Weekend at Mojtaba’s - on the Hormuz

A Weekend Thought Experiment

I was mooning around a hospital in the sunny Shi’a south of Iraq when a young doctor flagged me down and politely asked why were we - meaning Americans – there. He’d watched us invade his country twice before toppling the government and dismantling all the systems that ran the country. As far as he could tell, he gently explained, there had been no plan for after we’d blown the place up. The poor guy wasn’t even mad, he was just baffled on a cosmic level.

A dozen years later, while watching Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz - a maneuver the regime has been threatening since Caddyshack was released – I’m inclined to wonder how much second-order planning went into the current war.

Iran did exactly what they said that they’d do and it has been a wild week for the energy markets. The White House has suspended sanctions on Russian oil already at sea for 30 days in an effort to ease spiking oil prices. Unfortunately, like the strategic reserve release earlier this week, lifting sanctions temporarily it isn’t really going to help at the barrel or the pump. Energy is priced production and supply considerations, not a three week band-aid on a crisis that will reverberate for at least a few months. It won’t relieve energy prices, but it might top up the Russian war machine with some needed ready cash. Great Britain, certainly in a bigger bind with both energy and Russia that the US isn’t following suit.

European stocks are on the slide, as are Asian markets. Stateside, the S&P500 has hit its lowest since November of 2025. While that is a drop, to put it in context, most analysts were griping that stocks were over priced even then. In short, US stocks have fallen back, but to a still impressive level. Whether we’d chalk that up to market resilience is another matter.

Given how badly risk is being mis-priced since the war started, it seems more likely that what the market has just been slow to process the unfolding crisis. And that is a fair indication of the sheer size of the shock at hand.

On the other side of the equation sits Iran, which is learning to its delight that it is easier to shut down the Strait of Hormuz than it will be to keep it open. The new Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, has released yet another defiant message vowing to keep the strait closed and “to avenge the blood of our martyrs.”

Heady stuff, I suppose, but the defiant new leader who hasn’t been seen since his appointment. No video, no audio - just written statements read by a news reporter on top of rumors that the new boss was injured or incapacitated – possibly before he got the job. The whole thing is developing a Weekend at Bernie’s vibe to it.

Whisky Tango Foxtrot

Understand that this is a speculative thought exercise, but one worth the question, What might an endgame be for whomever is actually running the place? That the IRCG has taken over wouldn’t surprise anyone, we predicted something like this at the 4717. Although, not with the ridiculous 80’s farce plot-point: the IRGC claiming an incapacitated Supreme Leader is, in fact, in charge while it pulls the strings or props him up on skis.

A little whacky, but it actually creates a wide, veiled space for the ones in charge. It projects defiance in a time of crisis as well as institutional continuity. The regime can run up oil prices to $200 to probe global pain points and inspire fear while putting the US in a vice of his own making. At home, the regime gains a fair measure of domestic unrest as gauged by street protests. So far it doesn’t appear that the opposition has gathered around a central figure, but either way the regime has a clearer picture. No one else will, as the ruse would confound what is really going on inside the regime and the country.

If the US’s default weapon is sheer overwhelming force (and we are very good at that), Iran’s weapon of choice is chaos and confusion - and has been since Darius the Great. Tehran knows it can’t hold the strait forever, yet this gives the old cods running the place time to secure their loot and, possibly, their escape. They will also calculate the pain to derail the US president in the mid-terms. Crucially the subterfuge would give Iran the off-ramp it will need for when the pressure gets too much.

When regime’s internal breaking-point gets too close, the IRGC simply “overthrows” the Supreme Leader. Perhaps in a coup - but not one ordered by Trump. So the new regime takes over, declares an end to hostilities and demands a clean state à la Venezuela or Syria. And the White House, delighted that the pressure on the US markets has been relieved – the calculus will run – will accept this.

Iran, though, won’t be a repeat of anything. They will come out of the play having mapped US and global pain points, calculated their own leverage over those points and kept the ability to do it again in their back pocket. Not a bad plan.

Granted, this is all speculation on my part, but it does seem like something they’d do.