The United States is no longer negotiating with Iran. It is improvising against it. Donald Trump says he will review Tehran’s latest peace proposal, while keeping open the option of new strikes if Iran “behaves badly”. In diplomatic language, this is not a strategy. It is a threat wrapped in uncertainty, delivered to a world already paying the price of American escalation and Iranian endurance. Iran’s proposal is not naïve. It separates the immediate crisis from the ideological one. First, reopen the Strait of Hormuz, end the US naval blockade, stop the fighting in Iran and Lebanon, and create a one-month window for negotiation. Only then would the nuclear file be addressed. Washington, by contrast, wants the nuclear concession first, while maintaining the blockade as leverage. The result is a deadlock. The problem for the US is that Iran has not collapsed. Its economy is suffering, its currency is falling, its oil storage is under pressure, and production is being cut. But Tehran has spent decades learning how to survive sanctions, isolation and economic siege. Washington is discovering, once again, that pressure does not automatically produce surrender. Some regimes bend. Others adapt. Iran belongs to the second category.

This is the non-strategy at the heart of the American approach: squeeze harder, threaten more, wait for capitulation, then call it diplomacy. But Iran’s pain threshold is high, and the world’s is lower. The consequences are already visible. Brent remains above $100 a barrel. US petrol prices are politically toxic. Shipping companies are redesigning routes around Hormuz, using Saudi roads and smaller Gulf vessels, a more expensive and less efficient architecture of global trade. OPEC+ can announce symbolic production increases, but symbolism does not pass through a blocked strait. The danger is that the blockade has become the war’s central battlefield. The US wants to use it to strangle Iran’s oil revenues. Iran uses Hormuz to remind the world that its suffering can be exported. Every extra week raises the cost: higher energy prices, tighter financial conditions, weaker emerging-market currencies, more expensive fertilisers, more fragile food supply chains, and lower global growth. This is not just a Middle Eastern conflict. It is a transmission mechanism.

Asia pays first, because it depends most directly on Gulf energy. Europe pays through inflation and industrial fragility. Emerging markets pay through import bills, currency pressure and social tension. The US pays through petrol prices, bond yields and political fatigue. The rest of the world becomes collateral in a contest where neither side wants to blink. Trump says Iran has not yet paid a high enough price. Perhaps. But the real question is who else must pay it. That is the failure of the American strategy. It treats global energy flows as a bargaining chip, then appears surprised when the global economy starts to shake. It mistakes blockade for control, escalation for leverage, and public humiliation for diplomacy. Iran’s proposal may not be acceptable. It may be tactical. It may simply be designed to buy time. But it recognises one reality better than Washington currently does: before solving the nuclear question, the world needs Hormuz reopened. Until then, this war will not remain contained. It will travel through oil, gas, freight, fertiliser, food, inflation expectations, and interest rates. The United States wanted to trap Iran. Instead, it has trapped everyone.

Trump’s position at home is no less fragile. Under the War Powers Resolution, a president must seek congressional authorisation after 60 days of sustained military engagement. That threshold has been reached. Rather than confront Congress, the administration has chosen a more inventive route: arguing that the legal clock does not apply because hostilities are, in its own words, effectively “over”, reduced to containment, deterrence and enforcement of a naval blockade. It is a semantic manoeuvre that convinces few on Capitol Hill. Lawmakers from both parties are already questioning whether a war that disrupts one-fifth of global oil supply, involves active military deployments and carries a price tag estimated already at 25 billion dollars, can seriously be described as concluded. In reality, Washington is trying to fight a war without calling it one, avoiding both political accountability and legal constraints, a strategy that mirrors its approach in Hormuz: maximum pressure, minimum clarity, and an increasing disconnect between the narrative and the facts.