When an empire meets its limit – Iran, Trump and the battle for Hormuz

There are moments in international politics when a particular confrontation becomes larger than the immediate dispute that produced it. The present confrontation between Iran and the United States is one such moment. On the surface, it is about a nuclear programme, sanctions, the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz and the terms of a ceasefire that was supposed to lead to a broader peace. But beneath these issues lies a much more consequential political struggle: whether the United States can still compel a sovereign country to accept the political order Washington seeks to impose upon it, and whether a country such as Iran can resist that pressure without being forced into a war whose consequences would extend far beyond the Middle East.

The sixty-day diplomatic framework has now expired without producing the peace agreement Washington and Tehran were expected to negotiate. Instead of bringing the two sides closer, the period has exposed just how profound the disagreement remains. Washington has ruled out extending the arrangement, while Tehran has made clear that it will not return to negotiations on American terms. The Strait of Hormuz remains at the centre of the confrontation, with the United States seeking to reopen it under conditions that would demonstrate American control, while Iran insists that its security and sovereignty cannot be separated from the question of who determines what happens in those waters.

This is why the language coming from Tehran is important. Iranian officials have told Washington, in substance, to accept the reality of defeat rather than continue imagining that pressure will produce capitulation. That language is not simply the bravado of a government under military and economic pressure. It represents a political argument about the limits of power.

Iran is saying that the United States may possess overwhelming military superiority, enormous financial power and the ability to impose devastating sanctions, but none of these automatically gives Washington the right to determine the political choices of another sovereign state.

The distinction between military power and political power is at the heart of the crisis.

The United States has spent decades constructing a system of military alliances, bases, naval deployments and economic instruments that has allowed it to exercise extraordinary influence over the Middle East. The Gulf has been treated as an area of vital American strategic interest, while the security of energy supplies has frequently been used to justify an extensive American military presence. But the history of the region also demonstrates the limits of that power. Military occupation has not produced political stability. Sanctions have not necessarily produced surrender. Regime-change projects have repeatedly generated consequences that Washington itself has struggled to control. And threats have a way of losing their effectiveness when the country being threatened concludes that accepting the threat would amount to accepting permanent subordination.

Iran has reached precisely such a conclusion.

Its position cannot be understood without remembering the history of the nuclear agreement. Iran once accepted substantial restrictions on its nuclear activities through the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, while the United States and other powers undertook obligations involving sanctions relief and economic normalisation. The Trump administration’s withdrawal from that agreement profoundly altered the political meaning of negotiation for Tehran. The Iranian leadership was left with an argument that remains difficult for Washington to answer: if Iran accepts restrictions today, what prevents a future American administration from withdrawing tomorrow and demanding still more?

The question is not merely technical. It is about trust between states.

Washington wants Iran to provide guarantees concerning enrichment, nuclear capability and regional activity. Tehran wants guarantees that an agreement will not simply become another instrument through which the United States can impose additional demands later. Washington sees Iranian nuclear capacity as a threat to the existing regional order. Iran sees the American military presence surrounding it, the sanctions regime and repeated threats of attack as evidence that its own security cannot be entrusted to American promises.

Both sides therefore speak of security, but they mean entirely different things by the word.

For Washington, security means preventing Iran from acquiring capabilities that could challenge American and Israeli strategic dominance in the region. For Tehran, security means possessing enough independent capability to ensure that Iran cannot be coerced into submission by an outside power. The disagreement over the nuclear question consequently becomes inseparable from the larger question of sovereignty. Iran does not regard the nuclear issue as an isolated technical matter to be settled by American conditions. It regards it as one element in a broader struggle over whether it will remain capable of determining its own strategic future.

READ: Iran says Hormuz will remain closed until US fulfills commitments under memorandum

This explains why Tehran refuses to negotiate while military threats remain the principal language of Washington.

Diplomacy normally assumes that both sides enter the process with the possibility of compromise. But when one side approaches the table demanding that the other first accept the premises of its own defeat, negotiations become something else. They become an attempt to formalise surrender. Iran’s refusal is therefore not necessarily evidence that it has abandoned diplomacy. It can equally be interpreted as an insistence that diplomacy must begin from a recognition of reciprocal sovereignty rather than from the assumption that one side has already won.

This is where Donald Trump’s rhetoric becomes politically significant.

His suggestion that the United States could declare the Strait of Hormuz American territory is not merely an extravagant statement. It exposes the underlying conception of power that has driven much of the confrontation.

The Strait of Hormuz is not an American possession. Nor is it an Iranian possession simply because Iran has the geographical advantage of controlling the northern shore. It is an international strategic waterway governed by a complicated framework of geography, international law, navigation rights and the competing security interests of states bordering the Gulf. But when Washington speaks of making the strait American territory, it reveals something deeper than a dispute about navigation. It suggests an assumption that American military predominance can be converted into political ownership.

That is precisely the assumption Iran is challenging.

Hormuz has become the physical expression of the larger political confrontation. Whoever can determine the conditions under which shipping passes through the strait possesses enormous leverage over the global economy. Roughly a fifth of the world’s traded oil and substantial quantities of gas have historically moved through this narrow passage. Its disruption therefore reaches far beyond Iran, the Gulf monarchies or the United States. It reaches into the lives of workers, consumers and governments across Asia, Europe and the Global South. The current disruption has already contributed to higher energy prices, with Brent crude rising again as hopes of a diplomatic breakthrough have faded.

This is what makes the present crisis so dangerous. A political confrontation between two states has become an economic confrontation involving the entire world.

India, China, Japan and South Korea cannot regard Hormuz as merely an American-Iranian argument. Their economies depend heavily on Gulf energy. Any prolonged disruption affects industrial production, transportation, inflation, household expenditure and the balance of payments of countries far removed from the battlefield.

The poorest countries are particularly vulnerable because they have the least capacity to absorb higher energy and food costs.

The people who pay the price of geopolitical confrontation are therefore often the people who have no voice in determining it.

There is an even larger irony here. The United States justifies its presence in the Gulf partly in the name of maintaining international security and freedom of navigation. Yet the present crisis demonstrates how quickly the assertion of military control can itself become a source of global insecurity. When military power is used to enforce political objectives, the distinction between protecting international commerce and weaponising commerce becomes dangerously blurred.

Iran understands this contradiction.

It knows that the world needs Hormuz open. It knows that a prolonged closure harms the Iranian economy as well as the economies of its adversaries. It knows that energy prices affect ordinary Iranians and ordinary people elsewhere. But it also knows that geography has given it something that cannot be dismissed through sanctions alone: leverage. Iran does not have to dominate the global economy to demonstrate its importance. It merely has to demonstrate that the global economy cannot function normally while Iran is excluded from the political equation.

That is why Hormuz has become a bargaining instrument.

But it is also why the United States is determined not to concede the political meaning of Iranian control. Washington understands that accepting an Iranian-determined reopening could be interpreted as an acknowledgement that American military superiority has failed to translate into political control. The dispute over shipping is therefore really a dispute over the hierarchy of power.

This is the larger story that the nuclear negotiations often conceal.

The United States is still the world’s most powerful military state. Iran is not remotely its military equal. But the history of modern imperialism demonstrates that military superiority does not necessarily produce political obedience. Afghanistan demonstrated it. Iraq demonstrated it. Vietnam demonstrated it. And the experience of sanctions against countries such as Cuba, North Korea and Iran has demonstrated that economic punishment can impose immense suffering without necessarily producing the political surrender expected by the power imposing it.

READ: Trump says he is not seeking extension of framework agreement with Iran

The question before Washington is therefore not whether it can hurt Iran. It plainly can.

The question is whether it can make Iran obey.

That is a much more difficult proposition.

Iran has survived decades of sanctions, isolation, covert operations, assassination of senior officials and repeated threats of military intervention. Its society has paid an enormous price, and there is no romantic reason to minimise that suffering. But politically, Iran has demonstrated a remarkable capacity to absorb pressure without surrendering the fundamental proposition that its strategic decisions must ultimately be made in Tehran.

This is what makes the present crisis a moment of transition in international politics.

The world is no longer as easily organised around a single centre of power as it was after the collapse of the Soviet Union. China has become a major economic and strategic power. Russia continues to resist American dominance in its own geopolitical sphere. Regional powers from India to Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Iran increasingly seek room for independent manoeuvre. The countries of the Global South are becoming less willing to accept the proposition that international law and international institutions should operate according to rules selectively interpreted by the most powerful states.

Iran’s confrontation with Washington must be understood within this wider transformation.

It is not an argument that Iran represents a perfect political system. It does not. Nor does resistance to American power automatically make every action of the Iranian state legitimate. A serious political analysis must be capable of making that distinction. What matters is that Iran’s refusal to submit to American strategic demands represents one of the clearest challenges to the assumption that the United States can determine the boundaries of acceptable sovereignty for another country.

That is why Trump’s demand for surrender is so revealing. A demand that Iran raise the “white flag” does not sound like the language of negotiation; it sounds like the language of capitulation. And when the diplomatic framework expires under such circumstances, the failure cannot simply be blamed on Iranian intransigence. The question has to be asked whether the negotiating process itself was ever constructed on the basis of equality.

A durable settlement cannot be built on humiliation.

Iran cannot be expected to accept a settlement that leaves it permanently vulnerable to renewed American sanctions and military intervention. The United States, equally, cannot be expected to abandon all concerns about nuclear proliferation, regional security or navigation. But those concerns can only be addressed through an agreement in which obligations are reciprocal and verifiable, and in which neither side assumes that the other exists merely to obey.

There is still a diplomatic road out of this crisis. Indeed, the fact that Iran has been willing to engage Oman over the question of Hormuz suggests that diplomacy has not disappeared altogether. Iran and Oman have been discussing arrangements concerning navigation even as Washington has objected to the process and threatened further escalation. The existence of such channels is important because it demonstrates that the choice is not inevitably between surrender and war.

But diplomacy requires political imagination.

The United States has to recognise that Iran cannot be bombed into accepting a political identity designed in Washington. Iran, for its part, has to recognise that its control over a waterway of global significance cannot be treated simply as an unlimited instrument of national power. The international community needs a framework that protects navigation, prevents nuclear proliferation, addresses Iranian security concerns, ends collective economic punishment and establishes mechanisms through which regional states themselves can participate in determining Gulf security.

Such a framework would require precisely the thing that great powers often find most difficult: restraint.

The tragedy of the present moment is that both Washington and Tehran possess sufficient power to make the other’s victory extremely costly, but neither possesses the capacity to impose a clean political solution without paying an even greater price itself. That is the meaning of stalemate. It is not weakness. It is the recognition that force has reached the limits of what force can accomplish.

The United States may be able to blockade Iranian ports. Iran may be able to disrupt shipping. Washington can impose further sanctions. Tehran can raise the cost of maintaining the blockade. The missiles, aircraft, naval vessels and sanctions will continue to accumulate, but none of them answers the underlying political question.

Who has the right to decide Iran’s future?
That is the question beneath the nuclear negotiations, beneath Hormuz and beneath the present diplomatic collapse.

And it is a question that cannot ultimately be answered by an American president declaring a piece of international geography to be American territory. Nor can it be answered by Iran indefinitely holding global commerce hostage to its own security calculations. It can only be answered politically.

The emerging world will not be a world without great powers. It will be a world in which great powers increasingly have to negotiate with one another, with regional powers and with societies that refuse to accept the old hierarchy of obedience. The real lesson of the Iran crisis may therefore not be about who wins the next round of military confrontation. It may be about whether the age in which one power could issue demands and call them the rules of the international order is finally coming to an end.

Iran’s refusal to bend is part of that story.

The United States still has immense power. But power has meaning only when it can achieve political objectives. If sanctions produce suffering but not surrender, if military threats produce resistance rather than capitulation, and if diplomatic ultimatums end with the other side refusing to return to the table, then the limits of power have been exposed.

The defeat Tehran speaks about is therefore not necessarily the defeat of America in a conventional war. It is the defeat of the assumption that America can command and the rest of the world must obey. That is why Hormuz matters.

It is not merely a strait through which oil passes. It has become a narrow geographical passage through which the old international order itself is being tested. And the question before the world is no longer simply whether the ships will sail again.

It is whether, in the emerging international order, sovereignty will mean what powerful states say it means – or whether smaller and middle powers will finally insist on defining it for themselves.

OPINION: Iran, Trump, and the cracks in American power

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.