Nobody outside the Pentagon knew it was happening. On 10 June, President Donald Trump told the world that for a month American forces had been quietly escorting tankers and cargo vessels across the Hormuz chokepoint.
He did it the way he usually does, on Truth Social. “Last month, I directed our great U.S. military to execute a secret mission to support oil tankers and other commercial ships through the Strait of Hormuz,” he wrote. The result, he said, was over 100 million barrels of crude reaching the open market, and over 200 commercial ships getting across unharmed.
Then came the political point. The achievement, in his telling, proved that “the United States of America controls the Strait of Hormuz – Not Iran.” He added that Iran’s military was defeated and its economy lost. “It’s over for Iran.”
The figures are Trump’s own. The post gave no ship names, no dates of transit, no account of how the escorts were organised, and no word on what the operation cost. Readers are left to take the numbers on trust.
A harder line the next day
The boast arrived alongside sharper threats. According to Shipping Telegraph, Trump went on to promise that Washington would take Kharg Island “at some point in the not too distant future”, along with other Iranian oil infrastructure, and so assume “total control” of the country’s oil and gas markets. He compared it to what the United States had done in Venezuela earlier this year. He also said the American military would strike Iran “VERY HARD” that night.
In Europe the reaction was one of unease. Kaja Kallas, the EU’s top foreign policy official, described a “fragile pause” and said she hoped the parties would reach an agreement soon. Her warning was blunt: keeping the waterway shut was “unacceptable”: the damage, she said, spread far past the Gulf, hitting the world economy and putting food supplies at risk. A return to full-scale war, she said, would carry a tremendous cost for the entire region.
The United Nations was no less worried. On 11 June, Secretary-General António Guterres wrote on X that limits on navigation rights and freedoms in and around the strait were bringing hardship and instability to countries everywhere. Even in the best case, he said, the consequences would last for months, with developing countries bearing the heaviest burden. “The world needs a complete ceasefire, with navigational rights and freedoms restored, in line with international law,” he said.
Set side by side, the two messages could hardly be further apart. Washington described a waterway it says it commands. Brussels and the UN described one that remained shut to normal traffic, with the price paid in food and fuel by countries far from the Gulf. Trump’s tally of 200 ships and 100 million barrels is the only public measure so far of what the secret mission achieved, and it has not been checked by anyone else.
Sources
- Trump: 100 million barrels of oil passed through Strait of Hormuz (SRNA)
- Trump reveals 'secret mission' that moved 100 million barrels of oil via Hormuz (Shipping Telegraph)
