Powerplay: The Region Reacts to the IRGC
Reuters reported early today that “Iran’s Revolutionary Guards navy said” it had closed the Strait of Hormuz “until further notice” after firing a warning shot at a vessel it said had attempted to transit along an unapproved route.
A navy official, representing a force that has been effectively obliterated, announced that the Strait of Hormuz is closed. Traffic has crawled to a minimum. A country without a traditional navy has stopped the use of international waters. You can't make this stuff up.
The IRGC does not need a navy. It’s got missiles. Probably hundreds more, though most are likely of dubious quality. It also has the ability to manufacture a multitude of drones. These are cheap and bring a lot of bang for the buck. It does not need to control the Strait in the way navies once controlled water. It simply needs to make ship captains pause. It needs insurers to reprice. It needs oil traders to flinch. It needs everyone to wonder whether the next tanker becomes the next message.
Epic Fury broke much of Iran’s old deterrent. It exposed what Israel could reach. It killed people Iran did not want killed. It damaged systems Iran did not want damaged. It altered the Iranian state, perhaps more than anyone intended. But wars do not only destroy what they hit. They stimulate what survives.
What survived in Iran was the ugliest part of the system. The ultra-conservatives. The IRGC. The other security organizations that have always preferred the politics of crisis because crisis is where they become indispensable.
That is the second war. The first war was military. Israel seems to have won much of that very early on, within a couple of days. The second war is political. The IRGC is trying to win that one.
Its argument is simple enough. The old state failed. The old deterrent failed. The old Supreme Leader is gone. The new one, if he is the new one in any meaningful sense, is not visible enough to become the center. Diplomats can talk. Presidents can explain. Parliamentarians can posture. But the Guards can create facts. They can hit ships. They can threaten routes. They can turn the Strait into a question.
I am intentionally leaving the American side mostly outside this discussion because all the US can do is blow the shit out of things. It supposedly hit 140 targets in this latest round of strikes. 90 targets in the strike before that. It can hit launchers, boats, storage sites, drone systems, radars, command nodes, depots, and anything else that gets located long enough to be destroyed. But this is not opening the Strait.
Obviously, the IRGC is not trying to win a naval war. The US took only a few hours to crush their navy. But now, after losing a great deal of supporting infrastructure, it is trying to make the world accept that Iran must be dealt with as a gatekeeper to Hormuz. Not as one coastal state among others. Not as a participant in maritime safety. As the power without which normal passage cannot be guaranteed.
That is why the toll question looms so large. Iranian officials say they want “control” over the Strait but what they seem to be pushing for are toll fees. If Iran gets paid because the IRGC made the Strait unsafe, Iran wins the political war. Trump looks really bad. The Guards become emboldened survivors and, in their own story, victors. They get to say violence produced revenue. Violence produced recognition. Violence produced arrangements.
A voluntary international safety mechanism is one thing. An Oman-centered maritime arrangement is one thing. A rescue fund, navigation coordination, emergency services, legal mechanisms under international law, all of that can be made boring enough to function. An Iranian toll is different. An Iranian toll means the IRGC shot at ships and the world bought insurance from the arsonist.
The Saudis understand this because they have more to lose than most. They are in the process of investing $3.3 trillion, with a T, for something called Vision 2030. This, as it turns out, is the Saudi counter-motivation. This multi-trillion-dollar bet that the Gulf can become a haven for global investment. Tourism. Logistics. Finance. Manufacturing. Energy transition. Sports. Ports. Construction. Foreign capital. But that whole wager, years in the planning and developing, depends on regional stability.
The IRGC will soon become a pain in the butt of Saudi Arabia, if they aren’t already. The Saudis are trying to sell the Gulf as a place where the future can be built. The IRGC is trying to remind everyone that the future can still be interrupted by drones, a few missiles, and maybe a speedboat. Those two visions cannot coexist for long, especially with the older Arab-Persian rivalry sitting beneath the newer strategic one.
It was recently reported that Saudi Arabia conducted covert air strikes inside Iran earlier in the war, back in March. When U.S. air strikes ceased in the southern region of Iran during a recent operation, five locations additional sites were hit by another air force. The strikes are unclaimed and the IRGC has not attempted to assign blame. This is exactly the kind of stuff we need to watch.
Southern Iran is where the message belongs. Ports. Coastal systems. Energy infrastructure. Maritime machinery. The geography of the Strait and the Gulf of Oman. If the IRGC wants to make Gulf shipping reachable, then the Gulf can make the IRGC’s southern machinery reachable too.
Saudi Arabia and the UAE need Iran to behave like a state again. They need hostility to return to recognizable channels. Threats, talks, pressure, proxies, warnings, retaliations everybody can pretend not to understand too clearly. The IRGC is breaking the etiquette of hostility. It is making the region too expensive.
This is where Iran’s own problem deepens. Hormuz is Iran’s "weapon," but it is also the lifeline of the Iranian economy. The Guards can squeeze it to make the world gasp. They cannot squeeze forever without choking Iran too.
Iranian ports are presently inactive. Bandar Abbas does not get a magic exemption because the IRGC says the disruption is patriotic. Bushehr, Chabahar, Kharg-related trade, coastal logistics, customs revenue, port labor, trucking, warehousing, imports, exports, smuggling networks, sanctions-evasion channels, all of it depends on the sea remaining usable.
This is creating a chain of events that has decimated the entire Iranian economy, bringing with it all the internal instability economic ruin usually does. Even a sanctioned economy needs docks. Even a black-market economy needs routes. Even revolutionary prestige has to eat.
The IRGC can dominate the state and still leave the country unable to survive the stress of being dominated by the IRGC. That is the distinction. Power is not governance. Initiative is not coherence. A faction can seize the steering wheel and still drive the machine into a ditch. Iran looks increasingly like a country in that condition.
The government, if that word still applies cleanly, wants a way to cash the crisis out. It wants a settlement. It wants language. It wants safe passage mechanisms and recognition and face-saving and an end to the immediate bleeding. The IRGC wants the settlement to prove that the IRGC was right.
The government wants Hormuz as leverage. The IRGC wants Hormuz as authorship. It wants every future arrangement to contain the memory of ship strikes. It wants every fee proposal, every escort plan, every routing discussion, every insurance adjustment, every Oman meeting, to carry the shadow of its violence. That is how a damaged force becomes central. Not by winning, but by making itself impossible to bypass.
There may be no current solution to this. Not in the ordinary sense. The United States can punish. Israel can strike. Saudi Arabia and the UAE can signal. Oman can mediate. Europe can invent administrative language. Shipping companies can pause, reroute, or pay more. Oil markets can adjust badly. None of that creates a functioning Iranian center.
If Iran had a visible sovereign authority capable of restraining or at least directing the Guards, this crisis might be ugly but manageable. Someone could take the win, stop the bleeding, and put the maritime weapon back in the drawer. But if the hardest faction is running the show, or if it can veto whatever the state claims to want, then the drawer no longer exists.
But the Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khameni, is missing in action. He has not been seen nor has his voice been heard since the initial February 28 decapitation strike. We know little for sure. Apparently, he was wounded. Speculation is he might be disfigured in some way and unable to appear but that does not explain why he does not speak.
It should not be forgotten that Iran asked for this problem. He would have had whatever injuries already, before they appointed him Supreme Leader to succeed Ali Khamenei, his father, was killed outright. Why would the Iranians place a man who could not appear in public at the top of their government? Is this another stupid move by Iran to go along with their entire government meeting unprotected in a single building and known to Israeli intelligence?
Regardless of why, the absence of the Supreme Leader created the perfect power vacuum for the IRGC. That is what Epic Fury stimulated.
The US clearly has military dominance but that is not translating into any real political power. Trump declared the Strait "open" just two weeks ago. Before that, he claimed it would open naturally after the US and Israel won the war.
So now we have a Revolutionary Guards navy official announcing the Strait is closed and the sentence has to be taken seriously, even though we blew up his whole navy.
That is real power.
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