The Strait of Hormuz is not a place you can hold. It is a funnel of water, nine miles wide at its narrowest, through which a fifth of the world’s liquefied natural gas and a fifth of its oil must pass. To declare it a "territory of the United States" is to misunderstand the nature of the thing 1. You can blockade it, mine it, or patrol it, but you cannot own it any more than you can own a wind. Yet the declaration, promised by President Trump "very soon," is not a statement of geography. It is a statement of intent, and it tells us how the current war is being narrated by those who wage it.
Nearly six months into the conflict, Washington and Tehran each claim control of the strait 2. These are not competing military assessments; they are competing fictions, deployed for domestic consumption. The US insists on "total control" while Iran's military rejects the claim outright. Neither can be true in any absolute sense, because the strait is not a flag to be planted but a chokepoint to be contested. The real question is not who controls it, but who can afford to keep contesting it.
The answer, in part, is visible in the exhausted faces of the USS Abraham Lincoln's crew, relieved after a deployment of more than 250 days amid reports of mental health crises and supply shortages 8. A navy is a machine that runs on people, and this machine is running on fumes. The replacement of the carrier is a logistical necessity, but it is also an admission: the projection of power has a cost that even the most powerful must eventually pay.
That cost is being paid in human currency across the region. In Lebanon, Israeli strikes killed at least 11 people, including three children, in the deadliest day since the June framework 5. In Yemen, the fragile 2022 truce is unraveling, with at least 58 government soldiers killed in Houthi missile strikes 10, and six crew members dead in the first shipping fatalities since the war began 12. The Houthis, who have spent years learning to shoot at ships, have now learned to hit them. Each escalation is a lesson in the diffusion of power: the strait is not the only funnel, and the war is not the only war.
The language of total control is a myth, and myths have consequences. When an Israeli minister publicly calls for the killing of "30 to 40" people each night in Gaza 9, he is not describing a policy; he is testing the limits of what can be said. When Ukrainian drones kill four people, including a three-year-old child, in Russia and Crimea 3, the targeting of refineries and naval bases 4 is framed as strategy, but the civilian toll is a fact that strategy cannot absorb. The violence is not a series of discrete events but a single system, and the system is feeding on itself.
The tension between myth and reality is the defining feature of this moment. The myth is that power can be asserted by declaration, that a strait can be made a territory, that a war can be won by saying it is being won. The reality is that power is eroding, that the USS Abraham Lincoln must be replaced, that the bodies are piling up in Lebanon and Yemen and Russia and Gaza. The myth is seductive because it offers clarity; the reality is unbearable because it offers only complexity.
The question that matters most is not who controls the strait. It is whether the architects of these fictions can survive the consequences of their own narratives. The crew of the Lincoln will go home. The children of Ansar will not. The strait will remain a funnel of water, indifferent to the claims made over it. The only thing that is truly "total" is the cost, and it is still being counted.