Macron Wants Warships in Hormuz. Iran's Larijani Fires Back. Can Tanker Escort Plans Actually Work in a Strait That May Still Be a Kill Zone?
France is openly discussing naval escorts to help reopen the Strait of Hormuz when conditions allow. Iran says Western fleets already failed elsewhere. Is escorted shipping the next solution — or the next illusion?
When leaders talk about reopening the Strait of Hormuz, they often speak as if the problem were mainly legal or diplomatic. It is not. It is geometric, military, financial and psychological at the same time. That is why the latest exchange matters. Emmanuel Macron has discussed the use of warships, and potentially larger naval force packages, to help guarantee shipping through Hormuz once conditions permit. Iranian officials and allied voices have pushed back sharply, with Ali Larijani among those arguing in reported remarks that Western naval concentrations elsewhere have failed to guarantee safe passage. The clash is about more than ships. It is about whether navigation can be restored by force in waters where force is exactly what made navigation collapse.
Reuters reported that France is deploying about a dozen naval vessels, including its aircraft-carrier strike group, to the Mediterranean, the Red Sea and potentially the Strait of Hormuz as part of defensive support to allies threatened by the conflict. The Associated Press separately reported that Macron is leading an international effort to unblock Hormuz when circumstances permit, with the idea of warships escorting tankers and container vessels once fighting becomes less intense. That phrase matters: when circumstances permit. It is doing a great deal of work.
Because right now the central problem is not merely the absence of escorts. It is the density of threat. Naval mines, anti-ship missiles, drones, fast attack craft, insurance collapse, narrow lanes, and the possibility of deniable or asymmetric attack all combine to make the strait dangerous even for protected shipping. Naval officers quoted by AP were blunt: sending ships through while the shooting is still hot could be suicidal. In other words, escorting is not magic. It is a confidence-restoration tool that only works once the risk is reduced below a certain threshold.
That is where Larijani’s challenge bites. The Iranian answer, in essence, is that Western fleets have already shown the limits of maritime reassurance in contested chokepoints. Even large multinational deployments cannot guarantee that every ship gets through or that every route becomes commercially normal. In Yemen-linked waters, escort operations and defensive missions have reduced some risks while never fully eliminating them. Iran’s implication is obvious: if those efforts struggled in the Red Sea or Bab el-Mandeb, why assume Hormuz — narrower, more heavily militarized and closer to Iran’s core power projection — will be easier?
It is a fair question, even if it comes from a self-serving side. Hormuz is not just another lane. It is the most sensitive energy chokepoint in the world. The geography compresses shipping into corridors that can be watched, targeted and psychologically dominated. A tanker does not need to be sunk every day for the route to be effectively paralyzed. It only needs enough successful attacks, enough insurance shocks and enough fear to turn transit into an economic gamble. That is exactly why escort proposals sound stronger in speeches than in risk committees.
And yet there is a counterargument too. If states wait for perfect safety, commerce may not resume for far longer than the world economy can tolerate. At some point, naval power exists precisely to make partial restoration possible in conditions that remain dangerous. Escorts can reduce uncertainty, improve surveillance, coordinate defensive responses and reassure insurers enough to restart at least some movement. The question is not whether escorts can create zero risk. They cannot. The question is whether they can lower risk from catastrophic to commercially tolerable.
That answer will depend on timing. If the idea is to push escorted traffic through while active missile and drone campaigns continue, the critics have the stronger case. If the idea is to prepare a post-intense-conflict framework combining naval presence, intelligence, mine-clearing, diplomatic signaling and insurance backstops, then the proposal looks more realistic. The line between those two scenarios is the line between de-escalation support and escalation through miscalculation.
There is also a political layer that neither side can fully escape. France wants to appear useful, sovereign and globally relevant without becoming trapped in someone else’s war. Iran wants to preserve coercive leverage over the strait without confirming that it is openly strangling world commerce. Both need a narrative. Macron’s narrative is maritime security and free navigation. Iran’s narrative is that outside powers cannot militarize the waterway and then pretend to be neutral protectors of trade. Neither story is completely false. Neither is complete.
And that is why tanker escorts may turn out to be less a technical fix than a test of political sequencing. Can outside powers restore enough calm first to make escorts meaningful? Can they deter attacks without expanding the war? Can they persuade shipowners and insurers that the protection is real rather than theatrical? Can Iran signal limits without appearing to surrender its strongest pressure point?
The public often imagines the reopening of Hormuz as a switch. Closed. Open. In reality it is more likely to be a ladder. Partial movement. limited routes. selective escorts. cautious underwriting. emergency guarantees. perhaps state-backed insurance. perhaps only certain flags or cargoes at first. A corridor may reopen on paper while remaining effectively shut for many commercial actors.
That is why this exchange between Macron’s naval vision and Iran’s dismissal is so important. It forces the real question into view. Is maritime security in Hormuz something fleets can impose, or something politics must first make possible?
The answer may be both. But if politics fails, the escorts risk becoming what so many wartime plans become: impressive formations built to prove resolve in waters that are still too dangerous for the thing they are supposed to protect.