Two Clocks Over Hormuz: Why No One Is Backing Down, and How a Mistake Could Become a Catastrophe

Two Clocks Over Hormuz: Why No One Is Backing Down, and How a Mistake Could Become a Catastrophe

In the first week of November 2026, at least eleven ships were attacked in and around the Strait of Hormuz, and three of them sank. Traffic through the strait is running roughly 65 percent below pre-war levels. The United States has struck Iranian territory again, and mediators are working to keep the two countries from returning to full-scale fighting.

A reasonable person might ask: wasn’t this supposed to be over? In June, the United States and Iran signed the Islamabad Memorandum, which was meant to reopen the strait. So why is Iran still hitting tankers, and where is this going?

My argument in this piece is simple. This is not really a dispute about a waterway. Hormuz is the most visible part of a conflict that both sides see as existential. Because neither side can afford to back down, the conflict will probably be resolved by a change in who makes decisions, not by a change in what is decided. Until then, the main danger is not a war anyone chooses. It is a war that someone stumbles into.

The issue: an agreement built on two incompatible readings

The Islamabad Memorandum, signed on 17 June, gave ships 60 days of toll-free passage and required Iran to end its blockade of the strait within 30 days. In return, Washington would lift its naval blockade of Iranian ports.

The deal left one question unanswered: how ships would pass, and under whose authority. Iran insisted that vessels use a northern route close to its coast, under rules set by its newly created Persian Gulf Strait Authority. The United States directed shipping to a southern route through Omani waters, protected by the US Navy. When ships took the southern route, Iranian forces fired on them. By 8 July the agreement had effectively collapsed. Each side blames the other, and Tehran accuses Washington of a “flagrant violation” of the memorandum.

Iran’s position today, stated by its parliament speaker and lead negotiator, is that the strait will not reopen until seven Iranian conditions are met. Tehran has not published the full list. Officials have named three of them: an end to the war “on all fronts,” the release of frozen Iranian assets, and the lifting of the US blockade. Earlier versions of Iran’s demands went further and called for the withdrawal of US forces from bases across the region.

Most international lawyers say no. Hormuz is a strait used for international navigation. Under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, ships have a right of transit passage through such straits, and coastal states may not hamper or suspend it. Iran signed the convention in 1982 but never ratified it. It argues that only the narrower rule of innocent passage applies and that it has been a persistent objector to transit passage. Even on Iran’s own reading, though, innocent passage through an international strait cannot be suspended. That principle goes back to the 1949 Corfu Channel judgment. Half the strait also belongs to Oman. And “service fees” levied on ships in transit look very much like tolls under another name.

It is also true that many legal scholars regard the US–Israeli attack of 28 February as a violation of the UN Charter. One illegality has followed another. But a violation by one party does not license attacks on third parties. The Indian, Thai and Filipino sailors killed in this conflict were never party to it.

The deeper layer: an existential conflict

Hormuz is a symptom. The underlying conflict is about Israel’s survival, and about the survival of the Islamic Republic.

Iran’s official position calls for a referendum among the “original inhabitants” of Palestine, which would exclude most Israeli Jews from voting. This is not just rhetoric. Tehran has spent decades and enormous resources building a network of allied armed groups around Israel. Whether or not that plan could ever be carried out, the effect of pursuing it is the same: permanent insecurity for Israel, and an Iranian state that pays heavily for a project with no clear link to its own national interest. Israel’s view of Iran as an existential threat follows directly from this. Washington’s commitment to Israel’s security is bipartisan. The two US parties disagree about methods, not about the goal.

The mirror image matters just as much. Seen from Tehran, Israel’s existence is an existential threat too. Israel is widely believed to hold a nuclear arsenal that is not subject to any international inspection, while Iran is bombed for enriching uranium under international monitoring. For years Israel has assassinated Iranian nuclear scientists and commanders, sabotaged facilities, and struck Iranian territory. In 2025 it went to war against Iran directly, and in February 2026, together with the United States, it opened a war that killed the country’s Supreme Leader. Israeli leaders have openly called on Iranians to overthrow their government. Tehran also sees Israel as the forward base of American power in the region, backed by a superpower that guarantees its military superiority. From that vantage point, a strong Israel next to a weakened Iran is not a neutral fact. It is a standing threat to the Iranian state. The anti-Israel stance is also woven into the Islamic Republic’s founding identity and its claim to legitimacy, so abandoning it would feel like dismantling itself.

So each side sees the other’s existence as a threat to its own, and each side’s defensive measures confirm the other’s fears. This is the classic security dilemma in its most extreme form. The Islamic Republic sees retreat as the beginning of its end. Its hardliners often cite the Soviet collapse as proof that concessions lead to disintegration. When both sides frame a conflict as existential, the usual cost-benefit logic that ends wars works poorly.

The Palestinian question and the legitimacy of the rules

Underneath all of this sits a question that neither war nor deal addresses: the Palestinians. Decades of occupation, the devastation of Gaza, and the absence of any credible path to a Palestinian state are real grievances. They exist independently of Tehran. The Islamic Republic did not create them, but it has used them, and they give its project a resonance far beyond Iran’s borders. This also weakens the rules being invoked against Iran. In 2024 the International Court of Justice found Israel’s continued presence in the occupied Palestinian territory unlawful, and little followed. When international law is enforced firmly in Hormuz but loosely in the West Bank, many in the region conclude that the rules are an instrument of power rather than a constraint on it. That perception does not make attacks on ships lawful. It does mean that any order built on rules applied selectively will struggle to win the legitimacy it needs to last. A durable settlement in the region is hard to imagine without a just answer for the Palestinians, and one that does not depend on eliminating anyone else.

Who pays the bill?

The most useful way I have found to think about this conflict is to ask who receives the invoice.

For four decades, ordinary Iranians have paid for the Islamic Republic’s choices through sanctions, poverty, emigration and repression. In January 2026, when they took to the streets, the state answered with mass killings on 8 and 9 January. Amnesty International called it the deadliest period of repression it has recorded in Iran in decades. Estimates of the death toll range from several thousand to tens of thousands. Iranians have no working channel for sending the bill back to the people who make decisions. In Tehran, the top vote-getter in the 2024 parliamentary election won the support of only a few percent of eligible voters. Invalid ballots, often cast by people who must vote to keep their jobs, ranked among the largest “blocs.” The discontent reaches into the state apparatus itself.

The bill has now been sent much further: to the Gulf, to Asian importers of Gulf oil, to Europe, and to the United States. In America it arrived within months. Gasoline prices rose about 40 percent after the war began, a large majority of Americans told pollsters they opposed the war, and on 3 November Republicans lost both chambers of Congress. The US president himself acknowledged that the war and fuel prices played a role.

The pattern runs in both directions. Israel shifts part of the cost of its security onto the United States, and Washington shifts part of the cost of its wars onto the global economy. Its control of the dollar system lets it do the same in other ways. A market system that has been accepted is not legitimate for that reason alone. And an action is not automatically illegitimate because it breaks rules the powerful wrote. The test I find most honest is whether the people paying the cost had any say in the decision. By that test, almost every actor in this crisis has something to answer for.

The most probable scenario: two clocks, two tracks

Here are my working assumptions:

  1. Time is against everyone. Iran’s economy is being strangled by the blockade. An energy shock that pushes the world toward recession will hit the US economy as well.
  2. No one wants an uncontrolled war. The Gulf states are actively lobbying against new strikes on Iran because they fear retaliation against their airports, refineries and desalination plants. A Democratic Congress will constrain any large escalation. Tehran knows an all-out war with the United States is the surest threat to its own survival.
  3. Tehran’s doctrine on Israel will not change as long as the current power structure holds.

Under these assumptions, the conflict runs on two clocks moving at different speeds.

The short clock is economic. It pushes both Washington and Tehran toward a tactical truce: reopening the strait in exchange for lifting the blockade and releasing some frozen funds. In effect, Islamabad again, with clearer rules on routing this time, perhaps with Oman involved, so that the same question doesn’t break it a second time.

The long clock is existential. If Iran’s doctrine on Israel is fixed, any deal is just a pause. Israel knows this, and Washington ultimately agrees. So alongside any truce, the long-term strategy continues: changing the actors in Tehran. Because a full war is off the table, this will most likely take the form of a shadow war at higher intensity: targeted killings of Iranian military commanders, sabotage, intelligence operations, economic pressure on the military’s business empire, and efforts to widen the Iranian government’s internal divisions.

The result is that the Hormuz file and the Israel file come apart. Hormuz gets handled through transactions. The Israel file gets handled through attrition. The likely pattern is a cycle of truce, violation, escalation and new truce, with pressure on Tehran rising from outside (the shadow war) and from inside (economic collapse and a society that has withdrawn its consent).

Change in actors, not in positions

If no one retreats, the only way out is for the decision-makers to change. Political systems have a familiar way of handling this: retreat without retreating. A new leadership can say the old commitments and slogans were never its own, and accept a compromise that would have counted as defeat for its predecessors.

Inside Iran, this process may already have begun. The strikes of 28 February killed the Supreme Leader. His son was installed within about ten days, reportedly under pressure from the military, and has not appeared in public since. Real power appears to sit with a military-security core. That core is not united. Reporting describes a widening split between officials who want a deal with Washington and those who reject any compromise. The parliament speaker is reported to fear that open-ended confrontation could push the system into a crisis its institutions cannot contain. At the late Supreme Leader’s funeral, mourners chanting “Death to the compromiser” heckled the president and foreign minister.

So the strait will probably reopen. Its price and its shape depend on where the change comes from.

How miscalculation turns a war no one wants into one no one can stop

Under these assumptions, the situation is a textbook game of chicken. Two drivers race toward each other. Both know a collision would be catastrophic, and each hopes the other will swerve first. In this kind of game, collisions rarely happen by decision. They happen by misjudgment. Miscalculation is the only plausible path from the “probable” scenario to disaster.

Tehran’s possible mistakes

A mistake by Tehran would most likely speed up change imposed from outside. That opens the strait, but with the highest risk of chaos.

Washington’s and Jerusalem’s possible mistakes

A mistake on this side would most likely prolong and deepen the crisis: higher energy costs, stronger pressure on Washington to settle tactically, and, since the long clock hasn’t changed, a return to confrontation later.

The worst case: simultaneous error

The most dangerous moment is when both sides misjudge at once. Tehran concludes that America is exhausted and launches a major strike. At the same moment, Washington concludes that the Iranian government is about to collapse and hits hard. That is the collision no one wanted.

This conflict has already produced tragic examples of what happens when fingers rest on triggers and decisions take seconds. In 1988, the USS Vincennes mistook Iran Air Flight 655 for a fighter jet and killed 290 people. In January 2020, Iranian air defenses shot down Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 over Tehran and killed 176. Neither was a political decision. Both were products of a climate of extreme tension.

That is the uncomfortable conclusion. The longer the war of attrition lasts, the more moments there are in which such an error can happen. The scenario that is “very unlikely” today becomes less unlikely with every month that passes.

Can a state that bills the world be contained?

If the core problem is a state that sends its bills to others, containment means shrinking the bill, returning it to sender, or both. No single tool is enough:

The weakness so far is that the United States alone carries the burden of containment while the whole world pays the bill. As long as that imbalance lasts, Tehran can present this as a war with America rather than as its own problem with the world.

Conclusion

The flaws of the Islamic Republic are real. They can be the basis for reform, or for destruction. Facts are facts, but direction is a choice. The same diagnosis does not justify every treatment, and whoever makes the right diagnosis does not necessarily intend to cure. For Iranians, especially critics of the government, the challenge is to oppose the government without legitimizing bombs and chaos, and to oppose the war without being read as defending the government.

The strait will most likely reopen. The real questions are when, at what price, and who will be standing in Tehran when it does. The answer will be decided less on the water and on the battlefield than by a race between the internal erosion of a government with almost no popular consent and the economic clock of a world that is tired of paying its bills.

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