Closing Hormuz and bombing the Gulf isn’t just retaliation. It’s Tehran buying insurance — making the cost of the next American strike everyone’s problem, not just Iran’s.

Donald Trump has been announcing victory in the Iran war in roughly the same way he used to announce his golf scores — frequently, enthusiastically, and with a certain indifference to verification. On March 11, the President told a crowd in Kentucky: “You never like to say too early you won. We won. In the first hour it was over.” Minutes later, from the same podium: “We don’t want to leave early, do we? We’ve got to finish the job, right?”

These sentences are not contradictory only if you accept a definition of victory that requires no acknowledgment from the other side.

That is precisely the definition Trump is working with. And it is the wrong one.

Where does Iran find the confidence to defy, rather than fold? The administration’s theory of the war — never fully articulated, but legible in its public statements — rested on two hoped-for scenarios: a popular uprising, in which the assassination of Ali Khamenei would tip a restless population into revolution; and factional implosion, in which the shock of decapitation would fracture the IRGC and the clerical establishment.

Three weeks in, neither has happened.Brookings noted in the war’s opening days that the decapitation strike “neither toppled the regime nor produced an immediate wave of popular opposition.” Israeli officials now privately assess that the regime is unlikely to fall in the immediate future. The IRGC has held together. And the surviving leadership rapidly reframed the war — not as a defense of the clergy, but as a defense of Iranian soil. As an Al Jazeera analysis has noted, survivalist nationalism is a considerably more durable mobilizing force than religious legitimacy, and the regime knows it.

A regime confident in its own survival has something a desperate regime does not: the breathing room to plan. Iran is not scrambling for an exit. It is executing a strategy.

That strategy is more limited, and more achievable, than regime survival alone. Iran knows it cannot defeat the United States militarily. It knows it cannot prevent its nuclear and ballistic missile infrastructure from being degraded. What it can do — what it is doing, methodically, every day — is raise the cost of the current conflict so high, for so many parties, that the pressure to end it comes not from Tehran but from Washington’s own allies and from Washington itself.

The strategy is to make the war expensive enough for enough people that continuing it — let alone repeating it — becomes politically untenable everywhere that matters.

Consider what the administration’s own record reveals about how it expected this war to go. CNN reported this week that the Pentagon and National Security Council significantly underestimated Iran’s willingness to close the Strait of Hormuz — and that in classified briefings, officials told lawmakers they had not prepared for that possibility at all. Trump’s preference for a tight circle of advisers, CNN found, had the effect of sidelining the interagency debate that might have surfaced the obvious. Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security advisor, put it bluntly: Iran’s threat to Hormuz was “very obvious from the outset,” he said, and yet “nearly two weeks into the war, we seem befuddled by the fact that they have done that, and we have no answers for how to respond to it.”

Columbia’s Professor Elizabeth Saunders was more direct still: “It’s very clear that the Strait of Hormuz was not a focus of their planning and risk mitigation. This was entirely foreseeable.”

It was, in fact, foreseen — by a 2024 report from the company run by Trump’s own energy secretary, which explicitly warned that a conflict with Iran would “significantly escalate global oil prices” and flagged the strait as the mechanism. When Pete Hegseth called the CNN report “patently ridiculous,” he was careful to say that of course the military had plans for Hormuz.

What he did not say was that the economic and political consequences of closure had been adequately modeled. They hadn’t.

This failure of imagination is not incidental to the argument. It is the argument. The administration went to war having convinced itself that sufficient firepower would produce a sufficiently frightened adversary. It did not ask, with sufficient rigor, what an unafraid adversary would do. Tehran answered that question in the first 24 hours — and has been elaborating its answer every day since.

The economics of Iran’s campaign are punishing and, crucially, global. A shahed drone costs somewhere between $20,000 and $50,000 to build. A Patriot PAC-3 interceptor costs between $3 million and $5 million to fire. But the real asymmetry isn’t in the hardware; it’s in the reach. The Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly a fifth of the world’s oil flows, is effectively closed. Brent crude has breached $100 a barrel and Goldman Sachs has revised its price forecast upward by 20 percent for the year.

Americans are paying more at the pump than at any point in recent memory; small businesses facing fuel-linked cost spikes have no vote at the UN Security Council, but they do have one in the midterms. Asian manufacturers starved of feedstocks, European importers scrambling for alternative supplies, Wall Street watching the S…P oscillate with every headline from the Gulf — all of them are now, involuntarily, stakeholders in whether this war continues. Approximately 40,000 flights have been cancelled. Qatar Energy has warned it can no longer guarantee LNG deliveries. Bahrain’s state oil company declared force majeure. An Amazon Web Services data centre in Dubai was struck by Iranian drones — the cloud, it turns out, has an address, and that address can be hit.

None of this is collateral damage. It is the campaign. Iran cannot bomb the American homeland. It cannot crash the S…P 500 by missile. But by closing Hormuz and turning the Gulf into a war zone, it has found a way to make the entire global economy pay the price for Washington’s decision — and to ensure that the people most directly hurt by that price are not Iranians but Americans, Asians, and Europeans who have no dog in this fight and every reason to want it over. Tehran is not just building a Gulf constituency for its security. It is building a global one.

This is why Iran’s retaliation has targeted the Gulf Cooperation Council states with particular ferocity. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain — these are not Iran’s enemies in any meaningful military sense. They are its most valuable pressure points on Washington. For years, Gulf leaders used their unique influence in the Oval Office to steer the United States away from military action. Oman mediated the last round of nuclear talks. Qatar’s prime minister described Iran’s attacks on his country as a “big sense of betrayal” — which is precisely Iran’s point. Betrayal is expensive. Betrayal concentrates the mind. A Gulf that has watched its airports close, its refineries burn, and its flagship airlines suspend operations has a powerful institutional interest in ensuring there is no next round — and the access to Trump to say so directly.

This is not a new Iranian instinct. What is new is the scale and the precision with which it is being executed. After the Twelve-Day War last June, Iran rebuilt quietly and the world breathed out. That ceasefire lasted eight months before the United States struck again, harder. Tehran has drawn the lesson: a world at ease is a world that does not exert itself to prevent the next round. A world in pain — one whose gas prices are spiking, whose supply chains are fracturing, whose tech infrastructure is on fire — is a world with a collective interest in a durable settlement.

The human and material cost to Iran is enormous and real. Over 1,300 civilians killed by US and Israeli strikes. Tehran bombed repeatedly. Nuclear and missile infrastructure degraded significantly. A supreme leader assassinated and replaced, in a dynastic succession that undermines every founding principle of the Islamic Republic. These are not trivial blows. But the regime has concluded — and history supports this conclusion — that the cost of being seen to fold is higher than the cost of enduring. Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, told PBS NewsHour this week that his country had “a very bitter experience” of talking with Americans — noting that US strikes came both times in the middle of active negotiations. The lesson Tehran has drawn is not that diplomacy is pointless, but that diplomacy without sufficient deterrence is a trap.

That deterrence is what Iran is currently building — not through missiles targeting Israel, but through the cumulative economic pressure on everyone downstream of the Strait. If the world emerges from this conflict having suffered enough that it demands a durable settlement — one that includes guarantees Iran actually believes — then Iran will have achieved something the bombs cannot take away: not merely a regional constituency for its own security, but a global one. Parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf said as much, if you read past the rhetoric: “We believe the aggressor must be punished and taught a lesson that will deter them from attacking Iran again.” The lesson is not aimed only at Washington. It is aimed at every capital that might otherwise stand aside and let Washington decide alone.

Trump will announce the war’s end when the domestic political calculus demands it — and that calculus is being written not in Riyadh or Doha but at the gas pump, in the earnings reports, and in the polling that shows Americans increasingly queasy about a war whose costs they are absorbing directly. He will call it victory. Iran will call it victory. The Gulf will call it relief, and the rest of the world will call it overdue. And somewhere in the rubble of its bombed infrastructure, the Islamic Republic will begin, again, the patient work of reconstitution — this time with the understanding, held not just by Gulf princes but by markets and governments worldwide, that the next round will cost them too.

That understanding is what Iran is buying with every drone it fires at Dubai.