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US negotiating position is brute force. Iran’s is the power to hurt

Given the challenges, risks, costs, time-insensitivity, and unguaranteed success, it will not be surprising if enthusiasm about the blockade declines in the coming weeks.

The recent, unprecedented US-Iran negotiations seemed serious enough and had the positive effect of establishing channels of communication between US Vice President JD Vance and the Iranian delegation led by Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf.

Even as they disagreed—it was unfair to expect success from just one meet, after all—both sides remained respectful and neither explicitly ruled out further meetings. But two key points must be noted before we discuss the latest development related to the naval blockade announced by President Donald Trump.

Iran’s priority: long-term deterrence

First, since early to mid-March, Iran’s primary objective has been clear: to establish long-term deterrence vis-à-vis the US by imposing strong economic and political costs on the Trump administration through its de facto low-cost blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. This deterrence—through pain—is seen as the only guarantee of the regime’s future survival, given that Israel and the US have adopted a ‘mowing the lawn’ approach toward Iran and given that the US feels free (in principle) to withdraw from any signed agreement with Tehran and re-launch attacks at will anytime. A Chinese security guarantee could have averted such a desperate approach, but Beijing is also understandably not too eager to provide such an assurance despite Iranian requests.

The meeting in Islamabad allowed the Iranian regime to test whether the US has reached such a threshold of pain and resultant course-correction. Unfortunately for the world, it got the impression (justified or not) that the US has not. This is, according to Iran, evidenced by the US’ ‘ambitious’ negotiating position, which seeks to extract a positive commitment against nuclear enrichment and capabilities as well as a return to the status quo ante on the Strait of Hormuz in exchange for defreezing Iranian revenues worth $27 billion. 

For Iran, this was simply too much to give away for relatively little to no assurance against future attacks. The US adopts a perception framework that expects Iran to be more compromising after leadership decapitation, infrastructure bombing, and military neutering. On the other hand, the Iranian leadership assesses that it has been able to........

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