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For Iran, Flexing Control Over Waterway Is New Deterrent
Iran’s government could emerge from the conflict with a blueprint to keep adversaries at bay, regardless of any restrictions on its nuclear program.
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A satellite image showing ships’ movements in the Strait of Hormuz this month.
Credit...
Copernicus Sentinel-2, via Reuters
By
Mark Mazzetti
Adam Entous
and
Julian E. Barnes
Reporting from Washington
April 18, 2026,
5:02 a.m. ET
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The United States and Israel launched their war against Iran on the argument that if Iran one day got a nuclear weapon, it would have the ultimate deterrent against future attacks.
It turns out that Iran already has a deterrent: its own geography.
Iran’s decision to flex its control over shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, the strategic choke point through which 20 percent of the world’s oil supply flows, has brought global economic pain in the form of higher prices for gasoline, fertilizer and other staples. It has upended war planning in the United States and Israel, where officials have had to devise military options to wrest the strait from Iranian control.
The U.S.-Israeli war has significantly damaged Iran’s leadership structure, larger naval vessels and missile production facilities, but it has done little to restrict Iran’s ability to control the strait.
Iran could thus emerge from the conflict with a blueprint for its hard-line theocratic government to keep its adversaries at bay, regardless of any restrictions on its nuclear program.
“Everyone now knows that if there is a conflict in the future, closing the strait will be the first thing in the Iranian textbook,” said Danny Citrinowicz, a former head of the Iran branch of Israel’s military intelligence agency and now a fellow at the Atlantic Council. “You cannot beat geography.”
In several social media posts on Friday, President Trump said that the strait, which in one
post
he called the “Strait of Iran,” was “completely open” to shipping. Iran’s foreign minister made a similar declaration, but later in the day Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps
said
that it would still decide which ships could transit the strait safely, suggesting that Iranian officials remain divided on the matter.
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