If you go by Donald Trump’s account, he has already won the war with Iran several times over. Iran’s regime is pleading for the opportunity to capitulate, collapsing from within, and confronting the imminent, possibly explosive, demise of its oil industry. Final victory for the US in its historic confrontation with the Islamic Republic is assured and, perpetually, mere days away.
In reality, there is no indication that the Iranian regime is crumbling. Five days after Trump claimed Iran had just three days left until its oil infrastructure “explodes from within,” presumably from the pent-up pressure of all the exports thwarted by the US naval blockade, zero oil wells have exploded. “We could extend to 30 [days] and livestream the well here,” Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of Iran’s parliament and previous head of the country’s negotiating team, suggested in a mocking post on X on 29 April. He added that the US president was receiving “junk advice”.
Far from conceding defeat, Tehran’s latest proposal apparently offered to reopen the Strait of Hormuz if the US lifts its blockade, postponing negotiations over its nuclear programme to a later date. But this would consign the waterway to a worse version of its pre-war status, with Iranian officials indicating they intend to continue extracting tolls from passing ships and exercising authority over a crucial maritime trade route that was previously free to navigate.
Unsurprisingly, Trump rejected that proposal. Instead, he has reportedly instructed aides to prepare for an extended blockade and resumed his threats against Iran on social media. The US president posted an AI-generated image of himself holding an assault rifle on Truth Social on 29 April, against a backdrop of multiple explosions in Iran, accompanied by the caption: “NO MORE MR. NICE GUY!” The next day, Axios reported that Trump was due to be briefed by military commanders on options for a “short and powerful” new campaign that would aim to break the impasse with Iran. The plans under discussion were said to include a new wave of air strikes, a ground assault to seize Iranian territory along the Strait of Hormuz, and a special forces raid to extract Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium. With no end to the war in sight, oil prices surged above $120 a barrel, the highest price since the early months of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Two simultaneous, competing countdown clocks are now effectively ticking. On one side, the Trump administration appears to believe that a prolonged naval blockade will force Tehran to fold by cutting off the oil export revenues that flow, disproportionately, to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and worsening the economic crisis that was already underway. More credibly than Trump’s predictions of exploding oil wells, the US treasury secretary Scott Bessent insists that Iran’s storage facilities are already at capacity, with the country’s oil industry already beginning to “shut in” – or suspend – some production, risking permanent damage to some oil fields if the blockade goes on. Yet on the other side, Iranian officials are watching energy prices tick up and shortages of vital commodities taking hold as the US and its allies confront an unprecedented oil shock and an impending global economic crisis that many experts warn is already inevitable.
Both sides have already demonstrated they can inflict significant pain on the other. The question now is which side believes it can endure that pain for longer, and the answer appears to be: both. Both Tehran and Washington seem to believe that if they keep up the current level of pressure – or perhaps even ratchet it up – they can secure a momentous victory. Neither wants to submit to the humiliation of perceived defeat. And so, the double blockade goes on.
“There are a couple of huge assumptions underlying the US narrative that I think are seriously flawed,” said Rosemary Kelanic, director of the Middle East programme at the Washington-based think tank Defense Priorities and author of Black Gold and Blackmail: Oil and Great Power Politics. For a start, Iran already appears to be exploring alternative transit routes to mitigate at least some of the economic impact of the US blockade. “Iran is not an island,” she explained. “You can trade oil in many ways that are difficult to trace. It might be harder to scale, but they can send things by rail, through the Caspian Sea, or overland through Turkmenistan. They can’t do it overnight, it will take some time, but they will find ways to export oil outside the blockade because they are highly motivated.” Pakistan reportedly opened six overland transit corridors with Iran on 25 April, allowing goods to be transported across their 900km border by road. Iran has also shut in – and resumed – some production before, without ruinous consequences.
Then, there is the assumption that economic pain will force the Iranian regime into making significant concessions even if the blockade is effectively enforced. “Economic warfare – whether that takes the form of blockades, sanctions, embargoes, or even strategic bombing of industrial infrastructure – has been tried in many different ways for at least a century,” Kelanic argued. “It almost never works, particularly when a country believes it is facing existential stakes.”
She pointed to the examples of the Allied naval blockade of Germany during World War I, the blockade of Japan during World War II, and even the blockade of Confederate ports in southern states during the American Civil War. Japan continued fighting until the US dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Soviet Union entered the war against it. In the case of both Nazi Germany and the Confederacy, “it took four years, plus a devastating ground war to get the other side to surrender,” she noted. “So the idea that this is going to magically happen in a tolerable span for the world economy, and for Trump as president, is just fallacious.”
On 27 April, Iran’s foreign minister Abbas Araghchi travelled to St Petersburg on board a plane named “Minab 168” in memory of the 168 children killed in an alleged US missile strike on an elementary school at the start of the war. (The US military is investigating the incident.) The Russian president welcomed Araghchi and praised both the importance of their strategic partnership and Iran’s resilience. “We see how courageously and heroically the Iranian people are fighting for their independence and sovereignty,” Putin said in televised remarks. He vowed that Russia “will do everything that meets your interests and the interests of all people in the region in order to ensure that this peace is achieved as quickly as possible”.
Two seats to Putin’s left sat Igor Kostyukov, the head of the main directorate of military intelligence of the Russian General Staff (GRU), who also took part in talks with Araghchi in Moscow during the Twelve Day War in June 2025. “I think the Russians are definitely providing Iran with intelligence, as well as diplomatic coordination,” Nicole Grajewski, author of Russia and Iran: Partners in Defiance from Syria to Ukraine, told me. “The Iranians are also providing data and information back to Russia about how various systems performed against Iranian missiles and drones, and how they can wage war against the United States.”
Russia could also play a role in any future deal that includes Iran agreeing to hand over its highly enriched uranium. “If Iran actually does move on that, which is still unknown, the Russians are likely going to be the country that will ship that out, because they’ve done that before and they have the capacity to do it,” Grajewski said. (Russia offered last June, and again earlier this year, to take control of Iran’s nuclear material, and removed Syria’s chemical weapons stockpiles in 2014.) The Kremlin has benefited from the early months of the war as it has pushed up oil and gas prices, depleted US stocks of interceptor munitions, strained Western alliances, and diverted American attention from Ukraine. But this doesn’t mean Putin necessarily wants the conflict, and the accompanying global economic instability, to continue indefinitely, particularly if that threatens the current Iranian regime’s survival.
“If the war resumes, and Iran is pushed to the brink of collapse, then that’s really negative for the Kremlin,” Grajewski explained. “They want to see the survival of Iran, so if this does become an active conflict again, it is entirely possible that the Russians provide more munitions, more support, potentially even PMCs [private military contractors], without getting directly involved. If that means that the US is weaker, more distracted, and less prepared to fight a war with Russia, then that’s a real benefit for them.”
Trump is due to depart for China on 14 May for a summit with Xi Jinping that he has already postponed once because of this war. The encounter, if it goes ahead, will require deft diplomacy on both sides – an attribute not generally associated with the US president – to gloss over the jarring gap between their positions. Where Xi has called for the Strait of Hormuz to be reopened, albeit without directly mentioning either Iran or the US – he told Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman on 20 April that this was in the “common interest of regional countries and the international community” – Trump has repeatedly boasted about the success of his blockade.
Like Russia, China has benefited from some aspects of the war, which has diverted American military assets and strategic focus back towards the Middle East. But Beijing stands to lose much more than Moscow from an open-ended conflict that derails the global economy, threatening China’s own export-focused economic model, and with it, domestic stability. “China finds itself in a strategic bind,” said Ahmed Aboudouh, an associate fellow with the Middle East and North Africa programme at Chatham House. “On the one hand, the two realistic scenarios of the war resuming, or a protracted no-peace, no-war reality, weigh heavily on its energy supplies and non-oil trade with the Gulf region. On the other hand, it can’t decisively influence the trajectories of de-escalation or negotiations in a way that brings the war to an end, which is Beijing’s most desirable outcome.”
Xi likely views the war as an “unnecessary distraction” from the more important issues he planned to discuss with Trump during their summit, Aboudouh told me — such as trade, US technology restrictions, and the status of Taiwan. “China will make efforts to facilitate talks [between the US and Iran], but this is the best they can do. This shows the limits of Beijing’s Middle East diplomacy, which is premised on an engagement-without-entanglement basis.” In other words, if Trump is expecting Xi to intervene decisively in this conflict to pressure Iran, which is heavily reliant on trade with China, he is liable to be disappointed.
Surveying the economic fallout from this war, which is already reverberating across Asia with devastating effect, Beijing may also believe it is better prepared than many other countries, including the US, to withstand the coming crisis. China has an estimated strategic petroleum reserve of 1.2 billion barrels of crude oil, which it has not yet tapped, and access to diversified sources of energy, including vast reserves of coal and rapidly increasing renewable energy capacity. By contrast, the US economy is approximately 40 percent more oil-intensive than China.
“China is vulnerable because they are part of the global economy, but their economy is less vulnerable than the US economy to an oil shock,” Rosemary Kelanic explained. “China is hurt first [compared to the US], because they are closer to the Gulf, and they get more from the Gulf directly, but the economic pain is actually going to be worse for the United States because we rely so much more heavily on oil than China does.”
Of course, it is always possible that Trump will decide to simply declare victory – again – and walk away from a conflict that has already cost an estimated $25 billion and is extraordinarily unpopular at home, continuing to insist that he has won. But that would likely mean abandoning his efforts to extract serious concessions from Iran on its nuclear programme and leave the Iranian regime in a stronger position than it was before the war. He could just as easily decide to escalate, ordering the US military to resume bombing Iran in another attempt to force its leaders to come to terms.
Asked where she thought the conflict would go from here, Kelanic said the best strategy for the US would be to cut its losses while it was still possible to minimise the damage to the American economy, and with it, the global economy, but that was not the most likely outcome. “I think it is much more likely that Trump continues this conflict for months more,” she said. “It is just politically difficult to lose a war. It is the same reason we stayed in Afghanistan for 20 years.”
[Further reading: After Iran, America may turn against Israel]
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