For decades, Iran's threats to close the Strait of Hormuz were "almost cliche," dismissed by analysts as bluster from parliamentarians and military officials. The six-week war with the United States and Israel proved those threats were no bluff - and revealed a deterrent capability that may have rendered the nuclear question secondary.

Suzanne Maloney, vice president of the Brookings Institution, told Foreign Affairs that Iran's sustained control of the strait "really shifted the burden to the United States to try to find an off-ramp rather than enabling Washington to simply wait out the regime," "Hvylya" reports.

The closure caught even Iran's leaders off guard with its effectiveness. "I think that there was some sense of uncertainty about how successful it might be and how easily the United States, its allies, their neighbors might have been able to find alternative workarounds," Maloney said. Those workarounds never materialized. International shipping and insurance companies responded immediately, and no alternative routes could compensate for the disruption.

The damage went far beyond oil. Maloney pointed to "all of the other commodities that flow through the strait, especially fertilizer and helium and some of the other key byproducts of the petroleum industry for which there are no easy quick replacements." The global economic shock gave Iran leverage that no number of centrifuges could have provided.

As Foreign Affairs host Justin Vogt observed, Iran "didn't need a nuclear deterrent - they had this kind of conventional choke point deterrent the whole time." Maloney agreed, noting that the ceasefire terms appear to favor Tehran. Iran has reopened the strait "but only on its own terms, which is fundamentally stunning," she said. "That is an outcome that the regime might have hoped for, but its ability to prevail and to continue to control the straits even after the end of the conflict would be a complete strategic rebalancing for the region and frankly for the United States."

China, India, and other major economies that depend on the strait now face a new calculation. Beijing in particular "invested all over the world" and does not want a global recession, Maloney said. That economic pressure from third parties helped push both sides toward the ceasefire - but it also demonstrated just how much leverage Iran's geographic position gives it over the global economy.

Also read: why Iran's deterrence collapse made nuclear weapons more attractive to aspiring states across the region.