Military escorts not a sustainable solution to opening up Strait of Hormuz, says IMO chief
2026-03-17 08:34:00
Dominguez spoke to the FT earlier and said that naval escorts are not a “100 percent guarantee” in terms of ship safety in the Strait of Hormuz. Adding that:
“It reduces the risk, but the risk is still there. The merchant ships and seafarers can be affected.”
As such, he argues that military intervention to try and smooth the passageway is “not a long-term or sustainable solution” in opening up the strait.
As a reminder, US president Trump had over the weekend called on allies to send warships to the region in order to act as military escorts for oil tankers to pass through. Of course, everyone rejected him and with good reason. As mentioned earlier this week, it makes no sense for other countries to get involved now without any political benefit.
With regards to moving through the Strait of Hormuz, I highlighted yesterday how the risk-reward just doesn’t make sense at the moment:
“Having escorts doesn’t mean that the Strait of Hormuz becomes fully operational again.
The most likely scenario for escorting ships would be to gather a bunch of them as a convoy and then move along slowly through the strait. It means that the opening up of the blockade in this instance would be more of a trickle rather than a flow/rush.
The speed of the movement of the convoy would be extremely slow, not least already having to cater to the slowest of the vessels among the bunch. However, there’s also the fact that these ships will still have to navigate through the thousands of naval mines laid out by Iran while at the same time needing to fight off drones and shore-based missiles. It’s a full war-torn republic.
And you also have to add to the fact that Iran likely has jammers in the region to disrupt GPS and AIS tracking. And that means most ships will still be flying blind, making it even more perilous to navigate through the strait.”
