Over the past month, Iran has escalated its most intense campaign against international shipping in the Strait of Hormuz since the United States and Israel declared war in February. More than 100 drone and missile launches into the strategic waterway have been recorded since the conflict began. The physical toll on global trade has been immediate and severe; in October alone, a container ship and a bulk vessel were sunk within the waterway. Meanwhile, in the Red Sea, Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi movement has sustained its aggressive campaign to throttle seaborne trade. The group has increasingly targeted Saudi Arabia more directly, seizing fresh territory along the critical Bab el Mandeb Strait as the regional conflagration widens.
These dual maritime crises form two fronts of the same strategic challenge—one that, despite its current intensity, has persisted for years. In 2019, Iran launched attacks against commercial shipping across the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman in direct response to the first Trump administration’s "maximum-pressure" sanctions campaign. Four years later, in 2023, the Houthis launched relentless assaults in the Red Sea following Hamas’s October 7 massacre in Israel.
In the wake of each preceding crisis, the United States and its international partners rushed to establish defensive maritime coalitions designed to protect these vital global trade routes. While these past efforts succeeded in securing individual waterways to varying degrees, they fundamentally failed to persuade Iran and its regional proxies that asymmetric attacks on shipping were an ineffective way to project power. On the contrary, such coercive tactics have only become increasingly appealing to Tehran as a low-cost, high-impact method of disrupting the global economy.
Even today, a baseline of commercial shipping persists through both volatile waterways. On October 15, Lloyd’s List Intelligence reported that transit through the Bab el Mandeb Strait was up modestly from August levels. Through a combination of U.S. naval patrols and creative logistical adaptations by Gulf states—including extensive ship-to-ship transfers—some oil has managed to move through the Strait of Hormuz.
Nevertheless, global shipping remains severely throttled, and international actors have yet to find a way to update their deterrence playbook. In 2019 and again between 2023 and 2024, U.S., European, and Middle Eastern navies formed separate, overlapping defensive maritime coalitions. These groups were tasked with escorting commercial vessels, collecting intelligence on evolving threats, and intercepting incoming missile and drone attacks. In the case of the United States in 2024, a separate multinational coalition also conducted targeted offensive strikes inside Yemen to degrade Houthi maritime capabilities.
Today, governments are falling back on familiar instincts: joining forces, but refusing to pool all their assets into a unified command. The British and the French have proposed a multinational maritime defense coalition to secure the Strait of Hormuz once the broader war finally concludes. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia is actively planning—though has not yet deployed—its own independent alliance to protect the Red Sea. Notably, neither of these proposed projects includes the United States, which has deployed nearly one-third of its entire naval warship inventory to the Middle East. The U.S. presence is currently aimed at reestablishing freedom of navigation, enforcing a naval blockade against Iran, and supporting ongoing military operations against Iranian targets.
Multiple short-term, insufficiently coordinated defensive missions organized around voluntary contributions can buy down marginal risk for commercial shippers in the near term, but they cannot deliver long-term deterrence. Fragmented missions ultimately embolden Iranian and Houthi leaders. Tehran and its proxies interpret these fractured approaches as half-measures that are easily strained by resource scarcity, an inability to adapt quickly to evolving tactical threats, and a total absence of real-time intelligence sharing across the two critical chokepoints.
As the crises in the Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea become increasingly linked amid an expanding regional war, replicating the patchwork maritime strategy that never fully worked in the past would be a serious strategic mistake. What is required instead is a single, sustained multinational effort to secure both waterways, combining American military capabilities with the diplomatic legitimacy and operational participation of a unified coalition of Asian, European, and Middle Eastern countries. Without this unified front, Iran and the Houthis will continue to learn that threatening global commerce in critical maritime chokepoints is a strategy well worth repeating.
Overlapping, Underperforming
The maritime coalitions now taking shape share a troubling historical precedent. Twice before, international actors have mounted similar defensive efforts, and their mixed results demonstrate why even effective tactical operations ultimately fail to prevent renewed attacks in Middle Eastern waterways.
In mid-2019, following the launch of the first Trump administration’s maximum pressure campaign, Tehran lashed out. Iranian forces attacked commercial tankers off the coast of the United Arab Emirates and in the Gulf of Oman, and seized a British-flagged oil tanker from international waters in the Strait of Hormuz. The economic fallout was immediate: maritime insurance premiums spiked tenfold, and freight rates for crude-oil-carrying tankers jumped nearly 40 percent. In response, Washington established the International Maritime Security Construct (IMSC), headquartered in Bahrain. The mission sought to maintain naval vessels across key Middle Eastern waterways to deter Iranian aggression and collect intelligence on maritime activities to share directly with commercial shippers.
By the end of 2019, Albania, Australia, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and the United Kingdom had joined the IMSC. However, despite Washington’s intensive diplomatic efforts to expand the coalition further, most European countries abstained from joining. European capitals were deeply frustrated with the Trump administration’s unilateral withdrawal from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal and wary that joining the IMSC—with its explicit focus on confronting Iran—would be viewed by Tehran as aggressive or as an endorsement of Washington’s maximum pressure campaign. Instead, eight European nations chose to join a separate, French-led mission called European Maritime Awareness in the Strait of Hormuz (EMASoH), which prioritized de-escalation, surveillance, and encouraging regional dialogue with Iran.
Four years later, when the Houthis began threatening commercial shipping in the Red Sea—spiking insurance rates and forcing vessels to detour thousands of miles around Africa’s Cape of Good Hope—the United States and Europe once again organized separate, disjointed responses. In December 2023, the United States launched Operation Prosperity Guardian (OPG), a naval coalition that was soon joined by more than 20 countries. The mission maintained between four and eight warships in the Red Sea area at any given time and successfully shot down numerous Houthi drones and missiles. Within its first month, coalition leaders reported that it had facilitated safe transit for more than a thousand commercial vessels. Simultaneously, the European Union formed its own substantially smaller defensive maritime operation, which escorted European commercial vessels through the southern Red Sea and intercepted Houthi projectile attacks independently.
In both crises, the United States, Europe, and Gulf states broadly agreed that Iranian and Houthi threats to freedom of navigation required a collective response. Because freedom of navigation is viewed as a fundamental pillar of the global economic order, assembling large groups committed to upholding this principle was intended to demonstrate international resolve and isolate the aggressor. However, deep disagreements over how to confront the challenge diluted the effectiveness of the missions. Many governments declined to participate in offensive strikes or coalitions explicitly directed against a sovereign state. Furthermore, persistent political divides splintered the international response, as European nations sought to put diplomatic distance between themselves and the broader U.S. strategy toward Iran.
The 2019–2024 missions did achieve important tactical successes by improving maritime domain awareness, intercepting inbound attacks, and preventing a complete shutdown of maritime commerce. Yet, the lack of a long-term, coordinated strategy for ending Iranian aggression ultimately weakened the overall response. These missions never fully persuaded commercial shippers that the waterways were genuinely safe—particularly the Red Sea—nor did they prevent Iran and the Houthis from eventually returning to their efforts to exploit the chokepoints.
According to a 2021 assessment by the Dutch government, the Netherlands assumed that Iran could clearly differentiate between the European maritime mission and the American-led coalition, and would consequently be less aggressive toward European-flagged vessels. This dynamic underscored Tehran’s proven ability to exploit operational gaps between overlapping operations, highlighting the urgent need for a unified front.
Greater Than the Sum of Its Parts
The lessons of these past missions carry immense weight today. After years of shadow warfare, the United States and Israel have now engaged Iran directly. Throughout 2025, the United States and Israel also launched separate, months-long military campaigns against the Houthis in Yemen, following a decade-long Saudi-led effort to dislodge the rebel group.
While these comprehensive military campaigns badly battered Iran and the Houthis, they also inadvertently provided them with an opportunity to hone their asymmetric tactics. Having survived military campaigns explicitly intended to collapse their regimes, Iran and the Houthis have emerged even more willing to hold global commerce at risk and impose severe economic costs on third-party actors not directly involved in the wars against them. Both actors have learned a critical lesson: they do not need to fully close maritime chokepoints to achieve their strategic goals. Simply threatening them is enough to alter decision-making in the halls of power worldwide.
Governments everywhere reject the tolls and unilaterally imposed service payments that Iran has periodically tabled. Yet, instead of presenting a united front, the international response has devolved into a disjointed flowering of fragmented maritime coalition planning efforts.
The proposed British-French plan closely resembles previous European maritime initiatives, focusing on a defensive multinational mission to escort vessels. However, it explicitly excludes the United States and is structured not to activate until the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran ends for good—a condition that essentially guarantees its uselessness in the near term. Meanwhile, mounting Houthi aggression has sent Saudi Arabia scrambling to secure Red Sea transit, which is increasingly vital given major disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz. In late July, Riyadh announced the formation of its own defensive maritime coalition comprising 14 countries from across Africa and the Middle East, alongside Bangladesh and Pakistan. This mission remains distinct from both the European efforts in Hormuz and the U.S.-led mission in the region.
Concurrently, the United States has deployed its own military assets to secure Gulf waterways, focusing heavily on escorting vessels through Omani waters and actively defending commercial shippers from daily Iranian attacks. At the same time, the U.S. Navy is enforcing a naval blockade against Iranian ports and intercepting tankers that ignore its operational warnings.
Despite these efforts, European and Saudi planning initiatives remain behind the curve of events. Leaders across Europe and the Middle East are anxious to clearly differentiate their defensive maritime missions from U.S. and Israeli offensive campaigns against Iran, hoping to prevent regional escalation and protect their own deployed forces. Yet, neither the European nor the Saudi plans have moved beyond early-stage planning.
The U.S. mission, by contrast, is actively engaged in the wartime waterways of the Middle East and has successfully restored much of the prewar crude oil flow out of the region despite continuous Iranian attacks. However, over the long term, the U.S. Navy will inevitably struggle to maintain its massive force presence in the Middle East given competing global priorities and the heavy wear and tear of continuous deployments. Iranian leaders are actively gambling that they can outlast the United States in sheer political will and operational capability, while driving permanent wedges between Washington and its long-standing partners in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East—partners that have yet to mount a meaningful, unified defense of maritime transit. Without close coordination, these competing coalitions will all ultimately fail to deter Iran and the Houthis for good.
Without American naval capabilities and intelligence sharing, maritime missions designed to secure these critical waterways simply cannot succeed, given the sheer scope and scale of the threat. In 2019, for example, the European-led mission was only able to field a maximum of three warships and a single patrol aircraft, compared to the dozens of vessels deployed by the United States. Similarly, the U.S.-led Operation Prosperity Guardian mission in 2023–2024 was able to sustain its operations primarily due to its established naval infrastructure at nearby bases in Bahrain.
Yet, U.S. naval superiority alone remains insufficient. Iran and the Houthis have seen this rush to form uncoordinated maritime coalitions before, and they know precisely how to exploit the political and operational gaps between them. Truly isolating Iran remains the best method to extract concessions from its leadership. As long as foreign governments fail to agree on how to confront them, Tehran and the Houthis have little incentive to abandon their disruptive tactics.
European and Saudi leaders must merge their maritime planning efforts and formally invite the United States to join. Whatever serious diplomatic disagreements they hold with Washington regarding its military actions inside Iran must be set aside when it comes to preventing the throttling of international trade waterways. An Arab- and European-led command structure, backed by robust American military capabilities, would demonstrate broad international opposition to maritime aggression while clearly distinguishing the mission from the U.S.-Israeli war on Iranian territory.
For its part, the United States should be prepared to contribute significant military capacity and operational support, leveraging the extensive deployments it already maintains in the Middle East. Partners across Asia, Europe, and the Middle East should redirect the resources they previously pledged to isolated European and Saudi missions into a broader, inclusive coalition that incorporates the United States. Washington must lean into its role as a military integrator, smoothing out communication and tactical coordination at sea for navies unaccustomed to dynamic, multimember operations. In particular, the United States and Israel must share real-time intelligence concerning the evolving nature of Iranian and Houthi targeting capabilities and weaponry, ensuring coalition members can stay ahead of the tactical innovation curve.
In the near term, the United States should commit to operational flexibility, placing any offensive strikes under a completely separate chain of command. Leaders in Tehran will undoubtedly take notice of a unified international response to maritime aggression and will think twice before attacking a mission composed of dozens of navies working in concert. In exchange, Washington must accept that its partners are joining a defensive maritime mission—not enforcing the naval blockade or entering the active war against Iran. In 2024, Washington successfully navigated this distinction during the OPG defensive Red Sea mission while simultaneously conducting separate multinational offensive strikes against the Houthis. The U.S. government should replicate that operational model today.
Other regional militaries, including Israel’s, should contribute critical intelligence, sea drones, unmanned systems, maintenance, logistical support, and specialized personnel. In return for the United States serving as the backbone of the mission, European, Middle Eastern, and Asian partners must commit to gradually expanding their own naval capabilities and assets, ensuring the coalition transforms into a long-term investment with equitably shared burdens.
Joint strategic messaging—including regular coordinated statements and proactive outreach to commercial shippers to counter Iranian and Houthi disinformation—will be vital, alongside collaborative technological innovation. Because Iran and the Houthis adapt rapidly to military countermeasures, it will be far easier for the defense industries of coalition nations to stay ahead of them if they pool their resources and expertise.
Military efforts to date have failed to compel either Iran or the Houthis to fundamentally change their course at sea. In fact, Iranian and Houthi leadership continue to believe they have more to gain from escalation, as evidenced by their defiant public statements and continued attacks. Countries around the world are suffering the economic fallout. In October, the World Bank projected that Gulf economies would contract by 4.3 percent in 2026, driven largely by the disruption of the Strait of Hormuz and repeated attacks on critical energy infrastructure. Earlier in June, the International Monetary Fund estimated that the ongoing conflict involving Iran could reduce economic growth in the euro area by 0.5 percentage points in 2026.
A unified Middle East maritime coalition on its own will neither reverse these negative macroeconomic trends nor fully restore freedom of navigation overnight. However, it would represent a critical first step in denying Tehran the opportunity to drive permanent wedges between long-standing allies and global partners. If the current trajectory of political discord, piecemeal missions, and short-term commercial adaptations continues unchecked, Iran and the Houthis will learn that they can successfully exploit divisions among foreign governments, selectively escalating maritime threats to extract geopolitical concessions. Other adversaries around the globe will inevitably learn the same lesson: that economic disruption is an extraordinarily effective weapon when the international community lacks the collective will to defend the global commons.
