Iran has listed a new condition before ending the war with the United States. Tehran is seeking full sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz.
This has not been on Iran’s list prior to yesterday, and Donald Trump, the U.S. president, has told other ruling classes to head to the waterway and just take the Strait of Hormuz.
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The narrow waterway through which a fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas (LNG) ordinarily passes has emerged as the Islamic Republic’s most potent weapon. And it is now seeking to turn into both a source of potentially billions of dollars in annual revenue and a pressure point on the global economy, according to a report by CNN.
Iran has long threatened to close the Strait in case of an attack. So far, few political analysts actually expected it to follow through, or for it to prove so effective in disrupting global trade flows. The scale of the impact appears to have expanded Tehran’s ambitions, with the new demands suggesting it is seeking to turn that leverage into something more durable.
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Closing the Strait has been incredibly effective for Iran, and it’s upsetting the major ruling classes of the globe.
“Iran has been a little taken aback by how successful its (Hormuz) strategy has been – by how cheap and how comparatively easy it is to hold the global economy hostage,” said Dina Esfandiary, Middle East lead at Bloomberg Economics. “One of the lessons learned in the war is that it has discovered this new leverage, and it’s likely to use it again in the future. And I think monetizing it is part of discovering that it has this leverage.”
“Not only is this illegal, it’s unacceptable, it’s dangerous to the world, and it’s important that the world have a plan to confront it,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said after a G7 meeting in France. Foreign ministers from the group stressed “the absolute necessity” to restore “safe and toll-free freedom of navigation.”
Simulation: Extended Strait of Hormuz Closure Could Affect $1.2 Trillion in Global Trade
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