The four-day cycle of attacks that Iran set off with the United States over the Strait of Hormuz has risked derailing the newly reached cease-fire in a war both sides are eager to end.
Yet for Iran, analysts say, it was a necessary gambit.
Iran’s newfound power to disrupt traffic through a waterway that is pivotal to the global economy is critical leverage it cannot afford to lose — either at the negotiating table or back at war with the United States.
Last week, Oman and the U.N. International Maritime Organization designated a new route through the waterway that passed only through Omani territorial waters. That could have threatened the linchpin of Iran’s entire strategy — to make sure it alone controlled the strait.
“Best-case or worst-case scenario, they need this leverage,” said Ali Vaez, a senior Iran analyst at the International Crisis Group.
It is not clear yet when or where Iran and the United States might meet again for talks. But should that happen, Mr. Vaez said, Iranian officials see their control over the strait as their best tool for extracting U.S. concessions.
The Iranians are seeking relief from years of punishing sanctions if the two sides move forward on a nuclear deal. Such an agreement would most likely entail Iran handing over or diluting its stockpile of highly enriched uranium — material that could have been used to construct a nuclear weapon.
Iran’s potential weaponization of nuclear power, despite its insistence that the program is peaceful, was long seen as its main strategic deterrence. That was until the current war, when Iran demonstrated through limited attacks on the Strait of Hormuz that it could close the waterway and send the global economy into a tailspin.
For Iran’s worst-case scenarios, the strait is central.
Some Iranian officials suspect the Trump administration may have signed a preliminary deal with Iran only to buy time — easing economic pressures ahead of U.S. midterm elections before returning to war after.
If that happened, Iran would again need its ability to wreak havoc in the strait.
“This is really critical. This is their main leverage,” Mr. Vaez said. “It doesn’t make any sense for them to allow it to erode before they have a final deal.”
Tehran feared this erosion was exactly the situation Washington may have been trying to engineer last week, regional experts said.
During a visit to several Gulf Arab states last week, Marco Rubio, the U.S. secretary of state, repeatedly asserted that free navigation would return to the strait.
Then came the move by Oman and the International Maritime Organization to establish a new route that bypasses Iranian waters.
“The Iranians understood they’re losing control,” said Farzan Sabet, an Iran analyst at the Geneva Graduate Institute in Switzerland. They probably began to realize their influence works only “during wartime and during a hostile cease-fire, with regular hostilities.”
That is why Iran’s response to the newly announced route was so swift, experts say, in the shape of a strike on Thursday against a Singapore-flagged container ship that used it.
Tehran never claimed responsibility for that attack, nor for a second strike on a vessel on Saturday, both of which elicited U.S. military strikes in return and subsequent Iranian retaliation on U.S. military targets in the Gulf.
On Sunday, Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, appeared to deliver a veiled warning to expect more instability if attempts to bypass Iranian control over the waterway persisted.
“Any attempt to adopt new or separate arrangements from those currently being pursued by the Islamic Republic will only lead to further complications, delays in reopening the Strait of Hormuz, and an increase in tensions,” he said at a news conference during a visit to Iraq’s capital, Baghdad
Iran’s rulers see the newly devised routes through Omani waters as directly contradicting the fifth article of what Washington signed onto in its memorandum of understanding with Tehran, which laid the foundation for a cease-fire.
In their reading of the vaguely worded document, this article granted Iran oversight of the waterway because it charges Iran with ensuring safe passage through the strait.
It also says that Iran is to conduct dialogue with Oman, the other nation bordering the strait, “to define the future administration and maritime services in the Strait of Hormuz.”
From Iran’s perspective, analysts said, the route Oman organized with the U.N. maritime organization — and without consulting Tehran — violated that, and had to be challenged.
Iran’s willingness to provoke conflict amid the peace process aligns with the approach of the country’s new rulers, who want to show they are as willing to strike a deal with Washington as they are to go to war with it, said Ellie Geranmayeh, an Iran analyst who oversees the European Council of Foreign Relations’ Iran Nuclear Monitor.
Iran’s former supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamanei, who was killed in the opening salvos of the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran in February, had a “no war, no peace” strategy, she said. He long avoided direct confrontation with Washington, but also barred direct high-level talks.
The political elites around his son and successor, Mojtaba Khamenei, “have a different risk appetite,” she said. “The regime is prepared to escalate in bold ways, for example, the recent hits in the strait that could derail the M.O.U. But it is also prepared to unlock peace with America through a new direct, high-level negotiation track.”
Iran’s leaders may also believe this is the right moment to take risks, said Mr. Sabet, because they believe Mr. Trump will be reluctant to restart the war until after the U.S. midterm elections.
Iran and the United States both have good reason to keep negotiating in the face of a frequently violated cease-fire.
For the Trump administration, the war is domestically unpopular, and there is most likely little appetite to return to a conflict that set off a global energy crisis. For Iran, facing economic disaster, oil sanctions waivers and the possibility of unlocking billions of dollars in frozen Iranian assets are major attractions.
“The economic and military costs of a return to conflict produce enough incentives for both sides to try to keep the memorandum alive,” said Mr. Vaez of the International Crisis Group.
Most political analysts expect Washington and Tehran to continue to extend their initial 60-day negotiating period for many months.
But the repeated flare-ups in violence may mean that the already fragile peace process drags on with little progress.
The more negotiators have to focus on addressing threats to the interim agreement, the less time they have to hammer out an agreement to comprehensively end the conflict and reach a nuclear deal.
“They will have to keep moving to figure out, ‘what do we do about this, what do we do about that?’” said Mr. Sabet of the Geneva Institute. “That doesn’t bode well for progress on the substantive issues that were supposed to come in this second round of talks.”
