The Strait of Hormuz: Iran's Miscalculation, Washington's Opportunity

The Arab World Was Always Keeping Score

This piece was originally published in The Free Press

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Iran Spent Its Last Card

On Sunday, President Donald Trump announced a full U.S. naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz and threatened to destroy “the little that is left of Iran.” In a pair of Truth Social posts, Trump declared that the U.S. military would begin blocking ships from entering or leaving the strait, intercept any vessel that had paid tolls to Iran to transit it safely, and warned that any Iranian who fires on U.S. or peaceful vessels would be “BLOWN TO HELL” while the Navy works to demine the strait. The announcement came as ceasefire negotiations in Islamabad, Pakistan, broke down and the U.S. delegation led by Vice President J.D. Vance returned home. In effect, Washington has moved to strip Tehran of the one coercive instrument it believed it held in reserve.

Wars usually shut doors for American foreign policy. But this episode has revealed that Operation Epic Fury has opened them with uncommon force. To understand why requires an honest reckoning with Iran’s biggest mistake in this war. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ (IRGC) decision to weaponize the Strait of Hormuz ranks among the most consequential miscalculations in the regime’s history.

Following the American and Israeli strikes, the Revolutionary Guard pursued two anticipated outcomes from its Hormuz strategy.

The first was a global economic shock severe enough to force Washington to back down. Iran hoped it could cause a disruption so costly to oil markets and allied supply chains that the United States would be compelled to return to the negotiating table on Iranian terms. The strait carries roughly 20 percent of global oil trade and a similar amount of the world’s liquefied natural gas. A genuine closure would send energy prices soaring across Europe, Asia, and the gulf alike.

The second objective was political. Iran sought to use disruption in the Strait to fracture the alignment between Washington and its Gulf partners, demonstrating that American military operations imposed an unbearable cost on regional stability, pressuring Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, and Doha to demand a stand-down.

The Arab World Was Always Keeping Score

What the IRGC failed to account for was the weight of the political debt it had accumulated across the Arab world. For decades, Tehran positioned the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as the sacred center of Arab political life, consecrating every Iranian intervention and branding every Arab government that resisted as a traitor to Islam. The goal was to hijack Arab grievances and convert them into cover for the Islamic Republic’s conquest.

The Revolutionary Guard was the instrument of that conquest, deployed across the region to construct parallel states, capture financial systems, and install political figures whose survival depended entirely on Iranian patronage.

In Iraq, 67 armed factions tied to the Popular Mobilization Forces, collectively claiming some 230,000 personnel, consumed roughly $3.5 billion annually from the national treasury while Iraqi prime ministers governed with Tehran’s permission rather than a popular mandate.

In Syria, Iran poured billions into the Bashar al-Assad regime and transformed a once-sovereign Arab state into a forward operating base for revolutionary power projection. In 2013, Mehdi Taeb, the head of the Iranian regime’s Ammar Base think tank, called Syria “Iran’s 35th province.”

Farther south, Houthi commanders answering directly to the IRGC held the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, through which 10 percent of global seaborne trade passes, perpetually hostage.

Every theater followed the same logic: subordinate Arab sovereignty to the Islamic Republic’s revolutionary ambition, then present the occupation as resistance.

Arab populations ground down under this revolutionary machinery had long recognized the enterprise for what it was. As far back as 2017, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman described Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, as “the new Hitler of the Middle East.” During Operation Epic Fury, Faiq al-Sheikh Ali, a former member of the Iraqi parliament, stated that “I am Arab. I see humiliation from the Iranians. I do not see any humiliation from any Israeli.” The Arab world had been keeping score for years, and the IRGC had given it no shortage of reasons to reach that judgment.

This is why the second objective, fracturing Gulf alignment, failed. To make matters worse for Tehran, the regime had spent the weeks before the talks in Islamabad striking the very states on whose neutrality the strategy required, hitting desalination plants and oil facilities across the Gulf and curdling any residual sympathy in those countries into open hostility. Sultan Al Jaber, the United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) minister of industry and advanced technology, stated that the strait has never been under Iranian control in any manner that would permit Tehran to legally close or restrict international shipping. The Gulf States reinforced the American posture directly, and the political dividend Tehran had assumed would follow from economic disruption never materialized.

In other words, the IRGC shot itself in the foot. Iran’s available alternatives outside the strait can replace less than 10 percent of Gulf throughput. Before the war, inflation was running above 40 percent, the currency had lost more than 80 percent of its value over the preceding decade, and the shadow fleet Tehran had assembled to smuggle oil and fund IRGC operations was already straining under accumulated sanctions enforcement. Recruitment had collapsed so severely under the weight of unpaid salaries and economic asphyxiation that the IRGC was reportedly pulling 12-year-olds into its ranks. A sustained U.S. naval blockade renders continued resistance economically impossible.

By blockading the strait that Iran is trying to toll, America has called Tehran’s bluff, revealing that the Islamic Republic needs Hormuz commerce at least as much as the rest of the world.

The lesson for all has been that Iran cannot be worked with or relied upon. And Gulf States have since moved to make the lesson permanent. After Trump’s declarations, Saudi Arabia announced the full restoration of oil pumping capacity through its East-West pipeline to approximately seven million barrels per day, days after providing an assessment of damage to its energy sector from attacks during the conflict. By doing so, Riyadh has demonstrated that the region can route energy flows entirely around the strait. In trying to turn Hormuz into leverage, Iran accelerated the very investment the strategy was designed to prevent. The choke point Tehran sought to weaponize is being engineered out of strategic relevance by the states whose alignment Tehran had hoped to shatter.

Washington's Rare Door

But in the IRGC’s misery there is Washington’s opportunity, and opportunities of this magnitude do not repeat themselves. Properly leveraged, Trump’s blockade could unlock a broader regional consolidation.

The first opportunity lies in expanding the Abraham Accords into a robust regional architecture. The Accords signed in 2020 between Israel, the UAE, Bahrain, and Morocco have already delivered measurable cooperation in trade, technology, and security. During Operation Epic Fury, Gulf States coordinated with U.S. Central Command at a level of intimacy unimaginable a decade ago, sharing intelligence, opening airspace, and integrating into a defense posture that functioned as a coherent whole. Bringing additional Gulf partners into a structured framework would convert that wartime alignment into a durable order, with the India-Middle East-Europe corridor providing the economic spine around which the broader architecture could take shape.

The second opportunity is more consequential over time. For two decades, the United States attempted to suppress Iranian-backed networks through direct military engagement in states too weak or too captured to act as genuine partners, a model that proved strategically exhausting and produced no durable result.

The degradation of Iran’s proxy architecture changes the underlying condition entirely. An Iraq reclaiming sovereignty over its own security sector, a Syria freed from Iranian entrenchment, and Gulf States that absorbed sustained attack without political fracture are better positioned to police their own territory. Strong sovereign states are the only counterterrorism infrastructure capable of producing lasting outcomes, and Washington now has a genuine opportunity to help build them through security cooperation and diplomatic engagement, freeing up American strategic bandwidth for the Indo-Pacific.

The Middle East is already reordering itself around Iran’s diminishment. Washington’s opportunity is to consolidate what the region has begun.