So far the U.S. has lost all phases of its war on Iran.
The Strait of Hormuz is closed. Though a few ships slip through:
Tankers moving along the Strait of Hormuz dwindled further this week, with only five crossings on Wednesday and nine crossings on Thursday, down from a monthly average of 12 crossings, according to data from Kpler, as cited by Reuters.
Five tankers went into the waterway yesterday, according to the data, and four exited it, most of them moving along the Iranian corridor.
Traffic via the Bab el-Mandeb strait in the Red Sea was in the double digits, with Kpler reporting 19 commodity carriers passing the waterway on Thursday.
Before the closure of the Strait the traffic topped 130 vessels per day.
Those few tankers that manage to pass without being hit by Iran are not sufficient to relief the global economy from the pressures caused by a lack of hydrocarbons.
While the heavily manipulated future crude prices hardly budge, the price of real products, diesel and jet fuel, are steadily increasing. U.S. refineries are making record profits while running at full capacity. They try to avoid the yearly maintenance shutdown, a necessity that will later come back to bite them.
The U.S. has no answer to Iran’s blockade of the Strait. Its Air Force lacks the munitions to hold down Iranian air defenses and to hunt its ballistic missiles. Its Navy lacks the numbers to keep the Strait open. Its army is too small to launch the necessary land campaign. Its allies are strictly against an escalation of the conflict. Iran’s revenge to any renewed U.S. bombing campaign would devastate the infrastructure of its Gulf allies.
The U.S. is thus resorting to economic pressure. Its trying to uphold a sea blockade against Iran. And yesterday Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced a new economic war campaign:
“Watch this space for more announcements coming next week because we are going to apply measures like have never been seen in the history of economic isolation on a country,” Bessent said Thursday in an interview with Newsmax.
Bessent said the move will be part of a “one-two punch” that includes the continued blockade of Iran’s ports.
The Secretary did not explain how the new campaign would differ from Trump’s failed 2018 campaign of “maximum pressure“. Trump had renewed that campaign in February 2025 without it showing any result.
The Washington Post editors recommend (archived) to expand it:
The best path forward is an older, time-tested approach: containment.
…
The U.S. should adapt its blockade to be more sustainable, lowering the number of ships doing direct interdictions, while sanctioning anyone who buys Iranian oil that gets through. The regime’s frozen assets should also stay frozen. And Iran’s proxies should be relentlessly suppressed in Yemen, Iraq, Lebanon and Gaza.Crucially, Trump needs to keep the threat of significant escalation on the table, especially if Iran takes even the
smallest step toward reconstituting its nuclear program.
The editors seem to think of the 1990s containment campaign against Iraq, when, after the first Iraq war in 1991, the country was put under devastating pressure. Some 500,000* Iraqi children died of hunger and a lack of medication. A decade later Iraq was ripe to fall and got invaded.
But Iran is in completely different situation. It has closed the Strait and the lack of hydrocarbons passing through will, over time, hit the U.S.
Iran’s economy is mostly autarkic. It produces enough food, energy and weapons to survive a long campaign. It has lots of land based lines of communication. And, unlike Iraq in the 1990s, it can shot back.
When Trump attempted his maximum pressure campaign Iran did little to defend itself. The situation has changed since. Any renewed economic war campaign against Iran is likely to be countered by active measures.
Iran has announced that it is new strategy is to go offensive:
An adviser and aide to Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Mojtaba Khamenei says the Leader’s strategy for Iran to shift the war to an offensive phase if its conditions are not met will “undoubtedly change the equations of power in the world.”
Mohammad Mokhber made the remarks in a post on his personal page on Thursday, linking the strategy to developments surrounding the Strait of Hormuz and the failure of the United States to protect its allies in the Persian Gulf.
“The definite strategy of the Leader to make the war offensive if Iran’s conditions are not fulfilled will undoubtedly change the equations of power in the world,” Mokhber wrote.
Its options to do so?
It could finally start to directly attack those U.S. ships which try to blockade the country. It could launch drones against any place in the Middle East that houses U.S. military. There are also many U.S. companies which operate in the Gulf countries.
A containment strategy assumes that Iran, or any of its friends and allies, will not hit back or take aggressive counter measures. It also presumes that the U.S. can sustain a lack of hydrocarbon for a longer time than its experts think.
But whatever the U.S. may think or do, Iran is unlikely to be afraid of it.
*corrected