Forty Days of War Must Not End with Iran Holding Hormuz Hostage

Roughly 90 minutes before Donald Trump’s self-imposed deadline for Iran to yield or face a far wider assault, Washington accepted a two-week ceasefire that may yet spare the world an even deeper economic shock. About 200 tankers carrying roughly 130 million barrels of crude and 46 million barrels of refined fuel remain backed up in and around the Gulf. Their release would ease a crisis the International Energy Agency says is worse than the oil shocks of 1973, 1979 and 2022 combined. But the market rally after the ceasefire does not prove the danger has passed. It proves how fragile the global economy becomes when Iran can decide whether the Strait of Hormuz breathes or suffocates.

The war has pushed Iran toward resembling one of its own proxy structures: a state no longer primarily defined by clerical authority, but increasingly dominated by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps—much in the way Hezbollah exerts decisive influence over Lebanon. At the same time, the IRGC has adopted maritime coercion tactics long associated with the Houthis, threatening and disrupting commercial shipping across strategic waterways within its reach.

Iran is not asking only for a ceasefire. It is seeking something far more dangerous: a postwar order in which free navigation becomes navigation by Iranian permission. Reuters reports that Tehran wants any permanent deal to allow it to charge fees for passage through Hormuz, and that it has been working on a permits-and-licences protocol with Oman, while Oman itself says talks took place but has not confirmed any agreement. If that principle is accepted, even temporarily, then the lasting result of this war will not be deterrence. It will be the normalization of economic blackmail at the world’s most important energy choke point.

That is why a ceasefire on these terms would mark not a strategic victory for Trump, but a state of permanent uncertainty. Trump may call the deal a “total and complete victory,” but the structure of the truce says otherwise: Iran keeps leverage over Hormuz, and Israel has already made clear that the ceasefire does not include Lebanon. Israel has no choice than trying (again) to get rid of the threat from in the North. In other words, the war’s central coercive instrument remains in Iranian hands while one of its major proxy fronts remains active. That is not peace. It is coercion with a pause button.

The most visible political effect of these forty days is not liberalization inside Iran but militarization. Reuters reported in March that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps tightened its grip on wartime decision-making, took part in every major decision, delegated authority deep into the ranks, and reinforced internal security. A second Reuters dispatch, from Tehran itself, described civilian leaders walking the streets in carefully staged displays meant to project resilience and control while the new supreme leader remained out of public view. If the objective of the war was to loosen the hard core of the regime, the evidence so far points the other way: Iran increasingly looks like a Guard-dominated paramilitary state using missiles, drones, proxies and maritime coercion as instruments of rule.

That makes the sanctions question central. Iran’s own response to U.S. proposals included lifting sanctions, a Hormuz passage protocol and reconstruction. Washington should not trade sanctions relief for legalized extortion. If Tehran wants the power to choke the world economy, the United States and its allies should keep choking the regime’s access to cash, technology and diplomatic normalization until free navigation is restored as a principle rather than granted as a favor. The choke competition, in that sense, is only beginning.

Nor will the threat stop at Hormuz. Reuters has documented that Hezbollah and Iraqi militias stepped up attacks during the war, while the Houthis remain capable of disrupting navigation around the Arabian Peninsula. Israel’s insistence that Lebanon is outside the ceasefire only confirms that the Iranian model of pressure — missiles, proxies and chokepoints — has not been defeated. It has merely been redistributed across the map. Gulf states are already adapting to that reality: Reuters reports that Saudi Arabia and the UAE are looking at low-cost Ukrainian interceptor drones because Iranian attacks are draining stocks of much more expensive U.S.-made missiles. Even the Gulf’s showcase economies cannot assume that money alone buys lasting safety in a region where cheap drones can bleed high-end defenses.

Europe, meanwhile, has responded with a mix of fear, hesitation and delayed resolve that looks uncomfortably close to capitulation. Reuters reports that European countries initially declined to send their navies to open Hormuz, Britain then convened talks with 35 countries after Trump said reopening the strait was for others to solve, and Spain said Trump’s threats to quit NATO were pushing Europe to seek alternative security arrangements. France went further: Reuters says Paris would only help restore freedom of navigation after a ceasefire and consultations with Tehran, refused Israeli weapons transfers through French airspace, and led efforts to water down a U.N. resolution that might have opened the door to forceful action in the strait. In plain language, Europe has discovered that strategic autonomy remains more slogan than capability.

The NATO implications are grim on both sides of the Atlantic. Trump told Reuters he was “absolutely” considering pulling the United States out of NATO because allies refused to send ships to unblock Hormuz. Europe, meanwhile, is drawing the opposite lesson: that it cannot indefinitely rely on American guarantees when political disagreement enters the room. Spain’s foreign minister is already talking about a pan-European army and integrated defense industries. That is an aspiration, not yet a capability. For decades, NATO worked as a bargain of American power and European dependence. This war has exposed how brittle that bargain has become.

The energy lesson is just as stark. “Drill, baby, drill” is not a strategy for a world market held together by seaborne chokepoints. The U.S. Energy Information Administration says Hormuz carries more than one-quarter of global seaborne oil trade and about one-fifth of global oil and petroleum product consumption, with only limited bypass capacity — about 2.6 million barrels per day from Saudi and UAE pipelines. Even the United States, which got only about 2% of its petroleum liquids consumption through Hormuz in 2024, cannot insulate itself from a global price shock. The World Bank says the war will mean slower growth and higher inflation regardless of how quickly it ends. No country drills its way out of a hostage market.

In an interconnected world, the closest thing to durable energy sovereignty belongs not simply to countries that can pump more oil, but to countries that can reduce exposure to oil altogether. Reuters reports that Ursula von der Leyen has called Europe’s retreat from nuclear a “strategic mistake”; France has launched new renewable tenders explicitly in the name of energy sovereignty; and the European Commission has unveiled a strategy to bring Europe’s first small modular reactors online by the early 2030s. This war does not weaken the case for nuclear power and renewables. It clarifies it.

But Europe is late, and China knows it. Reuters reports investors are betting the war will boost demand for Chinese renewables in a sector China dominates, while EU-made batteries still face a roughly 90% cost gap versus Chinese ones. France’s new “Made in Europe” limits on Chinese components are really an industrial confession: Europe now understands that dependence can return through clean-tech supply chains just as easily as through oil tankers. The next geopolitical contest will not be only over barrels and pipelines, but over batteries, grids, reactor designs, fuel cycles and industrial speed.

For Gulf producers, the answer is equally obvious: build every bypass route that is financially and technically possible. EIA data show that Saudi Arabia and the UAE have some alternative infrastructure, but not enough to neutralize a serious Hormuz shock. That means more pipelines, more export flexibility, more storage and a much harder look at what it means to live beside a regime that has turned a waterway into a weapon. Betting on Iranian restraint is no strategy at all.

Forty days of war have opened many possible futures. The worst of them is a settlement that converts Iranian wartime disruption into permanent geopolitical rent. The heads of the IEA, IMF and World Bank are now coordinating on the fallout because this is not merely a regional war; it is a systemic shock. A ceasefire that frees tankers is welcome. A peace that legitimizes Iranian permits, fees and military oversight over Hormuz would not end the crisis. It would write blackmail into the map.