The United States military launched airstrikes against Iran on Tuesday after Iranian forces attacked three commercial vessels transiting the Strait of Hormuz. US Central Command said the strikes were conducted “to impose heavy costs for targeting and attacking commercial shipping crewed by innocent individuals in an international waterway.” Explosions were reported in the southern Iranian port city of Sirik, on Qeshm Island, and in Bandar Abbas. The incident comes just weeks after a June memorandum of understanding between Washington and Tehran — which had mandated a US naval drawdown in exchange for Iran reopening the Strait — appeared to have stabilised the corridor. Iran’s foreign ministry said it held the US government responsible for the consequences of the MoU’s breach. The US Treasury simultaneously moved to revoke its temporary 60-day suspension of sanctions on Iranian oil sales.
The received wisdom
The dominant framing from international affairs commentators is that this escalation was provoked by Iranian aggression: Tehran attacked commercial shipping, violated a freshly signed agreement, and left Washington with no credible option short of a military response. The argument runs that deterrence requires demonstrated willingness to follow through on warnings, and that the June MoU had already given Iran an off-ramp it chose to reject. Critics of inaction point to the 2019 Strait attacks, when a muted US response arguably emboldened further Iranian adventurism. From this view, the strikes are a calibrated, proportionate reply — aimed at naval and coastal military infrastructure, not civilian targets — and the world’s shipping lanes now benefit from a demonstrated red line. European allies who condemned the strikes as precipitous, this reading holds, are enjoying the fruits of American forward deployment while bearing none of its costs.
A different read
There is something both right and dangerously incomplete about the deterrence argument. Punishment without a political horizon is not strategy — it is expensive improvisation.
The June MoU itself deserves scrutiny. Al Jazeera’s reporting characterised it at the time as managing pain rather than ending a conflict — a telling admission. The agreement suspended sanctions for 60 days and lifted a naval blockade; it did not address Iran’s enrichment programme, its regional proxy infrastructure, or its domestic political pressures. Sixty-day truces negotiated under duress tend to produce sixty-one-day violations.
The tanker attacks that triggered Tuesday’s strikes were not necessarily ordered from the top of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard command. Iran’s internal politics after Khamenei’s death have fragmented authority in ways Western intelligence agencies are still mapping. Hardline IRGC factions have previously operated with a degree of autonomy that senior leadership could both deny and implicitly sanction. If Tuesday’s tanker strikes were a rogue or factional operation, US airstrikes on Iranian soil may have just handed the faction that wants escalation exactly the domestic political cover it needed.
History offers a sobering parallel. In 1988, the USS Vincennes shot down Iran Air Flight 655, killing 290 civilians, during a period of sustained American naval engagement in the Gulf. The Reagan administration had calculated that muscular presence would deter Iranian harassment of Kuwaiti tankers — and the tanker war did eventually end, but not before American credibility took profound damage from the civilian deaths and from the subsequent revelation of what the Vincennes’s captain had been doing. Military presence in chokepoints creates friction, and friction produces tragedies as often as it produces deterrence.
The Trump administration’s Iran policy — oscillating between maximum pressure, the June MoU, and now airstrikes — lacks the consistent logic that effective deterrence requires. Adversaries calibrate their behaviour against what they expect from Washington; when that expectation is uncertain, rational actors probe rather than comply. Iran’s attacks on tankers may have been, perversely, a test of whether the MoU’s American guarantees were real. The answer is now known: they were not. That clarity may reduce immediate incidents in the Strait. But it also tells Tehran — and watching governments in Beijing, Pyongyang, and Moscow — that American diplomatic instruments expire fast.
The economic dimension cannot be ignored. The Strait of Hormuz handles roughly a fifth of the world’s traded oil. Any prolonged closure would transmit immediately into fuel prices across Asia and Europe, where consumer confidence is already fragile after two years of post-pandemic inflation. Energy markets do not distinguish between just and unjust military actions; they price risk, not righteousness.
The right question is not whether the strikes were legally or morally defensible — they were, as a response to attacks on civilian shipping in international waters. The right question is what comes after. A strike without a diplomatic track is a sentence without a paragraph.
What to watch
Four indicators will determine whether Tuesday’s strikes represent a controlled escalation or the beginning of something broader. First, watch Iran’s formal response at the UN Security Council and whether Tehran announces any suspension of uranium enrichment negotiations — a return to maximum uranium enrichment would signal that the hardline faction has won the internal argument. Second, watch oil prices and the insurance premiums Lloyd’s of London assigns to Hormuz transits — these are the market’s real-time assessment of risk that no official statement can camouflage. Third, watch whether European allies — Germany, France, and Italy, all of whom Trump publicly named as refusing support — move towards a joint naval escort framework independent of CENTCOM. Fourth, and most consequentially, watch whether Iran announces resumption of full shipping through the Strait or imposes a selective blockade on US-flagged or US-aligned vessels.
— J