By WSJ Staff
A common view among power brokers in Middle East countries today is that they need to view the world as if Iran believes it now has a "nuclear weapon" in its ability to cut off and control the Strait of Hormuz, says Jared Cohen, president of global affairs for Goldman Sachs.
Cohen, speaking on CNBC's "Squawk Box" on Friday, said he'd recently returned from meetings in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, where people told him that the vital oil-and-gas shipping lane is unlikely to return to normal-perhaps not even in the long term.
Unless Iran's regime fully collapses "which I don't think it will, the Strait of Hormuz will never reopen in the way that it did in the beginning," he said. "You may have traffic flowing through there, but the Iranians will likely maintain partial or unilateral control."
The implications of such a scenario could create elevated energy prices for months or years. This is why countries in the region are staying united, instead of trying to negotiate separately with Iran, Cohen said, adding that they are trying to buy time to create other outlets for the oil and gas they export.
Countries such as Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. have the ability to build parallel pipelines to pipelines that already exist to carry more fuel to ports on the Red Sea or Gulf of Oman that bypass the Strait of Hormuz.
Gulf countries' power brokers tend to be pragmatic, according to Cohen, who said many of them feel "addressing all the root causes of this war as far too elusive, far too risky." Instead, some people in power there hope for a strong cease-fire to take effect and would be satisfied with a "sloppy peace," which he defined as "a bunch of half solutions on all the big issues."
Those would include:
-- Some traffic moving again through the Strait of Hormuz, though the Iranians would be able to close it any time for any reason
-- Iran keeping between 1,000 and 2,000 ballistic missiles, but with an agreement to not fire them
-- And a tentative cease-fire that would hopefully hold in Lebanon, though Hezbollah would not come to the table to negotiate and Israel would, in turn, keep its military in the southern part of the country
This item is part of a Wall Street Journal live coverage event. The full stream can be found by searching P/WSJL (WSJ Live Coverage).
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
April 25, 2026 17:11 ET (21:11 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
Comments