answer may be, no.
When Russia launched its full-scale invasion in 2022, Ukraine’s military presence on the Black Sea was dwarfed by Russia’s, but Kyiv managed to push back one of the world’s most powerful fleets.
Using exploding sea and aerial drones and missiles launched from land, Ukrainian forces have damaged or destroyed numerous Russian ships and forced others away from key areas in the sea.
In April 2022, Ukraine sank the flagship of Russia’s formidable Black Sea Fleet, the missile cruiser Moskva, using Ukrainian-made missiles. Since then, Ukraine has launched a number of devastating attacks on Russian ships, often using much cheaper drones.
“Ukraine doesn’t really have a navy,” Yaroslav Trofimov, a Ukrainian-Italian author, Middle East expert and chief foreign-affairs correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, told CBS News. Nonetheless, he said, Ukraine has “been able to prevent the Russian Black Sea Fleet from even entering the western half of the Black Sea.”
And Ukraine’s disruption of Russian activity has not stopped at its warships. According to U.N. data, Moscow’s grain exports fell by more than half at one point as its ports on the Black Sea were effectively shut down for months.
Ukraine did not take control of the Black Sea, but it made parts of it too dangerous for Russia to use.
President Trump has said repeatedly that Iran’s navy is “gone,” destroyed in the war, but Iran appears to be taking a page right out of Ukraine’s playbook when it comes to the Strait of Hormuz.
Even before the current conflict, U.S. military officials had acknowledged what the war in the Persian Gulf has made painfully clear: In modern asymmetrical warfare, large, expensive ships can be big targets for cheap, unmanned weapons.
Or as Trofimov put it as he spoke with CBS News in his current home in Dubai, modern naval warfare is increasingly “dominated by unmanned systems.”
“Iran is learning lessons of the war in Ukraine very carefully,” said Trofimov, who covered the Ukraine war extensively.
Those systems includes small drones that can be difficult to intercept, digitally or with conventional weapons.
“They don’t have a huge warhead,” he said. “But it’s big enough to blind a ship.”
In past conflicts, including the “Tanker War” of 1987-88 when Iran laid sea mines to block traffic, the U.S. Navy escorted tankers through the Persian Gulf.
That might not work today.
“Physically going along with tankers is not really that useful if you’re dealing with drones,” Trofimov told CBS News. “A drone … is just a flying mine.”
The U.S. has not yet attempted to escort any ships through the Strait of Hormuz during the current conflict.
Bedirhan Demirel/Anadolu via Getty Images 
In the meantime, Iran has floated demands that would effectively give it full control over the strait — turning it into a private “toll booth” for the Islamic Republic regime, Trofimov said, something the U.S. and its Gulf allies are unlikely to accept.
The Black Sea and the Strait of Hormuz are very different bodies of water, but the pattern is starting to look familiar: A vastly outgunned power using cheap tools and asymmetric tactics to thwart and frustrate a much better-equipped adversary — and not even needing to win outright, but just raise the risk level of any movement in the war zone.
The U.S. and Israel say they’ve struck more than 20,000 Iranian targets since the war began. And in narrow military terms, Iran appears to be losing. But as the strait’s closure keeps global fuel prices elevated, it’s having a ripple effect, pushing up the cost of consumer goods around the world, and Iran appears to be winning economically.
