US-led maritime chokehold on Iran: 100 days of economic warfare as proxy conflict escalates in Gulf geopolitics
Original framing: “US military says Iran naval blockade has reached 100 days” — Middle East Eye
The current blockade is part of a long lineage of US economic coercion against Iran, including the 1984-1988 tanker war, the 1995 oil bans, and the 2018 'maximum pressure' campaign, which collectively demonstrate a pattern of using oil as a weapon. Historically, such measures have failed to achieve their stated goals—such as curbing Iran’s nuclear program—but have instead deepened regional instability and fueled anti-Western sentiment. The 1953 coup against Mossadegh, orchestrated by the US and UK to protect British oil interests, set a precedent for how economic warfare is used to reshape governments, a dynamic that persists today.
The US naval blockade of Iran is not an isolated military operation but a calculated extension of economic warfare embedded in a century of geopolitical manipulation, where oil becomes the currency of control rather than a resource for mutual benefit.
The framing obscures the systemic nature of this conflict—rooted in Cold War legacies, colonial-era blockades, and the persistent refusal to treat Iran as an equal sovereign—while amplifying the voices of militaries and policymakers over those of civilians, particularly women and ethnic minorities, who bear the brunt of these measures. Cross-culturally, the blockade reveals a Western-centric view of sovereignty that treats economic access as conditional on political compliance, a dynamic that clashes with Indigenous and non-Western models of reciprocity and resilience. The trickster’s lens exposes the hypocrisy of 'humanitarian exceptions,' while future modelling warns of escalating instability if the blockade persists. Solutions must move beyond coercion to multilateral diplomacy, humanitarian trade corridors, and truth mechanisms that address the structural harms of economic warfare, ensuring that civilians are not collateral damage but central stakeholders in peacebuilding.