Iran is vowing to bar U.S. Navy warships from passing through the Strait of Hormuz as part of an agreement to reopen the waterway, pressing its goal of curtailing America’s decades-old military presence in the Persian Gulf.
Tehran’s threat highlights the ascendance within the Iranian leadership of hard-liners in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, who have long sought the ouster of American forces from the region. Though Iran has taken a devastating military beating, its leaders now see an opportunity to use negotiations on ending the six-month war to dislodge the U.S. as the dominant power in the Persian Gulf.
Iranian officials have publicly made the threat amid negotiations with Oman, the sultanate on the strait’s southern coast leading discussions with Tehran. U.S. officials have told mediators they won’t accept Iranian restrictions or tolls on Hormuz traffic, one of several sharp conflicts between Washington and Tehran that have delayed completing an agreement.
As a military matter, Iran is unlikely to be able to deny the U.S. Navy access to the Gulf if it decides to sail through the strait, analysts and former senior military commanders say. The Pentagon sent two Navy guided-missile destroyers through Hormuz in April at the height of the war.
But by laying out maximalist demands, Iran may be testing President Trump’s appetite for resuming the war or for taking an off-ramp, even if it means not immediately contesting Iran’s bid to block the U.S. from the Gulf.
No matter what Trump does, “the fundamental result is going to be significant Iranian de facto control over the strait,” said Jonathan Panikoff, a former senior U.S. intelligence officer now with the Atlantic Council, a Washington think tank.
The Trump administration would only accept an arrangement in the Strait of Hormuz where Iran receives no tolls or fees and can’t deny anyone access to the waterway, a U.S. official said, adding that any specified shipping routes would be temporary. Another American official said the U.S. would lift its blockade on Iranian ports if Tehran opened the strait without impediments.
“It’s sort of open right now” because of the U.S. blockade, Trump told reporters Thursday. He acknowledged that Iran “can always shoot something, always have something or drop a mine, and if you have one mine sitting out there, you sort of mess things up because people don’t want to take their billion-dollar boats and accidentally get hit by a mine.”
The memorandum of understanding Trump signed with Iran in June also sought to open the Strait of Hormuz and clear the way for deeper talks and an eventual end to the war. But it fell apart amid Iranian attacks on ships aimed at asserting control over the strait.
The draft Hormuz deal would temporarily set up an inbound lane near Iran and an outbound lane near Oman, though Iran’s top leaders still need to sign off, officials said.
The agreement could help unstick energy flows through Hormuz and ease pressure on the global economy. But the Arab energy exporters of the Persian Gulf, while weary of a war that has hammered their economies, are concerned it will give Iran a permanent say over a waterway that is their financial lifeline.
Iran’s diplomats, under pressure from the Revolutionary Guard, insist more steps would be needed for the strait to fully reopen, including oil-sanctions relief and lifting a U.S. blockade on Iran ports.
Israeli ships would also be banned from transiting the strait, according to a report by the Revolutionary Guard-linked Fars News Agency, along with ships or cargo linked to actions against Iran’s regional militia allies. Countries that have caused damage to Iran would have to pay compensation before being allowed to transit. Iran’s government and military would manage navigation and traffic, Fars reported, saying those terms were included in draft legislation being reviewed by Iran’s Supreme National Security Council.
Ali Vaez, the Iran project director of the Crisis Group, a conflict-resolution organization, said the prohibition on warships is at the heart of Tehran’s demands. “Iran’s control is designed to provide tools to deny access to hostile vessels,” Vaez said.
Mediators said the Iran-Oman agreement doesn’t include those provisions laid out by Fars. But they still took the Iranian demands seriously after Iranian officials communicated those demands to Arab mediators, leading to a setback in the talks, a sign of the Revolutionary Guard’s determination to end unfettered passage through the strait.
Iranian oversight of Hormuz would complicate an array of economic and security investments in the Gulf. About a fifth of the world’s oil typically flows through the Strait of Hormuz, as do tens of billions of dollars a year in Qatari liquefied-natural gas. Dubai runs a lucrative shipping business through its port at Jebel Ali, near the strait.
The permanent American naval presence in the Gulf stretches back to 1971, when the U.S. took over a British base in Bahrain and later made it the headquarters of the Navy’s Fifth Fleet. The U.S. military footprint in the Gulf expanded in recent decades, reaching 30,000 troops at bases in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.
But Iranian attacks on those bases have forced the Pentagon to redeploy troops and to rely heavily on less-vulnerable installations outside the Gulf, a shift showing how the war has already forced changes in the U.S. posture.
“They’ve already pushed us out of the Persian Gulf effectively in terms of usable military power,” said Rosemary Kelanic, director of the Middle East Program at Defense Priorities and a critic of the U.S. military presence in the Middle East.
Early in the war, Iran declared a new era in which it would control the Strait of Hormuz. Its leaders see that as a guarantee of security akin to their nuclear program and missile arsenal.
It set up a government agency called the Persian Gulf Strait Authority and has demanded shipowners register with it to cross and pay it for insurance. The U.S. has imposed sanctions on the agency, threatening penalties for any shipper that transacts with it.
While the U.S. denies Iran has control of the strait, it has only occasionally risked sending warships into the Persian Gulf during the conflict, and then only for brief missions. Commercial shippers are reluctant to cross the chokepoint without assurances Iran won’t attack. Overall Hormuz traffic is crippled.
Tehran’s hard-liners say they will enforce their demands. Mohsen Rezaei, a retired Revolutionary Guard commander and close adviser to Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei, said Thursday that Iran wouldn’t allow the opening of alternative routes through the strait.
Chris Long, a former British Navy officer in the Persian Gulf now head of intelligence at shipping advisory Neptune P2P Group, said he expects energy flows through the waterway will be “slow and low for years.”
Gulf officials acknowledge that the proposed agreement gives Tehran control over the strait and that control may be permanent, but say it is their best option at the moment. The Revolutionary Guard has shown it is willing to escalate and make the war as costly as possible for Washington’s regional allies.
Gulf countries are already looking at plans to bypass Hormuz by expanding pipelines to the Red Sea and the Gulf of Oman as well as expanding investments in overseas oil storage. But regional officials say without a credible peace deal, bypasses won’t prevent the Revolutionary Guard from targeting their energy infrastructure.
Write to David S. Cloud at david.cloud@wsj.com, Summer Said at summer.said@wsj.com, Alexander Ward at alex.ward@wsj.com and Benoit Faucon at benoit.faucon@wsj.com