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Seven months into an active military conflict between the United States and Iran, neither side has achieved its stated objectives, a ceasefire framework has expired without producing a deal, and the world’s most critical oil shipping corridor remains effectively closed. The situation is not a stalemate in the classical sense. It is something more unstable: a war being managed rather than won, by two parties who cannot agree on what winning even looks like.
The Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly a fifth of the world’s oil supply passes, has been functionally shut since the US and Israel initiated the conflict in February. A Memorandum of Understanding signed in June, which was supposed to produce a permanent ceasefire within 60 days, has now lapsed. In its place, Washington has announced a sweeping economic blockade targeting Iran and any country that continues to trade with it. Three experts, speaking to the BBC, offer sharply different readings of where this goes next, though they converge on one uncomfortable conclusion: nobody has a clean path out.
Washington Is Pulling Levers Without a Clear Destination
Jason Campbell, a Senior Fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington DC, identifies the core problem as strategic ambiguity on the American side. “We still do not know definitively what the US strategic objectives are in Iran,” he told the BBC. “The White House is persistently re-evaluating what it is willing to live with from a political standpoint.”
The original assumption, Campbell notes, was that military action alone would produce a swift result. That has not happened. The administration is now cycling through a combination of military strikes and economic pressure, while appearing, in his reading, to be “satisfied with some form of stasis.” Maintaining the blockade and conducting periodic strikes against Iran’s capacity to disrupt Hormuz shipping seems to be the operating posture, at least for now.
US forces have managed to keep a limited flow of traffic moving through the strait in recent days, which has so far prevented an oil-price shock or broader economic collapse. But Campbell is direct about what that means: “Those were not the US objectives when starting the war.” The administration’s hope is that new sanctions will bring Iran to the table in a weakened position. Campbell is skeptical. “My sense is that Iran is likely to demand a high price to get to a resolution, which is likely to remain politically untenable for the Trump administration.”
Tehran Is Absorbing the Pain and Waiting
Dr Aniseh Bassiri Tabrizi, an Associate Fellow with Chatham House’s Middle East and North Africa Programme in London, does not see the latest round of strikes as changing Iranian calculations in any meaningful way. Tehran, she argues, has already priced in an intensifying economic squeeze and is prepared to manage a continuation of the intermittent exchange of strikes. Its strategy is proportionate response, calibrated specifically to avoid triggering a larger escalation.
The economic damage is real. Iran’s economy was already under structural strain before the conflict began, as the domestic protests of December and January made visible. The war has compounded that. But Bassiri Tabrizi draws a distinction between pain and capitulation. “I do not feel like there is the sense from the Iranian side that the economic squeeze is going to alter the Iranian calculation any time soon, including on any negotiations,” she told the BBC.
Iran, she argues, is looking for an exit, but on its own terms. Specifically, it is waiting for Washington to return to the June MoU framework, or at minimum to offer some form of concession. “Tehran does not want to cave in to US pressure or alter its own approach in response to sanctions or additional attacks.” That posture makes a near-term deal extremely difficult, because it requires the US to move first, which is politically costly for an administration that framed the conflict as a show of strength.
The Deal Already Exists. The Question Is Whether Anyone Will Use It
Nicholas Hopton, a Distinguished Fellow in international security at the Royal United Services Institute in London and a former UK ambassador to Iran, is the most direct of the three. He dismisses the idea that either military escalation or economic pressure will produce Iranian capitulation, and he points to a structural reason why the sanctions campaign is likely to fall short. “China, Russia and many other countries which trade with Iran are not going to support unilateral US sanctions,” he told the BBC. Without multilateral enforcement, the blockade has significant holes.
Hopton’s argument is that the exit already exists in the form of the June MoU, and that the US would benefit from returning to it. A deal built around that framework would, in his analysis, produce a genuine American win: it would weaken hardliners within the Islamic Republic, provide assurances against Iranian nuclear weapons development, and over time, through economic re-engagement, gradually transform the nature of the Iranian state. The mechanism he identifies is the lifting of all US sanctions on Iran, which he describes as “a silver bullet” in the MoU. Removing sanctions would, over time, erode the economic dominance of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which has deep penetration across the Iranian economy, and open Iran to outside commercial engagement in ways that would drive political and social change from within.
He is careful not to oversell this. “That would not be straightforward to achieve,” he acknowledges, given how extensively the IRGC is embedded in Iranian economic life. It would require sustained strategic patience from the US and its partners, a quality he describes, with some understatement, as being “in short supply at this point.” His near-term forecast is blunt: “A messy, inconclusive situation that is bad for everyone.”
Why This Matters Beyond the Middle East
For Malaysia, Singapore, and the broader ASEAN region, the stakes in this conflict are not abstract. Southeast Asia is heavily dependent on Gulf energy flows, and the Strait of Hormuz sits at the upstream end of supply chains that feed refineries and power grids across the region. A prolonged closure, or a sudden escalation that triggers an oil-price shock, would transmit quickly into fuel costs, inflation, and trade disruption across economies that are already navigating a fragile global environment.
The broader lesson from the expert assessments is that this conflict has entered a phase where neither side can win quickly, but both sides face real costs from continuing. The June MoU represents the clearest available framework for de-escalation, and all three analysts, from different angles, point back toward it. Whether Washington has the political will to return to a deal it has already walked away from once is the central question. Until that changes, the Strait of Hormuz stays closed, energy markets stay anxious, and the world waits.
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