Reopening the Strait Is Now Job One in the Iran War
The regime has concluded that the ability to control the route is its ticket to survival and rejuvenation.
By Reuel Marc Gerecht and Ray Takeyh
America’s war with Iran has already transformed the Middle East.
For years, the Islamic Republic’s clerical regime bragged that it could strangle the Persian Gulf.
But it refrained from doing so, fearful of U.S. retaliation.
Two enormously destructive bombing campaigns in eight months altered Iran’s calculations.
Neither its nuclear-weapons program nor its ballistic missiles deterred the U.S. and Israel.
Today’s battle for the Strait of Hormuz offers the Islamic Republic an opportunity to resuscitate its fortunes and humble the U.S.
For Tehran, controlling the waterway surely now takes precedence over advancing its damaged atomic ambitions.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is the most consequential player in Iran’s scrambled wartime politics.
Javan, a newspaper that serves as a mouthpiece for the IRGC, recently published a scenario for economic rejuvenation: “The world economy’s critical dependence on this route makes this source of income absolutely unsanctionable and changes the structure of Iran’s political economy from crude oil sales to sustainable transit income.”
Tolls have become an essential tool that Iran selectively imposes.
Chinese ships may not have to pay, but Europeans and others surely will.
As important, the regime learned that it can inflict severe economic pain on its enemies with missiles, drones, mines and other established technologies.
The Islamic Republic is unlikely to forfeit this leverage peacefully.
Iran now acutely appreciates its neighbors’ fragility.
The Gulf Arab economies were built under the umbrella of American hegemony.
Take that away—and the freedom of navigation that goes with it—and the Gulf states will ineluctably go begging to Tehran.
Despite the Western weaponry in Saudi and Emirati hands, without U.S. intervention the Iranians will win any tug of war with Sunni Arabs.
Israeli aspirations for regional reorganization—ideally an expansion of the Abraham Accords—will likely fizzle unless Tehran loses control of the strait.
The Trump administration, like its predecessors, has focused largely on the nuclear issue and only secondarily on Iran’s missiles.
Economic warfare—the blockade and sanctions—is supposed to give America leverage in nuclear talks.
For Iran’s ruling elite, the bomb is still the ideal way of ensuring the Islamic Republic’s regional sway while protecting the homeland from American and Zionist raids.
But the nuclear infrastructure is too battered and the regime too unsteady to sprint for the bomb.
Tehran needs time, cash and deterrence.
Controlling the strait can yield all three.
Building a nuke and manipulating the waterway are two sides of the same coin.
The first probably can’t happen without the second.
America’s primary objective, then, must be reopening the strait.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio appears to understand Hormuz’s importance, saying: “Those are international waterways.
They cannot normalize, nor can we tolerate them trying to normalize, a system in which the Iranians decide who gets to use an international waterway and how much you have to pay them to use it.”
What Mr. Rubio may understand but left unstated is that this means that the U.S. is stuck in the Persian Gulf guaranteeing safe passage as long as the Iranian regime lasts.
It also means we are on the hook to protect, at a minimum, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates from missile and drone attacks against energy and water infrastructure, which may come if the blockade begins to eviscerate the Iranian regime or Mr. Trump starts bombing Persia into darkness.
No matter what happens, the price of oil will remain elevated—but not as high as if the strait isn’t opened.
It will take time for global commerce to regain its confidence in America’s commitment to the waterway.
There will probably be clashes between the U.S. Navy and Iranian armed forces.
If the Islamic Republic can get its hands on advanced Russian or Chinese cruise missiles, maintaining freedom of navigation will become a bloody, gut-wrenching affair.
Yet it’s entirely possible that the theocracy will crack.
All countries have an economic breaking point.
Severe economic hardship—much worse than what Iran experienced during the Iran-Iraq war—will soon slam the regime.
Another insurrection may yet topple the mullahs and the IRGC.
Authoritarian regimes always seem indomitable until they’re not.
But the Islamic Republic has demonstrated a resilience that should make us wary of quick fixes.
The regime’s “resistance economy,” designed to be insulated from pressure by other countries, is into its fourth decade.
In addition, the revolutionary elite sees itself as the vanguard of the Almighty.
Given the repeated insurrections, the Iranian people’s obvious fondness for Western ways, and the conspiracy-addled conviction within the regime that America has fueled and guided internal uprisings, Iran’s rulers and their foot soldiers see themselves as the last redoubt against unbelief.
If the regime doesn’t crack, we could be in a long struggle that will require commitment, patience, and discipline across the U.S. government.
Mr. Gerecht is a resident scholar at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Mr. Takeyh is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
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