Trump Says the US 'Totally Controls' the Strait of Hormuz. Iran Is Still Getting Paid.

When US and Israeli strikes on Iran began on February 28, 2026, Tehran's response arrived within days: an attempt to choke off the Strait of Hormuz, the 33-kilometer channel between Iran and Oman that roughly a fifth of the world's seaborne oil and LNG passes through. Six months later, both sides claim to be winning that fight. President Trump has repeatedly declared "total control" of the strait. Iran maintains the waterway remains closed to any ship that has not asked Tehran's permission first. Both statements cannot be true, and neither matches what tanker-tracking data actually shows.

The traffic collapse is not in dispute

Before the war, an average of roughly 130 ships a day moved through the strait, carrying about 20 to 21 million barrels of oil per day, per pre-war US Energy Information Administration figures. Iran closed the strait to non-approved traffic in early March, and while a ceasefire in April and a US-Iran memorandum of understanding on June 17 briefly eased the standoff, fighting resumed by July. By the time maritime intelligence firm Kpler pulled a detailed traffic count for August 1 to 19, 2026, only 236 ships in total had transited the strait across those 19 days, an average of about 12 ships a day. That is a roughly 90 percent drop in daily vessel counts from pre-war levels, sustained five months into the conflict.

Neither side's flag is the one ships are actually flying

The more interesting number in Kpler's data is not the traffic collapse. It is how ships are choosing to route themselves. Of the 112 oil, gas, and LPG carriers that transited the strait in that same 19-day window, only 21 openly used Iran's preferred northern route, hugging the coast near Larak and Qeshm islands. Just 2 openly used the Omani southern route that the US Navy protects. The remaining 89 vessels, more than 80 percent, went dark: transponders off, routing unverifiable, cargo transfers happening ship-to-ship in open water specifically to avoid being traced to either side's preferred corridor.

When the count is widened to all 236 vessels, including dry cargo and chemical carriers, the pattern holds: 83 openly used the Iranian route against just 3 for the Omani route and 2 for the old pre-war center channel, while 148 (more than six in ten) went dark. Energy policy researcher Marc Ayoub told Al Jazeera that "Iran is not losing control in the current status quo," while Chatham House associate fellow Neil Quilliam offered a more qualified read: Iran "still retains significant capacity to disrupt maritime traffic," but "the growing use of alternative logistics arrangements, ship-to-ship transfers, and enhanced regional maritime security measures suggest that Iran's ability to exert pressure through the strait is not absolute." Read together, the open-route data points one direction: among ships willing to declare a route at all, defying Iran openly happens far less often than defying the US Navy's preferred corridor. Fear of Tehran, not fear of Washington, appears to be shaping the visible traffic.

So how is any oil still moving?

This is where the picture gets genuinely contested. US Central Command says it has "assisted" the passage of 660 million barrels of oil through Hormuz since May, a rate approaching 7 million barrels per day in the most recent three-week stretch counted. US officials told Axios that around 10 million barrels a day have been exiting the strait in recent weeks. Energy Secretary Chris Wright put combined transits and rerouted volumes at roughly 15 million barrels a day over one week in mid-August, closer to (though still well below) the roughly 20 million barrel pre-war average. Independent ship-tracking data, however, has consistently come in below the US government's own figures throughout the war, a gap CNN's reporting noted explicitly. None of the official volume claims are reconcilable with only 12 ships a day physically transiting the strait unless a great deal of that oil is moving through exactly the kind of dark, ship-to-ship-transfer routing described above, which by its nature resists independent verification.

Attacks on shipping have continued on both sides of the ledger. ADNOC, the UAE's state oil company, reported that 15 of its vessels were attacked by missiles or drones since the war began, killing one crew member and injuring 20, as of mid-August. The US, for its part, has fired on vessels it accuses of running its own blockade of Iranian ports, including Hellfire missile strikes on a Panama-flagged cargo ship in August.

The China angle nobody's "control of the strait" headline captures

Regardless of who nominally controls the waterway, Iran has kept meaningful oil revenue flowing through a parallel channel: China. US Treasury officials say China now buys roughly 90 percent of Iran's total oil exports, mostly through independent "teapot" refineries in Shandong province that operate outside the reach of major sanctions enforcement, per Treasury's own April 2026 warning to financial institutions. Kpler-sourced estimates put the volume at around 1.4 million barrels a day in 2025, moved by a shadow fleet of 350-plus aging tankers using ship-to-ship transfers, increasingly staged in the Sea of Oman rather than the traditional Malaysia-Singapore corridor. The price Iran gets for that oil has fallen: the discount to Brent crude has widened from about $8 a barrel in 2023 to $14-17 a barrel in 2026 as Washington escalates secondary sanctions on the refineries and shipping networks involved. Iran is still getting paid. It is just getting paid less, through a route that has nothing to do with whoever the strait's daily traffic count says is "in control."

This is the part of the story that gets lost in the "who controls the strait" framing entirely. The US campaign's stated goal was never just naval dominance of a shipping lane; it was to cut off the revenue that funds the Iranian government and, per Treasury's own language, "its weapons programs and its military." By that measure, six months of blockade, naval strikes, and "maximum pressure" sanctions have not achieved the stated objective. The US-China Economic and Security Review Commission estimated Iran still pulled in roughly $31 billion in oil revenue from Chinese buyers alone, despite China logging zero official imports of Iranian oil since 2022, a bureaucratic fiction that has not stopped the money from moving. A blockade that a determined buyer and seller can route around at a widening but still-profitable discount is not the same thing as an effective embargo, whatever the traffic data at the strait itself shows on any given week.

The honest read

There is no clean scoreboard here, but the record so far cuts against both sides' public claims. Iran has not closed the strait the way it says it has, and its own economy is absorbing real costs: a rial that has lost roughly two-thirds of its parallel-market value since 2022, and a widening discount on the oil it can still sell. But the US has also not delivered the "total control" Trump claims, nor has it delivered the economic strangulation that was the campaign's actual stated goal. Iran's oil trade has been squeezed, not severed, and its government is still banking a meaningful, if discounted, income from it. Reopening the strait to anything resembling normal traffic is, per the International Energy Agency's own warning, becoming urgent as global oil stockpiles are drawn down to cover the shortfall. But "control" is the wrong frame for what the data actually shows. What has actually happened is a fracturing of a single, predictable shipping lane into a much smaller, much riskier, much harder-to-track flow, moving mostly through the shadows both sides say they've eliminated.

FAQ

How much has Strait of Hormuz shipping traffic actually fallen since the war began? From a pre-war average of roughly 130 ships a day to about 12 ships a day across a tracked 19-day window in August 2026, per maritime intelligence firm Kpler, a decline of roughly 90 percent.

Does the shipping data show Iran or the US in control of the strait? Neither cleanly. Among vessels that declared a route, ships defied the US-preferred Omani corridor far more often than they defied Iran's preferred northern route, which several analysts read as evidence that fear of Iran currently outweighs fear of US enforcement. But more than 80 percent of tracked vessels used neither declared route, going dark instead, which makes any full "control" claim by either side hard to verify.

Is Iran still exporting oil despite the war and the blockade? Yes, mostly to China. US Treasury officials estimate China buys around 90 percent of Iran's oil exports, largely through independent refineries that operate somewhat insulated from major sanctions enforcement, at a growing discount to global benchmark prices. The US-China Economic and Security Review Commission put Iran's resulting oil revenue from Chinese buyers alone at roughly $31 billion.

Has the US blockade actually achieved its goal of cutting off Iran's oil revenue? Not by its own stated standard. The campaign's goal was to choke off the revenue funding Iran's government and military, not just to physically dominate the strait. Six months in, Iran is still generating tens of billions of dollars in oil income through China, at a wider discount than before but still a real, ongoing revenue stream, which is a materially different outcome than the "total control" and economic strangulation both have been claimed.

Why do US government and independent tanker-tracking oil volume estimates disagree so much? US officials have cited combined transit-and-reroute volumes as high as 15 million barrels a day in recent weeks, while independent ship-tracking data has consistently shown lower figures throughout the war. The gap is partly explained by the large share of "dark," untracked shipping in the current data, which resists independent verification by design.