Six months into the war with Iran, only a handful of ships a day are moving through the Strait of Hormuz, down from hundreds before the fighting began. But President Donald Trump says the world’s most important oil choke point is “very functioning” and under “total control” of the United States.

Trump has claimed control of the narrow waterway between Iran and Oman for months, and this week he announced that the Navy had cleared the last Iranian mines from the main shipping lane. But traffic has not recovered, according to publicly available data from maritime tracking firms, including Kpler and Windward, and some countries have rerouted shipments entirely. The collapse has disrupted global trade and driven oil prices sharply higher.

“Every once in a while, there’ll be a drone or a rocket or something shot, but it is a very functioning strait,” Trump told Fox News on Wednesday. “A lot of oil is pouring out.” 

U.S. allies are privately casting doubt on the idea that all Iran explosives through the strait have been removed and detonated by the U.S. Navy, according to Bloomberg — an assessment U.S. officials dispute. Under a memorandum of understanding the two countries signed in June, Iran agreed to clear its own mines and guarantee “safe passage of commercial vessels.” It did neither. The agreement has since expired.

Neither side shows any sign of returning to the negotiating table. Trump said Thursday that the U.S. doesn’t want to speak to Iran, and the two countries aren’t looking to meet. Tehran, for its part, has held to its claim of sovereignty over the strait and to its position that the waterway should stay closed to the greatest extent possible. This week, the Iranian foreign minister emphasized that discussions with Pakistani and Omani officials were made about the “future management of Hormuz.” 

Iran is unlikely to give up the leverage it has spent six months demonstrating, said Jason Bordoff, founding director of Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy and a former Obama administration National Security Council official.

“The Trump administration’s attacks on Iran and this war have led Iran to understand that its Hormuz weapon can be as powerful as its nuclear weapon, and it’s a pretty potent tool,” Bordoff told MS NOW.

Traffic has fluctuated through the phases of the war, briefly surging in the days after the June memorandum – yet still nowhere near where it was prior to the war – before falling off again. Before the war, approximately 130 ships from various countries transited the Strait of Hormuz per day. That number has dropped significantly. As of this week, maritime data tracking firms estimated a dozen to a couple dozen ships going through each day. Since early May, U.S. Central Command forces have helped facilitate the transit of approximately 1,500 commercial vessels and 750 million barrels of crude oil, according to a CENTCOM spokesperson.

The economic reversal has been swift. 

“Prior to this conflict, we actually had anticipated oversupply in the global market,” said Landon Derentz, vice president of energy and infrastructure at the Atlantic Council, a think tank based in Washington, D.C. “So we really, in six months, kind of transformed from a moment of abundance to potentially a moment of scarcity.”

Derentz said he expects the disruption to outlast the fighting. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps sits “across the strait from the UAE and Oman, and has drones and missiles and the tools necessary to disrupt trade and has shown a willingness to do so is going to continue to frustrate business for the foreseeable future,” Derentz said. “That’s kind of the new normal.”

The standoff has visibly frustrated Trump, who has lashed out at NATO, China and allies in both Europe and Asia for refusing to send warships to help reopen the strait, arguing that they depend on Persian Gulf oil more than the U.S. does — even as the global oil market has dramatically increased gas prices at home.

In recent weeks, the president has repeatedly said the U.S. has “total control” of the strait, even calling it “an American territory.”

“They want to make a deal so badly, we don’t even know if we want” one, Trump said at a rally in South Carolina last week. “I view the Strait of Hormuz as an American territory right now.”

Last month, Trump floated charging a 20% toll on traffic through the strait. Secretary of State Marco Rubio moved quickly to tamp down the idea, saying the president meant only that countries benefiting from U.S. protection of shipping lanes should help cover the cost of what he called “this very valuable service.” Rubio added that it is “illegal, unlawful and unacceptable” for any country to control an international waterway.

Iran closed the strait in February, in immediate retaliation for the opening U.S. and Israeli strikes, and a series of tit-for-tat attacks followed. The U.S. imposed a blockade in April after negotiations in Pakistan collapsed. At the height of the escalation in July, American forces struck Iranian military targets for 13 consecutive nights in an effort to degrade Tehran’s ability to threaten commercial shipping.

Bordoff said Iran appears to have calculated that squeezing the strait — rather than inflicting American casualties — was the retaliation least likely to trigger overwhelming U.S. force.

“It was a more measured approach that didn’t invite the sort of large-scale retaliatory military action, but was able to impose significant damage on the global economy, including the U.S,” he said. 

“The reality is we’re a long way away from where we were prior to this conflict commencing in February,” Derentz said. 

Julia Jester contributed to this report.

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