Iran said today that after the war with the U.S. and Israel concludes that it will “oversee” transit through the Strait of Hormuz. It says it will do so in some kind of common arrangement with Oman. (Oman is the country on the other side of narrowest point of the Strait.) This was mixed with statements that this does not mean ships will be blocked. Basically Iran and Oman will try to make it a better cargo experience for everyone. The Times reports that Kazem Gharibabadi, Iran’s deputy foreign minister for legal and international affairs says that this oversight “will naturally not mean restrictions; rather, they are intended to facilitate and ensure safe passage and to provide better services to ships passing through this route.”
Obviously what Iran says will happen and what will happen are not necessarily the same thing. But when Iran and the President of the United States are saying essentially the same thing it starts to seem like this is what will happen. The geopolitical impact of this whole adventure starts to seem very reminiscent of the Suez Crisis of 1956. (Simply put: the UK and France got together and with a secret agreement with Israel tried to assert control over the Suez Canal. But the plan fell apart, the U.S. refused to support the scheme and the whole thing blew up in the former colonial powers’ faces. The UK and France were the past; the U.S. was the future.)
Perhaps it’s not quite what happened to the United Kingdom and France on the global stage, the way Suez cemented the secondary status of these two former Great Powers. One of the great advantages the U.S. has always had is internal wealth, vast land mass, a massive and highly educated population, relative isolation dominating a whole hemisphere. But it still looks like what no one is quite yet willing to call a massive, almost unimaginable strategic defeat. Taking Iran, which after the events of 2024 and 2025 was weaker than it had been in almost 50 years, and allowing it to emerge from a direct military confrontation with the United States as arbiter of a quarter of 20% of the global supply of oil and gas, simply beggars belief.
