Iran’s aggression across the Middle East is alarming its neighbours. Tehran is behind a campaign of attacks on merchant shipping that threatens to devastate the global economy and ignite a wider war. As a result, the US has stepped in to protect regional sea-lanes. But Donald Trump, while promising as president to be tough on Iran, is furious that America is defending ‘so-called allies’ and their vessels despite having less at stake economically in the region than them.

This was the situation in 1987, when Iranian attacks on neutral shipping precipitated the ‘Tanker War’ between Tehran and Washington, and provoked an intervention by Trump that sparked rumours of a first presidential run. There are clear similarities between the predicament that the US, and the wider West, faced then and the one it now confronts with the Houthi bombardment of vessels in the Red Sea. The current Iranian-backed onslaught presents an even graver challenge, part of a broader assault on the US-led global order that, unless decisively defeated, threatens to rebound to the benefit of Iran and its authoritarian allies.

The background to the 1987 shipping crisis was the Iran-Iraq War. The conflict, then in its seventh year, would ultimately lead to more than a million casualties. With stalemate on land, the brutal conflict was now raging at sea. With Saddam Hussein laying siege to all ships in the vicinity of the Iranian coast, Tehran responded by launching its own indiscriminate assaults on vessels in the Persian Gulf and neighbouring waters. With 60 per cent of the world’s oil passing through the Strait of Hormuz, President Ronald Reagan’s administration expanded its naval presence in the region. At the request of Kuwait, the US navy began escorting its tankers, replete with American flags, as part of an operation to ensure regional freedom of navigation. It was the largest naval convoy of its kind since the Second World War.

Disaster soon struck. On 24 July, an explosion rocked the Kuwaiti tanker al Rekkah, reflagged as the MV Bridgeton, ripping a 50-square-metre hole in its hull. An Iranian mine was the culprit. While nobody died, and the Bridgeton did not sink, administration officials had no doubt that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard’s navy had specifically targeted the American convoy.

As tensions escalated with Tehran, the incident also touched off a diplomatic controversy with America’s allies. US newspapers reported that Kuwait and Saudi Arabia were refusing to provide landing facilities for American mine clearing helicopters. Simultaneously, Americans read that the Saudis, along with Italy, Britain, France and West Germany, had turned down US requests to help by sending minesweeping ships, many of them American supplied, for fear of Iranian reprisals.

Into this controversy stepped Donald Trump. The then 41-year-old real estate mogul paid $94,801 for a full-page newspaper advertisement that ran in the New York Times, Washington Post and Boston Globe on 2 September 1987. Appearing under the headline, ‘There’s Nothing Wrong with America’s Foreign Defense Policy that a little backbone can’t cure’, Trump railed against successive US governments for ‘paying to defend countries that can afford to defend themselves’. He reiterated the message in interviews on the era’s leading talk shows, from Larry King to Phil Donahue to Oprah Winfrey, and in a set-piece speech in New Hampshire, leading to speculation that he would throw his hat in the ring for the 1988 presidential election.

While Trump railed against the conduct of America’s Arab allies, he expressed even more disgust with Japan and NATO allies, particularly West Germany, who were the principal recipients of the oil passing through the Gulf. Above all, Trump was adamant that ‘the world is laughing at America’s politicians as we protect ships we don’t own, carrying oil we don’t need, destined for allies who won’t help’. Yet while Trump complained that ‘we defend the Persian Gulf, an area of only marginal significance to the United States for its oil supplies’ in order to benefit others, and demanded the US extract more from them in defence dues, he was not necessarily calling for American retreat. Indeed, as Trump told the Guardian journalist, Polly Toynbee, in an interview soon after, that as president, ‘I’d be harsh on Iran. They’ve been beating us psychologically, making us look a bunch of fools… It’d be good for the world to take them on’.

While Trump took a mercantilist approach, focusing on how the US could gain materially from its involvement in the region, the Reagan administration prioritised the broader strategic benefits of maintaining the international order that the US had established after the Second World War. Preventing either a rival great power or regional antagonist from dominating the Gulf, and denying US allies access to its oil, was regarded by Reagan as critical to America’s own national security and prosperity. Stopping Iran from closing one of the world’s most vital waterways was important enough to justify US intervention, even if it had to carry the bulk of the burden.

As a result, the Reagan administration doubled down on its operation. Iranian ships caught laying mines were held responsible for committing an act of war. Deprived of onshore facilities by its Arab allies, the US navy established a sea base from which its helicopters searched for mines while American special forces targeted Iranian mine-laying units. Strong US leadership encouraged its European allies to reverse course and deploy its minesweepers, while Japan provided technical assistance. The results were impressive. After the Bridgeton scare, 136 convoys successfully completed their missions, keeping the oil flowing and the Iranian fleet hemmed in.

This did not end the clashes. The Iranians switched increasingly from mines to missile attacks on the tankers. The US navy responded forcefully with strikes against Iranian oil platforms, warships and fighter planes. Fears of further escalation were ever present, particularly when US forces were sunk by Iranian frigates and, amid the fog of war, an Iranian passenger plane was tragically shot down. Nevertheless, US intervention ensured that the balance of forces in the Gulf was firmly against the Iranians, forcing them to wind down their attacks and contributing to their decision to curtail hostilities in 1988. The US had established a lasting commitment to guaranteeing stability in the Gulf waters, and its naval presence would endure long after combat operations ceased.

There are a number of echoes from the situation for 2025 even if, today, Iran is not directly conducting the assaults. This time it is acting through its Houthi proxy, providing it with missiles, drones and speedboats, in contravention of UN Security Council Resolution 2216. The Houthis began their assaults on international ships passing through the Red Sea within weeks of another Iranian proxy, Hamas, perpetrating its massacre in Israel on 7 October. As in the late 1980s, when Iran initially claimed it was targeting the ships of Iraq and its allies, the Houthis originally announced that it was acting in solidarity with Hamas by attacking Israel. Again as in the 1980s, this has morphed into a broader assault on commercial vessels. And, just as then, this has led to a massive increase in insurance for shipping which has had a major downward drag on global trade.

The Houthis are carrying out their brutal strategy as part of a sophisticated commercial enterprise. As the Economist revealed in a recent special report, the terror group are procuring hundreds of millions, ‘or even billions’, of dollars per year from their piracy options in the Red Sea. At present, it is a low-cost, high-reward enterprise, carried out with all the trappings of modern communications. By threatening to unleash rudimentary Iranian-supplied missiles and drones on vessels passing through the Suez Canal, they extract ransom payments from shipowners, who can conveniently make transfers online and over email. Even so, the impact on international commerce has been dire, with a 70 per cent collapse in cargo shipments passing through the Red Sea. The total cost to owners of redirecting their ships around the southern tip of Africa approaches $175 billion.

The most important difference with the late 1980s is that these costs have not been borne by all the major powers. At that time, the Iranians attacked Soviet as well as American ships. But the Houthis have excluded Russian and Chinese ships from their assaults, and focused their fire on Israel and western shipping. As a result, Chinese ships traversing the Red Sea have increased, while those of western nations have fallen. China’s vessels now account for a fifth of all traffic, and the majority of crude oil passing through the Suez Canal is now Russian, sharply up from less than 50 per cent beforehand.

America’s allies clearly recognise the stakes. Right from its commencement in December 2023, the US-led Operation Prosperity Guardian, a coalition committed to regaining control of the sea lanes around the Red Sea and Arabian Gulf, included the UK, Bahrain, Canada, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Seychelles and Spain. Yet the Houthis appear undeterred by that or by repeated Israeli and US-UK led air and naval strikes. Having previously withstood a seven year onslaught from Saudi Arabia, they remain the most durable of Iran’s terror proxies, particularly after Israel’s destruction of Hamas and Hezbollah, and the collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria. Last September, the Iranian Major-General Hossein Salami boasted that because of the Houthis, in the Red Sea ‘today, the safest shipping lanes belong to those vessels carrying the Iranian flag’.

Just as in the late 1980s, Trump on his recent campaign trail combined a commitment to confronting Iran with trenchant criticism of existing US policy. In January 2024, after the US and its allies attacked Houthi targets in Yemen in response to its missile barrages, he lambasted the Biden administration for ‘dropping bombs all over the Middle East, AGAIN’. And today, just as in the Strait of Hormuz 40 years ago, the US is neither the principal origin nor destination of the commerce passing through the Suez Canal.

Nonetheless, there would be severe consequences for US security and economic interests if the disrupters were allowed to act with impunity. Most critically, it will rebound to the advantage of China, Russia and those revanchist nations who have aligned themselves with Tehran and the Houthis.

When it comes to the Red Sea, Iran and its proxies are indeed ‘beating us psychologically, making us look a bunch of fools’. It would be good for both America and its allies for Trump ‘to take them on’ by directly targeting Iran’s spy ships, the ports it uses to supply the Houthis and the IRGC units who oversee the whole enterprise. And even if the US still bears the bulk of the burden, preventing hostile powers from dominating the region’s resources and surrounding sea-lanes remains as critical to America’s own national security and global supremacy as ever.