Tanker attacks risk overplaying Iran’s hand and reigniting a war

DUBAI - Iran, fearing that its hold over the crucial Strait of Hormuz shipping lanes was gradually slipping away, risked overplaying its hand by again firing on oil tankers and potentially rekindling a major war with the United States, analysts said.

Both sides threatened on July 8 to scuttle the memorandum of understanding that they had signed June 17 to establish a blueprint for peace talks and extend a wobbly ceasefire in place since April.

US warplanes carried out even more intensive attacks on scores of targets across Iran overnight, while Iran vowed to ratchet up drone and missile strikes against US allies in the Persian Gulf.

The basic bargain in the vaguely worded, 14-point memorandum of understanding was that Iran would reopen the Strait of Hormuz for commercial shipping in exchange for badly needed economic relief.

Thornier issues, including the fate of Iran’s nuclear programme, were kicked down the road for further negotiations. But very little changed.

“The MOU increasingly looked like a mirage,” said Vali Nasr, a veteran Iran analyst and a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

“The view from Tehran is that the US is engaged in a concerted effort to take control of the strait out of Iran’s hands, to weaken its position in Lebanon and to regain its own strength in order to put even more pressure on Iran or to go back to war.”

As the 60-day clock on the agreement ticked away, Iran grew increasingly frustrated that the US Navy was encouraging maritime traffic to take a southern route along the coast of Oman rather than respecting Iranian demands that all traffic register with its newly minted Hormuz transit authority, a precursor to charging fees.

Traffic last weekend was about one-third of the prewar level of more than 100 ships daily, split evenly between the Iranian and Omani sides of the waterway, according to Kpler, which tracks marine traffic.

In addition, the United States was working to conclude a separate peace between Lebanon and Israel that would include the long-elusive goal of disarming Hezbollah, Iran’s main proxy force in Lebanon. Finally, in public discussions about financial aid, the scale kept shrinking.

Instead, even amid the weeklong funeral ceremonies for Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader killed in the war in February, the Iranians decided to strike rather than wait for their leverage to dissipate, analysts said.

Projectiles hit three tankers transiting the strait on July 7, although Iran did not claim responsibility.

The perception by Iran that it had bested the United States and Israel in the war earlier in 2026 likely helped lead to the renewed confrontation, analysts said.

“Having withstood this pummelling from the US and Israel, they are probably feeling quite secure,” said Suzanne Maloney, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington who has advised both Republican and Democratic administrations on Middle East policy.

“I think the timing of the attacks, coinciding with these funeral ceremonies, demonstrates a bit of triumphalism on the part of the regime that they finally, essentially extricated themselves from the war. They’re able to bury their dead, and they’re still firing back. There’s a message in that for sure.”

Even if shipping had flowed freely before the war, the message from Iran was that it intended to enforce a newfound chokehold over the strait, analysts said. The United States, which had lifted oil sanctions against Iran that had been in place for decades, immediately reimposed them.

Iran professed not to care. “Revenue is subordinate to control,” Majid Shakeri, an Iranian economist and adviser to Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, the Parliament Speaker and lead negotiator, said on state television.

“Either we hold onto the strait, or every single one of us becomes martyrs for it.”

Still, both sides make a habit of fierce rhetoric and bluster, analysts noted, and tend to use warfare as a form of negotiation. President Donald Trump did not entirely dismiss the idea of getting negotiations back on track.

Ultra hardliners in Iran have long assailed the very idea of negotiations, so there have been calls to withdraw from the memorandum of understanding over the situation in the strait.

“I think it is mostly posturing,” said Nate Swanson, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council who previously served as director for Iran at the National Security Council under President Joe Biden.

“I think it is akin to what Trump is doing. He is negotiating through kinetic actions and loud threats, so in some ways they are speaking the same language.”

Iran was betting that Trump, expressing annoyance with the conflict and facing difficult midterm elections in four months, would not gamble on restarting an unpopular war, analysts suggested.

Yet, Trump unleashed a tirade against the Iranians, assailing their leaders as “evil” and “scum” and suggesting that the United States would hit Iran even harder. He called the ceasefire “over”.

“They risk misreading President Trump which they have done over and over again,” said Joel Rayburn, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute who is a retired US Army colonel and a former special envoy for Syria during the first Trump administration.

Iran has a long habit of taking provocative actions like firing on the tankers and then acting as the aggrieved party, he said: “They are overplaying their hand.”

It would not be the first time.

Right after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the new hardline government in Tehran held onto American Embassy hostages for 444 days, far longer than they served as useful bargaining chips, and had billions of dollars of assets in Western financial institutions seized in return.

In 1982, Iran declined a truce in the Iran-Iraq war, leading to six more years of brutal fighting and hundreds of thousands of casualties. NYTIMES

• This article originally appeared in The New York Times.