The four-day round of attacks Iran has launched with the United States across the Strait of Hormuz threatens to derail the new ceasefire, which both sides are eager to end.
Still, analysts say it was a necessary step for Iran.
Iran’s new power to disrupt traffic through the waterway, which is vital to the global economy, is vital leverage it cannot afford to lose – either at the negotiating table or in war with the United States.
Last week, Oman and the UN International Maritime Organization designated a new route through the waterway that passes only through Omani territorial waters. This could threaten the pivot of Iran’s entire strategy – to ensure that it alone controls the strait.
“Best case or worst case, they need this leverage,” said Ali Waze, senior Iran analyst at the International Crisis Group.
It is not yet clear when and where Iran and the United States might meet again for talks. But if that happens, Mr. Waze said, Iranian officials see their control over the strait as their best tool to extract American concessions.
The Iranians want relief from years of punishing sanctions if the two sides move forward on a nuclear deal. Such a deal would likely require Iran to hand over or reduce its stockpile of highly enriched uranium – material that could be used to make nuclear weapons.
The potential weaponization of Iran’s nuclear energy, despite its insistence that the program is peaceful, was long seen as its main strategic deterrent. That was until the current war, when Iran demonstrated through limited attacks on the Strait of Hormuz that it could shut down the waterway and threaten the global economy.
For Iran’s worst-case scenario, the strait is central.
Some Iranian officials suspect that the Trump administration may have signed the initial deal with Iran merely to buy time – alleviating economic pressure ahead of the US midterm elections before returning after the war.
If that happens, Iran will again need its ability to wreak havoc across the Straits.
“That’s really important. That’s their main advantage,” Mr. Vaze said. “It doesn’t make sense for them to let this be destroyed before a final deal can be done.”
Regional experts said Tehran fears the erosion is exactly the kind of situation Washington was trying to create last week.
During a visit to several Gulf Arab states last week, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio repeatedly insisted that free navigation would return in the strait.
Then steps were taken by Oman and the International Maritime Organization to establish a new route that bypasses Iranian waters.
“The Iranians understood they were losing control,” said Farzan Sabet, an Iran analyst at the Geneva Graduate Institute in Switzerland. They probably began to realize that their influence only worked “during war and during ceasefires, with regular hostilities”.
That’s why Iran’s response to the newly announced route was so swift, experts say, in the form of a strike on Thursday against a Singapore-flagged container ship that used it.
Tehran never claimed responsibility for that attack, nor for a second attack on a ship on Saturday, which prompted US military strikes and subsequent Iranian retaliation against US military bases in the Gulf.
On Sunday, Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, appeared to issue a veiled warning that he expected more instability if efforts to bypass Iranian control over the waterway continued.
“Any attempt to adopt a new or different arrangement from the one currently adopted by the Islamic Republic will only lead to further complications, delaying the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz and increasing tensions,” he told a news conference during a visit to the Iraqi capital Baghdad.
Iran’s rulers consider the newly drawn up routes through Omani waters to directly contradict the fifth paragraph signed by Washington in its memorandum of understanding with Tehran that laid the foundation for the ceasefire.
While reading the vaguely worded document, the article allowed Iran to monitor the waterway because it charges Iran with ensuring safe passage through the strait.
It also said Iran was to negotiate with Oman, the other country bordering the strait, “to define the future governance and maritime services in the Strait of Hormuz.”
From Iran’s point of view, the passage — which Oman conducted with the United Nations Maritime Organization and without consulting Tehran — was a violation, analysts said, and had to be challenged.
Iran’s willingness to provoke conflict amid the peace process is in line with the approach of the country’s new rulers, who want to show that they are as willing to make a deal with Washington as they are to go to war with it, said Elie Geranmayeh, an Iran analyst who oversees the European Council on Foreign Relations. iran nuclear monitor.
He said Iran’s former supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed in February in an attack that began the US-Israeli war with Iran, had a strategy of “no war, no peace”. He long avoided direct confrontation with Washington, but he also prohibited direct high-level talks.
The political elite around his son and successor, Mojtaba Khamenei, “has a different appetite for risk,” he said. “The regime is prepared to move forward in bolder ways than, for example, recent attacks in the strait that could derail the MOU, but it is also prepared to pursue peace with the US through a new direct, high-level negotiation track.”
Iran’s leaders may also believe it is the right time to take the risk, Mr. Sabet said, because he believes Mr. Trump will be reluctant to restart the war until the U.S. midterm elections.
Both Iran and the United States have good reason to continue negotiations in the event of frequent ceasefire violations.
For the Trump administration, war is unpopular domestically, and there is little chance of a return to the conflict that gave rise to the global energy crisis. For Iran, which is facing an economic crisis, the relaxation of oil sanctions and the possibility of unlocking billions of dollars in frozen Iranian assets are major attractions.
“The economic and military costs of a return to conflict create substantial incentives for both sides to try to keep the memorandum alive,” said Mr. Waze of the International Crisis Group.
Most political analysts expect Washington and Tehran to extend their initial 60-day negotiation period by several months.
But repeated flare-ups of violence could mean that the already fragile peace process will continue to move forward with little progress.
The more negotiators have to focus on addressing the threats to the interim agreement, the less time they will have to reach a compromise to comprehensively end the conflict and reach a nuclear deal.
“They have to move forward to figure out, ‘What do we do about this, what do we do about this?'” said Mr. Sabet of the Geneva Institute. “This does not bode well for progress on the important issues that were to come in this second round of talks.”
