Strait of Hormuz
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The Strait of Hormuz is the shipping chokepoint at the mouth of the Persian Gulf. In John Kiriakou's commentary on the 2026 Iran war it functions as the war's true centre of gravity, the thing the fighting is actually about, and the clearest case he makes that the United States created the crisis it then demanded be solved.

The geography argument

Kiriakou's case rests on bathymetry rather than politics. Walking through a map on air, he describes ships having to round the Musandam Peninsula, the tip belonging to the United Arab Emirates, the rest to Oman, a fragment separated from the rest of Omani territory and almost entirely uninhabited desert.

The decisive fact comes next: "The Strait of Hormuz is very, very shallow and it's very difficult for ships to maneuver through. Well, the deepest part of the Strait of Hormuz is on the Iranian side of the maritime border." The practical consequence is that "for the last century plus, if you wanted to go through the Strait of Hormuz, you went through Iranian waters."

The toll, and why it collapsed

When bombing began and Iran closed the strait, a toll appeared, and, in Kiriakou's telling, Donald Trump announced the United States would collect it. His objection is jurisdictional: "It's not up to us to collect a toll for ships going through Iranian territorial waters."

It lasted days. Ships then tried the Emirati and Omani side instead, "but it's very shallow there and it's dangerous for ships to run aground." Iran, angered that the status quo had been upset, attacked one of those ships, which triggered renewed US bombing. "The bottom line being we're all back to square one again."

"We're the ones that forced the closure"

The sequencing is the whole of Kiriakou's argument, and he states it plainly: "There was no problem for ships going through the Straits of Hormuz before the US attack. The US and Israeli attack. It was the US and Israeli attack that closed the Strait of Hormuz. And then we're demanding that the Strait of Hormuz be open. The Strait of Hormuz was open. We're the ones that forced the closure." His forecast is bleak, "I'm hoping cooler heads prevail, but I'm not optimistic."

He grants the American motive without accepting the framing. Reopening the strait and restoring freedom of navigation became a central goal of the administration "mainly to stabilize global energy markets", "Well, of course it has. Nobody wants to pay $4 or four and a quarter for a gallon of gas." For Iran, control of the strait became a core objective in any settlement "because it belongs to Iran."

The memorandum that unravelled

The strait was the central provision of the US-Iran memorandum of understanding, and conflicting readings of its clauses are what caused the deal to come apart. The memorandum required Iran to allow safe passage; soon after signing, Iranian officials accused the United States of violating it by routing ships through the southern lane near the Omani coast without Tehran's approval.

Iran's position, as relayed by its top negotiator on X, was that the strait "will only open with Iranian arrangements, not American threats", accompanied by the warning "If you strike, you'll get hit."

By the third episode of his show, Kiriakou reported the strait closed again "for the most part," with US bases in the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Jordan under attack, and Iran calling on its Houthi allies in Yemen to close the Bab el-Mandeb Strait as well should the United States strike Iran's power infrastructure.

The desalination war

The escalation Kiriakou treats as most dangerous is not the strait itself but what sits along it. Iran struck a desalination plant in Kuwait, "That's technically a war crime. You can't hit infrastructure." His explanation for why Iran would do it anyway is symmetry: the United States and Israel had been striking critical infrastructure inside Iran, and "just a day earlier, the US blew up an Iranian desalination plant." These are, he says, tit-for-tat attacks.

The exposure is severe because Gulf states rely on desalination almost exclusively, roughly 90% of Kuwait's drinking water, about 86% in Oman, and around 70% in Saudi Arabia, drawn from hundreds of plants along the Persian Gulf. "The water supply for millions of people is within range of Iranian missiles and drones. Should the targeting of desalination plants continue, it will trigger a humanitarian crisis."

What the Gulf states are concluding

Kiriakou grounds his read of Gulf opinion in his own access: he was in Kuwait, Abu Dhabi and Dubai months earlier, and says he has close contacts in five of the six royal families, all but the Saudi.

The question he says they are asking unanimously is why the American bases are there at all. He enumerates them: army bases in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Oman; Bahrain as headquarters of the US Navy's Fifth Fleet; the largest US Air Force base anywhere in the world in Qatar; ground, air and naval personnel in the UAE. And yet "we can't stop Iran from attacking these countries, these friends of ours."

The conclusion he expects them to draw follows: "they're beginning to think maybe we should make our own peace with the Iranians because the Americans aren't able to protect us. If I were a leader of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, or the UAE, I would be seriously reassessing my country's relationship with the United States."

Who closed the strait

John Kiriakou rejects the framing in which reopening the strait is an American objective achieved against Iranian obstruction. In his account there was no problem for ships transiting the strait before the American and Israeli attack; the attack is what closed it, and Washington then demanded that it be reopened.

The geography drives the dispute. The deepest water lies on the Iranian side of the maritime boundary, so for more than a century transiting ships have used Iranian waters. Once the bombing began and Iran closed the strait, a toll appeared, and the American position became that the United States would collect it, which Kiriakou regards as indefensible for passage through Iranian territorial waters, and which lasted only a couple of days. Ships that then tried the shallower Emirati and Omani side risked running aground, and the departure from the status quo prompted Iran to attack one of them, triggering renewed American bombing.

The same clause sits at the centre of the collapsing memorandum of understanding: it requires Iran to allow safe passage, but Iranian officials accused Washington of violating the deal by routing ships through the southern lane near the Omani coast without Tehran's approval. Iran's top negotiator, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, wrote that "the Strait of Hormuz will only open with Iranian arrangements, not American threats."

The $2 million toll, payable in yuan

The earliest form of the toll Kiriakou describes carried a currency as well as a price. In late May 2026 the Iranians said they would charge a fee for each ship passing through, "as high as $2 million per ship, payable in yuan, not in dollars", which he reads as a direct challenge to American economic control of the oil moving through the region.

Days later Donald Trump said the United States would take over the strait, and on the morning Kiriakou recorded, the US Navy said it had control of it and that the strait was again closed. He calls the reversal what it is: "We're living in bizarro world here, where US policy has always been that the strait has to remain open. And now it's the US that is ensuring that the strait remains closed."

His forecast at that point was that neither party's claim would survive: "in the end, there aren't going to be any fees. There isn't going to be an American blockade, and the Iranians are going to go back to their side of their territorial waters." Both of the postures he rules out are unacceptable in the same way, Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps fast boats harassing shipping, and a US Navy blockade.

Fertiliser

The pressure Kiriakou expects to force a settlement is agricultural rather than energy-related. "65% of the world's fertilizer goes through the Strait of Hormuz."

The chain he traces runs to Africa: Ukraine, "the world's breadbasket," cannot grow enough wheat without fertiliser, and "right now Ukraine feeds all of Africa." His conclusion is that the standoff has a hard time limit, "this is an untenable position. It can't last. People are going to starve to death", and that the two sides will therefore have to reach some agreement, even a temporary one, letting fertiliser and oil through while leaving the Iranians something to show for it. "And it's not going to be in dollars."

What the closure looked like in practice

The economist Richard D. Wolff, speaking on John Kiriakou's programme roughly six weeks into the war, described the closure as the execution of a long-declared plan rather than an improvisation. Unable to match American military spending, the United States outspends the next eight or nine countries combined, and Iran's ninety million people face a country of 330 million with a budget many times larger, Iran had settled on "by far their greatest weapon," which was to close the strait if it were ever attacked again, overtly or covertly.

When the attack came, the declared terms were applied by flag: no Israeli ships, none registered to Israeli owners, none from the United States, and none from any country allying with them in the war. The practical result was not a total stoppage but a filter, the strait was closed "except to a trickle of ships mostly carrying Iranian oil to their conventional customers," whom Wolff identified as Asian: Japan, South Korea, the Philippines and China. Those customers could and did buy elsewhere, but the volume displaced was large, and disproportionately theirs.

The closure caught oil that had nothing to do with Iran. What could not move was crude from the other Gulf producers, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman, which has to transit the strait to reach anyone at all.

Iran's own account of the terms

Wolff also relayed the argument Iran was making about authorship, which runs parallel to Kiriakou's own. Iran's position, as Wolff put it, was that it had never wanted to stop the traffic and had conspicuously not done so for years while entirely capable of it: "Something on the order of hundreds of ships went through every day. For years and years, we were always there. We could have stopped it. We have the missiles, we have the drones, we have the boats, we're right there. I mean, it would have been childishly" easy. On that reading the decision belonged elsewhere, "We're not closing the strait. American and Israel, they're the ones who made the decision."

The terms attached to reopening were explicit and conditional: either the world pressed the United States to change course, in which case "the strait opens, the oil flows, and we're back in business," or it did not, and lived with higher energy prices and whatever recession or depression followed.

The 2026 closure

During the 2026 Iran war, John Kiriakou described the closure as under way rather than threatened: the Iranians "told us that they would close the Strait of Hormuz," and "they're in the process of closing" it, having attacked three ships on the morning of the interview, two oil tankers and one cargo ship.

His complaint was not that it was unexpected but that it had been announced: "What did we think was going to happen? They told us what was going to happen. And we just pretended not to hear." He gives the strait's share of the world's oil supply as at least thirty per cent.

The Oman channel negotiation

By August 2026 there were negotiations under way over the strait, but not the ones being reported. Iran's foreign minister described talks with Oman on determining a new maritime route, said they had reached their final stages, and was explicit that this did not amount to reopening the strait, which remained "contingent upon the fulfilment of a set of other conditions."

Kiriakou's contribution is to explain what the maps in question actually mean. "The channel on the Iranian side is deeper and any ship can pass through there. The channel on the Omani side is much more shallow and it's very difficult for ships to pass through there. It's also more narrow. So everybody goes through the Iranian side." The consequence of that geography is what had been happening in the water: "the handful of ships that tried to go through on the Omani side, the Iranians rocketed and set on fire." His summary of the diplomatic shape of it is that Washington is not a party, "a negotiation that has nothing to do with the United States, that has nothing to do with the US or Israeli bombing of Iran. It has to do with the maritime navigation of the strait of Hormuz." Iran's terms for actually reopening it are set out at its reopening conditions.

See also

- John Kiriakou
- Lindsey Graham
- Donald Trump
