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For three months, the Strait of Hormuz has been shut. Iran closed the narrow channel that runs between its coast and Oman when this year’s war with Israel and the United States began on 28 February, cutting off a waterway that carried roughly a fifth of the world’s oil and gas. Before the war, around 138 ships a day passed through it.
Today, the figure is close to zero. The International Energy Agency calls it the largest supply disruption in the history of the oil market. That’s a colossal understatement: it is a mortal blow to the entire fossil fuel system.
Most coverage treats this as a crisis waiting for a fix: a deal, a change of leadership in Tehran or Washington, or military breakthrough – any of which would reopen the strait and restore the old world order.
That fix is not coming. The Strait will stay closed, or half-open on Iran’s terms, because the people who could end this war no longer have the power to do so.
Most of the main actors want it to end. Yet each is held by a structure that rewards every move except the one that would reopen the channel. They lack the capacity to end it, whatever their intentions.
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The US Was Warned
This year, the United States and Israel chose to go to war with Iran. More than two decades ago, in the largest war game it had ever staged, the Pentagon tested a war against exactly this kind of adversary. In Millennium Challenge 2002, a Gulf force modelled on Iran, commanded by the retired US Marine Corps general Paul Van Riper, used swarms of small boats, mobile missile launchers and suicide attacks to sink 16 American warships, an aircraft carrier among them, in the opening hours – a loss that in reality would have ranked as the worst at sea since Pearl Harbour.
The commanders stopped the exercise, refloated the fleet, tied the Iranian side’s hands and ran it again to a scripted American win. The vulnerability it had exposed only grew as Iran’s arsenal of drones and missiles expanded in the ensuing years.
President Donald Trump went to war anyway. That is the typical behaviour of an empire in decline. Rome did versions of it in its last centuries, throwing legions it could no longer afford into wars against enemies it could not subdue. A power whose ruling ideology has drifted far enough from reality reaches a stage where it can no longer act on information that contradicts its carefully cultivated self-image.
Rather than adapt, it doubles down on the instrument that built it – force – and applies more of it. Each use of force exposes its own limits, and the decline accelerates. The war the US was told it could not win has left it with a strait it cannot reopen.
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Trump Is Stuck
Having failed to force the issue, the United States is now trying to leave it, but cannot do that credibly either. Writing in The Atlantic, the renowned American neoconservative analyst Robert Kagan reported that US President Donald Trump has been pressing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to accept a “letter of intent” with Tehran: a formal end to the war and a 30-day window for talks. Kagan reads this as Trump losing his nerve.
Washington is using both of its instruments at once, yet neither re-opens the strait. It keeps striking – US forces have hit Iranian positions overlooking Hormuz and Iran has struck back at the bases the raids came from – and it keeps announcing deals, because force cannot reopen the channel and no agreement on offer can hold.
The striking and the announcing are really two expressions of the same paralysis. On 23 May, Trump claimed a deal to reopen the strait had been “largely negotiated”; within hours Iran’s Fars news agency called the claim “incomplete and inconsistent with reality” and said the strait would stay under Iranian management.
A power that can no longer win by arms and can no longer make a settlement stick has little left to offer but the announcement itself, and oil markets, easing on each rumour of a deal, keep treating these announcements as progress.
Having abandoned the 2015 nuclear deal signed by his predecessor, Trump has proven to Iran that any future president (including himself) can do the same to whatever Trump signs today. Tehran has watched this happen and drawn the obvious lesson.
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