Iran's president, parliamentary speaker and central bank governor have all made unusually blunt public statements this week questioning whether the economic costs of maintaining the Strait of Hormuz blockade now outweigh its strategic value — even as Iran resumed formal negotiations with Oman on Wednesday over managing the strait's reopening. [1][2] A Guardian analysis published the same day lays out the internal debate in detail, describing officials who once treated the chokehold as untouchable now openly questioning its economics in terms Iranian state media has not previously permitted.

The shift follows this paper's coverage Tuesday of the fee regime Iran layered onto Hormuz transit even as crossing counts ticked upward, and of the petrol queues gripping Tehran without producing any visible protest signal — both filed the day before Wednesday's more explicit economic warnings from Iran's own senior officials. President Masoud Pezeshkian was the most direct: "The war must end at some point," he said, arguing Iran should end the conflict now, while Tehran still believes it negotiates from strength, rather than wait until its position weakens further. Parliamentary speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, a figure with a military background, made a related but distinct argument: "If people are hungry" and the economy is not growing, he said, "we know the value of peace better than those who talk about peace" — security, he argued, cannot be sustained without a functioning economy regardless of military capability. [1]

Central bank governor Abdolnaser Hemmati added the clearest numerical warning, telling Iranian television: "We are facing four or five major challenges simultaneously, including maximum sanctions, blockade, cutting off oil exports, and a budget imbalance, each of which puts pressure on the economy." He relayed a comment from an unnamed neighboring official that underscored the stakes: "One of the neighbouring countries told me that if one-fifth of what happened in your country happened in our country, we would not be able to govern the country." [1]

The economic case against maintaining Hormuz as a permanent security doctrine rests on data the Guardian compiled from ship tracker Kpler and Iranian economic analyst Hamid Paktinat, founder of the Forum of Economic Activists. Only 112 oil and gas tankers transited the strait between August 1 and 19 — a fraction of the pre-war average — with roughly 79 percent of vessels using unconfirmed routes, likely reflecting ships that switched off transponders to use US-protected passage along the Omani route rather than Iran's preferred northern corridor. [1] Iran has drawn up a blacklist of roughly 48 ships it intends to ban or fine over route violations, a figure that illustrates the scale of the workaround traffic Tehran is now trying, with limited success, to police. [1]

That workaround infrastructure is precisely what Paktinat's longer-term analysis identifies as the existential threat to Hormuz's strategic value. Looking at pipeline capacity under construction across six regional countries over the next one to four years, Paktinat projects Saudi Arabia's reliance on the strait will fall from 70 percent to 15 percent; the UAE's from 50 percent to 15 percent; Iraq's from 100 percent to 30 percent; and Kuwait's and Qatar's from 100 percent to under half. Oman, Paktinat projects, will shift from having no reliance on Hormuz to becoming a major coastal oil-transfer hub for the entire region. Overall, he concludes the strait's strategic value will be halved within three years and nearly eliminated within six, as the pipeline network currently under construction comes online. [1] Tehran-based geo-economics journalist Hamid Asefi framed the underlying dynamic starkly: "A threat that is constantly repeated turns from 'deterrence' into a political habit; and a political habit, if not accompanied by concrete achievements, sooner or later leads to an inflation of threats." [1]

Set against that erosion narrative, the current US claims about the strait's operational status remain contested. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said on August 18 that the US Navy had assisted the transfer of more than 15 million barrels of oil and other products through the strait, and claimed average daily transfers now exceed 8 million barrels — a figure the Guardian reports is still less than half the prewar average and is seen as inflated, with most independent ship-tracking data putting the actual daily figure closer to 6 million barrels. International Maritime Organization Secretary-General Arsenio Dominguez dismissed President Trump's broader claim that the US Navy had "all but opened" the strait, telling Bloomberg: "Given the very small number of ships that transit the strait of Hormuz, it is clear that this strait is, in practice, not open." [1] Trump has countered that his administration's claimed removal of all mines in the strait leaves only Iranian drone and naval attacks as the remaining threat to shipping — a framing that treats the mine question as settled while leaving the more consequential naval-threat question open.

This is where the American reading of Wednesday's news and the discourse this paper has tracked on X diverge sharply. The Guardian's analysis, echoed across most Western coverage of Pezeshkian's and Ghalibaf's remarks, treats the internal Iranian debate as evidence that Tehran's blockade doctrine is cracking under its own economic contradictions — a reading that fits neatly with the broader narrative of an Iranian government running low on options. X's Iran-watching accounts, including Policy Tensor, have argued for weeks against exactly that framing. "They have learned that they can squeeze Hormuz and reach the American consumer," Policy Tensor posted of Iran's leadership. "This is why they are determined to keep the Hormuz weapon." Journalist Kim Dozier made a structurally similar point in a widely circulated analysis: "From Iran's perspective, Hormuz is not separate from the sanctions confrontation; it is one of its most important remaining sources of leverage." Both readings treat the strait not as a doctrine Iran is abandoning under economic pressure, but as the one confirmed point of leverage Tehran retains — precisely because it is the one lever that reaches American and allied economies directly, rather than merely absorbing Iranian pain.

Those two readings are not, on close inspection, fully incompatible. Pezeshkian, Ghalibaf and Hemmati are not proposing Iran surrender Hormuz as a bargaining chip; they are arguing the domestic economic cost of holding it indefinitely, absent a negotiated resolution, now threatens to outstrip its value as leverage. That is fundamentally a case for using Hormuz now, while it retains maximum value, to extract a deal soon — precisely the argument for treating the strait as leverage worth cashing in at its peak, not leverage worth discarding out of exhaustion. The resumed Oman talks, which restarted Wednesday alongside the officials' economic warnings, are the concrete test of whether Tehran can convert that leverage into terms before Paktinat's three-to-six-year pipeline timeline erodes it for free. Oman's foreign minister Badr Albusaidi and Pakistan's army chief Asim Munir both visited Tehran this week specifically to discuss renegotiating strait-management terms and reviving the US-Iran memorandum of understanding agreed in June, according to the Guardian's reporting — talks whose substance neither government has yet detailed publicly, and whose outcome will be the clearest signal yet of whether Tehran's internal economic warnings translate into concrete concessions at the table. [1]

An oil tanker was struck by an unidentified projectile off the coast of Oman on Tuesday, according to Democracy Now's wire summary, even as the two governments announced the resumption of formal talks — a reminder that the strait's risk premium has not disappeared alongside the diplomatic overture. [2] Separately, Democracy Now's same wire summary reported that the US Secret Service is tracking a video broadcast by Iranian state television that alleged a $10 million bounty for the assassination of Trump's youngest son, Barron — a detail that landed the same day as the Oman talks and underscores how far apart the diplomatic and security tracks of the US-Iran relationship remain even as economic negotiators return to the table. [2]

The five-sector sanctions campaign the Guardian describes Washington preparing — gold, cryptocurrency, technology, shipping and aviation — is designed explicitly to keep pressure on Iran's economy while the Hormuz negotiations play out, on the theory that a state facing simultaneous blockade costs and sanctions escalation has the strongest incentive to settle quickly. [1] That theory assumes Tehran's calculus runs primarily on economic pain; Policy Tensor's and Kim Dozier's readings assume instead that Iran's leadership treats Hormuz control as a security asset whose value is measured in leverage over Gulf oil flows to Western and allied economies, not in Iranian government revenue. Those are different bets about the same set of facts, and Wednesday's dueling statements from Pezeshkian, Ghalibaf and Hemmati support both readings simultaneously: officials arguing for urgency because the economic cost is unsustainable, while never once suggesting Iran surrender the strait itself as a negotiating card.

Whether Wednesday's resumed negotiations in Muscat and Tehran ultimately produce a signed document addressing the fee regime, the blacklisted-tanker dispute and the underlying strait-security arrangement, or simply another inconclusive round of talks without resolution, will determine which reading of this week — Tehran cracking under pressure, or Tehran cashing in its remaining leverage — better describes what actually happened.

-- YOSEF STERN, Jerusalem