A Strait Comparison: Lessons from the Dardanelles for a Strait of Hormuz Closure
Jonathan Schroden
June 30, 2025
A Strait Comparison: Lessons from the Dardanelles for a Strait of Hormuz Closure
On June 22, the United States launched precision airstrikes as part of Operation Midnight Hammer against Iran’s nuclear facilities at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan. In the wake of those strikes, President Donald Trump said the operation had “totally obliterated” those facilities, while Tehran’s parliament voted to grant the government authority to close the Strait of Hormuz. Such a move, if successfully carried out, could instantaneously disrupt nearly one-fifth of the world’s oil shipments and cause substantial and potentially cascading economic harm to countries across the globe.
Iran threatening to close the Strait of Hormuz is not new. It has periodically issued statements to that effect and has been building capabilities to do so for several decades. In 2011, while serving as an advisor to U.S. Central Command, concern over this possibility led command leaders to ask me to conduct a comparative analysis of a potential Strait of Hormuz closure with Britain’s historic failure to reopen the Dardanelles Strait in 1915. While the two scenarios have substantial geopolitical and technological differences, both episodes center on maritime chokepoint warfare, layered and asymmetric threats, and the importance of political-military alignment and strategic communications when economic and kinetic warfare combine.
Here, I will update and summarize the lessons I previously identified for U.S. military leaders. As I stated in my paper then, “Although it may seem unlikely that a near-perfect-storm of errors and misjudgments would doom the U.S. to disaster in the [Strait of Hormuz] as it did the British at the Dardanelles, it is still better to eschew faith in the odds and apply the lessons of the past than to leave open such a possibility.”
https://warontherocks.com/2025/06/a-strait-comparison-lessons-from-the-dardanelles-for-a-strait-of-hormuz-closure/
