Iran’s decision to dramatically raise the price of reopening the Strait of Hormuz marks a significant shift in the logic of the conflict with the US.
What appeared, after the June Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding between Tehran and Washington, to be the beginning of a fragile process towards a ceasefire and negotiated settlement is increasingly being treated in Tehran as a failed experiment.
Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, has made it clear that the waterway will not fully reopen merely because negotiations have resumed. Instead, he has presented a much broader set of preconditions that the United States must meet first.
The significance of this is not simply that Iran has hardened its negotiating stance. It is that an increasingly influential current within Iran’s security establishment appears to have concluded that Tehran has little interest in halting the war through another fragile and incomplete arrangement if doing so would repeat what it regards as the mistakes of last June.
Zolghadr’s six conditions are unusually expansive. First, Washington must end its threats against Iran and what Tehran describes as insults to Iran’s national and religious values. Second, the United States must permanently cease all military action against Iran and its allies in Lebanon, Palestine, Yemen, and Iraq.
Third, Washington must lift its naval blockade and withdraw its naval and air forces operating around Iran. Fourth, the United States must compensate Iran for damage caused by what Zolghadr described as two “imposed wars”. Fifth, Washington must lift all sanctions on Iran. Sixth, it must unconditionally release Iran’s frozen assets.
Crucially, these demands are now being presented not merely as subjects for negotiation, but as conditions for the full reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has separately indicated that reopening the strait depends on Washington accepting these terms and is distinct from parallel discussions with Oman over maritime operational arrangements.
The inclusion of Iran’s regional allies, the US force posture, sanctions, reparations, and frozen assets among the six conditions for reopening of the strait shows that Tehran is attempting to transform a temporary geoeconomic chokehold into a comprehensive strategic bargain. The message is essentially that the costs imposed on Iran must be reversed before Iran restores the economic benefits of an open Strait of Hormuz.
The emerging arrangement with Oman is particularly revealing. Discussions over maritime traffic could give Tehran greater leverage over vessels entering the Gulf than it possessed before the war. In blunt terms, Iran appears to believe that keeping Hormuz partially closed, or reopening it only under controlled conditions, is itself a negotiating asset.
Reopening it without extracting major concessions would therefore amount to giving away that asset for nothing.
This represents a substantial departure from the June (MoU). The text of the Islamabad memorandum called for an immediate and permanent termination of military operations and committed Iran to ensuring safe passage for commercial vessels through the Strait of Hormuz, while the United States was to end its naval blockade within 30 days. The two sides were then to negotiate a final agreement within 60 days.
The arrangement was therefore deliberately phased. It created an immediate off-ramp from the war while postponing more difficult questions, including the nuclear issue and other outstanding disputes. Tehran now appears to have drawn a very different lesson from that experience.
Within important parts of the Iranian establishment, the June arrangement is increasingly being viewed not as the first building block of a durable settlement, but as a tactical manoeuvre that enabled Washington to obtain the immediate objective it most urgently needed: the restoration of shipping through Hormuz.
Once that objective was achieved, the Iranian calculation goes, the United States returned to pressure tactics, reinterpreted its commitments, and sought a stronger position before the next round of negotiations.
Consequently, the Iranian distrust of the Trump administration is profound, and the result is a demand for front-loaded concessions.
“Tehran does not want to exchange control of its most valuable strategic asset for promises that difficult questions will be resolved later,” an informed Iranian politician told Al-Ahram Weekly.
“The logic is straightforward: the sanctions must be lifted, assets released, military pressure removed, compensation addressed, and American forces withdrawn as part of the bargain itself. Iran wants to eliminate the sequencing problem that undermined confidence in the June arrangement. It does not want to reopen Hormuz first and negotiate the price afterwards,” he added.
IRAN STRATEGY: The preconditions help to explain the growing influence of a harder strategic argument inside Iran: if an ideal agreement cannot be secured, there is little reason to hurry towards any agreement at all.
That argument does not mean Iran believes it can fight indefinitely without any cost. It plainly cannot. But the calculation in Tehran appears to be that Iran can sustain the conflict for considerably longer than Washington may be willing to maintain its present level of military pressure.
There is evidence that this is more than wishful thinking. A US intelligence assessment reportedly concluded in May that Iran could withstand the American naval blockade for at least three to four months before facing much more severe economic hardships, while retaining a substantial arsenal of ballistic missiles and drones.
The condition of American interceptor inventories has also become increasingly important. A July assessment by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) found that repeated combat operations had reduced US air-defence stocks, with Patriot inventories falling below 1,000 and THAAD inventories to roughly 250.
The CSIS warned that diminished stockpiles could force the United States and its coalition partners to accept greater risks in intercepting future Iranian attacks.
Within this equation, the Strait of Hormuz is the decisive element because it reverses the normal balance of economic pressure.
Before the war, the United States could use sanctions and financial restrictions to squeeze Iran while the wider international economy continued to function. Hormuz now provides Tehran with a mechanism for imposing costs on that wider system.
The waterway normally carries a major share of global petroleum and liquified natural gas (LNG) shipments, and maritime traffic has collapsed far below pre-war levels. Only six vessels passed through Hormuz on Monday, while oil shipments through the route have also fallen sharply.
This creates the political paradox confronting US President Donald Trump. Washington wants a deal because it wants the strait reopened. Tehran knows this and therefore sees little reason to surrender its leverage cheaply.
The longer the waterway remains constrained, the greater the potential pressure on energy markets, shipping companies, insurers, and America’s Gulf partners. For Tehran, this changes the bargaining equation. The question is no longer simply how quickly Iran can obtain relief from pressure; it is how much additional pressure it can impose before Washington is compelled to offer more.
That is why the future regime governing Hormuz matters almost as much as the six new political conditions. Iranian sources emphasise that Tehran has no apparent intention of simply returning to the pre-war status quo, in which the strait functioned as an open commercial waterway.
Instead, Tehran appears to be developing a system under which navigation is subject to Iranian security requirements and potentially to fees. Iranian officials and lawmakers have also discussed permits, cargo disclosures, restrictions on vessels associated with the United States or Israel, and penalties for violations, including fines of up to 20 per cent of cargo value.
The proposed fees are another indication that Iran views Hormuz not merely as a geographic chokepoint but as a source of strategic jurisdiction.
The distinction Tehran is likely to draw is between “closure” and “controlled access”. The strait need not be sealed to every vessel to remain a source of leverage. Chinese shipping, for example, could potentially receive preferential or carefully managed passage, while vessels associated with hostile states could face restrictions, inspections, or exclusion.
The emerging navigation arrangements also underscore the limits of Washington’s influence. Iran and Oman have been discussing the practical management of maritime traffic, while Tehran insists that the strait is subject to an “Iranian order” that it regards as irreversible.
That is the dilemma Trump now faces.
Washington can insist that Hormuz must be “open” in the conventional sense, with non-discriminatory access and no Iranian toll regime. But military power cannot easily manufacture normal commercial traffic if shipowners, insurers, and crews believe the Iranian military controls the waterway. Nor can Washington simply compel Tehran to surrender that leverage without accepting the costs and risks of another round of war.
Indeed, the more America threatens escalation, the stronger the argument becomes inside Iran that the rational course is to retain the strait as a bargaining chip and raise the price of any eventual settlement.
The June memorandum consequently looks very different from Tehran’s current vantage point. Its central bargain, the cessation of hostilities and reopening of Hormuz in return for a negotiating process and economic concessions, depended on both sides believing that subsequent negotiations would be conducted in good faith.
That assumption has largely disappeared.
Iranian institutions increasingly appear to believe that Washington used the June agreement to obtain the immediate reopening of Hormuz before returning to coercive diplomacy. The preliminary deal has therefore lost much of its value as a foundation for trust. And the new six conditions are the political expression of that shift.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 13 August, 2026 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly.
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