The Strait of Hormuz: How the world endorsed Iran's blackmail - opinion

The answer lies not in Iran’s strength but in the prolonged silence of others and in an international environment that allowed this regime to expand without paying a real price.

Since 1979, the mullah regime’s behavior has not been random or impulsive. It has followed a calculated formula refined over time: terrorism as a tactic, proxies as weapons, the nuclear program as a bargaining chip, and the Strait of Hormuz as leverage.

The first test came during the Tanker War of the 1980s, when Iran targeted commercial vessels in the Gulf and disrupted traffic through the waterway. International responses were limited and temporary, and never amounted to real deterrence.

That was when the Iranian regime learned its first lesson: threats pay and the world retreats. Each time the international community moved toward confrontation, the regime repeated the tactic and the world stepped back.

This was less a product of careful calculation than a political retreat from responsibility, because the cost of confrontation always appeared higher than the cost of delay.

As this repeated decade after decade, deterrence was not only weakened but hollowed out until the term lost meaning. The problem was not Iran’s audacity alone. It was that the world, through silence and hesitation, taught Tehran that blackmail works and threats go unpunished, and Iran learned that lesson well.

To understand this systematic erosion, three factors cannot be overlooked. First, the cost of confrontation was consistently overstated until it became a standing excuse to defer decisions, on the premise that any firm action would trigger uncontrollable chaos, even though history shows delay is usually costlier than firm action.

Second, major powers let short-term commercial interests outweigh long-term strategic stability, opening markets to Iran while ignoring its terrorism financing networks.

Third, Iran’s conduct, based on denial, proxy attacks, and incremental escalation, exploited that hesitation and became entrenched. It was treated as a manageable nuisance rather than a danger that needed to be dismantled and denied its tools.

In this context, the Strait of Hormuz became a strategic weapon.

The waterway carries roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil and a quarter of its natural gas each day, and it is more than a shipping lane. It is critical to global energy supplies. A closure would hit economies hard and endanger hundreds of millions of the world’s most vulnerable people.

When a rogue terror state can threaten that flow, it gains a sense of immunity. The mullah regime cultivated that sense of immunity for decades and used it to deter anyone seeking accountability.

Iran's leverage over energy supplies was sustained without cost and used against the international system. What compounds the problem is that this leverage was developed with Western technology and international expertise and then deployed against those same partners for decades.

International institutions designed to deter such actions issued condemnations that were not enforced and passed resolutions that were not implemented.

Each stage of retreat did not reduce the Iranian threat but made it more complex and more dangerous, until manageable risks became an unsustainable crisis.

Then the mullah regime encountered something it had not anticipated. Conditions changed – not because the world grew more principled, but because the accumulated pressure became intolerable.

A leader with a different outlook entered the White House. US President Donald Trump rejected containment of risk in favor of removing the capacity to create it.

His administration adopted a policy of refusing to let vital sea lanes remain subject to blackmail and of treating threats to navigation and energy as a red line that would trigger an immediate cost.

This change was not theoretical. It showed, for the first time in the regime’s history, that escalation would carry a price, that rogue actors were not immune, and that determined pressure could work.

The point is not whether you support or oppose this political change. What matters is that a historic moment is emerging, and missing it reflects a failure of perception, not politics.

Today, the Strait of Hormuz is no longer a one-way instrument of pressure for Iran. The monopoly on threat has ended. The waterway that the mullah regime treated as a permanent tool of blackmail has become a test of broader international resolve, led by Washington and joined by regional states, foremost the United Arab Emirates.

Iran has now been denied the most dangerous weapon it relied on for decades.

This moment offers a genuine opportunity to set new rules of engagement and for the world to recognize that stability is not achieved by accommodating rogue regimes but by cutting off their evil sinews and shutting down their protection rackets with steady resolve.

In short, what we are seeing in the Strait of Hormuz is not a sudden incident. It is the outcome of policies the mullah regime pursued for decades, enabled by international silence and by the neglect of governments that prioritized short-term gains over long-term security.

Responsibility rests not only with the direct perpetrator; it also applies to all who helped create conditions that let it expand without cost.