The Strait of Hormuz Already Faces a Tough Recovery. Now Trump’s Iran Deal Is Unraveling

(Council on Foreign Relations) The fragile U.S.-Iran cease-fire appeared to be in danger on Wednesday as the two sides exchanged fresh strikes and President Donald Trump threatened to end the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU). U.S. forces attacked targets in Iran and the White House reimposed sanctions on Iranian oil sales on Tuesday. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps responded by firing at U.S. military sites in Bahrain and Kuwait. “To me, I think it’s over,” Trump said about the agreement during the NATO summit in Ankara on Wednesday. He later claimed that further strikes were imminent. “We hit them [Iran] very hard last night,” he told reporters, “and we’re going to hit them hard again tonight”. The collapse of the sixty-day MOU—signed just over three weeks ago to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and lay the groundwork for a permanent end to the war—would deal a severe blow to efforts to restore normal shipping through the waterway. But reopening the strait, through which roughly 20 percent of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas (LNG) transits, is just the first step. Several other formidable roadblocks—continued aggression between the United States and Iran, transit fees, sea mines, infrastructure damage, and deep mistrust in the region—stand between the strait’s nominal reopening and a genuine recovery of global energy markets after one hundred days of disruption. – The Strait of Hormuz Already Faces a Tough Recovery. Now Trump’s Iran Deal Is Unraveling. | Council on Foreign Relations