‘Shells within shells’

For years, the United States fought Iran with sanctions, not soldiers. In late February, that changed: U.S. and Israeli strikes hit Iran, and the long economic war became a shooting one.

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps—the elite arm of Iran’s military—hit back on both fronts. In early March, it declared the Strait of Hormuz “blockaded”—the channel that carries about a quarter of the world’s seaborne oil and a third of its fertilizer—and started making good on it, going after ships that tried to run the line.

Shipping through Hormuz plummeted.

The U.S. president’s answer, posted online: “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell—JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.” Then Washington threw a blockade around Iran’s own ports, from mid-April to late May.

Who’s still afraid of an American sanction?

Nicholas Mulder is an assistant professor of history at Cornell University and the author of The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War, and the forthcoming The Age of Confiscation: Making and Taking Property in the Creation of the Modern World.

Mulder says Iran was built to take this. It can choke Hormuz, it can fight, and it’s been here before—driven to almost zero oil exports under the last “maximum pressure” campaign—and it’s conspicuously still standing. But what Iran did here isn’t even an outlier; it’s the pattern. The Russians learned to slip sanctions, the Chinese built weapons of their own, and one country after another has worked out how to live with the economic weapon—and has stopped flinching.

Russia and China barely look up now, Mulder says: Years of sanctions forced them to build their own way out. Washington’s friends never had to—Europe and Asia stayed plugged into American tech, American finance, American security. So they’re the last ones Washington can still strong-arm—an irony they’re just now starting to see …

Gustav Jönsson: How much of an outlier is Iran’s closure of Hormuz, as an act of economic coercion against the United States?

Nicholas Mulder: Not an enormous outlier. It’s the second economic counter-response the U.S. has faced recently—the first was China’s rare-earth export controls last year. You’d expect China, with its commercial and manufacturing dominance, to hold serious cards. The Chinese have gone further—they’ve built their own copy of most of the U.S. export-control bureaucracy.