Iranian leaders have said they want to set up a toll booth situation in which any vessel that wants to transit the strait would need to pay and coordinate with them, but that goes against the long-standing international guiding maritime principle of freedom of navigation.

The current proposal, as outlined by Secretary of State Marco Rubio this week on Capitol Hill, would have both sides lifting their effective blockades, but there have been little signs of a breakthrough, and it appears like a stalemate of wills at this point.

“Condition number one is they have to reopen the strait, and reopening the strait means the following: Ships can sail through international waters the way they can through other choke points around the world, without being fired upon, without paying a toll,” Rubio said. “Phase two is they have to commit to very specific negotiations on highly enriched uranium that still is buried deep in a mountain somewhere.”

Mohsen Rezaei, military adviser to Iranian supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei, told CNN, “The negotiations are at a deadlock and (US President Donald) Trump must break this deadlock,” and added, “The ball is in Trump’s court.”

Rezaei said Iran wants access to $24 billion held up in overseas banks as a part of an agreement. Rubio told lawmakers that the administration has not discussed the possibility of giving Iran sanctions relief or payment immediately to convince them to open up the Strait of Hormuz, but had discussed it in connection with negotiations on Iran’s nuclear program.

Excluding Trump’s public comments about Iran’s willingness to make a deal, there are few available signs that point to Iran’s legitimate willingness to agree to any sort of deal that the president would be willing to sign, barring additional U.S. concessions.

“They will withstand the pain until they get diplomatically what they think that they have earned on the battlefield, so they’re not going to give up what they’ve earned on the battlefield due to the blockade,” Narges Bajoghli, a Middle East Studies professor at Johns Hopkins University, told the Washington Examiner. “Iran has withstood now 40 years of sanctions. It’ll withstand this blockade as well.”

Resumption of war?

While Iran continues to carry out attacks on U.S. Navy and commercial vessels and on Gulf countries, the president maintains that the ceasefire remains in effect.

Trump has said several instances of Iranian attacks on U.S. Navy and commercial vessels and attacks on Gulf countries have not violated the terms of the ceasefire agreement he announced on April 7, which has been extended several times and is still in effect. The initial ceasefire agreement, Trump said at the time, was contingent upon Iran reopening the strait, but that hasn’t happened.

U.S. Central Command said Iran fired two missiles at Kuwait and three at Bahrain on Tuesday in one of their most devastating attacks since the ceasefire commenced. One hit Kuwait International Airport, killing one person and injured more than 60 others. American troops have responded when attacked, but have not carried out offensive operations since the ceasefire began.

A major question, however, is what resuming the war would entail and what the best way to accomplish it would be.

The U.S. conducted more than 13,500 strikes, destroying more than 85% of Iran’s ballistic missile drone and naval defense industrial bases, as well as more than 90% of Iran’s naval mines. U.S. forces also destroyed 82% of Iran’s air defense missile systems along with the radar and command architecture that tied together Iran’s fixed-wing airfields, hangars, fuel storage, and munitions stockpiles, according to CENTCOM Commander Adm. Brad Cooper. Despite all of that, Iran has been able to continue their attacks.

Richard Goldberg, a former National Security Council official under the first Trump administration, told the Washington Examiner that resuming the war to hit the same target set “would appear to be a mission that may have diminishing returns.”

Goldberg said he could envision a new operation “targeting the critical infrastructure of the regime,” which “are targets that, by and large, were not hit during [Operation] Epic Fury,” but it would also presumably incur an even more aggressive Iranian response in turn.

“If the enemy has the capability to respond in kind throughout the Gulf provides the Iranian the opportunity, the pretext to retaliate with their missile capabilities against Gulf critical infrastructure, and what you would end up is the regime would absolutely be, would be done for, and, and you know, probably could not come back from from the hits that we would launch, but the rest of the region would also be suffering a great deal,” Goldberg said.

Trump said on Thursday he would restart military operations “very quickly” if Iran killed more American troops. To date, Iranian attacks have killed seven U.S. troops, six died in a refueling accident in Iraq unrelated to enemy fire, and one died from a medical emergency.

Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) told the Washington Examiner that while he supports the president’s diplomatic overtures, he believes U.S. forces will ultimately “have to go in and destroy the Iranian Revolutionary Guard,” but declined to say whether he would support a ground invasion to accomplish that.

“It’ll be one of two things, either their economy completely falls apart and there’s internal unrest, or we go out and demolish the rest of the leadership,” he added.

Iranian leadership

Iran’s Assembly of Experts anointed Mojtaba Khamenei the successor to his father, the slain Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in the early days of the war. The younger Khamenei was injured in those strikes and has not been seen publicly.

Ali Khamenei and many of his senior advisers who were killed during the war participated in the 1979 revolution, while the leaders who have replaced them largely grew up after it.

“Up until February 28, Iran was led by the founders of the revolution. It was led by the people who had been formed in the pre-revolutionary period, and they were folks who were constantly trying to prove the revolution in the aftermath to their own population, to themselves, and to all of their opponents, whether internal or external, this new generation that we now have in the rank and file and in decision making within Iran is one in which has grown up completely,” Bajoghli said. “It was born and raised with the Islamic Republic as a fact.”

Many of the younger generation, those who rose the ranks with Mojtaba Khamenei, gained more decision-making power following the 12-day Israel-Iran War last June, in part because the older generation incorrectly believed the steady “no war, no peace” precedent that had been the norm for U.S.-Iran relations for decades would continue unimpeded.

“A lot of the younger generation of policy makers and decision makers started to come to the fore for a couple of reasons, one is you had a lot of decapitation strikes in general during that war, and then second was that that older generation had sort of made a bet on the ‘no war, no peace,’ and this younger generation, you know, felt that that was that was actually leading Iran into a really big strategic conundrum,” said Bajoghli, who recently wrote about the shifts within Iran in an opinion piece for Foreign Affairs.

She went as far as to say the U.S. “lost this war,” and said that means “the broader U.S. foreign policy establishment has to come to terms with the fact that the past 40-some odd years of foreign policy in the Middle East is now going to drastically shift.”

The recent Iranian attacks, Bajoghli argued, were their attempts to see whether Trump was serious about making a deal, considering both Operation Midnight Hammer and Operation Epic Fury occurred amid talks about Iran’s nuclear program.

“I think the reason we see an escalation in the past few days is because they’re trying to test out, ‘Does Trump want to continue the war or not,’ and they’re trying to make it very costly for him to do so,” Bajoghli said. “This is why they’ve also, they’re not letting go of the Strait of Hormuz, because they know that by having a stranglehold over the global economy, it will help create that deterrent, so that they won’t be attacked again.”

The U.S. blockade has worsened Iran’s struggling economy to the point that there have been reports that it cannot pay its forces, but it’s unclear if the pain it caused will be enough for its leaders to agree to a deal that Trump would be willing to sign.

RUBIO: IRAN HAS ‘AGREED TO NEGOTIATE ASPECTS OF THEIR NUCLEAR PROGRAM’

A major factor in how Iran responds could be whether there are renewed protests in the streets, which had been going on in the months before the war due to the country’s struggling economy, and whether its inability to pay people at lower levels involved in enforcing the regime’s strict crackdowns may be less motivated to do so, Goldberg hypothesized.

The blockade is currently costing the Iranian economy hundreds of millions of dollars a day, Rubio said, adding that the “supreme leader and the IRGC core are a little bit more immune from those pressures until they can be convinced otherwise.”