The United States and Iran entered a third consecutive night of direct military exchanges early Tuesday, as Washington’s reimposed naval blockade and a new 20-percent transit levy on Strait of Hormuz shipping collided with Tehran’s insistence that it, not the US, controls the waterway.
US Central Command carried out a five-hour wave of strikes overnight, hitting targets across Bushehr, Chah Bahar, Jask, Konarak, Abu Musa and Bandar Abbas, which it said were intended to further degrade Iran’s capacity to threaten commercial shipping. Iranian state media separately reported explosions on Kish, Jam and Qeshm islands. In one notable first, CENTCOM said it used maritime drones over the weekend to strike an Iranian submarine and a maintenance facility at the Bandar Abbas naval base.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps responded in kind, claiming ballistic-missile strikes on a US air base in Jordan and hitting American-linked facilities in Kuwait, while Jordanian state media said four Iranian missiles were intercepted over its airspace. Bahrain’s Defense Force confirmed fresh Iranian attacks on the kingdom, and the IRGC warned Gulf states more broadly against cooperating with the American military effort to secure the strait. The Persian Gulf Strait Authority, an Iranian ceasefire-era body, declared passage through Hormuz “currently unfeasible.”
Trump’s blockade and the 20-percent toll
The immediate trigger for the latest escalation was President Trump’s Monday announcement reinstating the US naval blockade against Iranian vessels — branding Washington the “Guardian of the Hormuz Strait” — while demanding a 20-percent reimbursement fee on all other cargo transiting the waterway. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi rejected the figure as excessive, writing on X that Iran, not the US, deserves compensation for securing the strait, though he suggested Tehran “will be fair” on any rate it eventually sets. The UN’s International Maritime Organization and even US Secretary of State Marco Rubio have previously stated that charging tolls on an international strait has no basis in maritime law, a legal obstacle that now applies equally to Washington’s own scheme.
The move reverses the terms of the mid-June Islamabad memorandum of understanding, under which Tehran had agreed to forgo any tolls for 60 days in exchange for a ceasefire and reopening of the strait. Trump declared that ceasefire “over” last week after a spate of attacks on commercial tankers, and Washington reimposed oil sanctions on July 7 in tandem with resumed strikes. Oil prices jumped more than 9 percent on the blockade announcement, with the strait normally carrying roughly a fifth of global crude flows.
Diplomacy limps on in parallel
Despite the exchange of fire, the mediation track has not collapsed. Iran’s Foreign Ministry said Monday it remains in active contact with Pakistan, Qatar and Oman — the guarantors of the Islamabad MoU — to contain the crisis, and Doha reported “positive progress” in technical talks held in the Qatari capital in recent days, with a further round expected once Iran’s period of mourning for its late Supreme Leader concludes. Pakistan, co-mediator with Qatar, voiced “deep concern” at the pace of escalation.
Beyond the strait itself, the conflict is generating secondary friction: Britain’s designation of the IRGC as a state threat drew a formal Iranian protest; the Financial Times reported a coordinated phone-tracking campaign targeting US personnel in the region; and German authorities said they were investigating possible surveillance activity tied to the war, even as Berlin noted its own energy-price outlook had improved on hopes tied to the now-fraying US-Iran framework.
Analysis: leverage, not resolution, is the objective
Neither Washington nor Tehran currently possesses the capacity to impose a final settlement on the other, and both appear to understand this. What is unfolding around Hormuz reads less as an escalation toward decisive victory than as a contest to accumulate bargaining chips ahead of the next round of Doha talks. Trump’s blockade-and-toll gambit inverts Iran’s own long-standing threat to tax or close the strait, turning Tehran’s leverage instrument back on itself while signalling to Gulf allies that Washington, not Iran, will set the terms of access. Iran’s parallel strikes on Jordan, Kuwait and Bahrain, meanwhile, aim to raise the cost of Gulf-state cooperation with the American blockade without triggering the kind of sustained confrontation Tehran’s depleted position cannot sustain.
As Chatham House’s Bader Al-Saif observed, both sides “want to end the impasse on their own terms” but are finding it increasingly difficult to do so, which is precisely why the pattern of strike-and-negotiate persists: each round of force is calibrated to strengthen a negotiating hand rather than to break the other side’s will outright. The mediators’ insistence on continuing technical talks even amid active strikes lends weight to this reading — both capitals are still signalling, through Doha and Islamabad, that a negotiated arrangement over Hormuz’s status remains the endgame. The military exchanges of the past 72 hours are best understood as the coercive bargaining phase of a conflict whose parties have already concluded that outright victory is unavailable to either of them.