By Choking the Strait of Hormuz, Iran Found America’s Weak Spot

Just over a month after the United States and Israel attacked Iran, the country has suffered severe losses. But while largely outmatched militarily, Iran has used its geography to spread the cost of war. By all but shutting down shipping across the Strait of Hormuz, it has effectively grounded global oil trade to a halt and sent markets spiralling.

Look up this trade lane—a waterway for vessels moving through the Gulf, transporting more than 20 percent of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas—and you’ll find it described as a “choke point.” It’s a term that Edward Fishman, an energy policy scholar and former US diplomat, knows very well.

In his 2025 book Chokepoints, Fishman argues that our globalized trading system allows countries to win wars with the stroke of a pen—and it’s something America has come to master. As an adviser at the US state department, Fishman helped to devise decades-long sanction campaigns to inflict economic pain on American enemies, like Russia, China, and Iran.

But now, America finds itself at the mercy of such a strategy. In shuttering the Strait of Hormuz to the US and most of the world, Iran has forced oil prices to skyrocket, reshuffled the world’s energy power dynamics, and prompted desperate pivots from US president Donald Trump—ranging from diplomatic off-ramps to possible invasion plans to reopen the Strait by force.

As markets reel from lack of access to this crucial trading lane, and with no end to the war in sight, I spoke with Fishman to unpack how this will all likely end and determine who’s poised to gain or lose the most. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Before we discuss the situation at hand, I was wondering if you could define the term “choke points.” There are two senses of the word—the geographic choke point that we see in the Strait of Hormuz, but also the financial choke points that you mainly discuss in your book. What makes each of these potent forms of economic pressure?

Choke points are parts of the global economy where one country or a coalition of allies holds a dominant position, and there are few, if any, substitutes. These have always been fulcrums of power. Going back to the beginning of recorded history, you find that city states in ancient Greece controlling choke points often conferred them quite a bit of power. These geographic choke points—like the Bosphorus or the Strait of Hormuz—were the most salient, because we didn’t live in a hyper-globalized economy back then. We didn’t have an economy with one dominant currency or supply chains that went all the way around the globe.

These physical choke points were the essential conduits for economic warfare. You need to be able to block that choke point—either with ships or, in the case of what you’re seeing right now, in the Strait of Hormuz, with low-cost drones and missiles holding commercial vessels at risk.

In the 1990s, once the Cold War ended, and Russia and China entered the global economy, they started using the US dollar to settle cross-border transactions. We all embraced transnational supply chains that went from China, to Russia, to Vietnam, to Mexico, to the United States, to Canada. We had the emergence of these economic choke points that have very similar characteristics as the geographic ones, but they exist in financial networks and in supply chains. The US dollar is involved in 90 percent of all foreign exchange transactions. It’s effectively impossible to do business as a global firm without access to it.

What made economic choke points different was that countries can use them as weapons without deploying military force. So, the US government could cut off a foreign individual, foreign company, or even an entire foreign country from the dollar without putting a single soldier, sailor, or airman in harm’s way. It’s created a whole new kind of economic warfare.

In your book, you point to a lot of examples where, even when economic choke points are applied, military action eventually follows. Despite decades of sanctions and economic pressure from the US against Iran, we are now in a war. So, how should we make sense of that?

It’s not particularly surprising that the rise of contemporary economic warfare happened in the wake of two failed US wars—one in Afghanistan, one in Iraq—in which policy makers found themselves searching around for alternative ways to advance national security goals. It was really after George W. Bush was re-elected in 2004 that Iran’s nuclear program became the top national security concern, and officials created this modern economic warfare tool kit to confront Iran.

I would argue that in some ways, it’s been astoundingly successful. We would have never gotten an Iran nuclear deal in 2015, for instance, without economic pressure that happened totally below the threshold of military force. All the sanctions against Iran under Bush, and then later under the Barack Obama administration, didn’t involve naval blockades, sieges, or any of the military backing that economic wars used to require. Even the sanctions against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in the ’90s were backed by a multinational naval blockade for thirteen years, from 1990 all the way up until 2003. We had nothing like that against Iran.

And yet, here we are.

Unfortunately, the success of the Iran sanctions in the lead-up to the nuclear deal made policy makers overconfident. If you look back at the public record in 2015, Democrats in the United States credited sanctions as the skeleton key that unlocked the Iran nuclear deal. Republicans said that sanctions were working so well that if only we had done more sanctions, we could have gotten even more from Iran. We could have gotten an even better deal. Trump really embraced this philosophy. He thought, “If we just put maximum pressure against Iran, if we sanction them to the 100 percent level, we will get something not just better than the nuclear deal. We might even get regime change. We could push the Islamic Republic of Iran out of power.”

He made a similar bet with Venezuela. He put maximum pressure against Venezuela during his first term, with the idea that enough pressure could affect regime change, which is the most ambitious goal you have for your foreign policy. I think that when Trump came back into office in 2025, he looked at these campaigns against Venezuela and Iran. He figured, “Hold on a second. Maximum pressure hasn’t worked. These regimes are still in power.” And so instead of saying, “We need to change our objective,” he said, “We need to change our means. We need to escalate beyond economic warfare to actual kinetic force.”

First against Venezuela with the Nicolás Maduro raid—which I think was a very successful operation and maybe made him overconfident about what military force could accomplish—and now getting us into this war against Iran.

Looking at the situation right now, the war is still ongoing, tenuous talks for some sort of diplomacy are ongoing, and the Strait of Hormuz is still blocked. What’s your high-level assessment?

It’s been reported that Trump thought that Iran was going to surrender very early in the war, especially after the upper echelons of their leadership, including the supreme leader, were struck on the very first day of the conflict. Once it became clear that regime change wasn’t as simple as just taking out Ayatollah Khamenei, and that there was actually more depth to the Islamic Republic’s ranks than Washington and the Israelis thought, they started searching around for other war aims.

Early in the war, the Trump administration felt it would be fine to just degrade Iran’s military capabilities, sink their navy, and eliminate their missile program in large part. That’s, in some ways, the least ambitious objective. The problem is, if that was enough to declare victory, and the Trump administration said, “Well, you know, their military is degraded. We’re done,” you’re still left with a situation where Iran controls the Strait of Hormuz.

Iran has asserted control over the most important geographic choke point in the world, the most important energy artery in the world. If Trump were to try to declare the war on those terms, I think it’d be a humiliating defeat. Now, the overriding US objective is to reopen the Strait. That makes me concerned that the likeliest trajectory of this conflict is toward military escalation, because the only way to reopen the Strait—aside from a deal in which you’re giving up a lot to Iran—is for some level of escalating military offensive, almost certainly including ground troops.

Many analysts have forecasted that a military operation would be incredibly difficult, if even successful.

It might be easy to think that American warships could easily break open the Strait. But no matter how sophisticated these vessels are, Iran has a lot of low-cost drones and missiles that could even hold very advanced American warships at risk. The US Navy has apparently not wanted to deploy convoys, but what would military action require? Is it just degrading more of Iran’s missile and drone fleet? I’m skeptical. You don’t need a large factory to mass produce drones—you could do that in a relatively small facility. Iran is also one of the largest countries in the world. The idea that you could guarantee that you’ve eliminated that threat solely through air strikes just beggars the imagination.

I think you would have to probably create some kind of buffer zone to invade and hold territory in coastal Iran to ensure there’s no further risk to shipping. If you need to hold that much territory, it’s not as simple as sending in just a couple thousand troops.

Iran has stated that it wants to have recognized sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz as part of its peace demands. To use historical parallels, are we seeing another potential Gallipoli or Suez Crisis developing here?

I don’t think it’s strategically tenable for Iran to control the Strait. I don’t think it’s tenable for the United States, for the international economy, or for the Gulf states. Are the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar going to be okay with Iran determining whether or not they can sell oil or can effectively run their economies? I don’t think so. It does feel like the scales are tipped in favour of some kind of military escalation.

If I were to give the Black Swan or deus ex machina scenario here—where we’re rescued from that very grisly possibility—maybe the new Iranian leadership wants a breather, and they say, “You know what, we’re okay, so long as we survive,” coming to some sort of an agreement in which maybe a multinational naval consortium takes control of monitoring the Strait of Hormuz. That would be the kind of off-ramp I would be looking for if I were in the government. But we have so little visibility into the current Iranian government that it would be difficult to say.

To use one of Trump’s favourite phrases, who do you think has the cards right now?

In terms of who comes out of this conflict looking like they’ve won, it’s probably Iran—but you have to take that with a big grain of salt. Remember, they’ve lost a huge amount of their military capability and their leadership.

Going back to the earlier point, a big reason why economic pressure gained popularity in the United States over the last two decades was we saw the limitations of military force in Afghanistan and Iraq. The US did accomplish regime change in those countries; a new government was put in place, with hundreds of thousands of troops in Afghanistan. But as soon as the US pulled out, the Taliban came back and reasserted control over the country. Playing defence in these types of scenarios is always easier than offence. I do think that Iran holds the cards, although they’re holding them from a position where they’re already quite badly wounded and limping.

Depending on how this war ends, what does it mean for the use of economic pressure as leverage in future conflicts?

I suspect that this will lead to a resurgence in the popularity of economic warfare. There’s another lesson here: it’s not just great powers that can use choke points to hold the global economy hostage. Smaller powers can do so too—especially if they’re willing to use military force to back it up, as Iran has accomplished using drones and other asymmetric weapons.

Economic warfare can be quite nasty: sanctions, export controls, and the like can significantly harm other countries’ economies. In other words, it hurts regular people. It can hurt people’s livelihoods, and we should never resort to these tactics frivolously. We should always have a good reason to do so. We should have objectives that we can accomplish. When sanctions are criticized, in favour of more diplomatic efforts, what should be recognized is that oftentimes, the alternative to economic warfare is not peace—it’s kinetic war. It’s incumbent upon us to make sure that our sanctions are actually advancing practical objectives, because the alternative is often substantially worse.

• Trump Tests the Limits of American Power in Iran
• How Will the Iran War End? Even Trump May Not Really Know
• There’s Absolutely No Justification for Trump’s War on Iran

What role do you think other countries could play in this conflict, whether we’re talking about Canada, the United Kingdom, France, or maybe even Russia? Who stands to gain here?

Russia is the big winner so far. The Russian economy was under increasing strain up until this war in February. Just last month, they had the lowest oil monthly revenues that they’d had since the beginning of the full-scale war in Ukraine in February 2022. That was because last year, the Trump administration imposed sanctions on Rosneft and Lukoil, the country’s two biggest oil companies. As a result, there was a lot of risk aversion amongst oil trading countries and refineries toward dealing with Russia. But Iran’s de facto closure of the Strait of Hormuz has now led the Trump administration to take some quite desperate actions, like easing Russian sanctions. Russia is now making $150 million to $200 million more each day selling its oil than it was before the war, so I think President Vladimir Putin has been given a huge lifeline.

China is another big winner. The Chinese have been relatively insulated from the oil shock, given that they have around 1.3 billion barrels in their strategic reserve, which is over three times what the US has. They’ve also done more than any other major economy to electrify. I think they stand to be a big strategic winner, because most economies around the world are going to come out of this saying, “We can’t rely on fossil fuels anymore, and we’re going to have to rapidly embrace clean energy technologies, from solar panels, electric vehicles, batteries,” and China dominates all those industries. You could see a world where China gains a whole lot of economic leverage over many countries, including US allies.

As for the middle powers, I know Trump would love to have other countries come in to help patrol the Strait of Hormuz, and I understand why most countries are not interested in doing that. I don’t think Trump consulted them before he launched this war, and I don’t believe it would be politically popular in most countries to send their own navies in harm’s way for a war that they didn’t start and probably wouldn’t have supported. If I had to put together some plausible scenario where this could end without a ground war, it would have to involve a ceasefire, probably some relief for sanctions, and then a multinational force patrolling the Strait of Hormuz. Even if US allies want no part in this, they may have to play a role in this to avoid a costlier escalation.

Looking ahead at potential US military action in Cuba—it would be tempting to call this the most successful example of America using economic pressure to strong-arm an enemy. But on Monday, a Russian oil tanker was allowed access to the island, despite America’s ongoing blockade. What are the implications of this from an economic pressure standpoint?

Seizing another country’s oil tanker is a slippery slope to escalation. Through sanctions, tariffs, and export controls, we’ve been able to contain these conflicts below the threshold of military engagement. It doesn’t surprise me that we wouldn’t be willing to go there with Russia. By providing information to the Iranian military and helping them target US assets in the Gulf, it’s clear that Russia has other pressure points it can use against the US.

Would Russia retaliate if the US Coast Guard seized an oil tanker heading to Havana? What happens if they ramp up their support for Iran? I think these uncertainties just show the limitations of a more militarized economic warfare.

Will pure economic pressure be enough for Trump to achieve his publicized goal of taking over Cuba, or is military escalation likely there too?

I don’t think there’s a single example where economic pressure alone has caused regime change. I wouldn’t bet on it being enough to unseat the Cuban government.