After US President Donald Trump threatened more than once to impose his own pace on the war, setting a deadline for opening the Strait of Hormuz before retreating from it, and then extending the ceasefire indefinitely, it seemed that the dilemma was no longer in Washington’s ability to strike, but rather in its ability to turn this superiority into a decision.
In this fragile truce, Iran does not need an explicit military victory. Rather, it is enough for it to keep the strait suspended between opening and closing, and to make the cost of breaking it higher than its opponent’s ability to bear.
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Specifically from this angle, foreign readings converge on one meaning: the United States is capable of inflicting severe harm on Iran, but it was unable to extract from it the most sensitive card, that is, the ability to transform the most important corridor in the energy trade into a tool of deterrence, and raise the bill of war to a level that makes its continuation, or even its political justification, more difficult.
Hermuz holds the thread
In the American newspaper The Hill, Tolu Talbi wrote that Iran’s grip on the Strait of Hormuz is not just an additional means of pressure, but rather the core of its deterrence in this war.
The corridor, through which approximately one-fifth of seaborne energy trade passes, is no longer just a navigational artery. Rather, according to the report, it has turned into a tool capable of raising fuel prices, disrupting the global economy, and imposing a long battle on Washington in a field that was originally shaped by geography in a way that serves Tehran.
The report quotes Iranian researcher Alem Saleh that the American naval blockade does not dispel this strategy as much as it accelerates its realization. If Iran disrupts other people’s oil, and Washington blocks Iran’s oil, the practical result is the same: a closed strait and high global costs, which is what Tehran has sought since the outbreak of the war.
The seriousness of this scene does not stop at the economic impact, as the report points out that Iran, despite the strikes it has received, still maintains enough drones, launch pads, and asymmetric warfare tools to keep navigation in the Strait at risk.
This means that the question is no longer about Washington’s ability to strike Iran, but rather about its ability to take away Tehran’s ability to disrupt traffic and raise risks whenever it wants. Here geography appears to be part of power itself: a long coast, a narrow strait, and a constant threat that does not require complete control as much as it needs to keep the possibility open.
Expensive and closed corridor
Here comes the British newspaper, the Financial Times, to give this equation its practical content. In Jacob Goodah’s report on clearing mines from the Strait of Hormuz, the problem appears not only to be the number of mines, but also to the fact that the mere possibility of their presence imposes on the US Navy a slow and extremely complex task.
The report quotes experts that opening a safe passage may take weeks, while removing mines from the entire strait may extend to a month and a half or even four months, depending on the size of the threat and field conditions. If the fragile ceasefire collapses and the work is forced to take place under fire, the operation becomes more costly, longer-term, and more dangerous.
The picture is further complicated because the United States itself does not have a comfortable abundance of mine warfare capabilities. The report shows that these capabilities have been neglected for decades, and that the American fleet only has a limited number of ships ready for this type of operations, at a time when it needs European support that is still hesitant.
He adds that regional alternatives, such as pipelines or bypass routes, do not have enough energy to compensate for what passes through tankers, especially in oil and gas.
Thus, Iran is holding Hormuz not only because it closed it, but because it made opening it by force a cumbersome, slow, and expensive process, rather than just a military decision that is taken and then implemented.
Beyond oil and rules
The bill of war does not stop at the strait and the markets. According to an investigation reported by the American CBS network and reported by the Israel Hayom newspaper, the Iranian response caused much wider damage to the American military structure in the Middle East than was officially announced.
The investigation says that the strikes hit dozens of targets at American bases across seven countries, hitting warehouses, command headquarters, hangars, runways, advanced radars, and dozens of aircraft, while the Pentagon kept the extent of the damage and the cost of repairs away from the public, which sparked discontent even within Congress.
CBS also reported this week that the number of wounded among American forces during the war had risen to 400 soldiers, in addition to 13 dead.
Here the “hidden cost” of the war becomes evident: not only what is announced in oil prices, but also what is hidden in the rules, in the reform budgets, and in the renewed question about the feasibility of concentrating this amount of power in the range of the Iranian response.
The nuclear deal is out of the question
The limits of power are not revealed in Hormuz alone. In an opinion article published by the American magazine Newsweek, Jonathan Granoff, president of the Institute for Global Security, writes that war will not solve the Iranian nuclear dilemma, and that any lasting solution must pass through treaties, diplomacy, and enhanced verification, not through military coercion alone.
He points out that the American demands put forward in the Islamabad negotiations, especially stopping Iranian enrichment for twenty years and exporting uranium stock, clash with the right to the peaceful use of nuclear energy guaranteed by the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Therefore, the practical path, in his opinion, is not to remove the file from Iran by force, but rather to subject it to a more stringent and comprehensive inspection and control system.
The importance of this proposal lies in that it complements what the readings of the Hill and the Financial Times newspapers reveal: The United States can strike, besiege, and raise the threat ceiling, but it cannot turn all of this into a stable political solution, neither in the Strait nor in the nuclear issue.
Hormuz is not easily opened by force, and the nuclear file itself is not settled by bombing, but rather by a verifiable formula of understanding. Here, Washington’s dilemma appears in its clearest form: The problem is not only that Iran is still resisting, but that the war itself does not give the United States the path to what it declared it wants to achieve.
Iran and the equation of attrition
Based on these propositions, a clearer equation emerges than the logic of victory and defeat in their direct sense. Iran did not win a decisive victory, nor did it defeat the United States militarily, but it succeeded in what may be more important than that: keeping the cost of the war higher than the ease of continuing it.
In this case, Tehran does not need to regain everything it lost in the war. It is enough for it to keep the world looking at Hormuz as an open wound, and to keep Washington facing a burdensome equation: an unresolved nuclear war, a strait that cannot be broken without a heavy price, and a cost that accumulates politically, economically, and militarily the longer the confrontation lasts.
