Iran, fearing that its newfound hold over the crucial shipping lanes of the Strait of Hormuz was gradually slipping away amid sluggish negotiations with Washington, risked overplaying its hand by again firing on oil tankers, analysts said, potentially rekindling a major war with the United States.
Both sides threatened on Wednesday to scuttle the Memorandum of Understanding that they had signed on June 17 to establish a blueprint for peace talks and extended a wobbly cease-fire in place since April. American warplanes carried out even more intensive attacks on scores of targets across Iran overnight, while Iran vowed to ratchet up drone and missile strikes against U.S. allies in the Persian Gulf.
The basic bargain in the vaguely worded, 14-point Memorandum of Understanding was that Iran would reopen the Strait of Hormuz for commercial shipping in exchange for badly needed economic relief. Thornier issues, including the fate of Iran’s nuclear program, were kicked down the road for further negotiations. But very little changed.
“The M.O.U. increasingly looked like a mirage,” said Vali Nasr, a veteran Iran analyst and a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. “The view from Tehran is that the U.S. is engaged in a concerted effort to take control of the Strait out of Iran’s hands, to weaken its position in Lebanon and to regain its own strength in order to put even more pressure on Iran or to go back to war.”
As the 60-day clock on the agreement ticked away, Iran grew increasingly frustrated that the U.S. Navy was encouraging maritime traffic to take a southern route along the coast of Oman rather than respecting Iranian demands that all traffic register with its newly minted Hormuz transit authority, a precursor to charging fees. Traffic last weekend was about one-third of the prewar level of more than 100 ships daily, split evenly between the Iranian and Omani sides of the waterway, according to Kpler, which tracks marine traffic.
In addition, the United States was working to conclude a separate peace between Lebanon and Israel that would include the long-elusive goal of disarming Hezbollah, Iran’s main proxy force in Lebanon. Finally, in public discussions about financial aid, the scale kept shrinking.
Instead, even amid the weeklong funeral ceremonies for Ayatollah Ali Khomeini, Iran’s supreme leader killed in the war in February, the Iranians decided to strike rather than wait for their leverage to dissipate, analysts said. Projectiles hit three tankers transiting the strait on Tuesday, although Iran did not claim responsibility.
The perception by Iran that it had bested the United States and Israel in the war earlier this year likely helped lead to the renewed confrontation, analysts said.
“Having withstood this pummeling from the U.S. and Israel, they are probably feeling quite secure,” said Suzanne Maloney, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington who has advised both Republican and Democratic administrations on Middle East policy. “I think the timing of the attacks, coinciding with these funeral ceremonies, demonstrates a bit of triumphalism on the part of the regime that they finally, essentially extricated themselves from the war. They’re able to bury their dead, and they’re still firing back. There’s a message in that for sure.”
Even if shipping had flowed freely before the war, the message from Iran was that it intended to enforce a newfound chokehold over the strait, analysts said. The United States, which had lifted oil sanctions against Iran that had been in place for decades, immediately reimposed them.
Iran professed not to care. “Revenue is subordinate to control,” Majid Shakeri, an Iranian economist and adviser to Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the Parliament speaker and lead negotiator, said on state television. “Either we hold onto the strait, or every single one of us becomes martyrs for it.”
Still, both sides make a habit of fierce rhetoric and bluster, analysts noted, and tend to use warfare as a form of negotiation. Mr. Trump did not entirely dismiss the idea of getting negotiations back on track.
Ultra hard-liners in Iran have long assailed the very idea of negotiations, so there have been calls to withdraw from the memorandum of understanding over the situation in the strait.
“I think it is mostly posturing,” said Nate Swanson, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council who previously served as director for Iran at the National Security Council under President Trump. “I think it is akin to what Trump is doing. He is negotiating through kinetic actions and loud threats, so in some ways they are speaking the same language.”
Iran was betting that Mr. Trump, expressing annoyance with the conflict and facing difficult midterm elections in four months, would not gamble on restarting an unpopular war, analysts suggested.
Yet Mr. Trump unleashed a tirade against the Iranians, assailing their leaders as “evil” and “scum” and suggesting that the United States would hit Iran even harder. He called the cease-fire “over.”
“They risk misreading President Trump which they have done over and over again,” said Joel Rayburn, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute who is a retired U.S. Army colonel and a former special envoy for Syria during the first Trump administration. Iran has a long habit of taking provocative actions like firing on the tankers and then acting as the aggrieved party, he said, “They are overplaying their hand.”
It would not be the first time. Right after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the new hard-line government in Tehran held onto American Embassy hostages for 444 days, far longer than they served as useful bargaining chips, and had billions of dollars of assets in Western financial institutions seized in return. In 1982, Iran declined a truce in the Iran-Iraq war, leading to six more years of brutal fighting and hundreds of thousands of casualties.
