For the United States, reopening the Strait of Hormuz is a must-do, but how Washington does so determines whether it is a win or a strategic defeat.
If shipping resumes through diplomatic channels while the Islamic Republic, or a regime insider repackaged as an alternative, retains the power to close the strait again, the United States will not have restored deterrence.
President Trump’s blockade of Iranian ports has now added real pressure, but a victorious reopening can only happen through a military intervention that leads to the regime’s total defeat and surrender, or even better, regime change.
Anything less confirms that Tehran can use disruption and diplomacy in sequence without surrendering the coercive leverage that made the crisis possible. That is the strategic error Washington should avoid.
The central problem is not simply that Iran threatens maritime traffic. It is the method by which the regime turns pressure into leverage. The Islamic Republic does not use diplomacy to relinquish coercive tools.
It uses diplomacy to preserve them under more favorable conditions. That is why a temporary reopening of the strait, achieved through talks while the regime remains intact, would be so dangerous. It would teach Tehran that it can create a crisis, force the world to absorb the shock, and then return to negotiation without giving up the mechanism that caused the crisis in the first place.
Iran’s secret nuclear activities
That concern is not theoretical. It rests on the regime’s documented record. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) concluded in 2025 that Iran had carried out secret nuclear activities with undeclared nuclear material at three locations, and in early 2026, the agency was still demanding broader access to Iranian nuclear sites while warning that it did not know the status of a new underground enrichment facility at Isfahan.
A regime with a record of concealment, selective cooperation, and delay should not be treated as a reliable guarantor of stability in one of the world’s most important maritime chokepoints. The trust problem is institutional and well-established.
That matters because the strait is not a symbolic waterway. It is one of the central arteries of the global economy. According to the US Energy Information Administration, flows through the Strait of Hormuz in 2024 and early 2025 averaged about 20 million barrels per day, accounting for more than one-quarter of global seaborne oil trade and about one-fifth of global oil and petroleum product consumption.
Around one-fifth of global Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) trade also moved through the same corridor, with Qatar accounting for most of that volume. The power to selectively disrupt this corridor can impose immediate costs not only on energy markets but also on allied governments, shipping networks, insurers, and US strategic credibility.
Washington should also be careful not to confuse regime continuity under a softer presentation with a strategic solution. The issue is not whether Tehran can produce a more convenient negotiator, or whether a familiar insider can be marketed as a stabilizing alternative.
The issue is whether the regime that weaponized the strait survives the crisis with the power to do so again. If it does, then the crisis mechanism survives with it. A different face at the table does not change that underlying fact.
This is where Washington is most likely to make a mistake. Policymakers may be tempted to define success too narrowly: a reduction in attacks, a limited reopening for approved shipping, a mediated formula that lowers prices, or renewed talks that allow each side to declare partial victory.
But none of those outcomes would answer the only question that matters. Can Tehran still reimpose politically selective disruption at its choosing? If the answer is yes, then the strategic problem remains unresolved.
The policy conclusion should therefore be straightforward:
The United States should reject any arrangement, including one reached under the cover of blockade pressure, that treats Iran’s selective-access formula as a legitimate basis for reopening the strait.
Washington should define success not as traffic resumed, but as Tehran stripped of the practical ability to use the strait as a recurring instrument of leverage.
Negotiation should not be treated as the path to resolution if it preserves the same level of pressure.
As a result, the end state should not be regime continuity under a softer face. It should be a condition in which the regime’s apparatus of repression is neutralized, its coercive leverage is broken, and the people of Iran can reassert control over their own government.
Handled correctly, this could become Trump’s enduring legacy for generations: not simply reopening a strategic waterway, but helping create the conditions for a more durable peace in a region that has lived for decades under the threat of Iranian disruption.
A reopened Strait of Hormuz is not a strategic success if the regime that closed it survives with the power to do so again. If Washington accepts resumed shipping while leaving Tehran’s leverage intact, it will not have solved the crisis. It will merely have postponed the next one.
Dr. Aidin Panahi is an Iranian-American energy expert, and a member of the Iran Prosperity Project.
Dr. Saeed Ghasseminejad is a senior advisor at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and director of the Iran Prosperity Project.
Source:
www.jpost.com
