On Thursday, April 30, Admiral Brad Cooper, the top U.S. commander in the Middle East, briefed President Trump on potential military options against Iran should he decide to return to conflict. What some observers are now labelling the Third Gulf War has been on pause since April 7, when Trump agreed to suspend the U.S. bombing campaign for two weeks in order to provide space for a diplomatic process. Sensing that arriving at a comprehensive end-of-war settlement with Tehran would take far longer, the president has since extended the ceasefire indefinitely.
While the shooting has stopped, the war can hardly be declared over. Washington and Tehran are now in a new stage of conflict, with both sides staring one another down in the Strait of Hormuz and waiting for the other to blink.
The Trump administration has put its faith in the U.S. blockade of Iranian ports, which seeks to prevent Tehran from exporting crude oil to world markets and, the theory goes, will force the regime to shut down production once their storage tanks are full. The goal: deprive the Iranians of cash and cause so much pain to the regime’s bottom line that a nuclear deal on Washington’s terms becomes a more realistic prospect. In public, Trump is gung-ho about the strategy. “Well, the blockade is genius, OK,” Trump told reporters this week. “The blockade has been 100 per cent foolproof.”
Iran, however, is just as confident in its own strategy. Although the Iranians are grossly outgunned in terms of conventional military capacity, the regime has demonstrated that it doesn’t need to match the United States gun-for-gun or ship-for-ship to have an impact against the enemy. Iran’s ability to bottle up shipping in the Strait of Hormuz—according to shipping tracker Kpler, oil flows through the choke point declined by 95 per cent in April—and inject economic pain worldwide is a card it has deployed to the fullest extent.
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