Likely
Structured attrition settles into strait diplomacy
Strikes continue below full-scale war while the Omani two-corridor draft and European fee proposals become the real negotiation over who governs Hormuz.
Closing straits and burning ports replaced taking ground
JUL 07Tue
QOM MOBILIZES
Khamenei's funeral converts mourning into mandate; the successor leadership escalates at Hormuz.
JUL 12Sun
STRAIT SHUTS
Iran strikes a container ship and declares Hormuz closed; oil reprices.
JUL 15Wed
ODESA CHOKES
Russia's fifth straight day on Odesa squeezes grain; Kyiv reshuffles for winter.
Iran opened July burying Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and came out of the mourning harder. The successor leadership, buoyed by the crowds in Qom, escalated attacks on Hormuz shipping within days of the funeral.
On July 12, Iran's Revolutionary Guard struck a container ship it said was on an unapproved route and declared the strait closed until American interference ends. That broke what remained of the ceasefire while Oman hosted foreign-ministry mediation.
Washington answered with its third strike wave in a week, then went further. On July 13, Trump declared the United States guardian of the strait, reinstated the naval blockade of Iranian ports, and announced a 20 percent toll on cargo transiting Hormuz.
Iran retaliated against American bases in Kuwait, Jordan, and Bahrain. American strikes moved on to Iranian coastal defenses and the missile sites on Greater Tunb island that anchor Tehran's hold on the shipping lanes.
Through it all the negotiation channel stayed open. Iran's lead negotiator Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf declared on national television that Iran would defend itself on the battlefield and at the negotiating table alike, hours after the foreign ministry denied talks were coming.
The Russia-Ukraine war ran on the same fuel. Russia hammered Greater Odesa's ports for five consecutive days to choke Ukraine's grain exports, and timed mass missile barrages on Kyiv to the NATO summit in Ankara.
Ukraine kept scaling the drone campaign that holds Russia's oil income at risk. Moscow's finance ministry reported a first-half deficit of 75 billion dollars, with more than half the year's budgeted spending already consumed.
Zelensky reshuffled his cabinet for a winter of economic siege, ousting defense minister Mykhailo Fedorov, the champion of the drone-first strategy. Ukrainian troops marched in the Bastille Day parade in Paris as Trump announced Patriot production licenses for Kyiv.
On NATO's eastern edge, Lithuania and Poland warned of planned Russian sabotage against critical infrastructure. Moscow is testing what the alliance will absorb below the threshold of war.
Every war is now a revenue war
Strip away the strike reports and the first half of July reduces to one fact: nobody is fighting for ground. Iran taxes oil transit, Washington blockades Iranian ports, Russia strangles Ukraine's grain exports, and Ukraine burns Russia's refinery income.
Front lines barely moved in either war. The money moved everywhere: oil repriced, a major grain exporter suspended operations at Odesa, and Moscow burned through more than half its annual budget in six months.
Hormuz has no landlord
Two powers now claim to govern the world's most important oil passage, and neither can. Iran declared the strait closed and struck ships to prove it. Washington declared itself the strait's guardian and claimed a 20 percent toll it has no way to collect while Iranian missiles still reach the lanes.
American strikes are real, but they buy attrition, not control. Hitting the missile sites on Greater Tunb thins Iran's coverage of the shipping lanes without restoring transit, and Iran has rebuilt that kind of infrastructure before.
That vacuum is why the most consequential Hormuz work of the half happened in Muscat, not at sea. Oman is drafting a two-corridor transit regime, and European governments are weighing a voluntary navigational-fee system modeled on the Malacca Strait arrangement.
The drafts read differently depending on who holds them. One reading formalizes Iran's authority over the northern passage and rewards the closure. The other converts a national chokehold into shared governance and strips Tehran of the exclusive control the blockade was meant to break.
Either way, the shipping economy is already voting. Insurance and rerouting costs are teaching buyers what Russian gas taught Europe in 2022: a route that can be closed at will gets priced as a liability and engineered around, permanently.
Tehran bleeds while holding
Iran holds the lever that moves world oil prices and absorbed round after round of strikes without yielding it. It still ends the half weaker than it began.
The reason sits above the strait, not in it. Khamenei's death removed the arbiter who fused Iran's clerical, military, and financial power, and his presumed successor Mojtaba Khamenei has yet to appear in public.
Ghalibaf's promise to fight on the battlefield and at the table alike, delivered hours after the foreign ministry denied talks were coming, is what a system without an apex sounds like. Both statements were true. No faction can yet enforce a single line.
The street is a constraint of the regime's own making. A state that mounts a billboard in central Tehran promising to kill Trump has bound its legitimacy to revenge, and a government that owes its crowds a reckoning cannot sign the settlement its economy needs.
That is the trap the funeral built. The mourning that licensed the successor leadership to escalate is the same force that narrows its room to stop.
Grain becomes the front
Russia spent the same two weeks proving the doctrine in a different sea. Five consecutive days of strikes on Greater Odesa went after Ukraine's grain revenue, and the barrages on Kyiv were stockpiled for weeks so they would land during the NATO summit.
Ukraine's answer is symmetrical. Its drone campaign holds Russia's refinery and export income at risk, and Moscow's books show the squeeze working.
The two wars are now coupled through the oil price. The surge from the Hormuz fighting papered over Moscow's deficit in the spring, the fade exposed it by late June, and every week the strait stays shut sends the subsidy back. Washington's war on Tehran keeps part-financing the war it wants ended in Ukraine.
Kyiv's weak point in this contest is institutional. Ousting Mykhailo Fedorov at the demand of contractors and the general staff removes the architect of Ukraine's one scaling advantage at the exact moment strike capacity is its main claim on American support.
Europe is building around the bottleneck rather than waiting on Washington. Ten governments launched a ballistic-interceptor program around a battle-tested Ukrainian design, and the Gdansk conference folded reconstruction into a wartime resilience architecture anchored by a 90 billion euro loan.
The next window
Three forks decide whether the pattern hardens. The first is inside Tehran: Ghalibaf's channel survives only until Mojtaba Khamenei either consolidates authority or loses it to the factions promising revenge.
The second is at Muscat. A fee regime on the Malacca model would be the war's first durable off-ramp, while a draft that ratifies Iranian authority over the northern corridor would reward closure as a business model and teach every government sitting on a strait the same lesson.
The third is Yemen. The Houthi strike on Abha's airport and the bombing of Sana have the 2022 truce at the edge of collapse, and a reopened Yemen front would hand Tehran a second strait and double the tax on world shipping.
Underneath all three sits the same stuck fact. The two governments claiming to govern the world's oil passage are the two that cannot, and the settlement drafted around them will decide whether closing Hormuz was Tehran's costliest mistake or its most profitable act.
Closing Read
A siege only pays while the besieged cannot route around it. Every week of closure teaches oil buyers to price Hormuz as a permanent risk, and every toll claim strengthens Oman's case for a strait no one owns.
The revenue weapon depreciates with use, and Tehran and Moscow are spending theirs faster than their sieges earn. The question for the second half is whether either cashes out before the market finishes routing around them.
Scenarios
Long Shot
The Houthis open a second strait
The Saudi-Houthi truce collapses after the airport exchanges, a Bab el-Mandeb front opens, and world shipping faces tolls at two waterways at once.
Key Items
Iran declares Hormuz closed and strikes a container ship
The closure converted Iranian geography into a veto over a fifth of the world's oil and set the terms every other actor spent the half reacting to.
Trump reimposes the blockade and claims a 20 percent Hormuz
Washington's guardianship claim matched Tehran's closure claim, leaving the strait with two self-declared landlords and no working regime, the vacuum Oman is now drafting into.
Emboldened successor leadership escalates after Khamenei's funeral
The funeral converted mourning into an escalation mandate and bound the new leadership to a revenge line that narrows its own exit from the war.
Russia pounds Odesa's ports for a fifth straight day
The Black Sea campaign is the same doctrine in a different theater: strangle export revenue rather than take ground, and force Kyiv to reorganize its government around endurance.
Russia's first-half deficit hits 75 billion dollars as the oil
Moscow's budget briefly rode the Hormuz war's oil surge, and its fade shows how directly one war now finances the other.