Iran Can Hold America Hostage in Either War or Peace
Today, Iran continues to use people as leverage; six Americans are currently imprisoned there. The reality is that the Islamic Republic, though outgunned, outmanned, and far weaker militarily than the U.S., has adapted its favorite tactic by effectively taking the world hostage when it seized control of the Strait of Hormuz. “The Iranians have demonstrated that they can really bring the regional economy, and really the world economy, grinding to a halt,” Michael Singh, who worked on nuclear issues for the George W. Bush Administration, said at a recent panel at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
That dynamic plays out in diplomacy. “Washington tends to view negotiations with Iran through the lens of power. Tehran views them through the lens of possession,” Brett McGurk, who worked on Middle East issues, including hostages, for the past four Administrations, wrote for CNN.com. “Washington aims to force Iran to succumb to demands through economic pressure and sanctions. Tehran aims to force the U.S. to succumb after acquiring something valuable and refusing to give it back.”
Iran has demonstrated its ability to hold out, sometimes for years, for what it wants, while the U.S., with its two- and four-year election cycles, has limited patience. Washington countered Tehran’s seizure of the Strait with its own blockade of any ship coming from or going to Iran—but the conflict is costing U.S. taxpayers an estimated two billion dollars a day. As part of its price to end the war, Iran has demanded twenty-four billion dollars in frozen assets—four times the amount that was part of the hostage deal in 2023. (Iran never received that six billion dollars, because it was refrozen after Hamas attacked Israel.) “This twenty-four billion dollars is a test of trust,” General Mohsen Rezaie, the Revolutionary Guard commander who is now the military adviser to Mojtaba Khamenei, the new Supreme Leader, told CNN. “It’s a test America must pass.” Given the exorbitant sum, it also sounded a bit more like the beginning of negotiations at an Iranian bazaar.
On Thursday, President Trump announced—for the thirty-ninth time—that the war with Iran was over. An initial agreement to extend the fragile ceasefire would be signed within days, possibly this weekend, by Vice-President J. D. Vance, at an unspecified location in Europe, Trump said. (The President will be busy celebrating his eightieth birthday at a U.F.C. bout on the White House lawn on Sunday.) The Strait of Hormuz would then “open immediately with the signing.” The terms, he said, include “a very strong memorandum of understanding,” which he described variously as “in pretty final shape,” “a little conceptual,” and “more notional.”
Late on Friday night, Iran announced that Tehran and Washington were in the final stages of an agreement that would temporarily end conflicts in both Iran and Lebanon. According to the Iranian Foreign Minister, Abbas Araghchi, the agreement states in writing that the two long-standing enemies would respect each other’s sovereignty and rule. That basically means that the U.S. will not engage in any actions to undermine or topple the Islamic Republic—in other words, there will be no attempt at “regime change,” an idea cited by both Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the early days of the war. That would be a huge victory for the Islamic Republic.
Araghchi also claimed that Israel would be required to withdraw from Lebanon and end its attacks on Hezbollah, which effectively links the two separate battlefields. Israel now occupies more than ten per cent of Lebanon; Netanyahu has always claimed its attacks on its northern neighbor are defensive. So far, Israel has not been part of the negotiations, led by mediators from Pakistan and Qatar.
In a major shift, according to Araghchi, the agreement also establishes that, in the future, the Strait will remain under Iranian control and never revert to its prewar status. All commercial traffic will have safe passage, but Iran will eventually impose a “service fee” for transiting vessels. Both of these stipulations represent a significant and costly change for a waterway through which one-fifth of the world’s energy supplies travel. Both would be momentous, long-term gains for Tehran.
However the diplomacy plays out in the days ahead, a new principle has been established: Just as taking people hostage changed the strategies of modern terrorism, Tehran’s seizure of a vital international waterway has altered modern warfare. “It’s a good parallel,” John Limbert, who was one of the American diplomats taken hostage in 1979, told me. “The larger parallel to me is the Iranians overplaying their hand and doing enormous damage to themselves,” as they did during the hostage crisis. “It’s always dangerous when you start believing your own rhetoric,” he added. Yet, the theocracy is still in place, despite forty years of escalating political, economic, and environmental crises, along with growing public unrest.