Here is what you need to know this week:
President Trump announces a U.S. takeover of the Strait of Hormuz and a reimposed blockade of Iran. Iran struck five Gulf countries over the weekend. Oman got hit hardest, and summoned Tehran’s ambassador for the first time since the war began.
Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei says Iran has a hit list of names for retaliation, while Iran’s rial just hit a record low.
Find out more below, and share your thoughts, analysis, and predictions with me at ailves@mbn-news.com. If you were forwarded the MBN Iran Briefing, please subscribe. Read me in Arabic here, or on the flagship MBN Arabic-language and English-language news sites.
And don’t forget to check out the latest Iran Briefing podcast. In this edition I’m joined by Scott Wilcox, Senior Advisor at the Sicuro Group, a global risk management and operational resilience firm. We discuss how the war has affected business in the region – and why Iran’s cyber and disinformation campaigns worry Scott more than its missiles. Watch here.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
We are reinstating THE IRANIAN BLOCKADE … The U.S.A. will be, from this point forward, known as ‘THE GUARDIAN OF THE HORMUZ STRAIT.’
—U.S. President Donald Trump, on Truth Social today
TOP OF THE NEWS: THE WEEK AHEAD
1. Washington Says It’s Taking Over the Strait
This week tests whether Washington can make good on President Trump’s declaration that the U.S. will simply take over the Strait of Hormuz. Trump told Fox News the U.S. was “going to keep the strait, and we’ll probably run it. We’ll become the guardian of the strait. Maybe we’ll call it the ‘Guardian Angel of the Strait.’ And we should be reimbursed for that.” He added that Gulf energy producers should pay, since “we can’t be expected to do that for nothing.” In a followup post on Truth Social and reposted on the White House account on X, he specified a 20 percent fee on all cargo passing through, reinstating a blockade aimed only at Iranian ships and customers, and said the plan would “begin immediately.” Iran’s embassy in London accused the U.S. of having “done nothing but violate” the U.S.-Iran memorandum of understanding “since day one” by rerouting shipping onto a “dangerous southern parallel route” it called “unsafe, unreliable, and prone to accidents.” Iran’s Persian Gulf Strait Authority separately declared passage through the strait “currently unfeasible” given “recent hostile actions by the U.S. forces.” This is all happening two days after Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi’s visit to Oman produced only an agreement to keep talking, and a two-lane shipping proposal meant to bridge Tehran’s demand for fees with Washington’s demand for unrestricted passage. President Trump’s unilateral claim today now puts that entire negotiating track in question.
Three things to watch for: Whether Washington moves any actual military assets to enforce President Trump’s claim this week, whether Gulf states and shippers treat the 20 percent toll as real policy or a negotiating opener, and whether Iran answers the announcement with further attacks on shipping or on the countries it blames for hosting U.S. forces.
A vessel at the Strait of Hormuz today. Photo: Reuters
2. Iran Bombs the Gulf
This week we will see how the Gulf states (among them two that are mediating this conflict) react after Iran attacked five of them. Iran’s retaliation yesterday for the U.S. strikes this week struck Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Jordan, and Oman, wounding three people in Doha. Oman’s reaction was the sharpest of the five. Iranian drones hit sites near the strait Sunday, prompting Muscat to summon Iran’s ambassador, its first such rebuke since the war began. Qatar’s prime minister is working to keep Tehran and Washington talking despite the attacks, while on Friday Bahrain accused Iran at the UN Security Council of using diplomacy only “to manage crises and gain time.” Iranian MP Esmail Kousari has meanwhile warned the UAE that its ports, airports, and oil and gas facilities would be “certain targets,” and parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf has declared that “the era of one-sided deals is over.”
Three things to watch for: Whether Doha keeps engaging Tehran after being struck directly; whether more senior officials repeat Kousari’s threat against the UAE or distance themselves from it; and whether Bahrain’s UN Security Council complaint gains any traction beyond rhetoric this week
A statue symbolizing the hand of Iran’s late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei at Revolution Square in Tehran. Photo: Reuters
3. Threats of Revenge
On Saturday, a message was issued in the name of Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei in which he said that Iran has compiled a list of names for retaliation for the killing of his father Ali Khamenei and vowed that the reckoning will come regardless of “my personal existence.” The statement came hours after U.S. President Donald Trump warned on Truth Social that any attempt on his own life would trigger a U.S. campaign to “completely decimate and destroy” Iran, with “1000 Missiles … Locked and Loaded and aimed at the Islamic Republic of Iran.”
Trump’s post followed the display of banners in Tehran calling for him, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham to be killed. At the time, Graham, who passed away on Saturday, shrugged off being pictured on a placard with crosshairs on his forehead: “At least they used a good photo of me.” Iranian state media greeted his death with open satisfaction, with one presenter saying, with a smile, “This news is so sweet that I’m reading it twice.” Meanwhile, the pro-regime Lego animation team posted a video on its X account implying that the U.S. senator had been assassinated. The post has since been taken down but can be found here.
Gen. Ali Abdollahi, commander of Khatam al-Anbiya (the joint command overseeing Iran’s armed forces), separately vowed retribution against Khamenei’s killers, while Israeli defense minister Israel Katz warned that Israel stood ready to respond with greater force if needed.
U.S. officials have told reporters they believe a rogue faction of Iranian hard-liners reignited the war to sabotage the ceasefire.
Two things to watch for: Does the hostility between Washington and Tehran escalate; and whether the White House’s Iran war supplemental funding request finds a new champion now that Graham, who chaired the Senate Budget Committee, is gone.
4. Islamabad Track and the “Waste of Time”
U.S. officials say technical-level talks are continuing despite the exchange of strikes. Pakistan and Qatar are reported to be working to bring Washington and Tehran back to the table. Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif called both Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani to press for restraint and preserve the “hard-earned peace gains of recent months.” In Trump’s own comments to reporters at the NATO summit in Ankara, he said he no longer wanted to deal with Tehran, dismissing the process as “a waste of time.” At the same time, he permitted his negotiators to keep working. One round of direct U.S.-Iran talks has already taken place in Switzerland since the memorandum was signed, alongside indirect rounds in Doha, but there has been no visible progress since. Araghchi, for his part, insisted on X that “Iran has so far kept its word, unlike the so-called U.S. Treasury Secretary who is violating Para 9 of the MoU. That violation follows other violations and missteps by the United States.”
Three things to watch for: Can Islamabad or Doha can get both sides’ delegations back to a table this week; will a second direct round of talks get scheduled; and what practically remains of the memorandum’s 60-day negotiating clock now that both sides are trading fire again.
Shopping for jewelry at the Grand Reza Bazaar near the shrine of Imam Reza following the funeral of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and his family members in Mashhad on Friday. Photo: AFP
5. Rial Hits Record Low
Iran’s rial fell to a fresh record low of roughly 1,788,050 to the dollar yesterday. This record came the same day Iran was striking the Gulf and the U.S. hit Iran with its third round of strikes in a week. A separate market tracker put the rial even weaker, at roughly 1,793,000 to the dollar, and showed it losing value through the day.
The rial is now roughly 29 percent weaker than in December, when the fall in its value helped trigger the biggest protests against the Islamic Republic since 2022. At that time, the rial hit roughly 1,390,000 to the dollar, bazaar merchants in Tehran went on strike, and unrest spread to all 31 provinces before a violent crackdown.
There is, so far, no sign of central bank intervention or any official statement addressing yesterday’s slide directly.
Three things to watch for: Will the devaluation continue, and is there a tie-in to any continued fighting this week; will the central bank step in; and will, like in December, a collapsing currency — and the destruction of savings and living standards — stir renewed public anger.
