Secretary of War Pete Hegseth argued Friday that despite occasional Iranian attacks on commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz, the U.S. Navy dominates the waterway.
As the United States seeks a peace agreement, it has maintained a trade blockade on ships leaving Iranian ports while Iranian forces continue to attack commercial vessels in the strait, a chokepoint through which roughly a fifth of the world’s oil trade passed before the war.
“Iran’s battered military … has been reduced to a gang of pirates with a flag,” Hegseth told reporters at a Friday morning press briefing, saying that the U.S. has choked off Iranian exports and destroyed most of the country’s armed forces.
The United States has held a ceasefire with Iran since April 8.
On Wednesday, Iran fired on three ships in the strait—two of which it seized—per The Associated Press.
“The world now sees them for what they are—criminals on the high seas,” Hegseth added of Iran. “They’re acting like pirates, acting like terrorists. They’re the ones who lay indiscriminate mines, who shoot at random ships.”
President Donald Trump recently announced on social media that he has ordered the Navy to “shoot and kill” any boat laying mines in the strait.
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine described to reporters how the military had successfully interdicted multiple Iran-linked vessels attempting to break the blockade and had stopped Iranian tankers in the Indian Ocean.
Trump has declared the U.S. military operation in Iran a success, saying what remains of Iran’s navy is “little wise guy ships.”
At the Friday press briefing, Hegseth argued that the Iranian pirate crews do not constitute a major military threat.
“The vessels that the Iranians seized in recent days … they’re not American ships, they’re not Israeli ships. They’re just random ships … where they drove their little speedboats up to and shot at those ships with AK-47s,” said Hegseth.
“Anyone with a speedboat, a gun, and the wrong intentions can do that,” he added. “They know that we, the United States of America, control the flow of global shipping … Their real navy is at the bottom of the Arabian Gulf.”
Oil prices have not dropped to pre-conflict levels since the ceasefire, and the national average price of a gallon of regular gasoline remained over $4 Friday morning, per AAA.opens in a new tab
Nevertheless, Hegseth argued that European nations bear more of the brunt of the trade disruption in the strait and should do more to combat Iranian piracy.
“We would welcome a serious European effort to do something about this strait and this passage, considering it’s their energy capabilities that are most at stake,” he said.
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