Iran strengthens its position in the conflict with the USA by intensifying pressure on the Strait of Hormuz and influencing the price of oil. Deadlock in negotiations aggravates tensions and increases risks for the global economy.
With peace negotiations at an impasse and US President Donald Trump without presenting any timetable for the end of the war with Iran, the question on everyone’s lips is: who will be able to endure the suffering caused by this war for longer? There are more and more signs that it is Iran.
With no imminent threat of a return to a devastating bombing campaign, Iran is achieving its main war objective: raising the price of oil and thereby pressuring Trump to accept some of its demands.
For his part, Trump does not recognize any disadvantage. “I have all the time in the world, but Iran doesn’t — The clock doesn’t stop!” he wrote on social media on Thursday. “Time is not on their side!”
Meanwhile, media outlets linked to the Iranian state publicly speculated about what Tehran might attack next. The semi-official state news agency Tasnim said “at least seven” submarine data cables serving Persian Gulf countries are bundled along a narrow seafloor corridor in the Strait of Hormuz.
As NATO found when combating alleged Russian cable cuts in the Baltic Sea, this type of asymmetric warfare is expensive and time-consuming.
Iran’s armed forces are also signaling a possible conventional escalation if Tehran’s demands are not met, threatening specific targets in neighboring Gulf states, which are still repairing the damage caused by the latest round of attacks.
The Ruwais refinery and petrochemical complex in the United Arab Emirates on May 14, 2018. Christophe Viseux/Bloomberg/Getty Images/Arquivo
Among the targets mentioned were the Ruwais refinery in the United Arab Emirates and Abqaiq in Saudi Arabia, the largest crude oil processing facility in the world.
Iran’s provocations of its adversaries are nothing new. What is new, however, is a scenario in which Iran is emerging as the surprise leader in a game of nerves with the mighty US.
It is possible that most of the Iranian navy is at the bottom of the ocean, as US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth claims. However, its small naval vessels, with crews of two to six people, are attacking cargo ships and oil tankers near the Strait of Hormuz with apparent impunity.
There is no doubt that the US military would eventually crush Iran’s swarms of small speedboats, but time is a luxury Trump does not have. And while Iran may be playing with its B team, it appears, for now, to have home-field advantage against the world’s most powerful military.
President Donald Trump walks across the South Lawn toward the White House after landing on Marine One on April 17. Samuel Corum/Getty Images
Trump, who typically prides himself on his ability to intimidate enemies with a mix of bravado and braggadocio, is becoming a little less vehement on Iran. His explosive posts last week — claiming that a deal was close and that Iran would hand over “nuclear dust” and end uranium enrichment — backfired.
Iran responded with a statement from Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the apparently powerful speaker of parliament, who posted on X that Trump was “lying.”
The rest is already part of the story. Iran did not attend the talks in Islamabad and tensions in the strait increased again. The powerful US military has intercepted more than 30 vessels since it began the blockade against Iranian ports and associated vessels.
Iran, seemingly at the places and times that suit it, has attacked at least five ships along the disputed maritime trade route.
As Ghalibaf, Iran’s chief negotiator, said this week, the Iranians believe they have the upper hand. In recent speeches, he declared that the enemy was “strategically defeated”.
Iranians are masters at dividing issues into parts to get what they want. Obama administration negotiators witnessed this firsthand, as Iran reduced resistance to some of its demands over years of negotiations that led to the 2015 nuclear deal.
This week, the Iranians resorted to some of the same diplomatic maneuvers that gave them good results in 2015, claiming that they had not requested the extension of the ceasefire announced by Trump on Monday night. And since then, they have deliberately refused to give an official response to this announcement.
The sequence of some of the diplomatic moves in Islamabad suggests otherwise. But if they made a request, it was never an overt public maneuver. Instead, it was quietly buried in the subtext of statements by his chief negotiator, Ghalibaf, such as this one about
It would be clear to the Iranians that the end of the ceasefire would be used as a means of pressure to potentially extract concessions from them at the negotiating table.
No matter how decimated, or even fragmented, the Iranian leadership may be, it would never fall into this trap. Diplomacy and the pragmatic duplicity that sometimes accompanies it are ingrained at all levels of the Iranian political class.
US forces patrol the Arabian Sea near the ship “Touska” on April 20, 2026, after the Iranian-flagged ship attempted to evade a US naval blockade. US Navy
The Iranians’ great diplomatic strength lies in their ability to anticipate the future, predict what is to come and know how to position themselves to take advantage of it.
Knowing how to get something without you realizing they are asking for it, and then securing it and moving on to the next part of their demands, has become a true art for them.
Lifting the US blockade of the Strait of Hormuz was their next goal, something Trump publicly and steadfastly refuses to do.
In Islamabad, the almost indecipherable murmur of the leaks turned into total silence. This behind-the-scenes mediation phase has become so sensitive that no one with knowledge of the matter appears willing to risk anything at stake to calm tempers and restore trust.
In this deafening diplomatic stillness, it is the march of global markets that fills the silence.
