A Response to Alastair Crooke on Iran, Hormuz, and the End of the American Century
Who Alastair Crooke Is and Why It Matters
Alastair Crooke is not a commentator in the conventional sense. He served for decades as a British diplomat and intelligence officer in the Middle East, worked as a security adviser to the EU Special Envoy to the region, and was instrumental in establishing the 2002 ceasefire between Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Israel. He is the founder of Conflicts Forum and the author of Resistance: The Essence of the Islamist Revolution. He reads the Hebrew-language Israeli press closely and has done so for years. When he describes what Netanyahu said to Trump at Mar-a-Lago on 29 December 2025, he is drawing on multiple sourced accounts from the Israeli political correspondents he has tracked across decades. When he describes the geography of the Strait of Hormuz, he has been there.
This matters because the analysis he provides in his April 12 interview with Chris Hedges is not speculation. It is the considered judgment of someone with operational knowledge of the region, its actors, and its strategic logic, offered at the moment when the Islamabad talks are underway and their outcome is genuinely uncertain. His central argument deserves the most careful engagement, because it reframes everything that has happened since February 28, 2026, in terms that Western media have been structurally unable to provide.
The Cage — Named at Last
The key to Crooke's analysis is a single formulation. Iran's objective in this conflict, he states, is to blow up the existing paradigm, completely, in order to escape from what he calls the cage in which Iran has been held for 48 years. That cage has specific bars: US military forces encircling the country, sanctions, UN resolutions weaponised against it, political isolation, economic boycott, cultural exclusion. It is not, he notes carefully, the same cage that Gaza is in. Gaza has a literal fence, drones, and permanent monitoring. Iran's cage is constructed differently but is no less real, and no less deliberately built.
This formulation clarifies what the preceding articles on this platform identified through a different lens. The Prince's Rules argued that the rules-based international order is lex ex voluntate principis, law from the will of the prince, applied to constrain the weak and suspended whenever it inconvenienced the powerful. The cage is what that legal architecture looks like from the inside. The sanctions, the vetoed resolutions, the JCPOA withdrawal, the assassination of General Soleimani on Iraqi soil, the 2026 war of aggression, these are not separate events. They are the successive reinforcement of the cage's bars. And the key to breaking them, Crooke argues, is the Strait of Hormuz.
"Iran's objectives are to blow up the existing paradigm. That is a revolutionary objective — to blow it up completely — in order that they can escape from the cage in which they've been held for 48 years: surrounded by US military forces, besieged by tariffs, restrictions, UN resolutions, political isolation, economic and cultural boycott."
— Alastair Crooke, The Chris Hedges Report, 12 April 2026
The offer of enriched uranium before the war deserves to be stated plainly here. Prior to February 28, 2026, Iran had offered, as part of ongoing negotiations, to surrender its stockpile of enriched uranium. The United States, under Netanyahu's instruction as Crooke documents, chose to attack rather than negotiate. The reason Netanyahu gave Trump at Mar-a-Lago on 29 December 2025, according to Crooke's Hebrew-press sources, was explicit: forget the nuclear issue. The missiles are the target. Iran is not merely replacing its missile capacity, it is creating an entirely new strategic paradigm. If it is not destroyed now, it will become untouchable. And if Trump attempted to resolve the matter through another JCPOA-type nuclear agreement, Netanyahu told him directly: we will not give you a kosher certificate for that. You will lose the support of the American right. The war, Crooke concludes, was agreed in principle at that December meeting, weeks before the February 11 White House meeting that the New York Times described as the decision point.
— Alastair Crooke, 12 April 2026
What the Toll Actually Is
The International Maritime Organization has described Iran's $2 million toll on vessels transiting the Strait of Hormuz as a dangerous precedent threatening the global system of freedom of navigation. This position was examined at length in After the Pretense, where it was placed against the fifteen-year blockade on Gaza, condemned by the International Court of Justice, voted against by 149 nations, found to constitute the war crime of starvation, which produced no comparable IMO statement, no emergency session, no co-sponsored condemnation. The law sorts neatly into jurisdictions. The moral weight does not sort with it.
Crooke's analysis adds a dimension that the legal framework alone cannot capture. The toll is not primarily a revenue instrument. It is a sanctions-breaking mechanism. Every ship that pays the toll and transits Hormuz is bypassing the sanctions architecture directly, conducting commerce with Iran outside the dollar system, outside the Western financial infrastructure, outside the enforcement mechanisms that have strangled the Iranian economy for decades. Asian states, India, Pakistan, South Korea, Japan, are already making arrangements. The sanctions are being dismantled not by negotiation in Geneva or Vienna but by commercial fait accompli in the waters of the Persian Gulf.
The financial picture Crooke provides is extraordinary. In the first month of the war alone, Iran earned double from oil sales what it had earned in any single month for several years. On one Sunday, five tankers loading at Kharg Island earned Iran $850 million in a single day. Add the $2 million toll per vessel transiting Hormuz, and Crooke notes that analysts have calculated Iran could approach a trillion dollars annually through control of the strait. But the toll and the oil revenues are, he insists, only the visible surface of something much larger.
Supply Lines, Chips, and the Financial-Cultural Revolution
Hormuz does not only control oil and gas. It controls helium, sulfuric acid, fertiliser, food supply chains, and the liquefied gases without which semiconductor fabrication is impossible. Taiwan's chip factories are, at the time of writing, near standstill. The global technology supply chain runs through the same strait that Iran now controls. Crooke draws the explicit parallel with China's response to Trump's 155% tariff: Beijing did not match it dollar for dollar. It restricted rare earth exports and essential commodities and watched Washington recalculate. Iran is executing the same logic at the chokepoint of the world economy.
But Crooke's most far-reaching argument concerns the dollar itself. Since 1973, the Gulf has been the structural centre of dollar hegemony, the petrodollar system through which oil revenues flow to Wall Street, are leveraged across global financial markets, and sustain American economic dominance. Iran is now telling Gulf states directly: if you want a relationship with Iran, you must abandon your close economic ties to the United States. Not just the military bases, the Microsoft and Amazon data centres, the financialised economic culture the US has built across the Gulf over fifty years. Payment for cargoes transiting Hormuz is demanded in yuan. Gulf money is already moving, not back into dollars but into yuan, flowing toward China. Deutsche Bank is issuing panda bonds. Russia is demanding yuan for oil and gas from European buyers. The petrodollar architecture is being targeted at its structural root, and Hormuz is the lever.
This is what Crooke means by breaking the paradigm. It is not, he emphasises, about whether ships can go up or down the strait. It is a financial and cultural revolution, the dismantling of the economic environment that has made the cage possible, pursued with a strategic patience and precision that the West has consistently failed to appreciate because its media and political class have been unable to take Iranian strategic thinking seriously on its own terms.
The Strait That Cannot Be Retaken
In 1956, Britain, France, and Israel attempted to retake the Suez Canal after Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalised it. They failed. They were forced to retreat in humiliation. The episode marked the definitive end of British imperial reach and the beginning of a new order in which the United States, not London or Paris, would be the dominant external power in the Middle East. Crooke argues, and this writer agrees, that what is unfolding at Hormuz is America's equivalent moment, and the geography makes it even more decisive than Suez.
Crooke has been to the Strait of Hormuz. He describes what it looks like. The entire sea line is bordered by cliffs. In those cliffs are anti-ship missiles. Under the waterway Iran has submersible drones, deployed through tunnels, equipped with lithium batteries capable of four days of operation, capable of loitering and selecting targets using artificial intelligence. On the surface are high-speed explosive drones. In the shallows operate mini two-man submarines armed with anti-ship missiles. The peninsula on the far side of the strait conceals mountains riddled with artillery emplacements that cover the full width of the waterway up to Kharg Island. To attempt a landing operation down the strait would be, in Crooke's assessment, suicide. Even seizing Kharg Island, a small, flat terminal where pipelines from Iran's interior connect to tanker loading facilities, would change nothing. Iran would simply close the strait for three to four weeks, and the resulting pain in oil prices, inflation, and market valuations would be felt globally before any military advantage could be consolidated.
The missile cities compound this picture. Iran's primary missile capability is buried 800 metres under granite mountains, accessed by internal railway. A door opens. The missile fires from the railway line. The door closes. Sixteen thousand air strikes have not stopped it. Half an hour after each strike, the next missile comes out. The mountain is getting slightly darker. Nothing is affected. The command structure is decentralised on a mosaic model specifically designed after Iran observed the American decapitation of Baghdad's command structure in 2003. It snaps into action automatically. It cannot be stopped by killing leaders, as the assassination of the Supreme Leader demonstrated. The new leadership is more defiant, not less. The young are more fired up, not less. When Trump threatened to end Iranian civilisation, Iranians streamed onto bridges and nuclear facilities and said: here we are. If you are going to kill us, kill us. Crooke calls this a deep Shia readiness to accept personal sacrifice in the interests of the community, a civilisational response, not a military one.
The Cards the United States Does Not Hold
Crooke's assessment of the American position at Islamabad is blunt. The United States has very few cards to play. Iranian drone fire has pushed American naval carriers a thousand kilometres from the Iranian coastline, beyond the range at which their deck aircraft can strike Iran without mid-air refuelling over a hostile target, which is not a viable operational option. Most US radar systems and bases in the Gulf have been heavily damaged. Awacs aircraft have been disabled. What remains to the United States militarily, Crooke asks, that would be a game-changer? Bombing civilian infrastructure, houses, hospitals, residences in Tehran, with standoff cruise missiles and drones, largely without aircraft flying over Iranian territory at all. That is not a path to victory. It is the description of a power reduced to terror as strategy.
The Islamabad talks, as Crooke describes them on the day they began, are not proceeding as a peace process. They are a hoodna, an Arabic term for a temporary truce to explore whether political will exists, distinct from a ceasefire with underlying agreements. Iran believes the United States has not fulfilled the undertakings it gave to Pakistan, particularly on frozen assets. The Iranian position is unchanged and simple: a ceasefire on all fronts or a ceasefire on none. Israel is not in Islamabad. It was not party to the Pakistani brokerage. It is actively attacking Lebanon, killing hundreds of civilians, to force its exclusion from any comprehensive settlement, to extend the window for continued operations against Hezbollah, and to maintain pressure on Trump to keep the war alive.
Israel's Failures — From Its Own Military
The internal picture of Israel that Crooke draws from the Hebrew-language press he monitors is one that Western English-language media has not conveyed. The IDF Chief of Staff attended the last security cabinet meeting and presented ten red lights. The IDF is near the point of collapse. In the brief Lebanese ground operation, nearly 100 Merkava main battle tanks were destroyed, many with their crews. When Israeli forces attempted to establish a buffer line in southern Lebanon, they were routed. Hezbollah has gone dark: new leadership, new structures, no visible profile, appearing and vanishing like ghosts, firing missiles directly to Tel Aviv. The military is telling the political leadership, with clarity: we have achieved none of our objectives in Iran. The state did not collapse. There was no colour revolution. The enriched uranium was not recovered. The missile capacity has not been destroyed. Hamas is still running Gaza and re-equipping for the next conflict.
Against this military reality stands a political leader whose personal survival depends on the war continuing. Netanyahu's corruption trial is resuming. Conviction risks imprisonment. The war is his legal defence strategy, while it continues, elections can be deferred, the political class remains consolidated around him, and the fantasy of an imaginary victory can be sustained for a domestic audience that, Crooke notes with the same precision Finkelstein applied from a different angle, supports the destruction of Iran at 93%. The same population that streams into bomb shelters every night for eight to ten hours. The same society that has failed in every stated military objective and is asking for more.
The Bushehr Signal
One element of Crooke's interview requires particular attention. An Israeli missile struck near the Bushehr nuclear power plant, a functioning, Russian-Iranian joint venture, staffed until recently by approximately 135 Russian personnel. It was not a direct hit. The damage was minor. But Crooke's reading of the signal is precise and disturbing: it was not directed at Iran. It was directed at the United States. The message, as he reads it from the Israeli political press, is this: keep this war going, or we may decide to resort to practical nuclear weapons. Israel, it should be recalled, has never signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, has never submitted to IAEA verification, and possesses an estimated several hundred nuclear warheads. It is the only nuclear-armed state in the region. It is holding that fact over the American negotiating position as leverage.
This connects directly to the 1996 ICJ Advisory Opinion on the legality of nuclear weapons, which found most uses unlawful but left open a narrow exception: where the survival of a state is genuinely at stake. Israel is now constructing, through its conduct and its signals, a narrative in which its survival justifies the threat of nuclear use, against a non-nuclear state, in a war Israel initiated, in pursuit of objectives its own military has acknowledged it has failed to achieve. The wild beasts, to return to Locke's formulation from After the Pretense, are now rattling a nuclear cage of their own.
The Northwest Passage and the Irony That Writes Itself
A detail not present in Crooke's interview but directly relevant to his argument concerns Canada's Northwest Passage, a matter this writer has been examining in parallel with the Hormuz question. Canada claims the Northwest Passage as internal waters, giving it full sovereign jurisdiction to regulate, restrict, and potentially toll passage. The United States contests this vigorously, insisting the Passage is an international strait under UNCLOS, subject to free transit rights that Canada cannot override.
The structural parallel with Hormuz is exact, with the positions reversed. Washington insists on free transit through waterways it does not control, Hormuz, the Northwest Passage, and resists or contests any sovereign state's claim to regulate passage through its own territorial or adjacent waters, unless that state is an American ally operating under American terms. Canada is being told by its southern neighbour, the same neighbour whose Secretary of Defence has described it as part of a Greater North America security perimeter, that its sovereign claim over its own Arctic waters is inadmissible. Iran is being told the same thing about Hormuz, with bombs rather than diplomatic pressure, because Iran has the capacity to resist and Canada, for the moment, does not.
The principle the United States is asserting is not freedom of navigation. It is freedom of American navigation, the right to move through any waterway on the planet on American terms, without toll, without inspection, without the consent of the states whose waters are being transited. This is the Monroe Doctrine extended from the Western Hemisphere to the world's oceans. It is lex ex voluntate principis applied to maritime law. And Iran, for the first time in 48 years, has demonstrated that it does not hold.
Forty-Seven Years of Restraint — A Concession Never Legally Owed
1986 "7th Anniversary of The Establishment of The Islamic Republic of Iran" (IMAGE: Getarchive, Public Domain)One argument that neither Crooke nor Hedges makes explicitly, but which the legal record demands, is this: from the Islamic Revolution of 1979 until February 28, 2026, across 47 years of declared American hostility, Iran never closed or tolled the Strait of Hormuz. It exercised restraint that no legal instrument required of it. UNCLOS prohibits states bordering international straits from imposing tolls on transit passage. But Iran never ratified UNCLOS. It operates under the older 1958 Geneva Convention framework. And even under UNCLOS, the right of transit passage assumes a functioning legal order in which the rules apply to all parties. When one party launches a war of aggression, bombs civilian infrastructure, assassinates heads of state, and threatens to end a civilisation, while the institutions designed to prevent such conduct sit in session and blame the victim, the legal order that underwrote the concession no longer exists.
Iran's 47 years of restraint on Hormuz was a unilateral concession. It was never legally owed. It has now been withdrawn. The IMO's dangerous precedent warning identifies the consequence while declining, because its mandate does not require it to, name the cause. The cause is documented in two preceding articles on this platform and confirmed in every element of Crooke's analysis.
The Cages That Remain
Crooke's analysis is focused on Iran. But the implications extend far beyond it, and this is where the voice of the Global South must be added to his strategic register.
Cuba has been in a cage for over sixty years. A unilateral American embargo, consistently condemned by the UN General Assembly, most recently by votes of 184 to 2, maintained in defiance of international legal opinion, sustained by the same logic that built Iran's cage: compliance, submission, and the management of states that refuse to align with the hegemon's regional project. Venezuela has had its oil revenues seized, its president arrested on American charges, its resources described by Trump as now being accessed in partnership following military action, the open language of pillage that the Hague Regulations of 1907 prohibit and the Rome Statute criminalises. The sanctions imposed on these states, like those imposed on Iran, are extraterritorial, applied beyond American jurisdiction, enforced by threatening third parties with secondary sanctions, which many international legal scholars argue constitute a form of economic coercion prohibited under Article 2(4) of the UN Charter.
Every state in one of these cages is watching Islamabad. Every state that has been told its sovereign rights are conditional on American approval is watching whether the paradigm can in fact be broken. Crooke is right that Iran's success has produced a particular resonance in China and Russia, he notes that the Chinese were surprised by the extent of Iran's strategic preparation and its asymmetric effectiveness. But the resonance goes further. It reaches the states of Africa that are renegotiating their relationships with former colonial powers. It reaches Latin America, where Hegseth's Greater North America doctrine has made explicit what was previously only implied. It reaches every corner of the world where the rules-based order has been experienced not as protection but as the cage's legal paperwork.
The First Lesson of the Century — Continued
In After the Pretense, this writer argued that the first major lesson of the twenty-first century was being written in the rubble of Isfahan's bridges and the negotiating rooms of Islamabad. Crooke's interview, published on the day those negotiations began, confirms the lesson's content: a hegemon that mistakes the performance of strength for its substance, that launches a war on the advice of a Netanyahu who promised a weekend operation and delivered a strategic defeat, that threatens to end a civilisation on social media and accepts a brokered ceasefire ninety minutes before its own deadline, such a power is not demonstrating its dominance. It is demonstrating its limits.
Iran has not won a conventional military victory. Its infrastructure has been damaged. Its civilians have been killed, over 1,700, including 254 children, according to Crooke's figures, alongside 3 million displaced from their homes and 1 million Lebanese. The costs are real and must not be minimised. But it has achieved what Crooke identifies as the strategically decisive outcome: it has broken the cage open. The sanctions are being bypassed commercially. The dollar is being challenged at its structural root. The US military has been pushed back from the strait it claimed to dominate. The new Iranian leadership is more defiant than the old. The young are streaming onto bridges to say: here we are.
The Persian civilisation is 7,000 years old, as Crooke notes. It has outlasted every empire that has attempted to contain it. The rules-based order is seventy-nine years old and was, as the preceding articles in this series have argued, never a neutral legal framework but a set of preferences defined and enforced by the powerful, applied selectively, and suspended whenever compliance became inconvenient. That order is not being replaced by chaos. It is being replaced, slowly, painfully, at enormous human cost, by something more honest: a genuinely multipolar world in which sovereign states negotiate from their actual interests, in which the cage is no longer the architecture of international relations, and in which the first state to break out has demonstrated, for every state watching, that it can be done.
"Iran is not going back into that paradigm. Why should it, under any circumstances? They can see that. And now they are in the process of trying to make a strategic shift — to change that paradigm and to get out of this cage."
— Alastair Crooke, The Chris Hedges Report, 12 April 2026
References
Primary Source — This Article's Subject
Crooke, A. (12 April 2026). Interview: Breaking the Paradigm: America's Suez Crisis. The Chris Hedges Report, YouTube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RKEjfIDEys
Preceding Articles in This Series
Clothier, Y. (3 April 2026). The Prince's Rules: North America, Western Asia, and the Unmaking of International Law. bushgrad.blogspot.com.
https://bushgrad.blogspot.com/2026/04/the-princes-rules-north-america-western.html
Clothier, Y. (11 April 2026). "A Whole Civilization Will Die Tonight": After the Pretense of International Law. bushgrad.blogspot.com.
https://bushgrad.blogspot.com/2026/04/a-whole-civilization-will-die-tonight.html
Primary Legal Instruments
Charter of the United Nations, 1945. Articles 2(1), 2(4), 2(7), 51.
https://www.un.org/en/about-us/un-charter
Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), 1968. Article IV, inalienable right to peaceful nuclear energy.
https://www.un.org/disarmament/wmd/nuclear/npt/text
Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), Vienna, 14 July 2015.
https://eeas.europa.eu/archives/docs/statements-eeas/docs/iran_agreement/iran_joint-comprehensive-plan-of-action_en.pdf
Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, 1998. Article 8(2)(b), war crimes.
https://www.icc-cpi.int/sites/default/files/RS-Eng.pdf
UN General Assembly Resolution 1803 (XVII), 1962, Permanent Sovereignty over Natural Resources.
ICJ Advisory Opinion, Legality of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons, 1996.
International Court of Justice
South Africa v. Israel (Gaza genocide case), ICJ Provisional Measures, 26 January 2024; Advisory Opinion, 2025.
https://www.icj-cij.org/case/192
On the Northwest Passage
Notre Dame Journal of International and Comparative Law, Vol. XIV:1, Why Canada Should Recognize the Northwest Passage as an International Strait.
https://scholarship.law.nd.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1206&context=ndjicl
Secondary Sources
Crooke, A. (2009). Resistance: The Essence of the Islamist Revolution. Pluto Press.
Chomsky, N. (2003). Hegemony or Survival. Metropolitan Books.
Fanon, F. (1961). The Wretched of the Earth.
Locke, J. (1689). Two Treatises of Government. Second Treatise, Chapter III: Of the State of War.
