"For us to close the Strait of Hormuz, we would really have to reach the end of our rope," top security official Ali Shamkhani said in 2025, following the 12-day war and his own failed assassination by Israel. The resumption of hostilities in 2026, opening with the elimination of some of Iran's highest echelons of power, Shamkhani among them, was enough of an existential threat to activate this option.
What followed, however, has not been a last line of defence for Iran to maximize global economic pain. Rather, it has been an iterative attempt to convert a moment of existential pressure into a new governance system, seeking to extract durable gains from the strait and challenge the old order while stopping short of an overreach that would invite global castigation.
That attempt toward a new order is now under question as U.S. and Iranian negotiators have reached a Memorandum of Understanding that would end the conflict as well as restrictions to transit in the strait by mid-July the latest, thus significantly reducing the risks of a global energy crisis and ensuing stagflation.
Nonetheless, competing claims over who governs passage through the strait is unlikely to fade away. Iran has stacked legal, institutional and operational building blocks toward a new governance system since late February, and already created facts on the water that no diplomatic process can cleanly erase.
A revisionist governance system, not a full closure
Iran's control of the strait has operated not as a switch that can simply be turned on and off, but as a dial Iran can modify. The country has systematically loosened or tightened maritime traffic based on the U.S.’ behaviour, thus creating serious leverage over Washington and telling the world that a U.S. behavioural shift would ultimately re-open the strait.
