The aim of Tehran’s decades-long pursuit of a nuclear bomb was always twofold — the mullahs wanted to threaten Israel, but they also wanted to warn the U.S. and the rest of the world that attacking Iran would come at a cost no adversary would be willing to bear.

The joint U.S.–Israeli war has diminished the threat to Israel, but Tehran’s unbroken chokehold on the Strait of Hormuz shows the regime doesn’t need a nuke to inflict enormous pain on the world.      

The strait has quickly become the focal point of the war, with Iranian military forces and proxies in the region attacking tankers or harassing shipping via a toll system.

“Iran has discovered that controlling the Hormuz Straits is better for them than having a nuclear bomb,” said Marwan Muasher, vice president for Studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a Washington-based think tank.

On Sunday, U.S. President Trump fired off a profane social media post capturing his frustration with as-yet unsuccessful military efforts to force Iran to reopen the waterway through which one-fifth of the world’s oil passes annually: “Open the F——- Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell — JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.”  

That emphatic warning came just four days after the president’s more optimistic tone during a Wednesday night speech intended to shore up support among American voters and ease growing concerns among global allies.

“The strait will open up naturally,” Mr. Trump said. “They’re gonna want to be able to sell oil, because that’s all they have to try and rebuild.”

Mr. Trump said Operation Epic Fury was “nearing completion” and that the U.S. would “hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks.” 

Keeping the strait open and free from Tehran’s tolls and attacks by Iranian proxies has never been explicitly cited by the Trump administration as a rationale for the war — but the economic impacts rippling through the global economy have the White House scrambling.

The president and his Cabinet have even suggested the U.S. could consider ending the war without reopening the strait.

Iran may welcome that course of action, as analysts see no apparent incentive for the regime to surrender control of the waterway.

“They’re now openly talking about formalizing that control as if it’s going to be their own Panama Canal,” said Karim Sadjadpour, a Carnegie analyst who joined Mr. Muasher for a panel discussion on the conflict at the think tank last week. 

“That is something which I think is not only unacceptable for the United States, but for much of the globe,” Mr. Sadjadpour said.

The challenge according to Mr. Sadjadpour and Mr. Muasher, is that Iran has shifted away from a war focused only on military capability to one of political endurance and survival. Iranian leadership has demanded tens of billions of dollars to rebuild damaged facilities as part of any deal with the U.S.

Analysts said the risk of energy transactions increasingly using currency other than the U.S. dollar looms over the preferential treatment of China, slowly eroding the biggest American financial leverage in the region.

Reports that Iran is charging as much as $2 million per tanker for safe passage through the strait add up to tens of millions per day and billions of dollars a year for the regime.

Iranian leaders last week approved a plan to permanently charge a toll for ships passing through the strait while barring transit to any vessels linked to the U.S. or Israel. They are framing the plan not just as a revenue source, but also as a formal assertion of Iranian sovereignty.

Iran has already allowed preferential treatment for American adversaries, letting Chinese tankers and commercial assets pass through. 

Both Russia and China have supported Iran with satellite imagery for the war according to analysts, and have historically maintained a relationship that supported their military directly as well. 

“This is entirely natural; just as goods pay transit fees when passing through other corridors, the Strait of Hormuz is also a corridor. We provide its security, and it is natural that ships and oil tankers should pay such fees,” said Mohammadreza Rezaei Kouchi, an Iranian lawmaker and chairman of the Civil Affairs Committee of the Islamic Consultative Assembly.

About 20 million barrels of crude oil and petroleum products pass through the strait daily — about 20% to 25% of the world’s daily oil consumption. The vast majority of oil exports from Persian Gulf producers such as Saudi Arabia and Iraq pass through the crucial maritime chokepoint.

“We have seen Iran hijack an international shipping route to hold the global economy hostage,” British Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper said during a Thursday meeting of 41 countries held to brainstorm ideas to open the strait.

She said Iran has launched more than 25 attacks on ships since Operation Epic Fury commenced. At least 20,000 seafarers are “trapped” on about 2,000 ships that can’t move because of Tehran’s effective blockade of the maritime passageway.

Iran has controlled shipping for nearly a month now, and the financial windfall could support the reconstitution of Iran’s ballistic missile and drone, or unmanned aerial vehicle, programs.

Nicole Grajewski, a scholar in Carnegie’s Nuclear Policy Program and assistant professor at the Center for International Studies at Sciences Po in Paris, warned during Wednesday’s discussion that Iran’s military — despite the damage inflicted by Operation Epic Fury — could reconstitute its ballistic missile program within a year.

“On the UAVs, it’s much easier than that,” she said. “These can be done in smaller and smaller facilities, and they could really be done in civilian facilities. So it doesn’t really look that great on that side of the ledger either.”

Mr. Trump in his Wednesday speech attempted to reassure regional U.S. partners — Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Bahrain — promising that the U.S. would “not let them get hurt or fail in any way, shape or form.”

“The old strategy, the old answer of depending on the United States for the Arab world’s security is no longer credible,” Mr. Muasher said, pointing out that Israel is also conducting bombings in Syria. “We are starting to see a loose coalition of some like-minded Arab countries … this is the vacuum that we are witnessing in the Arab world, which has ben deepened through this war on Iran. It has transformed Iran from a potential threat to a real threat.”

The U.S. partnerships with the Gulf states ware predicated on an economic and security relationship that is now under immense pressure. 

While many of those partners want to see Iranian missile and drone capabilities degraded, they are now bearing the burden in terms of destruction and civilian casualties for the U.S.–Israel campaign, according to Mona Yacoubian.

“That is not helpful to the Gulf,” Ms. Yacoubian, the director of the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies told The Times. “When they say finish the job, that’s what they’re talking about.”

She argues that the Trump administration’s current willingness to target civilian infrastructure legitimizes those targets for Iran in allied Gulf states in the region.

A regime that has spent the last 47 years organizing around resisting American pressure now controls a strategic waterway and can threaten neighboring countries with missiles and one-way drones.

“We know Iran has demonstrated both the willingness and the capability to immediately respond in kind if any such targets are hit,” Ms. Yacoubian said. “It turns around and hits the exact same types of targets in neighboring Gulf countries.”

Reopening the strait may fall to European allies as Gulf partners focus on their own security.

Mr. Muasher isn’t convinced that will work.