Another ceasefire that never really took hold has broken down in the Persian Gulf, and the latest turn shows how the war of choice that the United States and Israel launched against Iran has changed.
When the U.S. and Israel first attacked Iran, their war goals were not clearly defined or easily discerned. But one could say that the two aggressor states were acting as a team. Both of those conditions have been reversed.
For Washington, the war has morphed from perhaps a regime change war or a war over Iran’s imaginary nuclear weapons program into the War for the Strait of Hormuz. Yet even while the Trump administration ratchets up the hostility, it has no clear strategy to address the simple fact that the Strait of Hormuz is under Iran’s control because of the immutable fact of its location.
The War for Hormuz
American goals in this war were nebulous from the start, revolving mostly around U.S. President Donald Trump’s personal ambitions and the strategic fantasies of neoconservatives. Now, there is a clearer agenda.
As the ceasefire, such as it was, took hold and the ill-fated Memorandum of Understanding was drafted, the terms of both reflected Washington’s unspoken acknowledgment that Iran had effectively taken control of the Strait of Hormuz.
But it’s clear that neither the United States nor its allies in the Gulf region were content with that understanding. While the current conflict is being presented as rooted in differing interpretations of the wording of the MOU, the reality is that the U.S.—and to a lesser extent, Qatar and Saudi Arabia—quickly grew uncomfortable with the idea that the Strait would be controlled by Iran in perpetuity. The pause in talks prior to the latest round of fighting worsened that anxiety in Washington.
Paragraph 5 of the MOU reads: “Upon the signing of this MOU, the Islamic Republic of Iran will make arrangements using its best efforts for the safe passage of commercial vessels, with no charge for 60 days only, from the Persian Gulf to the Sea of Oman, and vice versa…”
The point of contention is what it means that Iran “will make arrangements” and what safe passage means. The United States interprets the paragraph to mean that Iran will remove any mines and other impediments to shipping, but that otherwise, all traffic is free to move about in the Strait with no limitations.
Iran reads “making arrangements” as meaning that it will authorize shipping through the Strait, so all traffic must be coordinated with Tehran.
To get around this argument, several ships have tried to transit the Strait near the Omani coast. While Oman didn’t directly object to this idea, that seems to have been due to American pressure, and it undermines Oman’s efforts to maintain strategic ambiguity between the U.S. and Iran. It also makes Oman’s efforts to work with Iran on a proposal for a permanent system of transit through the Strait nearly impossible.
The final straws were cast earlier this week when three ships—sailing under Qatari, Saudi, and Liberian flags respectively—were fired upon as they tried to transit the Strait. That brought the much stronger U.S. response than previous incidents and escalated the tit-for-tat fighting again.
What makes this escalation especially worrisome is that the United States, in addition to bombing Iran, has rescinded the waiver that allowed Iran to sell its oil again at market prices, something it had been unable to do because of U.S. sanctions.
That license was worth billions of dollars to Iran and was one of the chief points of criticism from many in Washington of the MOU.
That decision, even more than the renewed attacks on Iran, critically endangers the fragile diplomacy between the two adversaries. By so quickly reversing Iran’s ability to sell oil on the open market freely, the U.S. again confirmed for the Iranian leadership that it will not adhere to its agreements and that any time there is any dispute, it will unilaterally move to cripple Iran’s economy again.
On the U.S. side, there was clearly a growing feeling that they had erred when they tacitly acknowledged Iran’s control over the Strait. But they have no solution to the simple fact of geography that allows Iran to disrupt traffic through the narrow waterway, even with the most limited military capability.
That’s what the war is now about, as the latest phase was kicked off by the United States trying to find ways to circumvent, or at least mitigate, Iran’s ability to threaten traffic through the Strait. For Iran, this has now become an existential issue; the power they exercise over the Strait is a far more effective deterrent than any weaponry. They must maintain it.
While the United States talks about the threat of tolls—and that is a concern that many countries share, even some of Iran’s allies—it is that insulation that Trump most fears. Iran has established the ability to ensure that it will not be attacked again.
Their move to close the Strait, rather than merely threatening to do so, significantly strengthens Iran’s deterrent capability. The potential for doing this was enough for Washington, despite its hatred of the Islamic Republic, to refrain from attacking it until Benjamin Netanyahu was able to convince Trump to do so. Now, Trump or any future president will be even more reluctant to shatter whatever peace or truce emerges at the end of this foolhardy and bloody affair.
The clock is ticking to Election Day
What we’re seeing right now is a desperate attempt by the U.S. and its Gulf allies to find a way to limit Iran’s control by using shipping routes through the Strait that veer close to Oman’s side of the waterway. Iran is clearly not going to tolerate that, which is unlikely to have come as a surprise to the Qataris and Saudis.
But neither the U.S. nor Iran wants to return to the war, at least not right away. Iran would prefer to find a path toward getting the compensation and ongoing security arrangements it wants. Those were outlined in the MOU, which, despite Trump’s declaration that it was dead, can always be revived.
The Trump administration is in a different position. Most of the pressure Trump feels now stems from the looming midterm elections. He will still have concerns afterward, as many of his billionaire and far-right compatriots do not want to see the global recession that a full return to war is sure to bring.
But those concerns will be less immediate for a lame duck Trump, who is likely to be working with a split Congress.
Given the lack of unity among Democrats as centrists and progressives grow more combative with one another and the fact that there are more than a few Democrats who are just as willing to support a Trump war on Iran, even if more subtly than their Republican colleagues, a split Congress might not be much more of an impediment to Trump’s war than the Republican one has been so far.
Yet while there’s good reason to believe matters will degenerate badly after the midterms, there is no guarantee they will not do so sooner. The U.S. has launched major bombing raids, but the damage to Iran’s infrastructure, especially its energy infrastructure, appears to be light. Similarly, Iran has targeted American-linked sites in the Gulf states, but the attacks seem to have been calibrated to avoid escalatory damage.
That shows that both sides are trying to avoid going back to full-scale war, and it is entirely possible that the U.S. taking the more escalatory step of cutting off Iran’s license was simply another example of Trumpian ignorance and impulsivity, not an attempt to return to all-out war.
But as the dueling attacks continue, the risk of escalation is extremely high, and a return to all-out warfare will have far greater consequences than the previous round.
Beyond closing the Strait of Hormuz, a renewal of hostilities is very likely to prompt Iran to press its Yemeni ally, Ansar Allah (the Houthis), to disrupt shipping in the Bab al-Mandab Strait, which connects the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden and then to the Indian Ocean. We have already seen how damaging the disruption of traffic there can be, and combined with the Strait of Hormuz’s closure, it would devastate global shipping.
That could well be enough for the U.S. to attack Iran’s energy infrastructure, which would surely bring retaliation against Gulf Arab energy production. Production damage would take far longer to recover from than sea traffic disruption. The economic implications for the entire world, the threat to the transit of food and other basic staples of life, are staggering, and the effects would be felt most by the world’s most vulnerable.
There is an alternative, and it is already documented in the MOU. Enacting the massive economic relief it promises for Iran and working out an equitable arrangement for managing the Strait of Hormuz, administered by Iran and at least one Gulf Arab state, would avert this catastrophic future.
It is a system that enforces cooperation between Iran and its neighbors, reducing tensions throughout the region and could even help alleviate conflicts in other regions over time. At the very least, it would ensure that the flow of goods and services through key global waterways is more stable than it is now.
Iran would surely jump at such an arrangement, as it addresses all their concerns. The problem, of course, is that Trump would see it as a defeat. He could be convinced otherwise—if he could be convinced to do something as patently stupid as starting this war, he can be convinced of anything.
Someone would need to convince Trump that this could lead to an agreement on Iran’s nuclear program, a genuine possibility as the power over the Strait is the deterrent Iran needs, and they might well be willing to agree to limit their nuclear enrichment to the low-level civilian use standards. Who might be able to convince him of that is not clear.
But right now, Trump is barreling in the other direction, reverting to his usual bellicosity, and trying to bomb his way out of the mess he has made. If he is not diverted from this course by November, it may be too late.
Mitchell Plitnick
Mitchell Plitnick is the president of ReThinking Foreign Policy. He is the co-author of Except for Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics and maintains the Cutting Through newsletter.
