Trump and Iranian regime in 'a high-stakes standoff to see which side blinks first,' says analyst
The war between the U.S. and Iran has morphed from being fought with missiles into a battle of blockades.
A key question now becomes which country can better withstand the economic pain.
The theory driving U.S. President Donald Trump's move to bar commercial ships from accessing Iran's ports is that the blockade will choke off the country's oil exports, hurting the Iranian economy enough to compel the regime in Tehran to accept U.S. terms for ending the war.
"The blockade is amazing. It's holding up very strong, very powerfully," Trump told reporters outside the White House on Thursday. "No ship is even thinking about entering. No ship is going past our navy."
Despite Trump's enthusiasm, it's unclear whether the naval blockade set up in the Gulf of Oman will bring Iran to its economic knees before Tehran's stranglehold on the Strait of Hormuz does so much damage to the global economy that the U.S. president will want to change his tactics.
The blockades are ongoing amid a two-week ceasefire in the U.S.-Israel war with Iran. The war has killed more than 2,000 people in Iran, more than 200 in Gulf countries and Israel, and 13 members of the U.S. military. Israel’s parallel war with Iranian proxy Hezbollah has killed more than 2,100 people in Lebanon, ahead of a U.S-brokered ceasefire that took effect Thursday.
Analysts with expertise on Iran and the economic effects of blockades appear to be broadly split over which side has the advantage.
Miad Maleki, who previously designed and oversaw sanctions campaigns for the U.S. Treasury, believes Trump made the right call.
The blockade of Iranian ports "could rapidly cripple the country’s economy, cutting off most of its trade, halting oil exports and triggering inflation and currency pressure within days," wrote Maleki, now a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a pro-Israel policy institute in Washington.
Resistance becomes 'economically impossible' for Iran
By shutting off Iran's seaborne exports of crude oil, petrochemicals and minerals, combined with disrupting imports of food and industrial products, Maleki calculates that the blockade would do $13 billion US worth of economic damage per month.
That amount of financial pressure on Iran "makes continued resistance economically impossible," wrote Maleki.
If all of Iran's crude exports by ship are halted, Maleki says the country's limited storage capacity means it could be forced to shut down oil production in as few as two weeks.
Matthew Kroenig, a former defense and intelligence official now with the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security in Washington, also believes the U.S. blockade can be effective.
"The Iranians are very dependent on trade through the strait," Kroenig told CNN on Tuesday. "I do think the United States is in the driver's seat now and this is a different position than we were in a few days ago."
Oil exports account for a significant proportion of Iranian government revenues. If the blockade succeeds in shutting off much of that income, Kroenig says it will create dilemmas for the regime.
"Do they stop subsidies for their people? Does that lead to more uprisings? Are they able to pay their security services?" he said.
Regime has 'greater incentive to endure pain'
The counterargument is that Iran is long accustomed to coping with the economic effects of sanctions and, since the country is run by an undemocratic regime that doesn't have to answer to its people, it has more room to manoeuvre when dealing with the effects of the blockade.
Nate Swanson, a former director for Iran on the U.S. National Security Council who served on the Trump administration’s Iran negotiating team in early 2025, says in this test of wills, time is on Tehran's side.
"For the Iranian regime, this war is existential, so it has a greater incentive to endure pain longer," Swanson wrote in Foreign Affairs.
"Trump, meanwhile, has to worry about public opinion ahead of the United States’ midterm elections," wrote Swanson, now director of the Iran Strategy Project at the Atlantic Council, a Washington think-tank.
A lingering shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz, stopping Gulf oil exports, coupled with the added blockade of Iranian oil, could keep global energy prices running high.
That includes in the U.S., where people are confronted with paying noticeably more for gas than they were before the war began, a situation that could provoke voter backlash against Trump's Republican Party when the midterms come this fall.
The national average price per gallon for regular gas was $4.09 US on Thursday, according to automotive club AAA, up 37 per cent since the war began a month and a half ago.
Ian Ralby, an expert in international maritime law and security based in Baltimore, says it's too early to predict the political impact on the midterms, but he doubts the U.S. has much stomach for economic hardship.
"This is a game of chicken," Ralby told Thursday's episode of the CBC podcast Front Burner.
"The Iranians have had to live with a degree of austerity because of the maximum pressure campaign and all the sanctions that have been imposed," Ralby said.
"The patience for hardship is much lower in the United States at this point than it perhaps needs to be in order to face a situation as critical as this."
Max Boot, a senior fellow for national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, says Trump is gambling that Iran has a lower threshold for economic pain than the U.S.
"With their competing blockades, Iran and the United States are engaged in a high-stakes standoff to see which side blinks first. I wouldn’t bet against Iran," Boot wrote in an article on the think-tank's website.
