Washington and Tehran Will Keep Hormuz at Risk, Not Fully at War

My call: The war everyone fears stays stuck in second gear

Picture this. The Pentagon steps up to the mic and insists, again, that the ceasefire with Iran is holding. At the same time, U.S. warships are enforcing a naval blockade of Iranian ports, Iranian forces are buzzing tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, and oil traders are refreshing Bloomberg like it is a cardiac monitor.

The consensus script writes itself: this fragile non-peace fractures, Hormuz goes hot, and we all learn more about shipping insurance than we ever wanted to know.

My call goes against that: between now and December 31, 2026, we do not get a sustained, acknowledged U.S.–Iran naval war in and around the Strait of Hormuz, and we do not get a seven day or longer shutdown of tanker traffic caused by such fighting.

Instead, we get something less cinematic and more durable. A managed cold confrontation under the label of "ceasefire," full of missiles, brinkmanship, and press conferences, calibrated to stay just short of the thresholds that would force everyone to admit the obvious and call it a war.

The forecast line: what would actually count as "collapse"

A forecast you cannot score is ambient vibes. So here is the resolution line that I am betting we do not cross by the end of 2026:

We would have to see sustained, large-scale naval combat in and immediately around the Strait of Hormuz, with U.S. or Israeli forces and Iranian regular forces openly engaging each other on at least three separate days within any rolling 14‑day period.

On top of that, those clashes would have to shut down commercial tanker traffic for seven or more consecutive days, not just spike insurance rates and delay a few sailings, but functionally close the artery.

Limited skirmishes for a couple of days, a heavily damaged ship, even a short pause in traffic while everyone re-prices risk, all of that fits inside my call. The question on the table is not "Will there be more scary headlines from Hormuz?" There will. The question is whether this slow-motion mess hardens into a clear, named war.

Why the Strait stays half-closed and half-deniable

On the water, the ceasefire looks ridiculous. The U.S. keeps a blockade on Iranian ports. Iran has effectively controlled Hormuz since the war began. Vessels get harassed, missiles fly near shipping lanes, and every flare-up gives oil prices a short spike and a longer hangover.

On paper, though, the truce still works for both sides, which is why it survives the humiliation tour.

First, Iran’s leverage works better in gray than in black and white. Full control of a chokepoint only pays off if you can use it repeatedly. Tehran gains more from constant, calibrated pressure on shipping than from a one-off attempt to actually close Hormuz and invite a U.S.–led campaign to shred its navy and coastal missile sites. A slow drip of risk keeps premiums high. A big closure gives Washington every excuse to go hunting.

Second, Washington wants lanes open, not a naval campaign. The U.S. can win a shooting war at sea, but only by courting missile strikes on bases, Gulf oil infrastructure, and maybe U.S. ships. That is not a background conflict you run while trying to manage inflation and alliance politics. A blockade plus escorts plus rhetoric is cheaper than explaining $150 oil to voters.

Third, everyone else hates the all-out war version. Gulf monarchies, Europe, India, China, Japan, Korea, pick your importer. They will tolerate harassment and risk, up to a point. They will quietly adapt routes and buy more storage. What they will not tolerate is a week or more of chokehold-level disruption that turns every cabinet meeting on Earth into an energy crisis briefing. That coalition does not have to love the U.S. or Iran. It only has to love continuity more than either side loves escalation.

Fourth, the ceasefire buys time for everyone’s domestic politics. Tehran gets to claim victory and resistance without testing just how survivable a real naval showdown would be. Washington and Jerusalem get to say the big war is over while keeping enough pressure on Iran to mollify hawks. No one has a clean political runway into an open Hormuz war. They all do, however, have a script for "regrettable incidents" that somehow do not break the truce.

What could prove this wrong

For this forecast to fail, the blockade-under-ceasefire contradiction has to snap in a spectacular way. A few concrete tripwires to watch:

• Rules of engagement shift. If credible reporting shows U.S. ships in or near Hormuz authorized to strike Iranian assets pre-emptively on "perceived" threats, we are closer to a fight that runs on autopilot.
• Iranian orders get openly aggressive. If Tehran is caught or quoted telling the IRGC Navy to prioritize "deterrent" clashes over avoiding incidents, that is a sign domestic politics is beating risk calculus.
• The targets change scale. Damaging a single tanker is harassment. Sinking a fully loaded VLCC with mass casualties, or repeatedly hitting U.S. or allied warships, is how you audition for a multi-week air and naval campaign.
• Blockade tightening turns maximalist. Boardings of more third‑country vessels, expanded exclusion zones, and de facto sanctions on anyone trading with Iran through the Gulf would crank Tehran’s incentives to force a crisis.
• Multinational fleets come with teeth. A big coalition patrol is one thing. A big coalition with a clear mandate to "restore freedom of navigation" by neutralizing Iranian assets is the staging area for the war the consensus is waiting for.

Layer any of that on top of a proxy attack that kills a lot of Americans and gets pinned, fairly or not, on Tehran, and the path to a real naval war gets shorter and straighter.

I am not ruling that out. I am ruling it out on this timetable and at this specific scale. The machinery for miscalculation is very real. The machinery for walking crises back, Omani phone lines, Qatari shuttles, back‑channel messages that never make the front page, is real too and has a better batting average than the war Twitter crowd.

How to watch Hormuz like a grown‑up

If you are looking for signals, stop treating every skirmish as a trailer for World War III and start treating it as a data point in a risk regime that is trying not to break.

Market behavior is a tell. The pattern so far is familiar: a clash, a jump in oil prices, breathless cable segments, then a retreat as traders decide this looks like last month’s scare. When the curve stops mean‑reverting, when a risk premium stays embedded instead of spiking and fading, that is when the probability of a real breakdown is finally creeping up.

Shipping is another. Rising day‑rates and insurance surcharges are coping mechanisms. A move to widespread refusal to cover transits, or to sail without heavy military escort, is how you know we are flirting with that seven‑day cutoff line.

Diplomatic noise matters more than diplomatic theater. Public name‑calling can coexist with quiet de‑escalation. What would really scare me is the opposite: everyone suddenly insisting there is "no one to talk to" on the other side while the gun camera footage gets a lot more frequent.

The satirical close: a ceasefire that never stops firing

So here is the uncomfortable forecast: by the end of 2026, we are likely still living with a ceasefire that features regular missile launches, naval harassment, and ritual statements that it "remains in place." Tankers will keep moving through a strait that is neither secure nor fully blocked, and finance will keep pretending a structurally higher risk regime is just a series of one‑off shocks.

When we score this in 2027, my expected headline is not "Hormuz War Shuts Down Oil Flows." It is "Ceasefire Turns Three, Still Has More Body Count Than Most Wars, Markets Unbothered." In other words, the truce will probably hold, mostly because nobody can afford to admit what it has already become.