In late 2025, the British Royal Navy made a fateful decision: it ended its permanent deployment in the Persian Gulf, a mission it had carried out for decades. It pulled its last frigate from Bahrain and sent home its remaining minehunter from the region. Months later, the Strait of Hormuz crisis erupted.
Now London is scrambling to fill the gap, former Royal Navy officer Alexander Wooley has written in the Washington Post, "Hvylya" reports. This month, British officials indicated they have aerial minesweeping drones and are considering deploying them to the strait. The catch: these systems have never been tested in combat. Britain has also convened meetings with France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Canada, and the Netherlands to discuss a multinational reopening effort.
The British pullback reflects a broader European retreat from mine warfare. During the Cold War, mine clearance was considered too unglamorous for the Americans, so it fell to the Europeans. The Belgians, Dutch, French, and British built sizable minesweeping fleets and pushed the technology forward into the 1990s. But all four nations have since retired most of their minesweeping ships.
The timing has proved disastrous. European capabilities have mirrored the American decline just as the Iran crisis demands exactly the kind of patient, specialized naval work that minesweeping requires. The entire Western alliance finds itself short on ships and caught mid-transition between old technologies and new, unproven platforms.
Trump has demanded that Europeans take the lead in clearing the strait, a position Wooley called understandable given Cold War precedent. But the Europeans now face the same problem as the Americans: they have retired the old ships and have not yet proven the new ones work. The longtime guarantors of freedom of navigation, Wooley wrote, "appear overstretched, ready to snap."
Also read: Why Gulf states have begun reassessing U.S. military bases as the Iran war erodes trust in Washington.