Two months ago, Iran appeared to be betting that it could outlast the United States: surviving the military campaign, keeping pressure on the Strait of Hormuz and allowing the economic and political costs of a prolonged war to gradually erode Washington’s willingness to continue. With the 60-day window created by the Islamabad agreement now expired, Iran has demonstrated that it can still severely restrict traffic through Hormuz despite months of U.S. military operations, but it has not produced the sudden global economic shock some in Tehran expected. Washington, meanwhile, has prevented the disruption from becoming an immediate economic crisis, but another round of intense fighting has failed to eliminate Iran’s ability to retaliate or force Tehran to accept U.S. terms.
The clearest evidence of Iran’s remaining leverage is in the Strait itself. President Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed in recent days that the United States controls Hormuz and has gone so far as to say that he will declare the Strait U.S. territory after the war. Actual shipping traffic looks very different. Preliminary Kpler data show only six commodity vessels crossed the Strait on Monday, after just three on Saturday and two on Sunday. No very large crude carriers or LNG tankers were recorded. Oil shipments through the Strait have fallen from roughly 18 million barrels per day before the war to around 2 million barrels per day.
Nearly six months into the war, Iran has therefore retained the practical ability to keep one of the world’s most important energy corridors operating at a fraction of normal capacity. What has not materialized is the economic collapse that some Iranian officials expected such a disruption to produce. For decades, a closure of Hormuz was treated as a potential doomsday scenario for global energy markets, and early Iranian calculations appeared to assume that sustained disruption would send oil prices dramatically higher and rapidly create unbearable pressure on Washington and its allies.
Instead, Brent crude remains around $90 a barrel - higher than before, but not necessarily debilitating. Strategic reserve releases by the United States and other major consumers, China’s enormous oil inventories and reduced demand have given the global economy considerably more capacity to absorb the disruption than many expected. China in particular entered the conflict with stockpiles estimated to cover more than 100 days of consumption and has reduced its dependence on Middle Eastern imports.
But the ability to absorb the shock should not be confused with eliminating it. The U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve has continued to decline and is now at its lowest level since 1982. Oil around $90 has also kept upward pressure on American gasoline and diesel prices. The oil market increasingly appears to be treating restricted Hormuz traffic not as a temporary emergency but as a prolonged new reality.
That creates a different kind of pressure on Washington that is slower and less dramatic than Tehran may initially have hoped, but could prove more sustainable politically over time. Trump’s approval rating has now fallen to 33 percent, the lowest of his presidency, while 80 percent of Americans say they are concerned the Iran war will become prolonged and only about one in five believe the conflict has been worth its costs. Rising fuel prices are not the only reason for Trump’s political difficulties, but the economic consequences of the war are increasingly part of a broader cost-of-living problem facing the administration ahead of the midterm elections.
The latest military confrontation has also tested Washington’s assumptions. After the Islamabad agreement broke down, the United States and Iran returned to intensive strikes. The United States inflicted significant damage on Iranian military and infrastructure targets, but Iran continued firing missiles and drones at American positions across the region. Iranian attacks on U.S. forces in Jordan killed American service members and triggered another round of U.S. retaliation.
The failure of U.S. defenses to protect American personnel was significant enough to prompt speculation among some analysts that Iran’s increasingly accurate and effective strikes may reflect technological or intelligence assistance from China or Russia. Combined with repeated reports that the war has significantly depleted stocks of some U.S. precision munitions and air-defense interceptors, the episode has raised further questions about assumptions that superior American military power can translate into a rapid or decisive victory.
The disparity in conventional military power remains enormous. But the renewed fighting demonstrated again that superior U.S. firepower has not produced a clear military path to ending the conflict on Washington’s terms. Iran has retained enough missiles, drones and operational capacity to impose casualties and costs on U.S. forces even after months of sustained attacks.
It is against this backdrop that the political signals emerging from Tehran over the past several days become particularly important. After the collapse of the Islamabad process, the political trajectory inside Iran initially appeared to be moving away from negotiations. Hardliners criticized the agreement, reports suggested that Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei opposed further talks, and personnel changes in the national security establishment - including the appointment of Mohsen Rezaei as secretary of the Supreme National Security Council - reinforced perceptions that Tehran was preparing for a more confrontational phase.
The signals now look more complicated. Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, who played a central role in the Islamabad negotiations, has moved from a relatively defensive posture over the agreement to an explicit public defense of it. Today, Tuesday, he acknowledged that the ceasefire and temporary easing of the blockade created by the memorandum gave Iran valuable time to increase its economic resilience and rebuild its defensive capabilities.
More importantly, Ghalibaf explicitly presented the implementation of the Islamabad agreement as the route out of the current confrontation. He said the Strait of Hormuz would not reopen until the United States lifts its blockade, frees Iranian frozen assets, removes restrictions on Iranian oil exports, ends military operations and fulfills the other conditions Tehran says were included in the agreement.
A similar message is now coming from the IRGC. Yadollah Javani, the Guard’s deputy commander for political affairs, said Monday that the war should end on the basis of the Islamabad memorandum and that Hormuz would reopen once Washington fulfills its commitments under it.
The significance is not simply that Iranian officials are defending an old agreement. It is that influential figures from the political and military establishment are now publicly defining a possible exit from the war at a moment when the 60-day negotiating period has formally expired.
There has been some movement on the Hormuz question itself. Iran says its negotiations with Oman over shipping arrangements have advanced to the point that the two sides have agreed on a navigation route and are discussing the language of a joint statement. Tehran has stressed that an agreement with Oman would not automatically mean reopening the Strait. Qatar, however, says mediators are waiting for the Iran-Oman arrangement to be finalized because resolving the Hormuz issue would make a return to broader U.S.-Iran negotiations considerably easier.
The emerging Iran-Oman arrangement may therefore be important not simply as a technical agreement over shipping, but as a possible face-saving mechanism for both Tehran and Washington. Based on what has emerged publicly so far, there is little indication that Iran has simply agreed to abandon its control over shipping through the Strait. Iranian officials continue to insist that full reopening remains conditional on U.S. implementation of the Islamabad terms. That raises the possibility that the Oman channel is developing an arrangement that allows commercial traffic to increase while Iran preserves at least some of its leverage, giving Washington a way to ease the disruption without publicly accepting Tehran’s demand that it has lost control of Hormuz.
Trump’s recent rhetoric adds another wrinkle to the situation. His comments about bombing Oman, amid negotiations over the Strait, further reinforce that Washington has been applying significant pressure on the Oman channel. The fact that Tehran continues publicly to insist it has not surrendered its conditions - while mediators describe an Iran-Oman understanding as the potential gateway back to broader negotiations - suggests that any workable formula will give both sides something they can present domestically as a success.
Signals from Washington and the region reinforce the impression that diplomacy is continuing beneath the public confrontation. Jared Kushner has described U.S. contacts with different elements of the Iranian government as unusually active, while acknowledging that no final understanding has been reached. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has now spoken directly with President Trump and urged continued negotiations with Tehran, offering Türkiye’s assistance in efforts to end the conflict.
None of this means a new agreement is imminent. Trump says he does not want to simply extend the previous arrangement, Tehran continues to threaten a more offensive military posture if diplomacy fails, and another incident in Hormuz could rapidly trigger a new escalation. Today, Tuesday, a vessel was struck by an unidentified projectile while leaving the Strait, killing a crew member and underscoring how easily the military and diplomatic tracks can collide.
But the strategic picture is different from where it stood when the Islamabad agreement was reached. Iran has learned that restricting Hormuz can impose sustained costs on the global economy but cannot easily produce the immediate economic shock that would force Washington to change course. The United States has learned that strategic reserves and alternative energy supplies can soften the impact of Hormuz disruption, but at growing economic and political cost. And the latest fighting has again shown that even after months of bombardment, Iran retains sufficient capacity to inflict casualties on U.S. forces and disrupt regional shipping.
Neither side has demonstrated that it can force the other to capitulate. The next test may therefore come not on the battlefield but in the Iran-Oman negotiations. If those talks can produce a formula that restores significant shipping without requiring Iran to publicly surrender control of the Strait or Washington to acknowledge that military pressure failed to reopen it, they could provide exactly the kind of face-saving off-ramp both governments need. That, in turn, could create the space Qatar, Turkey, Pakistan and other mediators are seeking to move Washington and Tehran back toward broader negotiations.
For now, Iran’s strategy of outlasting the United States has not delivered a decisive victory. But Washington’s strategy of using overwhelming military and economic pressure to force Iran into submission has not done so either. After nearly six months of war, that mutual failure may be creating a stronger incentive for diplomacy than either side’s battlefield successes.