The Strait Is Giving Iran The Leverage The U.S. Feared A Nuke Would

Edited by Sam Thielman 

THE PAST 24-PLUS hours have brought the United States and Iran back to volleyed air and missile strikes and threats of worse. This latest exchange of fire—Iranian strikes on ships moving through the Strait outside of their control; more than 60 U.S. strikes on Iranian targets that reportedly killed a soldier; Iranian retaliatory fire against U.S. sea and air bases in Bahrain and Kuwait—show the U.S. thrashing around in the Iranian snare, unable to break it by force and unwilling to pay the price for release. 

It's entirely possible that one or both sides opts to climb down and everyone is spared further escalation, possibly by the time markets close. But the snare is the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that was supposed to get Donald Trump out of the war he foolishly started. The Iranians are determined to ensure Trump and his ilk understand that the MOU shapes diplomacy between Teheran and Washington from here on out.

Most important in the MOU is its acceptance that Iran can impose some manner of transactional cost upon vessels transiting the Strait of Hormuz. The Trump people are adamant that they made no such concession in the document. Unfortunately for them, they did. Paragraph Five says that Iran "will make arrangements using its best efforts for the safe passage of commercial vessels, with no charge for 60 days only, from the Persian Gulf to the Sea of Oman, and vice versa." The explicit, 60-day waiver of shipping fees/tolls/etc. necessarily implies that these fees/tolls/etc. return after such time. 

One sentence later, the paragraph concludes: "The Islamic Republic of Iran will conduct dialogue with the Sultanate of Oman, to define the future administration and maritime services in the Strait of Hormuz, in discussions with other Persian Gulf Littoral States, in line with applicable international law and the sovereign rights of coastal states of the Strait of Hormuz." As it happens, Iran and Oman conducted that dialogue. Against the wishes of the United States and its Gulf allies, they agreed to make the Strait of Hormuz a toll highway. This is now a diplomatic and economic fact. It is also the wages of the U.S. losing a war it started under clear diplomatic perfidy. 

Unsurprisingly, Paragraph Five is the part of the MOU that the Iranian foreign ministry said today that the U.S. is violating.

The Iran hawks are not wrong about the MOU being favorable to Iran. The war they wanted turned out to be favorable to Iran. They're wrong about the U.S.' ability to do anything about it. Since signing the MOU, the Trump people have often sounded like they think they'll rewrite the entire terms of the MOU when they get to the final-status negotiations intended to actually end the war. Since the Iranians now and forever expect that sort of perfidy from the United States, they have a counter: the Strait of Hormuz. 

While the Iranians do not wish to be bombed, it's the U.S. that can't afford—first economically and then politically—to return to open war. Oil futures are already up following yesterday's exchange of fires. The Iranians are happy to turn it into a summer of pain at the pump. Should the U.S. go back to war, it will do so in the absence of a military capability to force and keep the Strait open, and will have no diplomatic course to negotiate such a state. The Iranians will not accept anything less than the MOU. They seek to make Trump recognize that the future looks like the present, not like the past, when the Strait was a free boat ride.

Trump, indulging in a temper tantrum at the NATO summit in Ankara, doesn't sound like he's ready to recognize shit. Gone are the weeks of praise for the moderation, probity and responsibility of the (IRGC-backed) new leadership in Teheran. Now they're "scum" and "sick people" whom he's telegraphing he'll bomb tonight. (As this piece was being edited, Iran reported blasts in Bandar Abbas and Bushehr.) He's once again threatening Kharg Island and he's back to war-crimes talk about bombing Iranian desalination plants. U.S. Central Command is flexing its naval power on Twitter, although the necessities of refurbishment following such extensive time underway raise questions about the wisdom of such posting. The Iranians are responding with their own defiant rhetoric about not a single American soldier returning alive from Kharg. 

Justified fears about a return to war have their way of obscuring the truly extraordinary strategic transformation of the long U.S.-Iran hostility that happened this year, a transformation the MOU both represents and entrenches. Remember—and then immediately put to the side for the sake of the larger point—that this is all supposed to be about stopping Iran from ever acquiring a nuclear weapon. Iran had to be stopped from getting a nuclear weapon, according to the more thoughtful voices within the hawkish coalition, because a nuclear Iran would feel impervious to the coercive capabilities of the United States. The United States would in such a case be deterred from compelling Iran into acting the way Washington wants. Faced with a nuclear Iran, Washington would have to think long and hard about whether attempts at coercion would not result in either outright failure or success at an unacceptable price. 

Closing the Strait of Hormuz, you will notice, accomplishes all of that for Iran. All without any complicated uranium enrichment. All without Mount Nuke. All without the normalized assassinations of nuclear scientists.  

After winning a war that they didn't seek, after seeing their leaders killed, after enduring the whiplash of U.S. administrations that negotiate with them and then rip up the results of those negotiations, the Iranians are offering a choice. Everyone pays a toll for the Strait from now on, or they close the Strait, making the U.S. (and everyone else) endure sustained economic pain—pain, a wag might observe, of the sort that the United States has made the Iranian people pay for more than 15 years, though not yet at the same scale. 

Trump cannot bring himself to accept that. But nor can he do anything about it, and the Iranians have proven that. He might not be interested in the MOU, but the MOU is interested in him. 

HERE'S A REIGN OF TERROR headline for you: "Administration Demands States Change Voting Rules or Lose Antiterrorism Funds."  Losing the money wouldn't actually make the public more vulnerable. It would mean states would lose access to a gravy train that supplements their budgets for unrelated reasons. That's what they're leveraging to erode voting rights. 

ICE HAS KILLED again. Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, whose son said was driving to pick people up for work,  was shot in the abdomen and killed by ICE in Houston yesterday morning. ICE is using the same claim against Salgado Araujo that they deceitfully used against Renee Good and Marimar Martinez: that he tried to run ICE over with his car. Area surveillance footage does not support that account. Listen to his son, Ronaldo Salgado, describe who he was. 

How many more must die before this agency is abolished?