It took only five days after the attack on Iran by the United States and Israel in late February for Iran to close the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world’s most vital energy and maritime chokepoints.

Describing the waterway as a place where Iran and the U.S. flex their muscles doesn’t tell the whole story. The story did not start on March 4, when Iran closed the strait with a combination of asymmetric naval tactics, geographic control and maritime blockades. It was years in the making.

Understanding why the strait stayed open for so long, and why it’s not open now, requires thinking not in terms of current entities but in terms of loops.

The loop that kept the peace

Iran has long leveraged the Strait of Hormuz to transport its own oil to international markets. The revenue generated worked as Iran’s binding self-constraint. In the language of systems thinking, this is called a balancing loop: a mechanism where the system corrects itself.

Think of the predator-prey dynamics in ecology: when rabbits multiply, foxes thrive. When rabbits are scarce, fox populations decline and the rabbit population recovers.

The oscillation in Iran’s relationship with the West followed the same self-correcting logic. Iran’s revenues were the rabbits and the West’s diplomatic pressure were the........

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