Iran is signaling ever more clearly that it is prepared to raise the stakes in its confrontation with the United States. Within days, Tehran moved from threatening new restrictions on shipping to attacks on vessels, while U.S. forces responded with strikes on oil tankers that Washington links to financing the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
On Sept. 8, U.S. Central Command said it had destroyed five Iranian oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman and near Kharg Island. The American side described the operation as retaliation for two IRGC attempts to strike a U.S. warship with ballistic missiles. No American service members were killed.
It was already the second such episode within several days. On Sept. 5, U.S. forces destroyed three more Iranian oil tankers after attacks on an aircraft carrier and a destroyer. Subsequent Iranian strikes on ships near the Strait of Hormuz turned localized clashes into the most serious maritime escalation in months.
According to statements from Tehran, the era of limited “proportionate” responses is coming to an end. Iran’s leadership has warned that new strikes on its assets will draw faster and stronger retaliation, while a new restricted zone for shipping is being planned in the Persian Gulf.
Daycom’s analysis indicates that Iran is raising the stakes not because its position has become stronger, but precisely because one of Tehran’s main sources of leverage is weakening. The U.S. naval blockade is cutting Iranian revenue while Washington gradually restores the passage of foreign tankers through Hormuz. For the regime, escalation is becoming a way to recover lost influence.
The U.S. strategy is built on asymmetry. Washington is trying not only to protect international shipping, but also to keep Iranian oil off the market. The White House said in late August that nearly 1,500 commercial vessels had passed through the area under U.S. protection, while Iran’s own seaborne exports had been effectively blocked.
Independent data show a more complicated picture, but one that remains unfavorable to Tehran. Exports from Gulf states have recovered to roughly two-thirds of prewar volumes, partly through “dark transits” in which tankers switch off their transponders. Iran, however, remains far more constrained by the U.S. blockade.
The Strait of Hormuz itself illustrates the shift. Before the war, one of the world’s largest flows of energy passed through it. In the fourth quarter of 2025, oil and petroleum-product flows were about 21.6 million barrels a day, but by the second quarter of 2026 they had fallen to 4.9 million.
The latest wave of attacks has sharply reduced traffic again. On Sept. 10, tracking systems recorded only seven transits through Hormuz, compared with an average of 15 over the previous ten days and roughly 125 ships a day before the war began. Some tankers, however, may have passed with their transponders switched off.
For Iran, the problem is that this has still not produced the full economic shock Tehran had hoped for. The global market has adapted: Saudi Arabia is redirecting part of its oil toward the Red Sea, alternative suppliers are being used, and the United States is escorting selected convoys of commercial ships.
But adaptation has limits. In early September, roughly one-third of prewar oil exports from the Persian Gulf had still not returned to the market. Industry analysts estimated that the region was shipping about 15 to 16 million barrels a day, around 10 million barrels below prewar levels.
That shortfall has already become a global economic problem. Brent crude moved back above $100 a barrel this week and on Sept. 11 climbed to nearly $110 before easing toward roughly $104 on reports of possible new diplomatic contacts over shipping through Hormuz.
The consequences reach far beyond the oil market. Average U.S. diesel prices have crossed $6 a gallon for the first time, while more expensive fuel is again pushing up transport and production costs. The inflationary effects of the war are already influencing expectations for interest rates in both the United States and Europe.
This is where Iran still holds its strongest card. Tehran does not necessarily need to physically close the Strait of Hormuz. It only needs to make it dangerous enough that insurers raise premiums, shipowners delay voyages, and governments are forced to spend ever more resources on military escorts for energy flows.
But that leverage cuts both ways. The more Iran complicates passage through the strait, the greater the pressure on American consumers — and at the same time, the tighter the blockade on Iran itself becomes. Tehran is trying to make the war more expensive for the United States faster than Washington can make it economically unbearable for Iran.
The American campaign has expanded significantly in recent weeks. On Aug. 24, the U.S. Treasury launched Operation Economic Outcast, imposing sanctions on nearly 60 companies, individuals and vessels while increasing the risk of secondary sanctions in shipping, technology, gold and digital assets.
On Sept. 10, Washington announced new measures against networks linked to Iran-backed groups and further restricted licensing for Iran-related transactions. The U.S. strategy increasingly looks less like a conventional sanctions package and more like a systematic attempt to cut Iran off from the global financial system.
For the Iranian authorities, that is creating not only a foreign-policy problem but a domestic one. Falling oil revenue means less foreign currency for imports, a weaker rial, more expensive goods and greater difficulty maintaining the vast system of state subsidies that for decades has partly cushioned citizens from the effects of economic isolation.
Fuel has become one of the most politically sensitive symptoms. In September, the government doubled the gasoline tariff for the heaviest consumers — those using more than 110 liters a month. The decision came amid fuel shortages, inflation and consumption exceeding domestic production capacity.
Gasoline prices carry particular political weight in Iran. Previous sharp changes to fuel subsidies have already triggered protests, while a currency crisis at the end of 2025 again brought people into the streets. The leadership therefore sees economic exhaustion not simply as a welfare issue, but as a potential threat to regime stability.
That internal fear helps explain the increasingly aggressive rhetoric. If the leadership believes that prolonged economic pressure is steadily weakening its position, waiting ceases to be a safe choice. The incentive then grows to raise external risks now, while Iran still has the military capacity to do so.
Behavior at sea already reflects that shift in calculations. In the past, Iran generally avoided attacks that could cause significant American casualties and give Washington a direct justification for a major response. Now the IRGC is using ballistic missiles against U.S. naval vessels.
At the same time, Tehran is trying to widen the geography of maritime pressure. Mohsen Rezaei, secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, has announced a future restricted zone in the Persian Gulf that would go beyond Iran’s current claims to control shipping through Hormuz.
Details of how that system would work remain unclear. Rezaei has said that ships entering the zone defined by Tehran could be placed on an Iranian sanctions list. Politically, it is an attempt to answer the American blockade with a mirror principle: if the United States decides who can trade with Iran, Iran wants to decide who can sail safely through the Persian Gulf.
There is also a technological dimension. On Sept. 8, the IRGC said it had captured a U.S. autonomous underwater vehicle, a Dive-LD, near the entrance to the Strait of Hormuz. The Pentagon confirmed the loss but said the older model had malfunctioned and carried neither classified equipment nor sensitive data.
For Tehran, even such an episode has propaganda and military-technical value. Iran has spent decades studying captured foreign systems and attempting to reproduce selected technologies. More important, however, is what the underwater drone reveals: the density of U.S. surveillance around the critical maritime passage.
Despite the escalation, both sides are still leaving themselves a diplomatic exit. In June, the United States and Iran agreed to a memorandum that envisaged a halt in hostilities, restored navigation through Hormuz and a 60-day period for negotiations on a broader agreement, including the nuclear program and sanctions.
That framework did not survive mutual distrust. The U.S. blockade was restored because negotiations failed to produce a permanent agreement, and fighting began to intensify again. Washington and Tehran are now effectively arguing not only over the terms of a future deal, but over who will arrive at the table from the stronger position.
As of Sept. 11, the diplomatic channel is not completely closed. Reports that Middle Eastern states were trying to reach at least a temporary arrangement with Iran over shipping through Hormuz were enough to pull oil prices back from an early high near $110. That shows how much value markets place even on a limited chance of de-escalation.
But the margin for error has narrowed dramatically. When ballistic missiles are flying toward American warships, tankers are being destroyed by air or missile strikes, and commercial vessels are coming under fire, any failed episode can produce casualties after which political logic may demand a far larger response.
Another layer of risk is emerging in Yemen. Iran-aligned Houthis have captured Mokha and advanced toward Bab el-Mandeb while also attacking Saudi targets. If instability deepens there as well, the world could face simultaneous pressure on the two key maritime corridors around the Arabian Peninsula: Hormuz and the exit from the Red Sea.
For Tehran, that regional tension creates additional leverage regardless of how closely specific operations by allied groups are coordinated with Iran. For Washington, by contrast, it increases the number of assets, routes and partners that must be protected at once, making the strategy of attrition more expensive.
In the United States, that cost is becoming politically visible ahead of the November midterm elections. Expensive oil has revived inflation concerns, pushed bond yields higher and strengthened expectations of another Federal Reserve rate increase. The war is increasingly reaching directly into American voters’ wallets.
That may be central to Iran’s calculation: not to defeat the U.S. Navy in a direct confrontation, but to make continued pressure sufficiently expensive economically and politically. Yet the strategy is extremely dangerous because, to raise the cost, Tehran has to move ever closer to a threshold beyond which the United States could respond with a much broader military campaign.
Washington is making the opposite bet. The U.S. administration believes that the blockade, sanctions and strikes on oil infrastructure will break Iran’s economic resilience before high energy prices break America’s political willingness to continue the campaign. The conflict is becoming a contest between two different forms of attrition.
The problem for both sides is that the outcome of such a contest cannot be calculated precisely. Economic pressure sometimes forces states to compromise, but in other cases it convinces leaders that time is working against them and that they must act more aggressively. The latter scenario is becoming increasingly visible in Tehran’s behavior.
Iran has not fully closed the Strait of Hormuz, the American blockade has not forced the regime to capitulate, and the diplomacy of June did not produce a lasting peace. Instead, both sides have learned how to inflict steadily greater damage on each other without formally crossing into unrestricted war.
That is the most unstable point in the conflict. Each side believes that one more level of pressure may force the other to yield, but every such move simultaneously increases the chance of retaliation. A strategy of controlled escalation works only as long as both adversaries share the same understanding of where the final boundary lies.
There is no sign today that Washington and Tehran share such an understanding.
That is why the central question around Hormuz is no longer simply whether Iran can close the strait completely. What matters more is how much economic pain Tehran is still prepared to inflict on the world — and on itself — in order to recover the bargaining leverage that the U.S. blockade is steadily taking away.
