DUBAI-By squeezing the Strait of Hormuz, both the U.S. and Iran expected to outlast their foe, believing time would work in their favor.
Now, it looks like the trend is moving against Tehran.
The U.S. naval blockade has prevented Iran from shipping any oil from the Persian Gulf since July. At the same time, despite Iranian drone and missile attacks, Washington has been able to assist Gulf Arab states in moving significant amounts of their crude through the waterway, keeping global oil prices from surging above critical levels.
"The Iranian blockade is more leaky than the U.S. blockade," said Samir Madani, co-founder of the maritime intelligence firm TankerTrackers.com. "The Iranians just aren't able to shut it all down."
The strategic question of whether time will eventually work in favor of Washington-or the Tehran regime-has yet to be settled. Tehran retains ways of escalating what has now become a protracted conflict, raising costs for the U.S. and its allies. The U.S. military's ability to maintain the naval blockade for many more months is also uncertain.
But now it is clear that Tehran's calculation six months ago, as it shut down the Strait of Hormuz and bottled up one-fifth of the world's crude oil supply, proved erroneous. The move didn't trigger a worldwide economic crisis or force President Trump to end the war on Iranian terms.
Yet, Trump's blockade of Iranian ports, imposed in April and reimposed in July, after a short-lived memorandum on reopening the waterway collapsed, hasn't changed Iran's behavior either. Despite growing economic disruption, the blockade didn't spur a popular uprising against the Islamic Republic-and didn't convince Tehran to reopen the strait to allow free navigation.
"The assumptions of both sides have not come true, and both of them also do not have an exit," said Vali Nasr, a professor of Middle East studies at Johns Hopkins University and a former State Department official who has been involved in informal contacts with Iran.
For now, however, Iran's leverage over the Strait of Hormuz is slowly but surely being eroded by the U.S. military campaign in the region. Crude oil prices remain below $100 a barrel on international markets, elevated but well below the critical threshold for the global economy. In part, this was due to China drawing on domestic reserves and reducing imports.
It isn't just about oil, of course. Shipments of liquefied natural gas, fertilizers and other commodities also remain stuck in the Gulf, choking the economies of Qatar, Kuwait, Iraq and Bahrain-nations that don't have alternative sea outlets.
Time isn't benefiting either side, said a senior Gulf Arab official, but the clock is ticking more for the Iranians because they are under enormous economic strain. The American clock is more about politics and public opinion than economic pain, he said.
TankerTrackers.com estimated earlier this week that on average about 5 million barrels a day of crude oil, almost none of it Iranian, exited the Persian Gulf via the Strait of Hormuz over the previous 28 days, along with roughly 2.5 million barrels via oil ports on the Gulf of Oman such as Fujairah in the United Arab Emirates. These exports represent more than 40% of the region's prewar flow of oil.
Iran's continuing attacks on vessels are aimed at maintaining its control over the Strait of Hormuz, triggering exchanges of missile and drone strikes that, so far, remain carefully calibrated. Iran has struck tankers at sea and U.S. bases and military facilities in Bahrain, Kuwait and Jordan-but has refrained from larger-scale attacks on Israel and the Gulf's biggest economies, Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E.
The U.S., meanwhile, hasn't bombed major cities in Iran or targeted its military and political leadership. This reprieve has allowed Iran to repair and rebuild its military industries, including those involved in missile production, that were targeted by U.S. and Israeli strikes during the 40 days of full-scale war between February and April.
Iran's Gulf neighbors hope that the relative restraint will persist on both sides, paving the way to a deal down the road. "For us here in the region, while we prefer a stalemate over war, we prefer a permanent cessation of hostilities over a stalemate," the senior Gulf official said.
Iranian leaders, however, have long warned that they can't allow a situation in which Arab Gulf states export their oil while Iran's trade is strangled. When the U.S. blockade was first imposed by Trump, Iranian officials estimated they could hold out for five months or so without catastrophic repercussions for the economy. That point is now approaching fast, forcing a strategic decision on Tehran.
"One option for them is to cave in. The other is to escalate in a much bigger way, to try to fight their way out of the corner," said Nasr, the professor. Such an escalation could be a more likely choice, he added: "Their calculation is that even if they have to go back to the negotiating table and even if they have to make concessions, they would have to make fewer concessions if they put more pressure militarily."
The American political calendar is also a major factor in Iranian thinking, pointing to likely escalation. A pivotal moment in the early history of the Islamic Republic was a decision to manipulate the 1980 U.S. presidential election by withholding the release of American hostages until after Ronald Reagan beat Jimmy Carter. The Reagan administration later secretly supplied weapons to Iran.
Today, Iranian leaders are acutely aware of how unpopular the war is in the U.S., in part because it has led to an increase in gas prices at the pump. And they have little desire to reward Trump, who ordered the assassination of much of Iran's political and military leadership in February, with a compromise on the Strait of Hormuz that would lower the price of gas just before the U.S. midterm elections in November.
"As the clock starts ticking, the viewpoint in Tehran is: Why on earth would we relieve any pressure on Trump to make concessions? Let's make him feel pain at the polls," said Ellie Geranmayeh, Iran expert at the European Council on Foreign Relations.
Internal political pressures, to be sure, also exist in Iran. The country's civilian leaders, such as President Masoud Pezeshkian and parliamentary speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, who led the June negotiations with the U.S., have called for a return to the talks, pointing to the deteriorating state of the Iranian economy.
The country's currency is losing value fast, inflation is rising, and gasoline shortages have become commonplace. "Some say sanctions have no effect at all. To those people, I really don't know what to say," Pezeshkian said in a recent TV interview, noting that Iran's trade has fallen between 25% and 35%.
Real power in Tehran, however, appears to be in the hands of commanders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, especially as the country's official new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, remains in hiding after injuries sustained in the U.S. strike that killed his father, Ali Khamenei, in February. These commanders, such as the new Supreme National Security Council chief Mohsen Rezaei and IRGC chief Ahmad Vahidi, see the government as conducting a war of survival and are unlikely to be swayed by economic pain felt by the country's citizens.
In some ways, inflation and the resulting impoverishment of Iran's middle class could be a policy choice to create a much more militarized and centralized society geared for war-and to prevent a return to the kind of protests that pushed Iran to the brink of revolution in January.
"Iran's economy is weakening. But a weakening economy can still be part of a deliberate strategy by some figures in the Iranian leadership to retain staying power in this conflict," said Esfandyar Batmanghelidj, chief executive of the London-based Bourse & Bazaar Foundation think tank. "They maintain an incredible repressive capacity, and they understand that as the economic situation gets worse, ordinary people lose their capacity to mobilize in a massive way."
If recent history has taught anything about developments inside Iran, it is to be wary of predictions, added Norman Roule, who served as the principal U.S. intelligence community official on Iran matters from 2008 to 2017.
"Those who believe the regime is too strong, too deeply embedded in Iranian society, or too well protected by pervasive domestic security institutions to fail, should recall how similar judgments were once made about Mubarak, Ben Ali, Ceau?escu, and even the Soviet Union," he said. "Anyone who claims to know with certainty whether, or when, the Islamic Republic will collapse or that it will endure should first be asked to demonstrate their skills as a prophet by sharing next week's lottery numbers."
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