At roughly the same hour on Saturday that Iran announced it was closing the Strait of Hormuz again, Vice President JD Vance went on Fox News and said the opposite was true. The United States had moved 16 million barrels of oil through the strait in the previous 24 hours, Vance said, “basically to where it was before the war even started,” which to him suggested, “the straits really are open.” He doubted reports that Iran had been turning ships away, and said Washington was “not seeing any evidence” of an Iranian closure.
To be fair, it was not clear whether Vance even knew about Tehran’s announcement when he spoke. That is the strange, unresolved center of this morning’s news: Iran says the most important oil chokepoint on earth is shut, the second-ranking official in the U.S. government says it is flowing at prewar volume, and both statements were issued almost simultaneously.
U.S. Senator J. D. Vance speaking with attendees at the 2023 Turning Point Action Conference at the Palm Beach County Convention Center in West Palm Beach, Florida. Image Credit: Gage Skidmore.
Iran Says Closed, Washington Says Open
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps declared the strait closed, accusing the United States and Israel of violating the memorandum of understanding that President Donald Trump and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian signed on Wednesday, citing Israel’s refusal to withdraw its troops from southern Lebanon.
The trouble is that the strait had only just reopened under that same deal.
A total of 25 commercial ships crossed the strait on Thursday, the most since April, and oil prices eased on the prospect of supply returning to the market.
So the first question is whether Iran has actually closed the Strait or only said it has. The administration’s position, delivered by Vance, is that the barrels are still moving and that any warnings to shipping are about minefields rather than an Iranian blockade. At least as of this moment.
This is the pattern the whole war has followed: Iran has declared the strait shut several times since February, and each time the practical reality has been messier than the announcement, with some traffic continuing even as Tehran claimed total closure.
The closure may be real and in progress. It may also be a declaration that the physical facts have not yet caught up to.
As of this morning, no one outside the region can say for certain which.
Why Tehran Is Pressing Now
What is clear is the leverage Iran is trying to apply.
Tehran is using the strait as the lever to force Israel out of Lebanon, or at least to force a halt to Israeli strikes on Hezbollah, which Iran has named as its condition for reopening the waterway.
The timing is deliberate. The closure announcement followed Israeli strikes on Beirut that nearly collapsed the days-old framework, and Iran is betting that the threat to global oil supply will pressure Washington into leaning harder on its own ally.
The bet is shrewd because it targets exactly where the United States is weak. America’s strategic petroleum reserve has fallen to its lowest level since 1983, and the 38-day bombing campaign against Iran has drawn down critical munitions severely.
According to one analysis, U.S. forces expended roughly half of their stockpile of THAAD and Patriot interceptors in a matter of weeks, and the Center for Strategic and International Studies has warned that it would take two to three years or more to rebuild those inventories. The Navy has paused billions in approved arms sales to Taiwan to preserve munitions for the Iran fight. Those same shortages are a major reason Trump took the deal in the first place.
Iran is now squeezing the two tanks it knows are nearly empty, oil and missiles, to extract more.
The Pressure On Trump, And The Overplay Risk
The danger for Tehran is that it may be misreading the pressure on Trump, which runs the other way.
Hawks in Washington want him to scrap the deal many of them never liked and return to the war to extract better terms, and the president has kept up the combative posture that plays to them, declaring only this week that Iran is “FINISHED.”
A president who looks like he is being extorted by an adversary over a chokepoint has every political incentive to prove he is not, even at a real military cost. Analysts have noted that dwindling stockpiles are now part of the escalation calculus, but they cut both ways: the United States still has enough to fight Iran in any plausible near-term scenario, and the constraint is the longer-term risk of a Pacific fight, not tactical exhaustion today.
That is where Iran could overplay its hand. If Vance is right that 16 million barrels moved in a day, then Iran’s closure is closer to rhetoric than fact, and Trump can call the bluff cheaply while the hawks cheer him on. If the closure is real and the oil stops, the price spike and the political humiliation could push a depleted president back into a war he is low on the weapons to wage, which is the outcome Iran presumably wants least.
Or A Play For The Negotiating Table
The most likely reading is that this is leverage for talks that appear to be reviving rather than a genuine attempt to seal the Strait indefinitely. Maybe this is Iran’s version of ‘Maximum Pressure’ on Donald Trump?
Even as Iran announced the closure, U.S. envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner were heading to Switzerland for the next round, and the regional mediators who brokered the earlier de-escalations, Qatar and Pakistan among them, are back in the mix.
Closing the strait, or saying so, on the eve of negotiations, is a way to walk into the room holding the maximum possible card.
Iran gets to demand that Washington pressure Israel on Lebanon, remind the world what it can do to the oil price, and still reopen the waterway as a “concession” once talks deliver something.
The risk in that strategy is the same as the risk in any brinkmanship play. It works only if the other side wants the deal more than it wants to look strong. With hawks pushing Trump toward war and the president already calling Iran “finished,” Tehran is gambling that an exhausted Washington will choose the table over the trigger.
The next few days, whether the barrels keep moving and whether the Switzerland talks actually convene, will show whether that gamble was smart or whether Iran has finally pushed a cornered president one step too far.
About the Author: Harry J. Kazianis
Harry J. Kazianis (@Grecianformula) was the former Senior Director of National Security Affairs at the Center for the National Interest (CFTNI), a foreign policy think tank founded by Richard Nixon based in Washington, DC. Harry has over a decade of experience in think tanks and national security publishing. His ideas have been published in the NY Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, and many other outlets worldwide. He has held positions at CSIS, the Heritage Foundation, the University of Nottingham, and several other institutions related to national security research and studies. He is the former Executive Editor of the National Interest and the Diplomat. He holds a Master’s degree focusing on international affairs from Harvard University.
