Iran has discovered that its true leverage over Washington is economic, not nuclear, and the Strait of Hormuz has become the Islamic Republic's most effective weapon. Writing in The Atlantic, Carnegie Endowment fellow Karim Sadjadpour says Tehran stumbled into a strategy that frightens the global economy in a way that uranium enrichment never did.
"Few countries feel directly threatened by an Iranian bomb, but most people around the world have felt the consequences of Iran's closure of the Strait of Hormuz," Sadjadpour writes in the piece published by The Atlantic, as "Hvylya" reports. The waterway carries nearly a quarter of the world's seaborne oil and a fifth of its natural gas.
The numbers show what the shutdown looks like in practice. Before the war, more than 100 vessels transited Hormuz daily. On April 8, just four ships passed through. Sadjadpour calls the tactic a move born of desperation - a direct reply to Trump's $50 billion military campaign aimed at collapsing the regime - and says it worked where years of nuclear bargaining failed.
The scholar draws a direct parallel to the 1979 hostage crisis. "During Jimmy Carter's tenure, Iran's nascent revolutionary government held Americans hostage for 444 days, releasing them one minute into Ronald Reagan's presidency," he writes. "During Trump's, Tehran is holding the global economy hostage. The mechanism has changed - from the embassy in Tehran to the Strait of Hormuz - but the strategy is identical: to imperil the American administration politically rather than defeat it militarily."
Sadjadpour says this is why Iran's demands in Islamabad will not resemble those of a defeated party. Tehran's security establishment has framed the talks as a formality meant to cement a win already achieved on the battlefield. Iran plans to treat any American request on enrichment, missiles or regional proxies as a concession that requires payment, not a condition to be accepted.
For two decades, Sadjadpour notes, Iran's insistence on enrichment "has delivered neither nuclear energy nor a deterrent - and has cost Iran an estimated $1 trillion in sanctions, lost oil revenue, and now a devastating war." The Hormuz card, he argues, required none of those sunk costs and delivered more immediate political pressure on the United States than two decades of centrifuges ever did.
Earlier "Hvylya" wrote how Iran struck a U.S. Air Force E-3 Sentry AWACS aircraft on the ground in Saudi Arabia, delivering one of the war's sharpest blows to American air power in the Gulf.