“We Own It”: The Wall of Steel Springs Another Leak at Larak in the Strait of Hormuz

Somebody should tell the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps that the Strait of Hormuz is closed for business — American business, that is, and completely under control. President Trump has been saying so for weeks. On August 11 he informed the world by Truth Social that the United States has “total control” of the strait and “I THINK WE WILL KEEP IT,” the naval blockade a “wall of steel” against which “there is nothing Iran can do.” On August 14 he went further: “we own the Hormuz Strait,” letting boats through only “if we want them to come in,” and promised, with a chuckle, to soon declare the waterway a territory of the United States. As recently as three days ago the White House published a release titled “President Trump Was Right: America Controls the Strait of Hormuz,” a tidy chronology of the President assuring reporters the strait is open, functioning, and awash in oil.

The IRGC, evidently, does not subscribe to the newsletter. On Sunday, US forces struck two Iranian launchers on Larak Island — the first known American attack on Iranian soil since late July — because, a US official told Al Jazeera and Reuters, Guard units were observed preparing to fire rockets carrying sea mines into the strait the United States supposedly owns. One is left to wonder how Tehran plans to mine a waterway it does not control, into which it is not permitted to bring so much as a boat. The wall of steel, it seems, requires periodic bombing to stay upright.

Iran’s Tasnim agency called it a drone strike. The IRGC confirmed dead and wounded, soldiers and civilians, and promised to answer. The Washington Post and US News carried the same account within hours. Take the official rationale at face value and the strike is narrow, even routine: a counter-mining action to keep the strait open. But the target, the timing, and the diplomacy running underneath the war suggest a second reading worth putting on the table — one considerably less flattering to the “we own it” thesis.

The real irritant may be a piece of paper, not a rocket

For three weeks, Iran and Oman have been quietly negotiating who actually governs traffic through Hormuz — which is an awkward thing for two other countries to be doing about a strait the United States claims to own. Tehran’s deputy foreign minister, Kazem Gharibabadi, described the two sides as near agreement on the coordinates of a safe transit corridor, on the technical machinery to run it, and — critically — on a joint coordination center to manage maritime traffic and collect data from transiting vessels. It builds on the Muscat Protocol the pair signed in April, which stood up a jointly managed “Green Channel” policed by the IRGC Navy and the Royal Navy of Oman.

Two features of that emerging regime deserve a close read. First, per CNN‘s August 5 account, the new corridors would run partly through Iranian territorial waters, a departure from the decades-old arrangement routing commercial traffic through Omani waters. Second — and here is the detail that connects to Sunday’s strike — the proposed arrangement would close the temporary routes near Larak Island and through Omani waters in favor of the new, jointly administered channels.

So the island Washington bombed on Sunday sits at the geographic and administrative heart of an Iran–Oman condominium over Hormuz traffic: a regime that would formalize Iranian control of the chokepoint, potentially monetize it — Tehran has already floated tolls through its “Persian Gulf Strait Authority” — and quietly write the United States out of the management of a waterway its President insists is American property. CNN put it plainly: an agreement is taking shape, but not the one Trump wants.

The analytical observation, then: the counter-mining justification is real, but it may not be the whole of it. Striking Larak degrades a specific IRGC capability and — more to the point — signals that Washington will not sit still while Iran and Oman institutionalize a control regime that makes the “total control” boast look like what it is. The mine threat is the stated cause. The maritime-governance question is the strategic one, and it will still be there long after the rubble on Larak is cleared and the next Truth Social post declares the matter settled.

Iran’s response: back to the base-hitting playbook

Iran answered fast, and not in a manner consistent with a decimated force fleeing an unbreachable wall. The IRGC announced a combined ballistic-missile and drone operation against US positions, naming the King Hussein Air Base and Al-Azraq Air Base in Jordan among its targets, and reporting that Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar — CENTCOM’s forward headquarters — was hit as well. Iranian state television reported launches from multiple sites across the country; air-defense activity lit up over Jordan, with alerts in Qatar, Kuwait, and Dubai. A US source told Fox News that nearly all incoming projectiles had been intercepted, with no significant impact “at this point” — the standard, and genuine, mitigation. Ebrahim Azizi, who chairs the Iranian parliament’s National Security Commission, promised more, and did not sound like a man who believes his country has “no money” and a country that is “shot.”

The pattern is familiar — Al Udeid in June 2025, the Gulf bases through the spring of 2026 — and the intercept-heavy outcome again points to a calibrated response: enough to satisfy the demand for punishment, not so much as to force an escalation Tehran cannot afford. What matters is less the damage on any given night than the cumulative reality these barrages impose on a posture the President keeps describing as invincible.

The strategic cost: Iran is pushing the U.S. westward

Here is the part no wall of steel can intercept. Every Iranian barrage against Al Udeid, against the Jordanian bases, against the Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain, adds weight to a conclusion the Pentagon is already reaching without Iran’s help: the forward architecture built after Desert Storm is too close, too fixed, and too exposed to Iran’s precision arsenal to hold.

That reassessment is not speculative, whatever the podium says. As reported by the Washington Post and Times of Israel in mid-August, the Pentagon is actively weighing a pullback from the Gulf, examining a dispersed posture that would move forces farther west — toward Prince Sultan Air Base near Riyadh, deeper into Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Israel, southern Europe, and more distant Indian Ocean facilities — and out from under Iran’s shortest-range fires. The June 2026 memorandum that closed the main phase of the war already carried a commitment to reduce US assets in the Gulf. The Council on Foreign Relations and a stack of defense analyses make the same case: the war exposed the vulnerability of Gulf basing, and the pressure to reposition is mounting.

Sunday’s exchange feeds that dynamic directly. Each time Iran demonstrates it can put missiles and drones over Al Udeid and the Jordanian fields — even when most are allegedly knocked down — it raises the cost of parking high-value assets there and strengthens the internal Pentagon argument for dispersal. The strikes need not destroy the bases to work; they need only make them untenable as concentrated, forward-leaning platforms. Iran is expelling US forces from the region by using ballistic missiles and drones. It is making the current map expensive enough that Washington redraws it — quietly walking its own assets back from the strait it claims to own, even as the President announces he may annex it.

The official reason for the Larak strike is counter-mining. The more consequential context is the Iran–Oman move to institutionalize control of Hormuz — a move the strike may have been meant to disrupt and deter, and one that sits badly beside the insistence that the strait is already American. Iran’s retaliation against Al Udeid and the two Jordanian bases fits its established, calibrated pattern, but its real payoff is strategic: it compounds the pressure on the Pentagon to pull its forces westward, away from the chokepoint and out of range. A strait one genuinely owns does not have to be re-conquered every few weeks. This one keeps requiring it.

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Here is the audio from Live on the Fly with Randy Credico, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson and me:

I showed up on Nima’s show just in time to discuss the latest attack by the US and the Iranian response:

As Sulaiman likes to say: “Breaking News, Breaking News.” Ryan Dawson joined me and Sulaiman to discuss the latest exchange of blows between the US and Iran:

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