The aim of Tehran’s decades of pursuit of a nuclear bomb was always twofold: The mullahs wanted to threaten Israel and also to warn the U.S. and the rest of the world that attacking Iran would carry a cost no adversary would be willing to bear.
The joint U.S.-Israeli war has diminished the threat to Israel, but Tehran’s unbroken chokehold on the Strait of Hormuz shows that the regime doesn’t need a nuclear weapon to inflict enormous pain on the world.
The strait has quickly become the focal point of the war. Iranian military forces and proxies in the region are attacking tankers and harassing shipping via a toll system.
“Iran has discovered that controlling the Hormuz Straits is better for them than having a nuclear bomb,” said Marwan Muasher, vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a Washington-based think tank.
On Sunday, President Trump fired off a profane social media post capturing his frustration with military efforts to force Iran to reopen the waterway through which one-fifth of the world’s oil passes annually: “Open the F——- Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell — JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.”
He issued the emphatic warning just days after striking a more optimistic tone during a Wednesday night speech intended to shore up support among American voters and ease growing concerns among global allies.
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“The strait will open up naturally,” Mr. Trump said. “They’re going to want to be able to sell oil because that’s all they have to try and rebuild.”
Mr. Trump said Operation Epic Fury was “nearing completion” and that the U.S. would “hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks.”
The Trump administration has never explicitly said that keeping the strait open and free from Tehran’s tolls and attacks by Iranian proxies is a rationale for the war, but the economic impacts rippling through the global economy have the White House scrambling.
The president and his Cabinet have even suggested that the U.S. could consider ending the war without reopening the strait.
Iran may welcome that course of action. Analysts see no apparent incentive for the regime to surrender control of the waterway.
“They’re now openly talking about formalizing that control as if it’s going to be their own Panama Canal,” said Karim Sadjadpour, a Carnegie analyst who joined Mr. Muasher last week for a panel discussion at the think tank.
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“That is something which I think is not only unacceptable for the United States, but for much of the globe,” Mr. Sadjadpour said.
The challenge, Mr. Sadjadpour and Mr. Muasher said, is that Iran has shifted away from a war focused only on military capability to one of political endurance and survival. The Iranian leadership has demanded tens of billions of dollars to rebuild damaged facilities as part of any deal with the U.S.
Analysts said the risk of energy transactions increasingly using currency other than the U.S. dollar looms over the preferential treatment of China, slowly eroding the biggest American financial leverage in the region.
Reports say Iran is charging as much as $2 million per tanker for safe passage through the strait. That adds up to tens of millions of dollars per day and billions of dollars a year for the regime.
Iranian leaders approved a plan last week to permanently charge a toll for ships passing through the strait while barring transit to any vessels linked to the U.S. or Israel. They are framing the plan as a revenue source and as a formal assertion of Iranian sovereignty.
Iran has allowed preferential treatment for U.S. adversaries, letting Chinese tankers and commercial assets pass through the strait.
Russia and China have supported Iran with satellite imagery for the war, analysts say, and have historically maintained a relationship that supports its military directly.
“This is entirely natural. Just as goods pay transit fees when passing through other corridors, the Strait of Hormuz is also a corridor. We provide its security, and it is natural that ships and oil tankers should pay such fees,” said Mohammadreza Rezaei Kouchi, an Iranian lawmaker and chairman of the Civil Affairs Committee of the Islamic Consultative Assembly.
About 20 million barrels of crude oil and petroleum products, accounting for about 20% to 25% of the world’s oil consumption, pass through the strait daily. The vast majority of oil exports from Persian Gulf producers such as Saudi Arabia and Iraq pass through the crucial maritime chokepoint.
“We have seen Iran hijack an international shipping route to hold the global economy hostage,” British Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper said during a Thursday meeting of 41 countries held to brainstorm ideas to open the strait.
She said Iran had launched more than 25 attacks on ships since Operation Epic Fury commenced. At least 20,000 seafarers are “trapped” on about 2,000 ships that can’t move because of Tehran’s effective blockade of the maritime passageway.
Iran has controlled shipping for nearly a month, and the financial windfall could support the reconstitution of Iran’s ballistic missile and drone, or unmanned aerial vehicle, programs.
Nicole Grajewski, a scholar in Carnegie’s Nuclear Policy Program and assistant professor at the Center for International Studies at Sciences Po in Paris, said during the discussion Wednesday that Iran’s military could reconstitute its ballistic missile program within a year despite the damage inflicted by Operation Epic Fury.
“On the UAVs, it’s much easier than that,” she said. “These can be done in smaller and smaller facilities, and they could really be done in civilian facilities. So it doesn’t really look that great on that side of the ledger either.”
In his Wednesday speech, Mr. Trump attempted to reassure regional U.S. partners — Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Bahrain — by promising that the U.S. would “not let them get hurt or fail in any way, shape or form.”
“The old strategy, the old answer of depending on the United States for the Arab world’s security is no longer credible,” said Mr. Muasher, pointing out that Israel is also conducting bombings in Syria. “We are starting to see a loose coalition of some like-minded Arab countries. … This is the vacuum that we are witnessing in the Arab world, which has been deepened through this war on Iran. It has transformed Iran from a potential threat to a real threat.”
The U.S. partnerships with the Gulf states were predicated on an economic and security relationship that is now under immense pressure.
Although many of those partners want Iranian missile and drone capabilities to be degraded, they are now bearing the burden in terms of destruction and civilian casualties for the U.S.-Israel campaign, Mona Yacoubian said.
“That is not helpful to the Gulf,” Ms. Yacoubian, director of the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told The Times. “When they say finish the job, that’s what they’re talking about.”
She said the Trump administration’s willingness to target civilian infrastructure legitimizes those targets for Iran in allied Gulf states.
A regime that has spent 47 years organizing around resisting American pressure now controls a strategic waterway and can threaten neighboring countries with missiles and one-way drones.
“We know Iran has demonstrated both the willingness and the capability to immediately respond in kind if any such targets are hit,” Ms. Yacoubian said. “It turns around and hits the exact same types of targets in neighboring Gulf countries.”
Reopening the strait may fall to European allies as Gulf partners focus on their own security.
Mr. Muasher isn’t convinced it will work.
“If Trump leaves without opening [the strait’s shipping lanes], nobody is going to try and open them by force. Those states are incapable and unwilling to open them by force,” he said.
• John T. Seward can be reached at jseward@washingtontimes.com.
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