Talks to reopen the Strait of Hormuz appear unlikely to produce an agreement, analysts told Jewish Insider this week, with little sign that Washington and Tehran can bridge their competing demands over the waterway. The Trump administration is more likely to pursue continued economic pressure than return to military confrontation, the experts suggested — but that strategy may not be enough to force Tehran to back down.

Reports indicate that an agreement between Iran and Oman on managing traffic through the strait is imminent, but a final deal has failed to materialize despite days of negotiations. Mohsen Rezaei, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, insisted on Tuesday that any agreement reached between the two countries is separate from Tehran’s broader closure of the waterway, which will only be lifted once the U.S. accedes to Tehran’s demands, including full compensation for its war costs.

Trump has also applied conditions of his own, stating the U.S. would also seek compensation from Iran for the current conflict as well as previous ones. Experts maintained to JI that a broader agreement between Washington and Tehran over the strait appears increasingly unlikely, with both sides seeking to preserve the leverage they have gained.

“Iran is unlikely to give up control of the strait anytime soon, having spent years threatening to choke the waterway and finally proving it can with relatively few cheap missiles and drones,” Ari Cicurel, associate director of foreign policy at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, told JI. “The mere threat of attacks remains Iran’s best leverage after a war that gutted its economy, which is why its demands for reopening [the strait] center on Washington lifting the blockade and pulling back forces, the two things that give the United States its own leverage, leaving the two sides’ positions increasingly incompatible.”

Steven Cook, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said his “sense is that we are going to have a long and drawn-out contest of wills over the strait.” 

“The president has toggled between threatening force, using force and negotiating. He seems to like the idea of economic pressure, but of course there is no way of knowing that the resulting economic pain will dislodge the regime,” he continued.

Michael Koplow, chief policy officer at the Israel Policy Forum, similarly noted the Trump administration is more likely to continue pursuing economic pressure than return to military hostilities, citing American munitions shortages, the war’s unpopularity with the public and Congress and the approaching midterm elections.

“Given the extreme unlikelihood of any successful negotiation between the U.S. and Iran, the two plausible scenarios are either a continuation of the status quo, or Trump using an Iran-Oman agreement on Hormuz to declare victory and extricate himself from the situation altogether,” Koplow said. “Trump’s preferred option is economic pressure … The economy has priced in the Hormuz closure, so if the U.S. keeps up economic pressure without returning to war, Trump can at least count on no drastic changes on inflation or public opinion, even if neither improves before the election.”

Elliott Abrams, who served as Iran envoy in the first Trump administration, said Washington has caused “great economic damage” to Iran by maintaining its blockade on oil exports, something he called “the right policy now.” He noted that Iran’s inflation rate “is just under 90 percent and it loses hundreds of millions of dollars a day in oil revenue.”

Cicurel cautioned, however, that economic pressure may not be enough to force Tehran to surrender its leverage over the strait, pointing to the Iranian regime’s history of passing along economic hardships to the country’s citizens while continuing to direct resources toward its military. He suggested Washington could instead seek to weaken Iran’s control over the strait by establishing “protected windows of time” for commercial vessels to transit and offering financial backing to shipping companies and insurers.

“The Iranian regime has long shown it can absorb immense economic pressure at the expense of the Iranian people while funneling resources into the military programs that have now handed it this leverage,” Cicurel said. “Neither economic pressure nor the limited tit-for-tat strikes over the past few weeks have changed Tehran’s calculus on leverage it waited years to gain.”

Additionally, Abrams indicated that the decision may not be entirely up to Trump should Tehran grow impatient under increased economic pressure. 

“The problem for Trump is that Iran may decide not to allow him to sit and wait. It is a vicious and brutal tyranny, but the rulers know that they risk another uprising as the economy worsens. That may lead them to attack Gulf Arab states, Israel and U.S. bases again,” Abrams said. “At some point Trump will have to hit back. The decision to return to war is really in the Ayatollah’s hands right now.”

Cook also noted that the economic pressure strategy “has costs for Americans too.”

“So far, prices at the pump have generally been manageable, but that cannot go on forever,” Cook said. “Americans have also been helped by the fact that experts undercounted how much oil is in storage around the globe. That’s a good problem to have, but it doesn’t change the fact that less oil (and other products like fertilizers and aluminum) is flowing through the strait. At some point, the laws of economics are going to catch up with us.”

Top Middle East analysts — including the Carnegie Endowment’s Karim Sadjadpour and Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ Mark Dubowitz — offered starkly different takes on whether the United States or Iran has emerged in a stronger strategic position following the recent U.S.-Iran conflict, yet shared a deeply critical view of the preliminary memorandum of understanding brokered between Washington and Tehran.

Speaking on Monday at the Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado during a panel discussion moderated by CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, Sadjadpour, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, argued that Tehran successfully leveraged the crisis to its advantage.

“Iran is in a much better place now than it was four months ago, before the war,” Sadjadpour said. “I think the biggest advantage they now have is controlling the Strait of Hormuz. They want to try to turn it, if not into the Panama Canal, at least have administrative control over it.”

Sadjadpour expressed deep skepticism that the Islamic Republic has any intention of making the fundamental concessions that the Trump administration has long demanded.

“I don’t think that they plan to make any meaningful compromises on the points which President Trump hoped to advance before the war, which is their nuclear program, their missile program, their regional proxies,” Sadjadpour said. “If you read that memorandum of understanding, which I call a ‘memorandum of misunderstanding,’ the two sides have very different takeaways from that. Really, the only thing it asks of Iran is a vague nuclear compromise, but it concedes the idea that after 60 days, perhaps they could control the strait. There’s nothing in there about missiles or proxies.”

Sadjadpour added that the conflict has inadvertently reinvigorated an Iranian regime that had otherwise appeared to be buckling under domestic dissent prior to the outbreak of hostilities.

“Four months ago, I used to describe the Islamic Republic as a zombie regime with a dying ideology, a dying leader, and dying legitimacy,” he observed. “I fear, at least in the immediate term, that we’ve kind of breathed new life into this zombie regime. It has a newfound self-confidence.”

He noted that while the war and protests among the Iranian public should have forced Tehran to rethink its priorities, the regime ultimately drew the wrong conclusions from the conflict.

“A lot of governments would say, ‘You know what? It is time for us to prioritize our economic and national interests first, instead of our ideology being death to America and death to Israel’ — which has gotten them into two catastrophic wars and triggered continuous popular uprisings,” Sadjadpour said. “But I actually think the regime has reached the opposite conclusion: that revolutionary ideology is not an albatross around the neck that’s going to sink the regime, it’s actually proven to be a life preserver, and we’re going to double down on it.”

Veteran Middle East journalist Ghattas similarly argued that the war has not led to a favorable outcome for the U.S. and has left the Iranian people in a worse position.

“I don’t see yet how this leads us to a better place in the region, and there’s a sense of despair in Iran,” Ghattas said. “It’s hard to get access to voices in Iran, but I think people feel betrayed.”

She added, however, that Tehran did suffer some losses, including that its “regional project has been severely damaged.” Ghattas also notedthat Iran has “lost their foothold in Syria.” 

Offering an opposing perspective, Dubowitz, CEO of FDD, countered that Tehran has actually suffered an unprecedented, devastating strategic and military defeat.

“The United States of America is winning, Israel is winning and the Islamic Republic of Iran is losing,” Dubowitz insisted, pointing to the physical damage inflicted on Iran’s sensitive facilities.

“Their nuclear infrastructure is severely degraded, the top 40 of their nuclear weapons scientists have been eliminated, and their nuclear sites are in ruins, with nuclear dust under the rubble,” Dubowitz added. “Their nuclear program has been set back by years, and their missile program has been severely curtailed.” Iran’s intercontinental ballistic missile program, he argued could have allowed Tehran to target America, is “obliterated.” 

But Dubowitz agreed that the White House squandered its upper hand by rushing into a substandard diplomatic framework.

“Why would you take that incredible military leverage and negotiate a fatally flawed MOU, which looks like it was written by the Qataris, written by the Iranians, and translated by ChatGPT into English?” Dubowitz asked. “It’s a terrible agreement. Why would you squander all that leverage at the negotiating table?”

According to Dubowitz, the driving force behind the agreement stemmed from  domestic political pressures rather than long-term geopolitical strategy. Trump, he argued, felt compelled to secure a quick pause in hostilities to stabilize the U.S. economy ahead of the upcoming midterm elections.

“Why? Because Trump needs to hold the House, he needs to hold the Senate, he needs to punt to November,” Dubowitz said. “He needs to open Hormuz, he needs to get gasoline and oil prices down, inflation down, and punt to November. And then he’s got two years and three months to double down on his Iran strategy” until his term is over.

“I think what Trump did is he realized ‘I have serious leverage, but I have a time issue,’” he continued. “So two parties are going in for an MOU, neither believes that either party is going to comply with it, and for their own reasons they need to hit the pause button.”

Sadjadpour noted, however, that those within the president’s inner circle remain deeply divided over whether the current diplomatic pause represents a genuine policy shift or a mere tactical intermission.

“When you talk to people who are in daily contact with the president, they will tell you very different things about where his mind is on this,” Sadjadpour said. “Some will tell you that this MOU was just temporary, don’t take it that seriously — ‘We needed to bring down the price of oil, and if within two months the Iranians are not playing ball, he’ll go back to the blockade or back to bombing.’ I speak to other people who are in daily contact with the president who say no, he’s done with Iran.”