A False Dawn in the Strait of Hormuz

Global energy prices collapsed on Friday morning following an announcement from Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi that “passage for all commercial vessels through the Strait of Hormuz” is now “completely open.”

The move signals the implosion of Iran’s overly ambitious “toll booth” strategy, but it does not represent an acknowledgment by Tehran that it does not and will not control traffic through the Strait.

“Iran’s Foreign Minister nevertheless added that ‘this passage must be conducted along the coordinated and pre-announced route by the Islamic Republic of Iran’s Ports and Maritime Organization,’” the U.S.-backed Persian language news service Radio Farda reported.

Perhaps that’s why President Donald Trump responded to Araghchi’s announcement by restating his intention to keep the U.S. blockade of the Strait in the Gulf of Oman in place. After all, according to CENTCOM, the siege of Iran’s ports is working:

The movement on the Iranian side is noteworthy and welcome. It’s only the latest indication that Tehran’s effort to put a halt to Gulf exports was full of holes — both diplomatically and militarily unsustainable. But there has been a lot of movement on the American side, too, and the desirability of those gestures is highly debatable.

It should go without saying that having a president who is an unreliable narrator in a time of war is suboptimal. Trump announced on Thursday that the Iranians had agreed to hand over their enriched uranium stockpiles — presumably, once they are recovered from the facilities in which they were entombed during Operation Midnight Hammer. But markets did not move on the news, owing perhaps to the degree to which observers now discount the veracity of the president’s pronouncements.

Likewise, there are rumors that bilateral U.S.-Iran peace talks are set to resume, and Trump is reportedly prepared to sweeten the pot. Media outlets claim the administration is toying with a mere 20-year moratorium on domestic Iranian nuclear enrichment. Others relate a U.S. proposal to unfreeze $20 billion in Iranian assets abroad if Iran surrenders its nuclear material. Trump has denied these reports, but a general mistrust of the president’s public statements persists.

If these proposals are a genuine reflection of the U.S. position’s evolution, they amount to the abandonment of the goals America took with it into this war.

A 20-year enrichment moratorium may sound like no big deal. After all, their costly and sensitive enrichment facilities have been destroyed. They’ll take years and vast sums of capital to rebuild. Moreover, while $20 billion is a lot, it’s nothing against the scale of the devastation Iran absorbed during the high-tempo phase of combat operations. And who knows? Maybe the Iranian regime won’t even be around that long.

Maybe. But agreeing to such an arrangement would be to sacrifice the rationale that led to the war in the first place and scuttled peace talks in Islamabad: namely, the Trump administration’s steadfast refusal to countenance any domestic Iranian enrichment program. To agree to any sunset would be to repeat the mistakes of the Iran nuclear deal.

By countenancing any time at which Iran had a legal right to make homegrown fissile material, the U.S. would legitimize an Iranian nuclear bomb program. And if Iran maintains its support for terrorist groups, unfreezing its assets amounts to licensing Iran-backed terrorism. After all, as the JCPOA’s critics so often observed, money is fungible.

As for the strait, if the president succumbs to the temptation to relax U.S. controls at the mouth of that contested waterway in exchange for Iranian reciprocity even while Tehran continues to assert its sovereignty over it, America will have ceded its role as the world’s guarantor of free maritime navigation rights. America’s adversaries would test that proposition in their neighborhoods, likely setting the stage for an even worse crisis down the road.

The blockade is clearly working. The Iranian regime is feeling the pressure, and its leaders are casting about for relief. Those are the precise conditions Trump set out to engineer. But this is not capitulation — not yet. As such, Trump would be unwise to take his foot off the gas just yet.