Last week presented a stark contrast in the trajectories of the Trump administration’s two riskiest foreign policy ventures. On July 13, the President Donald Trump formally declared a return to military action in Iran, making clear that a war that he had anticipated would last just four or five weeks will stretch past the five month mark and probably longer. Trump appears increasingly frustrated by Iran’s failure to concede to his demand to fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz, comparing the country to a “great boxer”: “You think you have them beat, and then all of a sudden he comes back and he gives you a shot.”

On the far side of the globe, however, the other country Trump attacked this term has proven much more manageable. Venezuela’s government — now led by former Vice President Delcy Rodríguez, who took power when Nicolás Maduro was captured in a US raid in January — agreed to talks with an opposition leader handpicked by the US that aimed at “strengthening democracy.” 

The New York Times reported earlier this week that US Secretary of State Marco Rubio is effectively the “viceroy” of Venezuela, ruling the country in absentia from Washington, DC. (“Viceroy” is traditionally an official who governs a country or colony as a direct representative of a monarch.) The US has direct control over the revenues Venezuela receives from selling its oil abroad, giving Rubio effective power over the country’s budget. The grip is so tight, the Times reports, that Rodriguez asks for White House approval before appearing on Fox News, much to Trump’s delight. 

Two different countries in two different parts of the world with two different responses to Trumpian military pressure. But when future historians tell the story of how this administration ended up enmeshed in exactly the sort of Middle East quagmire that he had run for office pledging to avoid, they’re likely to devote at least a few paragraphs to Venezuela. The easy success of one operation set the stage for the still unfolding disaster of the other. 

Exporting the Venezuela model

In a daring predawn raid on January 3, US Special Forces managed to capture Maduro in a matter of hours, with no US troops killed. Contrary to the warnings of critics that such regime change would result in chaos — and to the hopes of the Venezuelan opposition that it would lead to democracy — Trump and Rubio successfully replaced Maduro with his much more pliant vice president, who has proven more than happy to let Washington call the shots. Trump now regularly muses about making Venezuela the 51st state. 

The operation was, the Times reported, “evidence to the president of the unmatched prowess of U.S. forces” and, along with the relative success of the first round of airstrikes against Iran’s nuclear program last June, emboldened him to take further military action. 

“What we did in Venezuela, I think, is the perfect scenario,” Trump said in early March, referring to prospects for regime change in Iran. And in one sense it worked; the US was able to remove the head of state within hours of launching military action, with Iranian Ayatollah Ali Khamenei killed in a joint US-Israeli airstrike. 

 “I have to be involved in the appointment, like with Delcy in Venezuela,” Trump said, when Iran’s regime was considering Khamenei’s successor. 

Trump was not involved. Iran’s Assembly of experts chose the former supreme leader’s son, Mojtaba Khamenei, whom Trump dismissed as “unacceptable” and a “lightweight”.

Despite this, Trump continued to insist that regime change had effectively happened in Iran and that its new leaders were “much more reasonable.” While Iran’s new political system is still very much a work in progress, its insistence on maintaining control of the state and ongoing attacks against shipping and US allies in the region have made it fairly clear that it will not be taking orders from Marco Rubio or anyone else in DC. 

Why Iran is not Venezuela

On the surface, there are some striking similarities between Iran and Venezuela: They were once close allies of each other, as well as of Russia and China. Both are oil dependent authoritarian states espousing a revolutionary ideology defined in large part by opposition to the United States. Both are known for sponsoring foreign militant groups. Both have a history of disputed elections and crushing opposition protests. Both have large and vocal exile communities in the US. Both have struggling economies and have spent years under US sanctions. 

That’s where the similarities end, however. Start with the military: Iran’s combined forces are roughly three times the size of Venezuela’s and far better equipped, possessing missile and drone capabilities that have spread chaos across the region for months. Iran’s senior leaders came of age during the brutal Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s and have spent decades engaged in proxy battles with the US and Israel, whereas Venezuela has not fought an interstate war in modern times. It’s telling that Maduro was relying on Cuban personnel for his own security. 

Then, there’s geography. Thanks to its fortuitous location on the western side of the Strait of Hormuz, Iran has means to retaliate against the US by blocking shipping through the world’s most important energy chokepoint, driving up oil prices. Venezuela may have the world’s largest oil reserves, but it doesn’t have anywhere near the ability to disrupt global energy flows. 

Iran was able to attack US allies throughout the Gulf with both its own missiles and via the military groups it supports throughout the region. Despite Trump’s misleading claims that Maduro’s government was in direct control of gangs in the US or weaponizing migration, Venezuela simply didn’t have the same kind of leverage with which to fight back. 

There’s history, too. Even at the nadir of relations with the US, when Venezuela was under heavy American sanctions and formal diplomatic contacts were cut off, there were still periodic talks over energy issues and prisoner releases. The US oil company Chevron continued to operate inside the country. Rodriguez herself was a familiar figure to US officials, having participated in talks with both the Biden and Trump administrations. 

And finally, there’s ideology. Venezuela’s rulers may still be publicly committed to the “Bolivarian” socialist vision of former leader Hugo Chávez, but, in reality, the regime operates as “an extreme form of crony capitalism with some pretenses of redistribution of oil windfalls to the poor,” said Chris Sabatini, director of the Latin America program at the think tank Chatham House. Senior civilian and military officials were heavily involved in a range of enterprises of varying degrees of legality from the oil industry, from gold mining to drug trafficking. When push came to shove, they were more interested in preserving their fiefdoms than standing up for a long-dead revolution. 

According to some reporting, denied by the Venezuelan government, Rodríguez had been in direct contact with US officials prior to Maduro’s capture, assuring them of her cooperation, which would make this less a regime change invasion than a US-enabled coup. Even Interior Minister Diasdello Cabello, considered the hardest of the hardline Chavistas with a US price on his head, has been more than happy to play ball with the country’s new American overlords. 

Iran has widespread corruption, as well, but the regime is far more organized, disciplined, and committed to the radical Islamist ideology of the 1979 revolution. Iran’s leaders had long been planning for invasion and had detailed succession plans in place for when top leaders were eliminated.  The fact that the US’s Israeli partners were reportedly cultivating Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the former president best remembered for calling for Israel to be wiped off the map and promoting a long-shot plan to arm Kurdish rebels to mount a ground invasion, is an indication that there were simply no plausible candidates for an “Iranian Delcy.” 

It should have been obvious from the start that a quick and easy operation that would replace Iran’s top leaders with more cooperative ones without requiring a dangerous and costly ground invasion by US troops was never a realistic prospect. It’s notable that the administration sidelined many of its own Iran experts ahead of the war, but, in fairness, Trump’s own CIA director dismissed Israel’s optimistic regime change scenarios as “farcical.” 

“President Trump has not really taken the time to study the history of Iran-US relations going back to 1979, or even earlier,” said the Middle East Institute’s Alex Vatanka. “If he had studied that relationship, I think he would have taken a different approach.” But Trump may have been thinking less about what happened in Tehran in 1979 than what had happened in Caracas just a few weeks earlier. 

The end of hubris?

Many scoffed in January when Trump suggested that the US would be “running” Venezuela for the foreseeable future, but that appears to be more or less what’s happening now. It’s not clear how long this arrangement can last. Discontent with both Rodríguez and Trump is growing in Venezuela, and many in the opposition accuse the government of using the recent devastating earthquake as a pretext to delay called-for democratic reforms. Venezuelans may come to hold the United States responsible for the failures of the government it is remotely controlling. 

But the initial success of the Venezuela operation was a vindication for a president who often sees himself as running the world in addition to the United States.

Has Trump faith in his ability to bend other countries to his will been shaken at all by the Iran experience? He has frequently described Cuba as “next” on the list of countries he’d like to “take” after Venezuela and Cuba.

In terms of culture and geography, Cuba may look more like Venezuela. But in terms of its political system, it’s “more like Iran,” said Sabatini. “It’s completely state-centric, vertical, disciplined.” Dealing with a system still fiercely devoted to its founding revolutionary ideology that has been largely isolated from the US for decades, the administration may have no better luck finding a “Cuban Delcy” than it did finding an Iranian one. 

Trump still hasn’t ruled out taking over Cuba in some fashion, and Pentagon planners are reportedly examining a range of options for action against the island, though he claimed Rubio wants to “get [Iran] finished first.” If that’s true, it may be a long wait until Iran is “finished.” 

On the other hand, Trump is once again talking about taking over Greenland and posting memes referencing his desire to annex Canada. Iran may have proven that Venezuela was the exception, not the rule, when it comes to regime change, but Trump’s ambitions for world domination do not seem to have disappeared. 

If you can think back to the distant days of March 2026, you’ll remember that the US-Iran war was, at one point, primarily a conflict over Iran’s nuclear program, though at times it was also about Iran’s treatment of protesters, threat to Israel, missile program, and support for regional proxies. 

At this point, however, it’s now clear that it’s about something entirely different, and something that wasn’t even an issue until this conflict began more than four months ago: Iran’s ability to control shipping through the Strait of Hormuz. 

Iran’s ability to use cheap drones and missiles to throttle ship traffic through the crucial waterway, through which around a fifth of the world’s oil and gas normally transits, became, during the war, its primary source of leverage against the US. Iran’s new leaders now view de facto control of the Strait as their primary deterrent against future attacks by their enemies — an arguably more effective and flexible deterrent than their nuclear program ever was — as well as a potential source of revenue via tolls and fees. Iranian officials have in recent days variously described the Strait as a “golden weapon” and a “divine blessing.” US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has called it Iran’s “economic nuclear weapon.”

This week, however, as violence flared again in the region, there were some indications that Iran might be overestimating the power of that weapon and its ability to coerce and deter its enemies. 

A return to war in the Gulf

This week, Iranian leaders showed how far they’re willing to go to protect their “divine blessing,” attacking three ships transiting the Strait with missiles. The ships were traveling through a corridor close to the coast of Oman, under recommendation from the UN’s International Maritime Organization, and had not coordinated with Iranian authorities. This led to the biggest exchange of fire between the two countries since an interim ceasefire agreement in June, with the US bombing more than 80 targets in Iran and the Iranians launching missiles at US targets in Kuwait and Bahrain. The US also reimposed sanctions on Iranian oil sales, while President Donald Trump declared the ceasefire between the two countries to be over. 

The letter of the dispute comes down to a vaguely worded clause in the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the two countries on June 17. The MOU commits Iran to take steps to restore shipping through the Strait and work with Oman, with which it shares the Strait, to determine future arrangements for administering it. US officials interpreted this as restoring the free navigation through the strait that existed before the war. The Iranians, however, interpret it as giving them control over which ships can cross. This rather wide ambiguity over the control of a very narrow body of water made it easier for both sides to sign the deal, but it’s now led to a new phase of the conflict. 

After the deal was completed, oil shipments through the Strait returned to around half of their prewar levels, but much of it was on ships traveling at night with their identification systems turned off, escorted by the US Navy.

That was an unacceptable situation for Iran, whose leaders have signaled they believe they have created a new status quo that gives them a say over who comes and goes in the Strait. The increasing number of ships traveling the Oman route under US protection was a threat to that status quo. Add in the fact that Tehran appears to believe that Trump is reluctant to return to full-scale war, and they calculated that this week’s attacks were a risk worth taking. 

“Because they believe that the US is deterred from resuming full-scale hostilities, there is scope for pushing the envelope, for pushing their luck and seeing how much they can extract in the Strait,” said Gregory Brew, an Iran and energy analyst at Eurasia Group. 

This may be a miscalculation. 

A weapon, but not an all-powerful one

Iran’s Hormuz deterrent might be more effective against a more normal politician than Donald Trump. The Iran war is deeply unpopular, and Trump’s Republicans can ill afford high gas prices heading into this year’s midterm elections. But Trump, generally speaking, appears to value his own idiosyncratic political projects — including the conflict with Iran — more than his party’s political prospects. 

But Trump aside, the ability to close Hormuz may also simply not be as powerful a weapon of mass disruption as many thought it would be. Crude oil prices went as high as $126 per barrel during the war, but usually hovered closer to $100 — well short of the $200 many experts were predicting at the outset of the war. 

That’s due to a number of factors, including non-Mideast producers like the US increasing production and the fact that the world’s largest importer, China, proved able to suddenly slash those imports far more than anyone realized was possible, leaving more oil for everyone else. And thanks to the wider adoption of electric vehicles and renewable energy sources, oil is simply not as central to the global economy as it once was. 

This isn’t to say that the crisis isn’t having an economic impact — it’s driving a slow-moving food crisis throughout much of the developing world — but it’s not creating 1970s-type gas lines or even COVID-type supply chain disruptions. 

“The closure of the Strait of Hormuz was always understood to be this massively destabilizing black swan event,” Brew said. “And it turns out to have been more manageable.”

While continued flare-ups in the fighting have driven spikes in oil prices throughout the crisis — including this week — markets have also been quick to settle in the periods of calm that followed. One week after the signing of the MOU, prices were back at pre-war levels. Even during this week’s fighting, oil jumped to only around $80 before receding as the fighting died down. Energy markets appear to be pricing in the expectation that any return to war won’t last long.  

Iran’s leaders can probably be confident that Trump isn’t inclined to risk large numbers of US casualties by committing ground troops, embarking on a costly regime-change operation, or even returning to the level of airstrikes that we saw at the height of Operation Epic Fury. But they may on the other hand,  the cost to the United States of periodic “mowing the grass” strikes is relatively low. The US has also been striking Iranian bridges for the first time since April. This attack on civilian infrastructure rather than military targets suggests Trump’s tolerance for escalation may be higher than the Iranians anticipated.  

Has Iran bought a diminishing asset? 

Iran’s moment of maximum leverage may be right now. Oil producers in the region are heavily investing in new pipelines and alternative routes to allow them to eventually bypass the Strait. The more Iran attacks the ships used by its Gulf neighbors, the more it will encourage those investments. The crisis is also driving a surge in demand for electric vehicles in many countries. The more dangerous it stays in the Strait, the more consumers and producers will be incentivized to lessen their dependence on it. 

In a recent article for Foreign Affairs, the Atlantic Council analyst Nate Swanson argued that there may also be a contradiction between Iran’s twin goals with the Strait: creating a deterrent to future attacks while also extracting maximum economic value from its control of the waterway. Iran has already shown it can shut down shipping at will, as well as attack the energy infrastructure of its neighbors. (It’s worth remembering that any new bypass pipelines built by Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates will still be within range of Iranian missiles and drones.) 

But the more Tehran tries to squeeze the region economically through tolls, and the more chaos it creates by actually launching attacks on both shipping through the strait and Gulf countries, the more it will seem worth the cost to both the US and countries in the region to go back to war. 

Some in Tehran may consider this a price worth paying. The recent mass funeral for the late supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei doubled as a rally and coming-out party for what Iranian leaders hope will be a new regional order that they will help to shape, and control of Hormuz is part of that. But drawing a hard line on this issue will also push back any return to normalcy for a population exhausted by war and economic crisis. Iran has also not yet received the frozen assets held in banks in the Middle East as promised in the deal, and that seems unlikely as long as tankers in the Strait are taking incoming fire. 

The US and Israel launched this war with what proved to be massive overconfidence in their ability to force a weaker country to bend to their will through sheer dominance in firepower. In this new lower-intensity phase of the conflict, Iran may have similar overconfidence in its ability to coerce its rivals through an advantage in geography. 

Iranians leaders once believed that their missile forces and regional proxies like Hezbollah could deter foreign attacks and that their nascent nuclear program gave them bargaining leverage with their rivals. Ultimately, that deterrent failed, and Khamenei and many other top Iranian leaders paid with their lives. Their successors believe they’ve now found a more effective deterrent and bargaining chip. If it fails, they can’t say they weren’t warned. 

This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.

Welcome to The Logoff: Is the US-Iran deal “over”?  

What’s happening? The US launched a second consecutive day of strikes against Iran on Wednesday, deepening a breach in the three-week-old “memorandum of understanding” between the two countries. 

The immediate incident began on Monday after Iran attacked multiple ships in the Strait of Hormuz. The US struck Iran on Tuesday, and Iran responded with strikes of its own in neighboring Kuwait and Bahrain, which are both home to US military installations.

The US also reimposed sanctions on Iranian oil on Tuesday, restricting what had been a new income stream for the regime.

When asked about the ceasefire on Wednesday, President Donald Trump, who is currently at a NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey, said, “I think it’s over. I don’t want to deal with them anymore. They’re scum.”

What’s the context? As my colleague Josh Keating wrote last month, the end of the Iran war has been greatly exaggerated from the jump. This isn’t even the first time the US has attacked Iranian targets since the two sides reached a “memorandum of understanding” in mid-June, which laid out a 60-day pathway toward a more permanent deal (at least in theory).

Other problems also abound, including the status of the Strait, the outstanding question of Iran’s nuclear program, and the Israel-Lebanon conflict.

So what now? It’s hard to say. Violence has broken out and receded at other points during the ceasefire, and Trump’s comments can be an unreliable indicator of where things are headed. But the strikes are once again grinding traffic through the Strait to a halt, according to CNN, and oil prices are rising. 

If that continues, Trump could also begin to lose ground on gas prices, which had been falling following the ceasefire agreement — and with the midterms quickly approaching and voters broadly unhappy about the state of the economy, he doesn’t have much time left.

Speaking of the midterms: The road to control of the US Senate may well run through Maine, where Democratic nominee Graham Platner is facing serious new allegations that are likely to end his campaign. On a special episode of his podcast America, Actually, my colleague Astead Herndon explains why the left ignored Platner’s red flags in the first place.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

Here’s a Logoff piece if I’ve ever seen one: The moral case for being less online, featuring some fun history about Luddism (as always, it’s a gift link).

Plus, from the World Cup: No games today. But don’t miss the Vox video team on how soccer players train for chaos.  

Thanks for reading, have a great evening, and we’ll see you back here tomorrow!