Starlink next door could loosen Iran’s grip on internet

“There’s probably only about 30 million barrels of Iranian crude oil left that China hasn’t bought,” Bessent said. “So that will run out soon, and there will be no problem with China buying because they have no product.”

Bessent described the pressure campaign, dubbed “Operation Economic Outcast,” as the largest effort to isolate a country economically and said Washington intended to “asphyxiate” Iran’s ruling establishment.

“The blockade is working like nothing we’ve ever seen, and the combination - everyone says sanctions don’t work - but I can tell you, blockade and sanctions are one of the most powerful one-two punches in the history of economic isolation,” he said.

Asked about his prediction that the Strait of Hormuz would become irrelevant to the oil industry within two years, Bessent said oil-producing countries around the Persian Gulf were developing “alternative pipeline routes that will no longer entail oil going through the Strait of Hormuz.”

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  US tanker attacks near Iran's shores widen from Jask to its oil heartland

Bessent also rejected the suggestion that Iran controlled the waterway.

“The Iranian chokehold, to the extent they have one - and I can tell you, they do not have one - we are in control of the strait,” he said. “To the extent that they can threaten their neighbors, once we leave, that will not exist anymore.”

Iran’s Economy Ministry has established an “economic war” command center to coordinate and accelerate responses to economic problems caused by the conflict, deputy economy Minister Morteza Zamanian said on Sunday.

He acknowledged that higher energy prices caused by the conflict were affecting Americans but predicted that the shock would end and wage growth would continue.

“This war will end, and those will turn into real wage gains,” Bessent said.

He added that the administration expected the conflict to leave Iran unable to develop a nuclear weapon.

“I think we are going to get to the other side of this Iran conflict with a safer world, with an Iran that cannot have a nuclear weapon,” he said.

The United States imposed a naval blockade in July alongside expanded sanctions aimed at restricting Iran’s oil exports and cutting a key source of government revenue.

Iran’s Economy Ministry has, meanwhile, established an “economic war” command center to coordinate and accelerate responses to economic problems caused by the conflict, Deputy Economy Minister Morteza Zamanian said on Sunday.

The center will initially focus on problems affecting businesses, trade and financing within the ministry’s authority, while using government economic bodies to coordinate responses across agencies, he added.

The apartments are at 3a Palace Green, an exclusive development overlooking Kensington Palace and close to the official London residence of the Prince and Princess of Wales. Both properties include staff accommodation and private roof terraces, according to the report.

One is a five-bedroom duplex covering 3,944 square feet across the sixth and seventh floors. It was purchased for £19 million in 2016 but is now being offered for just under £12 million.

Knight Frank and Sotheby’s International Realty are jointly marketing the apartment. The listing describes it as “an exceptional duplex penthouse with staff accommodation and commanding unrivalled views across Kensington Gardens from one of London’s most prestigious addresses.”

The brochure does not identify its politically sensitive connections but notes: “Due to the property being in receivership, we do not have all of the material information for the property; therefore you should ensure you make all relevant inquiries,” the report said.

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  Khamenei's son built secret overseas property empire - Bloomberg

The second penthouse occupies the seventh and eighth floors of the same building. It was bought for £16.75 million in 2014 and has also entered receivership.

Land Registry documents show that financial advisory firm Teneo was appointed as its receiver, the report said, adding that the apartment does not appear to have been publicly listed, leaving its asking price unknown.

Several prospective buyers are believed to have viewed the properties amid significant interest, according to The Sunday Times.

The registered owner of both apartments is Iranian banker Ali Ansari, whom the US Treasury sanctioned in July as a “key financier” for Khamenei. Washington said Ansari “oversees a sprawling global network of assets benefiting Iran’s leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, and other regime elites.”

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  US probes Iran’s Supreme Leader's money flows through Wall Street banks

Ansari was previously sanctioned by Britain over allegations that he financed the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. His British assets were frozen, and he was barred from entering the country. He is understood to deny wrongdoing.

The British government is believed to have authorized the sale of the two apartments after Ansari defaulted on their mortgages, according to The Sunday Times. The private lenders that financed the purchases appointed receivers to recover their money, although the amount originally borrowed is not known.

Any proceeds remaining after the lenders are repaid are expected to be frozen while Ansari remains under sanctions.

Neither Khamenei nor Ansari has been seen by employees at the Palace Green development since the apartments were purchased, the newspaper reported.

Since his father was killed in US-Israeli airstrikes in February, Mojtaba Khamenei has not been seen or heard publicly, leaving his condition and circumstances unclear.

“The mere threat out there, just the threat of these, is enough to deter traffic, certainly commercial traffic,” Votel told Eye for Iran podcast. .

“It has a huge deterrent effect and it puts the burden on us to keep really, really close watch on this area.”

That creates a paradox in the latest battle over Hormuz: Iran may be turning to rocket-launched mines because more powerful options have been degraded, yet Washington must still behave as though the threat could get through.

The latest US-Iran flare-up began after the US military said it detected Iranian forces on Larak Island preparing to launch rockets carrying sea mines into the Strait. US forces struck the launchers before they could fire.

Iran has traditionally been able to deploy naval mines using small boats, submarines or aircraft. Firing them from rockets would allow Iranian forces to place mines at a distance without exposing boats and crews to US forces watching the waterway.

Why Iran may be turning to rockets

Iranian state television reported on the Fajr-5 multiple-launch rocket system as a weapon for mining Hormuz as early as January 2025, and military analysts have said Iran had been testing the concept.

What has changed is the battlefield around it.

Farzin Nadimi, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute and an expert on Iran’s military and asymmetric warfare, told Eye for Iran that Iran’s conventional military capabilities were significantly degraded during the war, followed by attacks on important IRGC Navy infrastructure.

Nadimi said Iran has lost much of its ability to deploy the larger and more dangerous sea mines it could once put into the water through more traditional means.

“They have little choice but using these smaller, less capable rocket-launched mines,” he said, adding that Iran has also repeatedly tried to strike shipping with anti-ship cruise missiles and one-way attack drones, many of which have been intercepted or jammed.

Iran’s apparent new weapon can therefore be read not simply as evidence of innovation, but as adaptation after military losses.

Less destructive does not mean less disruptive

Rocket-launched mines come with significant compromises. Naval mines capable of badly damaging large ships are heavy. Fitting one into a rocket requires a smaller weapon, limiting its destructive power.

Nadimi said Iran’s rocket-delivered versions are significantly smaller than some older naval mines in its arsenal and consequently less capable of inflicting major damage on large tankers.

But a mine’s effectiveness is psychological as much as it is physical: once mines are believed to be in the water, uncertainty over their location can deter ships from entering.

Votel pointed to the history of mine warfare in the Persian Gulf, including US Navy encounters with Iranian mines during the Tanker War of the 1980s.

Commercial vessels and their insurers therefore do not necessarily need evidence that a mine will hit a ship before taking the threat seriously.

Washington’s burden

That uncertainty shifts part of the burden from Iran to the United States.

The US does not simply have to destroy mines once they enter the water. It has to watch the Strait, Iranian coastal positions and potential launch sites closely enough to prevent Tehran from putting them there in the first place.

“It puts a lot of pressure on us to make sure that we have constant surveillance, not only of the waterways themselves and the main transit routes, but really of the locations where these mines or these weapons can come from,” Votel said.

The latest US strike suggests Washington currently has the intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities to do that. American forces identified the Iranian launchers and struck them before the mines could be fired.

But Iran does not necessarily have to defeat that surveillance system to impose a cost. Simply retaining the capability forces the US to keep watching and commercial operators to trust that nothing has slipped through.

For Tehran, that creates an asymmetric advantage even after significant military losses: the US must repeatedly demonstrate that Hormuz is safe, while Iran only has to preserve doubt that it might not be.

Degradation or restraint?

There is an important caveat. The smaller scale of Iran’s recent attacks does not necessarily mean Tehran is incapable of doing more.

Nadimi said there are signs Iran is deliberately exercising restraint with some weapons, particularly ballistic missiles, to avoid triggering a larger escalation involving both the United States and Israel.

The rocket-launched mine claim itself also remains contested. Some maritime specialists have questioned whether Iran has operationalized the system as the US describes, while others consider it technically plausible.

Even if the system is operational, however, Iran would not need to mine the Strait extensively for it to have an effect. All Tehran needs is for military planners, ship operators and insurers to believe there is a credible possibility that it could get some mines into the water.

Votel sees that as part of a broader Iranian strategy: “Their intention is to make this painful for us and for those that are supporting the United States.”

Iran may now have fewer options for mining Hormuz than it once did. But if the threat of a mine is enough to make a ship hesitate—and enough to make the US military watch Iran’s coastline around the clock—Tehran can still impose a cost without a mine ever hitting a vessel.

Iranian officials and state media have long portrayed control of the strategic waterway as a powerful bargaining tool, and many continue to do so.

But a warning from a commentator close to parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf that Washington was trying to erode that advantage suggested the consensus may not be as solid as before.

“Targeting Iranian ships by the US, in response to Iran confronting any vessel that does not accept the route and arrangements determined by Iran for passing through the strait, is Trump’s dangerous method of reducing Iran’s control over the Strait of Hormuz,” Ali Gholhaki wrote on X on Thursday.

Without a new initiative from Tehran, he said, the United States could gradually “discredit the Strait card for Iran,” urging authorities to “devise a new plan.”

A card to play, not hold

Ghalibaf himself had hinted at this earlier.

“We should not turn the Strait of Hormuz to its opposite,” he said in a televised interview in June. “The Strait of Hormuz is valuable when traffic through it increases day by day, not when it decreases.”

The argument is not that Hormuz has no value, but that its greatest value may lie in the threat of disruption or its use as a short-term shock rather than prolonged restrictions that also damage Iran.

Journalist Arash Hashemi questioned whether that point had already been reached.

“Hasn’t the Strait card been without a payoff for some time? When we close the strait, they impose a blockade; and our own exports and imports decrease as a result, the value of our national currency falls, and everything else follows,” he wrote. “Does the Strait card still have any bargaining value?”

Reformist journalist Mohammad Sohofi similarly argued that closing the strait could work as a short-term shock to create leverage for a deal.

“Closing the Strait of Hormuz had value as a powerful blow and shock to the market, to shape an equation and conduct a deal,” he wrote, “but it was obvious from the beginning that continuing to use this card would turn it against itself.”

The concern is that the longer restrictions persist, the more Iran suffers from reduced trade while the United States and other countries have time to develop countermeasures.

Hardliners push back

Hardliners reject the suggestion that Iran is burning through its leverage, arguing that such claims risk weakening Tehran’s position.

“One of the most ridiculous and baseless things I have heard these days is that the Strait of Hormuz card will soon lose its value,” hardline commentator Alireza Taghavinia wrote on X.

“These are the same people who once claimed that Iran could never close it,” he added. “Some people would do better to remain silent and not break the morale of the people.”

The disagreement therefore turns less on whether Hormuz can impose costs than on whether Iran can sustain those costs long enough to extract political concessions without inflicting comparable damage on itself.

Searching for another weapon

The debate has gained another dimension from an unlikely source.

Kayhan editor Hossein Shariatmadari, who has advocated closing Hormuz to US, Israeli and allied shipping for years, has now proposed that Iran’s military and the Revolutionary Guards disrupt or sever international fiber-optic cables beneath the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz.

Shariatmadari argued that such action could be “many times more frightening and dangerous for the enemy” than keeping the strait closed.

Critics seized on the proposal as evidence that even proponents of maximum pressure were searching for additional leverage.

Journalist Hassan Abbasi warned that disrupting the cables would not hurt Iran’s adversaries alone, because the country’s own trade, banking, communications and digital economy depend on the same infrastructure.

That is increasingly the question running through the debate in Tehran: not whether Iran can impose costs through Hormuz, but how long it can do so before the weapon begins imposing comparable costs on Iran itself.

Reports on Friday, including by the Financial Times, indicated that mediators were working to establish a framework for possible fresh talks.

Iranian and Omani foreign ministers have already discussed creating a temporary shipping corridor as a step toward a more permanent arrangement.

Such a deal offers something increasingly scarce after six months of war: a face-saving compromise. Tehran could present it as recognition of its role in securing the strait, while Washington could claim it had restored freedom of navigation.

The possibility comes after months of strikes, economic pressure and intermittent diplomacy have failed to break the deadlock.

Iran’s restrictions on maritime traffic through Hormuz have meanwhile turned the vital energy corridor into one of Tehran’s most important bargaining chips.

A route back to talks

The moderate Fararu website quoted Andreas Krieg, a Middle East security expert at King’s College London, as describing an agreement over Hormuz as the most plausible route from direct confrontation toward broader negotiations.

A limited shipping agreement would not resolve disputes over Iran’s nuclear program, sanctions or regional security. But it could provide a confidence-building measure without requiring either side to publicly concede defeat.

The alternative paths being discussed in Iranian media are considerably darker.

Economic escalation

One is an intensification of the economic confrontation already underway.

Washington has shifted increasingly toward aggressive economic pressure through secondary sanctions under “Operation Economic Exclusion,” alongside its maritime blockade and the threat of further strikes.

Iran’s counter-strategy is to make that pressure costly for others. By restricting shipping and threatening regional energy infrastructure and trade routes, Tehran can force Persian Gulf states and other international actors to bear some of the economic consequences.

The US strategy has its own limitation: China. Enforcing secondary sanctions against major Chinese financial institutions would carry considerably greater economic and geopolitical risks than targeting smaller intermediaries.

Back to military action

Another possibility is renewed large-scale military confrontation.

A collapse in diplomacy, failure of economic pressure or a high-casualty Iranian attack on US forces could trigger further American and Israeli strikes, followed by Iranian retaliation.

Recent attacks on southern Iran have already shown how quickly economic and maritime confrontation can return to the battlefield.

Civilian casualties, including those from a strike on a residential building hosting a wedding, have further raised the costs of escalation, although responsibility for that attack remains under investigation.

A war without an end

Perhaps the bleakest scenario is also the least dramatic: neither diplomacy nor escalation produces a breakthrough.

Instead, the conflict settles into prolonged attrition involving intermittent strikes, maritime disruption, cyber operations, sanctions, covert economic measures and nuclear pressure.

That prospect helps explain the significance of the tentative diplomacy around Hormuz.

The strait has become one of Iran’s most powerful instruments of pressure, imposing costs far beyond the battlefield. Yet that same leverage may now provide the basis for an agreement neither side has to describe as capitulation.

After six months in which war, economic pressure and diplomacy have all failed to break the deadlock, the waterway at the center of the confrontation may also offer the narrowest route out of it.