What the Hormuz blockade has achieved, and why it has not become leverage.

The campaign that succeeds at everything but the point.

For eight months the US has been successful on only one front: raising the price of oil. Kharg’s terminals have been silent for stretches; Chinese refiners have scrambled for alternative cargoes; Freight costs have multiplied; Interceptor stocks have been depleted at a rate that will take years to replenish. The direct cost of the maritime effort remains a fraction of the overall campaign ledger. By every conventional metric, save for regime collapse, the pressure is real.

Despite this, it has not become leverage on Tehran’s nuclear stockpile, nor on access to its remaining deep sites. When mediators approach with offers, Iranian officials continue to treat enrichment and site access as solid red lines. From Tehran’s perspective, the US/Israeli campaign is a cost-imposition contest it must survive rather than a terminal stranglehold it must end.

Tehran's toll gate

That posture is by design, of course. The binary of open or closed is replaced with strategic selective restriction. US flagged or aligned vessels face risk while others pass on a permission-and-toll basis. Iranian officials have discussed formal transit fees and a coastal-state framework with Oman, intended to convert wartime control to a durable claim where revenue can be generated, incremental recognition can be forced and a subsequent return to less restricted access is priced in. In Iranian strategic framing, any settlement is predicated on the recognition of Iranian authority over a designated, fee-conditional Hormuz corridor, while still tabling a deal timed to the mid-terms. 

Tehran’s dual-track remains intact: its missiles and drones are hitting ships in the Strait of Hormuz, while it keeps talking through Qatar, which is acting as a go-between. Iran has offered to reopen the strait quickly but only if the US eases economic pressure and changes where and how its forces are positioned in the region. With Trump reportedly preferring more time for diplomacy over a post-midterm strike decision, the political calendars govern the kinetic option. For now, the timing of any military action depends on politics more than on events on the ground. While Iranian reopening conditions remain high, Beijing and Muscat have now jointly called for a ceasefire, for the Islamabad Memorandum to be revitalised, and for Hormuz navigation to be restored. 

For Gulf states, the Strait is a vulnerability to be managed, not a reality to be endured. A fraction of crude oil is already diverted by pipelines. New land infrastructure between the UAE and Oman is moving freight that would otherwise be constrained by the blockade. Though they make a long disruption less automatically catastrophic, they are not equitable substitutes; they cannot yet replace the volume that previously moved by sea. An attritional campaign seemingly sustainable on today’s figures is also one that slowly erodes the decisive effect of the chokepoint it is meant to control. Tehran knows its strategy is finite and is incentivised to formalise its claim before sustainable alternatives mature.

The limits of more force

No number of extra strikes changes the basic maths. The tunnels at Pickaxe Mountain sit under as much as 100 metres of solid granite. Even the deepest-reaching non-nuclear bunker-busting bombs the US has can’t be relied on to reach them. A bigger air campaign after the midterms would hit the same wall.

The US is also stretched. Aircraft carriers are being swapped in and out, so the total number in the region isn’t growing. Stocks of weapons are running low. There are far too few ground troops nearby to commit a force that could fight on land without risking a protracted defeat on unfavourable ground. Gulf allies have refused to join any attacks and doubts inside the US government make a large escalation after the midterms less likely.

Cruise missiles could cave in the tunnel entrances and buy some time, but that would make any later operations harder.  A nuclear strike could solve the depth problem, though it would break the threshold that has constrained US action since 1945 and collapse the room for manoeuvre that remains everywhere else. Trump has publicly ruled this out. Even so, some parts of the US national security system talk about “one more conventional package” after the midterms as if it were something new. It’s just the same approach used with more force.

Israeli pressure does little to mitigate the mismatch. Its interest in degrading Iran’s nuclear programme is longstanding. That interest is what led to US bunker-busters falling on Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan last summer, after which Trump claimed the facilities had been “completely and totally obliterated”. The bias in Jerusalem leans toward kinetic action on the assumption that Israel can absorb the regional consequences more readily than Washington can absorb the political and fiscal ones. That is the calculus that has led to a campaign whereby costs outpace Iranian degradation.

A reversible offer

There is a viable alternative, however. Cargo licensing in exchange for an enrichment freeze and IAEA inspections, while the blockade stays in force and Iranian-designated routes are not recognised. It is a reversible coercive offer that does not require Tehran’s total capitulation, which it will not give in any case. It would also refuse to recognise Iran’s claim to control the Strait, even though Iran currently treats that claim as a condition of any deal. The offer tests whether a small amount of relief can win inspectors real access without giving ground on that claim. It does mean seeing the current campaign for what it is: a long battle to wear the other side down, with no clear idea of what winning looks like and with industrial costs that keep piling up and making each other worse. If inspectors are already inside Iran’s facilities before the first barrel is licensed, the pressure would have produced something genuinely useful. If that access is prevented, the offer can be withdrawn without having legitimised Iran’s control of the Strait.

Measuring progress by activity alone is a fallacy. More bombs dropped, more projectiles fired, more tankers delayed. The question that matters is whether the adversary’s core position has shifted. The answer in this case is that the blockade has been successful in raising costs, but has fallen short of converting them into a change of Iran’s declared nuclear posture. Operating on the assumption that the next increment of pressure will be the one that moves the dial is not strategy - it is hope dressed as strategic coherence. Hope that geography, pressure, regime priorities and the slow materialisation of regional transit alternatives will, in time, yield to volume. So far, they have not. It remains to be seen how long Washington intends to keep paying to discover that.