Taha Zeinali
The Question the Empire Cannot Answer
As of late May 2026, the ceasefire holds only provisionally, and the gap between Washington and Tehran has proven too wide to bridge through the exchange of proposals. The US plan demands that Iran halt all uranium enrichment, dismantle its enrichment infrastructure, and surrender its stockpile of highly enriched uranium, with any lifting of the naval blockade contingent on Iran’s prior acceptance of these terms.
It is, in effect, a demand for strategic disarmament, offered in exchange for sanctions relief that Washington has already twice proven it can revoke unilaterally. Iran’s counter-position begins from the opposite end: an immediate end to the war, lifting of the naval blockade, removal of all sanctions, reparations for war damages, and the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz — with all nuclear discussions explicitly deferred to a later stage, after sovereignty has been recognized and the military confrontation formally concluded. In Tehran’s sequencing, the nuclear question is the last item on the table, not the first. In Washington’s sequencing, it is the only item. Between these two positions, there is no splitting of the difference. One side is demanding the concessions of a defeated state. The other is refusing to perform a defeat that did not occur.
Washington is demanding the concessions of a defeated state from a state that knows it has not been defeated. It is clear that the US administration cannot comprehend why, after nine weeks of the most intensive military, financial, and political pressure ever assembled against the country, Iran is not pursuing peace from a position of weakness, but instead issuing its own conditions, structuring the sequence of negotiations, and projecting power through the world’s most critical energy chokepoint.
This incomprehension is systemic. Edward Said’s notion of the “arrogance of the imperial gaze” helps explain this moment. Imperial power produces distorted knowledge about the targeted country or region, assuming that local actors will behave in ways that confirm US expectations rather than their own strategic logics. Washington’s failure to understand Iran’s current posture is an epistemic one. US imperialism cannot process the possibility that a state subjected to simultaneous military assault, the assassination of its supreme leader, sanctions escalation, UN snapback mechanisms, naval blockade, and regime change operations might emerge from that convergence more defiant, more unified, and more strategically capable than before. That, however, is precisely what happened.
On May 19, Trump announced “another big hit”, and the same day, the IRGC warned that any resumed assault would take the war “beyond the region, to unimaginable places.” A new round of war appears imminent. This essay explains why it will not produce what the first one failed to deliver and why each successive round of imperial aggression compounds, rather than reverses, the transformation Iran has undergone. The Third Imposed War on Iran by the US Imperialism and the Zionist regime constitutes a new strategic conjuncture, one reshaping Iran’s internal political dynamics, reconfiguring regional alignments, and fundamentally altering the balance of power in the Arab-Iranian region. The line of this transformation begins with the assassination of Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei.
Martyrdom as Political Renewal
The strategic logic behind this targeted killing is familiar: remove the symbolic and institutional center of authority, induce a succession crisis, fragment elite cohesion, and create conditions for political realignment toward Western preferences. This logic, however, rests on a fundamental misreading of Iran’s political culture, specifically, the deep structural role of martyrdom in Shi’a political theology. In the Shi‘a Iranian cultural and political tradition, martyrdom marks not the end of a movement, but its rebirth. Rooted in the paradigm of Karbala, it is a generative political event capable of converting grief into cohesion, loss into moral authority, and shock into mass mobilization.
What is increasingly clear from available accounts is that Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei did not simply fall victim to an attack. He remained publicly present despite elevated risk, consciously accepting the possibility of martyrdom rather than withdrawing from the field. That decision transformed the political meaning of the event entirely, converting an act of enemy aggression into an act of sovereign witness. The assassination produced a revival.
The martyrdom reactivated the revolutionary spirit of the state, reinforced the moral narrative of resistance, and produced large-scale spontaneous mobilization, significantly among younger generations who had grown up long after the revolution. A sustained mass movement demanding revenge and resistance emerged and has continued with force. The people mobilized from below and, in doing so, reshaped the political field within the Islamic Republic itself. The discursive architecture of resistance has become socially re-embedded and popularly re-enforced. This movement actively strengthened the political factions rallying behind the defense establishment while isolating those advocating strategic compromise. The defiant line has prevailed in internal power struggles, with supporters of accommodation lacking sufficient leverage to alter the negotiating trajectory. The enemy’s most dramatic act of decapitation thus became, through the generative logic of martyrdom, the most powerful instrument of political renewal the Islamic Republic has experienced in decades.
The Collapse of the War Trap
Militarily, Iran demonstrated a level of resilience that most Western analysts had systematically underestimated. Facing the world’s most powerful military apparatus, Iran sustained operations, absorbed pressure, maintained both defensive and retaliatory capacities, and executed calibrated responses without triggering uncontrolled escalation. Iran has demonstrated that it retains the capacity to launch precise attacks when necessary, and that residual capability, combined with Hormuz control and axis-of-resistance depth, remains more than sufficient to impose unacceptable costs on adversaries. This revealed sophisticated escalation management and a strategic depth that debunked longstanding Western portrayals of Iranian military thinking as impulsive or irrational.
The military performance also shattered a long-standing psychological constraint: the “war trap” narrative. For years, the possibility of direct US military intervention served as a structural obstacle in Iranian political debate. The argument that any escalation could trigger catastrophic war with the US shaped internal discourse, generated caution, and created sustained pressure for compromise. Iran has now experienced direct confrontation with the US without systemic collapse or strategic capitulation. The myth of American military invincibility and the consequent inevitability of Iranian defeat has been broken. Once that psychological barrier falls, the entire strategic landscape changes. Consequently, Iran’s room for maneuver expands, and the deterrent power of US military threats diminishes in kind.
This transformation must be understood within the broader contest over regional order-making. The US and Israeli regimes have long pursued an architecture centered on US security guarantees, Israeli military and technological primacy, and the integration of Persian Gulf monarchies into a US-led economic and security framework. That architecture is now fracturing visibly. The UAE’s decision to exit OPEC, accelerated by its open alignment against Iran, signals the deepening reconfiguration of the Persian Gulf political economy that the war has catalyzed. The project of imposing a US-centered regional order is now encountering resistance that is sustained, deepening, and structurally embedded.
The Strait of Hormuz: Sovereign Control as Anti-Systemic Power
It is within this context that the most consequential development of the entire war must be understood: Iran’s effective sovereign control over the Strait of Hormuz. Approximately one-fifth of the world’s oil supply passes through this narrow waterway. Since the April 8 ceasefire, Iran has maintained restricted movement through the strait while the US has maintained a blockade of Iranian ports. This strategy constituted a dual chokehold that has effectively frozen global energy flows and exerted immense pressure on all parties, including third-party economies.
For decades, the US weaponized financial chokepoints to exert pressure on Iran. Through its control over the dollar system, SWIFT, and international clearing networks, Washington imposed sanctions not only on Iran but on any third country that attempted to sustain trade with it. These secondary sanctions were particularly damaging because they weaponized the US’s central position in the global financial infrastructure. Iran was repeatedly pressured to make concessions on strategic sectors, most visibly its nuclear program, in exchange for partial and easily reversible relief. The JCPOA represents the clearest example of this asymmetric dynamic. Iran made significant and largely irreversible technical concessions, while sanctions relief remained conditional, partial, and ultimately revocable at Washington’s unilateral discretion.
Iran must now understand its control of Hormuz as one of the most significant sources of anti-systemic power, in a manner similar to how the US understands its control of the dollar system. Just as US sanctions weaponize control over financial transactions, Iran can impose its own regime of control over energy flows, oil tanker passage, and commercial shipping through the strait. The proposal for a maritime toll mechanism — reportedly to be co-managed with Omani support — is the institutional beginning of precisely such a regime. This requires two distinct control architectures. In the current ceasefire context, sanctions relief must be negotiated not against nuclear concessions but against Iran’s lifting of its counter-sanctions over Hormuz transit. Sanctions are an instrument of war, and Iran is fully justified in treating its control of the strait as a sovereign, reciprocal response to Washington’s control of the dollar system. The two chokepoints must be placed on the same table simultaneously, breaking with the asymmetric concession structure of the JCPOA era.
For the post-war era, Iran should establish a durable legal and institutional framework for its control, grounded in mandatory piloting requirements, ecological auditing, environmental inspection protocols, security guarantees, and maritime safety standards — internationally recognized instruments of coastal state authority that provide a legitimate legal basis for a permanent Iranian control regime. Iran now effectively possesses what it previously lacked: a structural lever of equivalent anti-systemic significance to the dollar system.
Beyond its strategic weight, this control regime is also a sovereign revenue architecture. Mandatory piloting services, environmental compliance fees calibrated to vessel emissions, and security escort charges for high-risk cargo can generate billions of dollars annually for the Iranian state. This income stream directly reduces the structural dependence on oil export revenues that has historically made Iran vulnerable in sanctions negotiations, replacing a single point of economic exposure with a durable, diversified source of sovereign income anchored in the world’s most critical chokepoint.
This control regime is a graduated instrument that can always be escalated. The legal architecture Iran is building allows for a phased response to future pressure: from enhanced environmental and security inspections, to selective restrictions on vessels flagged by sanctioning states, to the partial or full restriction of transit under Article 51 self-defense provisions should Washington or Tel Aviv resume open aggression. Once seized, control over this chokepoint does not relinquish its deterrent function at the negotiating table. It remains permanently in Iran’s hands, and every party in the region knows it.
What makes this conjuncture historically singular is that the two chokepoints are not merely parallel instruments of power. They are structurally bound to one another through the petrodollar circuit itself. The dollar’s global dominance has never been an abstract financial phenomenon; it has been materially anchored, since the 1970s, in the agreement that Persian Gulf oil flows are denominated, priced, and recycled in US dollars. Iran’s sovereign control over the strait through which that oil moves thus positions it at the physical foundation of the very financial architecture Washington has weaponized against it. Iran’s newly developed sovereign control makes the Strait of Hormuz a counter-leverage instrument as well as a pressure point on the dollar system’s own material basis.
The institutional dimension of this sovereign control has now been formally codified. Iran’s parliament has advanced a Strait of Hormuz Management Plan — an 11-point bill placing the Iranian armed forces as the sole regulatory authority over the waterway, imposing mandatory transit fees collected in Iranian rials rather than US dollars, requiring the use of the designation Persian Gulf in all shipping contracts, and permanently banning vessels linked to Israel, US military forces, and countries that impose sanctions on Iran. The currency provision carries particular anti-systemic weight. By mandating rial-denominated payment for passage through the channel through which roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil flows, Iran is enacting a micro-level rupture in the petrodollar circuit, precisely at the physical point where that circuit originates.
The New Conjuncture and the Path Forward
The US intelligence confirms the strikes left Iran’s nuclear capacity largely intact. The negotiations confirm Iran will not trade its enrichment program for revocable sanctions relief — a concession it made once, in the JCPOA, and paid for with nothing in return. The IRGC’s warning that a resumed war will extend “beyond the region, to unimaginable places” is the declaration of a deterrence architecture that Iran has been constructing throughout the ceasefire with deliberate urgency. It is designed to make the cost of a second round for the enemy qualitatively different from the first.
History is instructive here. Empires in asymmetric wars do not fail because their adversaries are stronger in conventional terms. They fail because their own epistemic arrogance prevents them from reading the battlefield accurately until it is too late. Said’s imperial gaze is the operational condition of a Washington that cannot acknowledge Iranian resilience without acknowledging its own strategic failure. That acknowledgment seems strategically and institutionally impossible. And so the cycle continues: more pressure, more defiance, more consolidation on the Iranian side, more incomprehension on the US.
If a new and more destructive round of military aggression —involving US, Israeli, and UAE forces in combination— begins, it will not encounter the Iran of February 2026. It will encounter a state that has absorbed the worst convergence of pressure in its modern history, consolidated internally around that experience, institutionalized its chokepoint power through force and law, and built a second-strike capability designed to demonstrate, at global range, that there is no military solution to Iranian sovereignty.
What the new conjuncture demands is that Iran build, with urgency, the legal, economic, and geopolitical architecture equal to the historic position the war has opened. That is the only strategic path commensurate with what Iran has, through this imperial aggression and the resistance against it, actually become.
Taha Zeinali is a researcher at the Center for the Study of Resistance, Sovereignty, and Development (MOHAAT) at the University of Tehran.
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