While Iran keeps the Strait of Hormuz closed,

Dubai – After President Trump he backed off his threat to “destroy” Iran’s energy infrastructure if it refuses to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, the vital sea route remains effectively closed to vessels that have not been granted explicit permission by Tehran.

As the United States and its allies weigh how to get oil and other critical supplies back across the strait, a growing question is emerging: Even with thousands more American forces heading to the region, you can any Does 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 in the Black Sea was dwarfed by Russia’s, but kyiv managed to push back one of the world’s most powerful fleets.

Using explosive maritime and aerial drones and ground-launched missiles, Ukrainian forces have damaged or destroyed numerous Russian ships and forced others away from key areas of the sea.

In April 2022, Ukraine sank flagship of the formidable Russian Black Sea fleet, the missile cruiser Moskva, using Ukrainian-made missiles. Ukraine has since launched a series 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 News themezone. However, 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 been limited to its warships. According to UN data, Moscow’s grain exports fell by more than half at one point as its Black Sea ports were effectively closed for months.

Ukraine did not take control of the Black Sea, but it made some parts of it too dangerous for Russia to use.

President Trump has repeatedly said that Iran’s navy was “disappeared,” destroyed in the war, but Iran appears to be taking a page from Ukraine’s playbook when it comes to the Strait of Hormuz.

Even before the current conflict, American military officials had recognized what the war in the Persian Gulf has made painfully clear: in modern asymmetric warfare, large, expensive ships can be great targets for cheap unmanned weapons.

Or as Trofimov put it while speaking to News themezone at his current home in Dubai, modern naval warfare is increasingly “dominated by unmanned systems.”

“Iran is very carefully learning the lessons of the war in Ukraine,” said Trofimov, who covered the Ukraine war extensively.

Those systems include 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 1987-88 “Tanker War,” when Iran laid sea mines to block traffic, the U.S. Navy escorted tankers through the Persian Gulf.

That may not work today.

“Physically accompanying tankers is not as useful if drones are involved,” Trofimov told News themezone. “A drone… is just a flying mine.”

The United States has not yet attempted to escort any ships through the Strait of Hormuz during the current conflict.

Meanwhile, Iran has raised 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 United States 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 thwart a much better-equipped adversary, and need not even win outright, but simply raise the risk level of any move in the war zone.

The United States and Israel say they have struck more than 20,000 Iranian targets since the war began. And in strict military terms, Iran appears to be losing. But as the closure of the strait keeps global fuel prices elevated, it is having a domino effect, raising the cost of consumer goods around the world, and Iran appears to be winning economically.