Over three consecutive nights of air operations, United States military forces have launched strikes against hundreds of Iranian targets, including sites in the southern strategic port city of Bandar Abbas. The campaign was launched by sitting US President Donald Trump in an effort to reassert American control over the critically important Strait of Hormuz, the world’s most vital chokepoint for global oil and natural gas trade.
Trump has positioned the United States as the self-declared “guardian” of the waterway, revived a naval blockade of Iranian commercial ports, and made a fleeting demand for a 20 percent toll on all cargo transiting the strait – a proposal that his own Secretary of State Marco Rubio had publicly ruled out just two weeks prior to the announcement.
In response to the US strikes, Iran has escalated hostilities in turn: the country has carried out attacks on two commercial tankers operating in the strait, which left one crew member dead, and launched retaliatory strikes against US military bases located across the Persian Gulf. Tehran’s open decision to target commercial shipping in the strait, a move that directly threatens the stability of the global economy, lays bare the significant strategic leverage Iran holds in the escalating conflict.
Yet amid this spiraling cycle of tit-for-tat violence, a critical question has emerged: why has Iran chosen to carry out its long-dormant threat to disrupt traffic through the strait now, when it has held the military capacity to do so for nearly 40 years?
For four decades, the threat to close the Strait of Hormuz remained a rhetorical weapon that Iran never chose to fire. Even at the peak of the brutal Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, which saw more than 400 commercial and military vessels attacked across the Gulf, Tehran exercised deliberate and notable restraint. Iran never attempted to fully seal off the strait, not even after the USS Vincennes, a US Navy warship, mistakenly shot down an Iranian civilian passenger airliner in 1988, killing all 290 people on board.
At that time, Tehran’s strategic logic was clear: closing the strait would cripple Iran’s own critical oil export revenue and guarantee devastating retaliation from Western powers. As political scientist Caitlin Talmadge observed in 2008, closing the strait would have been “the military equivalent of cutting off its nose to spite its [enemies] face.” For decades, the strait functioned solely as an instrument of Iranian coercive diplomacy: Tehran leveraged the threat of closure as a deterrent and bargaining chip, but never followed through on the warning.
This pattern held through decades of escalating tensions. In 2011, then-Iranian Vice President Mohammad Reza Rahimi threatened that “not a drop of oil will pass through the Strait of Hormuz” if Western sanctions on Iran’s petroleum exports were implemented. Yet in the end, Tehran backed down, allowing the embargo to take effect without disrupting strait traffic. This pattern of rhetorical bluffing held through every round of escalation before 2026, making Iran’s current decision to act on its threats a significant departure from decades of strategic behavior.
Scholars argue this dramatic policy shift stems not from a change in material military capacity, but from a fundamental shift in how Iran’s leadership perceives risk. Behavioral economics’ prospect theory offers a compelling framework to explain this reversal: the theory holds that decision-makers do not evaluate risk in a consistent, rational way. When leaders operate within a context of perceived gains, they overwhelmingly prefer the certainty of what they already hold over risky gambles that could cost them their current advantages. But when leaders frame their situation as one of accumulating losses, this logic flips: they become far more willing to take extreme risks to recover what they have lost.
The clearest evidence of this shift comes from the first public statement by Iran’s new Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei, issued March 12, two weeks after the assassination of his predecessor Ali Khamenei. In the address, he declared: “The revenge we have in mind is not just because of the martyrdom of the illustrious leader of the revolution. Every member of the nation martyred by the enemy is a separate case that demands we seek revenge … the leverage of closing the Strait of Hormuz must definitely continue to be utilised.”
The statement reframed every Iranian death from conflict not as a tragic cost of war, but as a sacred debt that the United States and Israel owed in retribution – and the Strait of Hormuz was positioned as the tool to collect that debt. Khamenei’s insistence that the strait’s leverage “must definitely continue to be utilised” transformed the waterway into a mechanism through which Iran could recover its accumulated perceived losses.
This framing has spread widely across Iranian society. In a mid-April address delivered directly at the shore overlooking the strait, Iranian cleric Hojjat al-Islam Jafar Rastakhiz argued that “for 47 years the criminal America has sanctioned us” and now “the Strait of Hormuz, because of the atrocities of America, has been closed.” Ali Khamenei’s recent state funeral, which drew mass processions across Iran, turned the regime’s collective losses into a public national ritual, with mourners chanting in unison: “Our word is one! Revenge! Revenge!”
This public rhetoric lays bare how the Iranian regime now narrates its geopolitical position: it has framed Iran as a state burdened by decades of accumulated military, political, and symbolic losses that demand recovery. In doing so, it has created the exact conditions under which extreme risk-taking becomes politically and strategically acceptable to Iran’s leadership.
This shift carries uncomfortable implications for US strategy. Trump’s decision to launch repeated strikes on Iran, while framing the action as protecting commercial shipping in the strait, may actually be reinforcing the very psychological conditions that drive Tehran’s risky behavior. Conventional effective deterrence relies on the assumption that an adversary will calculate what it stands to lose from escalation. But against a regime that believes it has already suffered irrecoverable losses, every additional US strike simply deepens the perceived deficit that Iran’s leaders are gambling to reverse. Today, the conflict is being fought on terms entirely defined by Tehran.