It Will Open Itself

Entering our fourth month in the Iran War, the Strait of Hormuz is moving under seven vessels a day. Before all this started, it was seventy. Just saying, as of today Iran still controls the Strait. Although the Strait will apparently reopen soon, the IRGC seems to be positioning itself to claim that it maintains control of the Strait even though it is open.

The official story is that things are trending toward normal. The actual water tells a different story. The United States carried out new strikes near Hormuz against Iranian drone control sites while negotiations were simultaneously underway. That's not a smooth reopening. That's a chokepoint still being contested by everyone with a stake in who controls it.

The obvious question, if Trump won the war – “obliterated” Iran was his word, then why isn’t the Strait opening faster? I mean, we obliterated them. So…

The answer isn't military. It's trust, and there isn't any. Tanker owners, insurers, crews, and the buyers at the other end of the cargo need more than a presidential post or an Iranian draft agreement. They need proof. Proof that ships won't be seized. Won't be mined. Won't be hit by drones mid-passage, sanctioned for paying a toll, or stranded if the talks collapse next week. None of that proof exists yet. The market is cautiously hopeful. The water is not.

Then there's the total disagreement that one side is naming out loud and the other is pretending isn't there. This isn't really about ships passing through the Strait. It's about who owns the fact that ships pass. That is the whole damned question. The IRGC named it directly in its formal counter-proposal: international recognition of Iranian sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz, written into the official record as one of its five demands as a stated condition.

The United States has publicly rejected any such arrangement, warned Iran directly, and the emerging memo reportedly makes clear Iran cannot impose tolls and must remove all mines within 30 days. U.S. win on paper.

Except Iran simultaneously created the Persian Gulf Strait Authority — a new body to enforce its rules on shipping — and after it was added to the U.S. Treasury sanctions list this week, it vowed to continue operations without interruption. So Iran is agreeing to no tolls while maintaining the apparatus to impose them. Nobody is reconciling these positions because the positions are irreconcilable. The incompatible mythologies aren't just in the room. They're written into the draft agreement itself.

The IRGC's math is straightforward enough. Full closure is expensive — it alienates China, India, the Gulf states, Iran's own revenue base. But reopening can't look like surrender. So a memorandum of understanding becomes the working fiction. It buys time for each side to construct its mythology about why ships are moving again. The control question — the actual question — stays unresolved, postponed, quietly buried under the rubble of the next news cycle. And the IRGC is not without cards. It can close the Strait again just as much as it is closed by them today. That capability didn't get bombed away. Everyone in this negotiation knows it, and nobody is saying it.

Meanwhile, Trump isn't threatening more strikes and extending the ceasefire period because we almost, not quite, shot our wad. Operation Epic Fury hit more than 12,000 targets over 38 days. The Center for Strategic and International Studies published its full assessment this week. At least 45% of U.S. Precision Strike Missiles expended. Half the THAAD inventory. Nearly half the Patriot interceptors. Approximately 30% of Tomahawk stockpiles gone. Replenishment will take one to four years depending on the system — and several years beyond that to reach where inventories need to be. The window of vulnerability is real, documented, and visible to every adversary paying attention. China is paying attention. The IRGC is paying attention. Every actor with binoculars and a grievance is doing the math.

So Trump may threaten another round in the middle of the night when he is pissed about something. But it would be militarily unwise at this point. Plus, more strikes would spook tanker markets, give Iran a propaganda gift, and — critically — advertise exactly how thin the magazine has gotten. He is sitting where he is because sitting is the only move that doesn't reveal the hand. The depleted magazine becomes "strategic patience." The limitation becomes a posture. The mess becomes the method. This is not a strategy he designed. It's a situation he improvised his way into.

Which brings me to Trump himself. I want to be precise about this — I'll give credit where it's due, and I mean that, even though I disagree with this man at just about every level imaginable.

Trump has a gift for creating utter chaos (or just making things worse – like a global oil crisis we didn’t have before) and then somehow coming out stronger. That is not the same as control. He often has no real control over how things turn out. He never appears to have a plan in the conventional sense. He does not seem to see very far into the thing he is doing. He free-styles in the moment. He gets away with it because he has an uncanny ability to survive the consequences of his own bad premises, then reappear at the center of the crisis as the only person through whom the next stage can pass.

Since long before the January 6 riot he has improvised everything. Multiple impeachment proceedings. The legal jeopardy involving billions in high-rise real estate values. The 2024 comeback campaign. The tariff regime. Executive Order hell. The economy perpetuated through pure pressure and theater. Now a war. He doesn't work from a plan. He works from a read of the room, moment to moment. He finds the camera, the chokepoint, the humiliation point, the panic button, the headline. Then he bangs them together until something bends. The ability to absorb contradictions, shift framings overnight, and still project command is not nothing. It's actually rare. It's a hideous talent, but a talent.

But improvisation is not foresight. Those are completely different things.

And Hormuz is the proof.

The Strait crisis happened because we were being spontaneous. That is really the whole sentence, ridiculous as it sounds. The United States and Israel attacked Iran, Trump declared that victory over Iran would settle the larger problem, and the Strait of Hormuz would simply take care of itself by the laws of war. Win the war and the Strait "opens itself." The problem is that this was completely wrong as to what was (and still is today) actually happening.

Iran did not need to defeat the United States or Israel in the conventional sense. Iran only needed to retain enough capacity to threaten, obstruct, condition, or close the Strait. As long as Iran controls the Strait, it is winning the war. Not winning in the parade sense. Winning because it retains the decisive regional chokepoint. Winning because it can still put its hand on the windpipe of the oil market.

Let me remind you of the record, because the press apparently isn't going to.

On March 20, standing outside the White House before boarding Marine One, Trump was asked how the Strait would reopen. His answer: "It's a simple military maneuver. At a certain point, it will open itself." He added that "we've defeated the enemy." Then, in a phone interview with the New York Post, he said "I don't think about it, to be honest" — regarding the logistics of reopening the world's most critical oil chokepoint — and added "when we leave, the strait will automatically open."

That was the plan. The Strait would open itself.

Iran was decapitated, it’s Navy obliterated, Epic Fury is over. Total victory.

It did not open itself.

Instead, we went through this ridiculous maze of behavior. Trump issued Iran a 48-hour ultimatum to reopen or face strikes on its power grid. Then he extended that deadline by five days. Then extended it again. Then extended it a third time. He told NATO allies to "build up some delayed courage" and go take the Strait themselves. Three days later he said the U.S. never needed NATO's help and "WE NEVER DID." He called it "the Strait of Trump" at a Miami investment forum, then immediately said it was a mistake, then said "there are no accidents with me."

He threatened to obliterate Iran's power plants, oil wells, desalination plants, and Kharg Island. Then he announced a pause. Then a ceasefire. Then a ceasefire extension. As of yesterday, May 29, U.S. and Iranian negotiators reached a tentative framework to extend that ceasefire another 60 days — and Trump still hadn't signed it. Vance said it was "TBD." All while the Strait sat there, closed, under seven vessels a day, with global oil inventories being drawn down at a record pace heading into peak summer demand.

This is the record. This is historical fact.

The liberal media called it chaotic. Called it an "incoherent clown show." Fair enough, as far as it goes. But chaos coverage is still event-by-event coverage.

My God, has everyone forgotten it? The story has already moved on. The press is no longer asking why Trump misunderstood Hormuz. Why was there no real plan for Hormuz inside Epic Fury? Instead, we are covering Trump “negotiating” Hormuz. That is the magic trick. He was wrong about the mechanism, then moved into the failure and became the main actor in repairing it. The original stupidity disappears into the drama of the rescue. He outruns the audit by becoming the next event.

This is Trump’s skill. He will claim he was right all along, even though, clearly, that is not what happened. The Strait is not just opening itself.

Which is why the current situation is so hard to describe cleanly. Has anything been signed? Apparently not. Is there a deal? Not really. Is there a draft? Yes, a memorandum of understanding, maybe. Is there an understanding? Sort of. Is everyone just playing nice? No, but they are definitely playing.

The IRGC had the physical chokepoint. Trump made himself the political chokepoint.

The IRGC controls the Strait, but Trump positioned himself as the condition through which the reopening must pass. Oil moves if he accepts the terms. The blockade lifts if he says so. Iran gets relief if he validates compliance. Markets calm or panic based on whether he sounds like dealmaker Trump or volcano Trump that morning. He equalized himself to the Strait itself. A master of positional improvisation. It is a chaos daemon with media instincts.

The Strait will reopen, partially, under whatever framework eventually gets signed or simply allowed to happen by mutual exhaustion. When it does, Trump will proclaim the greatest, most complete, most total victory in the history of American foreign policy — knowing him, probably the greatest victory since the Revolutionary War. He crushed Iran militarily, he will say, which is not much of an exaggeration — Operation Epic Fury (and Israel’s Lion’s Roar where decapitation is concerned) was genuinely spectacular in its scale. He will say the Strait opened because of maximum pressure. He will say it was always going to happen this way. He may even say it opened itself, just like he predicted.

The IRGC will say something completely different. It will say Iran managed the crisis on its own terms, that Iranian sovereignty over the Strait was preserved, and that the Great Satan blinked. It will remind its audience, quietly, that it can close the Strait again — because it can, and it knows it, and we know it.

Both stories will be told simultaneously. Nobody will attempt to reconcile them because reconciliation is not the point. The point is the domestic audience. Always the domestic audience.

The reopening is not an ending. It is an intermission. Iran retains the geography. Iran retains the IRGC. Iran retains the mines, the fast boats, the coastal batteries, the drones, and the institutional will to use them. Nothing about the physical or strategic reality of the Strait changes when the ships start moving again. The control question that was unresolved on March 20 will be unresolved on the day the tankers return to normal flow. It will still be unresolved a year from now. The next time Iran needs leverage — over sanctions, over nuclear negotiations, over Israel, over anything — the Strait is still there, still available, still closeable at a time of Iran's choosing.

Nothing will have changed. The reopening is what a reset button looks like when neither side will admit there is a reset button.

Nothing is being negotiated in any meaningful sense. Both sides agreed to stop pointing guns at each other long enough for the news cycle to move on. That is what this is. And the underlying control question — who owns the fact that ships pass — will be available for the next crisis whenever someone needs it.

Except Israel. Israel won. Concretely, measurably, in ways that will compound for years. Israel decapitated the Iranian regime. Israel bombed the hell out of key nuclear bomb development facilities. That outcome doesn't need a mythology. It's already a fact on the ground, and it was the actual objective from the beginning.

War and oil should not be free-styled. Nuclear states, missile systems, maritime chokepoints, proxies, global energy prices, and the replenishment rate of U.S. munitions should not be treated like a campaign rally or a licensing dispute over a casino name. But here we are.

Oil is priced sky-high and it will take months to fully correct itself. Years will pass before the US will restock to it previous munitions levels. The IRGC has filled the void created inside Iran.

On Friday Trump posted that "Iran, with the help of the U.S.A., has removed, or is removing, all sea mines." Victory. Progress. The machinery of peace in motion. Except the U.S. military told CNN the same day that it has not confirmed Iran placed any mines in the Strait at all — despite continued searches of the waterway.

Nobody is capturing mines from the IRGC. Nobody is taking an inventory. The whole thing is nebulous. The U.S. almost certainly knocked out most of the mine-laying capacity when it obliterated the Iranian navy during Epic Fury. But whatever mines remain — if any do — the IRGC gets to keep them.

Just saying.