Why the timing has moved forward
The Iran war has quietened down since the memorandum of understanding between the US and Iran collapsed last month. Senior US officials now say a deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz is close. Iran denies it is talking to the US at all, though it has confirmed progress in separate talks with Oman.
CommBank Geo-Economics Analyst Madison Cartwright says that the shift is real. “In our view, moves towards a new deal are genuine,” he noted, while warning that negotiations remain challenging.
Cartwright originally expected the US to hold out until economic and political pressure built up, probably by early October. Two things changed that. The US wound down its tit-for-tat bombing campaign, and the war spread to the Red Sea, where Iranian proxies in Yemen and Iranian-backed militias in Iraq have raised the risk of wider regional damage. The Houthi blockade has cut tanker traffic through the Bab el-Mandeb Strait and from the East-West pipeline port at Yanbu, and traffic through the Suez Canal, the alternative way out of the Red Sea, has not picked up the slack.
The US is running low on interceptors
Military maths is part of the calculation too. The US has used 80% of its THAAD missile interceptors and roughly half of its Patriot interceptors since the war began, according to CNN. Both are central to defending against Iranian missile attacks, and neither is quick to replace. THAADs take 53 months to build and Patriots take 42 months.
On the offensive side, Reuters has reported the US has used “virtually all” of its Precision Strike Missiles and Army Tactical Missile Systems. Without them, Cartwright said, the US would have to lean harder on fighter jets to hit targets in Iran, putting pilots and planes at greater risk.
What a deal might actually look like
Iran and Oman are negotiating over how the two countries jointly administer traffic through the strait, which sits in Omani waters to the south and Iranian waters to the north. Reports suggest they are close to announcing a final deal, but Cartwright is clear that an Iran-Oman agreement on its own would not reopen the waterway.
A deal that formalised Iran's control of the strait may be enough of a concession, he said, likely including a mechanism for Iran to exercise authority over all traffic and the legal groundwork for a “service fee” on ships passing through. Reopening the strait would also require the US to lift its blockade of Iranian ports and its sanctions on Iranian oil. How those assurances are being given to Iran is unclear, given Oman cannot negotiate for the US and Iran denies it is negotiating directly with the US.
Why it could still take longer
Cartwright puts a 35% chance on talks stalling, and he is not expecting a fast fix.
“Iran still has more leverage and will extract additional concessions from the US under any new deal,” he said.
Iran is likely to want those concessions delivered before it lifts the blockade, given how little it trusts the US to follow through. Possible preconditions include the release of more frozen assets or more pressure on Israel to withdraw from southern Lebanon.
Further escalation is now the least likely outcome at 10%, Cartwright said, because the US appears reluctant to deepen the conflict. Even if the strait does reopen, he expects traffic to normalise more slowly than it did after the last agreement. And the Red Sea is a separate problem. It is not part of the current talks, and Cartwright expects the Houthi blockade to stay in effect pending negotiations of its own.
You can read Madison Cartwright’s full research note here.
