Opinion | Why the Strait of Hormuz Is Iran’s Trump Card

If this conflict ends with Iran in control of the Strait of Hormuz, and that with Iran knowing that at any given time it can achieve geostrategic objectives that it wants by closing the Strait of Hormuz, and that there is not the will to open the Strait of Hormuz, then I would say that Iran has probably emerged from this conflict with a greater level of deterrence than the United States has, in part because even though we are absolutely demolishing all of the targets that we’re trying to hit, that we are seriously degrading Iran’s military capacity, no question about it, we’re also dealing with a regime that really, truly doesn’t care about its losses in the same way that say, a Western military does. In the same way that we would. And so if they can, at the end of this conflict, achieve the effect of essentially dividing America from its allies (that’s happening), if they can achieve the effect of controlling the Strait of Hormuz (that’s happening), if they can achieve an even worse — even worse, guys — a sort of tolling effect, where in exchange for vast sums of money, they will let some people through and not others, then we may have just created a system that helps enrich this regime, literally enrich it, so that even if there are factories are demolished, if their missile stocks are depleted, they can go buy more missiles, they can go use the windfall from controlling the Strait of Hormuz to buy more weapons and to reconstitute the force.