Recent comments by J.D. Vance on Israeli cabinet members demonstrate a break from the usual pampering of Israeli foreign policy by American officials. The American public cannot bear the financial consequences of another war when fuel-driven inflation has entered ordinary life again. Iran’s ability to close, or even credibly threaten, the Strait of Hormuz with apparent ease has exposed Operation Epic Fury’s Achilles’ heel.
Washington and Jerusalem entered the war with the old confidence of military superiority. Airpower, intelligence dominance and the destruction of Iranian infrastructure were expected to create political facts on the ground. Yet more than four months of war, and the collapse this week of its latest ceasefire, have proved something more uncomfortable. Iran’s geography alone can make victory unaffordable, and Tehran has demonstrated this without winning a single conventional engagement.
Operation Epic Fury was launched to end Iran’s nuclear programme and, in Israel’s more maximalist language, to break the regime itself. It achieved neither politically. Iran was damaged and its programme was set back, but a programme set back by bombing is still a programme waiting for negotiation.
The more consequential shift was in the value Iran learned to attach to the waterway beside it. For decades, Hormuz was treated in Washington as a known vulnerability, on the assumption that the United States could protect the maritime order whenever it chose. The war has weakened that assumption. Hormuz is no longer a theoretical risk. It is now a precedent markets have lived through once.
Iran did not discover the strait during the war; it had threatened Hormuz and rehearsed disruption for decades. What Operation Epic Fury supplied was the missing demonstration. Roughly a fifth of the world’s oil and a comparable share of LNG pass through that single channel. A chokepoint of that weight is an inflation corridor as much as a maritime one.
Tehran has learned the market value of disruption, and how quickly the politics of war changes once households, importers, insurers and central banks enter the calculation. Washington can present the reopening of Hormuz as proof that pressure worked. Iran can present the same reopening as proof that the strait now requires its consent. The details favour Tehran’s version. The central channel remains closed by mines; traffic moves through corridors in Iranian and Omani waters; Tehran insists that demining is its task alone. Last week’s quiet held for exactly the week it promised. With the funeral ceremonies in Tehran barely over, Washington accused Iran of striking three commercial ships, answered with fresh strikes, and Iran targeted American bases in Bahrain and Kuwait. A ceasefire can quiet the strait, but it does not restore the old assumption that American power alone decides the terms of passage.
Trump appears to understand this better than his public language admits. Ahead of the NATO summit in Ankara, he declared the ceasefire and the interim agreement effectively over, dismissing further negotiation as “a waste of time.” Months of restraint followed from arithmetic; the war had taught him the price of escalation. This week he has chosen to test that arithmetic again, and the strait will deliver the answer. The United States, Trump said, could bomb Iran for “another two or three weeks” and leave it with “nothing left whatsoever,” but the strait would not be open for months. American force can still punish Iran. It cannot guarantee, on its own, the reopening of Hormuz on American terms.
Freedom of navigation has been a central doctrine of American power since Jefferson sent the navy to the Mediterranean rather than pay tribute to the Barbary powers. The Iran war has made that principle look conditional. Washington still insists that Hormuz must remain open, but the strait has now entered the language of negotiations, service fees and regional guarantees.
A formal toll would collide with the law of the sea, which forbids charging vessels merely for passage through an international strait but allows fees for services genuinely rendered. Iran is insisting on billions of dollars in such fees. Washington rejects the demand, yet the private consensus is drifting; some European and Gulf officials now expect a service charge in some form. Once a principle becomes a schedule of charges under negotiation, the dispute has already moved onto terrain more favourable to Tehran.
The war has also exposed the changing terms of the U.S.-Israel relationship. On the surface, Operation Epic Fury represented the height of operational intimacy: American and Israeli aircraft over Iran shared intelligence, diplomatic cover and escalation management. Yet a war that showed how closely the two states fight together also showed how unequally they bear the consequences.
Israel sought strategic relief from the Iranian threat. The United States inherited the global bill for pursuing it. Vance’s rebuke of Itamar Ben-Gvir and BezalelSmotrich was not normal American language toward Israeli ministers, and his warning that Israel cannot simply “kill your way out” of every security problem placed Israeli officials inside the category of actors frustrating American interests. Vance sounded like a patron reminding a dependent ally that the invoice has arrived.
The alliance is not about to disappear. But the indulgence is no longer cost-free. Israel’s continuing pressure in Lebanon lets Tehran treat each new Israeli action as proof that the wider conflict has not ended. Israel’s defence minister reportedly marked the new supreme leader for death in a closed briefing, and Iran’s parliament has cited the leaked threat as grounds for reconsidering its nuclear doctrine and its commitments under the Islamabad Accord. The United States wants the Iran file narrowed; Israel’s regional battlefield keeps widening it.
The Iran war has made the cost of the special relationship visible to the progressive left and to a restraint-minded faction of the American right, and it is no longer confined to the flanks; Rahm Emanuel, a Democrat weighing a presidential run, has chosen Tel Aviv itself to call for an end to unconditional American support and to military aid. Netanyahu’s effort to recast a future reduction in U.S. military aid as Israel’s own choice is a retreat arranged in advance, announced on his own terms. The likeliest future is already visible in his caution: the alliance outlives the special relationship. American support becomes conditional, priced and audited, and Israel discovers that an ordinary ally is a very different thing to plan a war around.
The consequences of the war have not been constrained to the warring nations. In the United States, the Middle East returned as a price at the pump: petrol averaged $2.96 a gallon before the war and peaked at $4.56 in late May, and this week’s collapse sent crude climbing again within minutes of Trump’s remarks. The gap between the barrel and the pump is where the war still lives, and it turned foreign policy into household arithmetic at the very moment fuel-driven inflation had become politically dangerous again.
South Asia understands this better than most. For Pakistan, India and Bangladesh, imported energy reaches beyond the trade account into electricity tariffs, transport costs, fertiliser prices, food inflation and currency pressure. Any permanent risk premium on Hormuz is regressive, punishing households that did not choose the war and cannot hedge against it. Pakistan, which helped broker the peace that reopened the artery, may still pay one of the tallest prices.
Iran did not win in any romantic sense. It was damaged, bloodied and economically strained, and its people paid, as they always do, for the decisions of their state. Damage, however, is a poor measure of this war. The truer test was whether Washington and Jerusalem could reduce Iran’s strategic options at a tolerable cost.
On that test, the result is uncomfortable. The campaign to reduce Iran’s leverage ended by proving it; the defence of freedom of navigation made Hormuz negotiable; the display of allied strength exposed its price to American voters and Asian importers. Iran could never defeat the United States outright, and it never had to. It was enough to make the next Middle Eastern war arrive as a line on the household budget. Lessons learned at the pump are not soon forgotten.
The writer is an economist and an educationist
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