Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Tuesday that Iran has been “given every opportunity to negotiate” and that any attack on commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz will continue to be met with escalating force, describing the current U.S. naval blockade of the waterway as impenetrable.
Hegseth’s remarks came during a joint appearance with President Donald Trump in the Oval Office, where the two men fielded questions from reporters following a bilateral meeting with Lebanese President Joseph Aoun. When Trump turned the floor over to his defense secretary to characterize the state of the Iran campaign, Hegseth framed the conflict as one Tehran has repeatedly chosen to prolong through its own aggression in the strait.
“It’ll Be an Honor… Something No President’s Been Willing to Do”
Hegseth opened by referencing an upcoming trip he and Trump plan to make to Dover Air Force Base to honor American service members killed in the conflict, calling it “an honor” to join the president in a gesture he said no previous administration had been willing to make. He then pivoted to a comparison between Iran’s current weapons buildup and North Korea’s path to a nuclear arsenal, warning that unchecked conventional buildup can eventually deter international intervention entirely. “They build up a conventional capability like the North Koreans did. Remember that’s how North Korea made their way to a bomb, so much weaponry that no one was willing to stand up to them,” Hegseth said.
“Nobody Gets Through the Blockade”
Turning to the immediate military situation, Hegseth said Iran has had repeated chances to de-escalate but has instead continued targeting commercial vessels transiting the Strait of Hormuz, prompting nightly retaliatory strikes. “Iran’s been given every opportunity to negotiate to show that they’re reasonable on the Strait of Hormuz, but if they’re going to shoot at commercial shipping, then we’re going to hit them, as the president said, 10 times harder, which every night we’re degrading them further and further, and the president has all the options necessary,” Hegseth said. He added that Iran’s choices were binary: “If they want to talk, they can talk, otherwise they can deal with the War Department and we’re to the blockade is up and fully, I mean, it’s nobody gets through. Nobody gets through the block. It’s like a steel wall.”
CENTCOM Confirms Continued Nightly Strikes
Hegseth’s description of nightly degradation strikes matches U.S. Central Command’s own public accounting of the campaign over the past several days. In a release dated July 20, CENTCOM said it had completed another round of strikes against Iran at 9 p.m. ET, targeting “Iranian military command centers, maritime capabilities, missile and drone launch sites, and air defense systems to degrade Iran’s ability to continue attacking commercial vessels flowing through the Strait of Hormuz.” The command said commercial transits through the corridor continue, citing roughly 900 vessels and 450 million barrels of crude oil moved through the strait with U.S. assistance since early May, and stated that American forces “remain postured and prepared to hold Iran accountable for unwarranted aggression toward civilian mariners.”
The night before, CENTCOM reported it had completed a ninth consecutive evening of strikes against Iran, hitting “Iranian military command centers, air defense and coastal surveillance sites, maritime capabilities, missile and drone launch sites, and communications networks.” That release described the campaign as being carried out “at the Commander in Chief’s direction,” with forces “highly vigilant, focused, lethal, and ready.”
A War Measured in Consecutive Nights
The nine-consecutive-night streak referenced in CENTCOM’s July 19 release illustrates how the conflict has shifted since its initial 38-day phase concluded in April. Rather than the large, concentrated opening barrage that killed Iran’s Supreme Leader and senior military leadership in February, the current phase of Operation Epic Fury has taken the form of nightly, targeted strikes tied directly to Iranian actions against shipping in the strait — a tit-for-tat dynamic that both Trump and Hegseth suggested Tuesday will continue indefinitely unless Iran halts its attacks on commercial vessels.
That dynamic has come at a cost in American lives. Reporting this week noted that the number of U.S. troops killed since the war began has continued to climb, with multiple service members killed over the past weekend alone, in one of the deadliest stretches for U.S. forces since February. Trump referenced the losses earlier in the same availability, telling reporters he would travel to Dover to pay respects and attributing a recent breach in Jordan to reliance on partner forces rather than U.S. operators. “They did slip something through in Jordan, and if we had other operators, you know, it would have not happened unfortunately, but because we have the best equipment in the world, you know, we’ve stopped almost everything,” Trump said.
The Broader Message to Tehran
Taken together, Hegseth’s remarks reinforced the administration’s public position that the war’s continuation is a matter of Iranian choice rather than American escalation — a framing consistent with Trump’s own comments in the same session that Iran “wants to desperately meet” but has not done so “in a meaningful way.” Hegseth’s invocation of North Korea also served as an implicit warning about the stakes of allowing Iran any window to rebuild conventional or nuclear capacity, a theme that has run through the administration’s public statements since the war’s earliest days.
Neither Hegseth nor Trump specified how long the nightly strike pattern is expected to continue, though both suggested the campaign’s tempo will remain tied directly to Iranian conduct in the strait. The Lebanon-focused meeting that prompted the exchange concluded shortly afterward, with Trump and Aoun turning to questions about Israeli troop withdrawals from southern Lebanon.