Tehran, Iran – As the United States awaits Tehran’s latest response to texts for an agreement being exchanged through intermediaries, Iranian authorities and state-linked media emphasize that they consider control over the Strait of Hormuz to be more important than ever.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei told reporters on Saturday that Iran was still reviewing Washington’s proposal.
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“We do our own work, we don’t pay attention to deadlines or timelines,” he said, referring to U.S. President Donald Trump’s timeline for an Iranian response.
With no progress in sight, Iranian authorities continue to signal an elevated status in their doctrine for the strategic strait, perhaps rivaling the controversial nuclear program for which the country has been sanctioned and isolated for decades.
Iran’s theocratic and military establishment has “neglected the blessing” of the strait for years, said Mohammad Mohkber, a senior adviser to slain supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and first vice president to the late Ebrahim Raisi.
“Actually, it is a capability at the level of an atomic bomb, because when you have a capability that can affect the entire global economy with a single decision, that is a huge capability,” he told the state-run Mehr news agency on Friday.
Mokhber said authorities will in no way relinquish control “that we have gained through this war” and will endeavor to “alter the governance regime” of the Straits, either through international channels or through domestic laws passed by the hardline-dominated parliament.
Mohammad Reza Aref, the current first vice president, said Tehran’s control over the Strait of Hormuz will serve to counter sanctions imposed by the United States, including those aimed at reducing oil sales, which are increasing every week.
“We certainly will no longer face something called sanctions, because with the latest behavior of Trump and his enemies, our right and our vision of the Strait has been consolidated, so I don’t think we will face any more serious problems,” he said on Thursday.
Aref said Iran’s “management will ensure the safety of this waterway and benefit all countries in the region.”
‘Unusable for us, unusable for everyone’
State television went a step further to draw parallels with the early Muslims and how they lost the Battle of Uhud near Medina about 1,400 years ago, after archers abandoned a strategic pass despite instructions from the Prophet Muhammad, which allowed rival cavalry to attack from behind.
Hossein Hosseini, host of the Ofogh channel, told viewers on Saturday morning that the Strait of Hormuz is Iran’s Uhud Pass, which, if abandoned, could set the stage for its defeat.
“Smart Iranians are careful not to abandon this Uhud Pass, not to give it back. Strait conditions will never go back to what they were before; the enemies must certainly know that,” he said.
Multiple text messages attributed to Mojtaba Khamenei since he succeeded his father as supreme leader shortly after the start of the war have also emphasized the need to maintain control over the waterway.
But officials are keen to convey that they have reflected on and discussed the implications of the conflict on Iran’s major southern waterways long before the current war with the United States and Israel.
Several state-linked media outlets on Friday published a clip of a speech given decades ago by former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the leading reformist cleric who died in 2017. Rafsanjani says Iran is not threatening to close the strait without cause, as the move also hurts Iran.
“We have always emphasized that we will close the Strait of Hormuz at a time when the Persian Gulf is unusable for us. If the Persian Gulf is unusable for us, we will make it unusable for others; this has been our policy,” he said in the undated speech to journalists gathered in parliament.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and US warships have exchanged fire over traffic in the strait in recent days, as Washington continues to impose a naval blockade on Iran’s ports and considers advancing its “Project Freedom” operations, while saying the ceasefire reached last month remains in effect.
Internal focus in talks with the US
The different aspects of the mediated negotiations with the United States are the subject of daily deliberations by the Iranian authorities, who present themselves as if they have taken the lead after the fighting.
Hardliners, who have become more entrenched as a result of the war, are strongly opposed to making major concessions on Iran’s nuclear program, its missile arsenal or any other major issue. Some say nuclear enrichment or the extraction of highly enriched material buried under the rubble of facilities bombed by the United States and Israel should not even be discussed.
Ali Khezrian, Tehran’s representative and a member of parliament’s national security committee, told state media on Friday, citing unnamed senior officials, that Iran “has not participated in any kind of nuclear negotiations.”
He said the Trump administration is highlighting the “lie” of a possible deal on nuclear issues with the goal of “compensating for battlefield defeats.”
Mahdi Kharratiyan, a pro-establishment foreign policy analyst, told the state television channel that it would be “dreams and wishful thinking” to think that a deal with Washington could lift all sanctions and allow Iran’s development through investments, so Tehran must gravitate even more towards China.
Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi was in China for high-level meetings last week, but the top diplomat has also not been spared domestic criticism over his role in trying to advance negotiations with the United States.
Hardline lawmakers like Mahmoud Nabavian, who was among dozens of members of the negotiating team who participated in talks with the United States in Pakistan in April, have gone so far as to call for the team’s leader, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, to remove Araghchi from the process.
“It is up to Mr. Ghalibaf to completely remove the men from the costly JCPOA deal from the team,” Nabavian wrote in Trump torpedoed the agreement in 2018.