Hormuz Is Not the Crisis – The Regime Is

A Change Leadership and Crisis Management Perspective by Dr. Alan Bostakian

The Hormuz crisis will not end until the real problem is solved.

The Strait of Hormuz has quietly become one of the clearest indicators of where things actually stand with the regime in Iran. Every time a ceasefire is signed, a memorandum is reached, or a new round of talks is announced, the question that matters is not what was said in the room. It’s what happens the next time a ship enters the strait. The answer has been the same every time: the regime shows its nature again.

This is not a criticism of the United States. The US has paid an enormous price (militarily, economically, and in lives) to confront a crazy regime that has spent decades destabilizing the region, creating proxies, and threatening the Iranian people along with its neighbors and the whole world. The frustration isn’t with the effort. It’s with the pattern of stopping just short of finishing it, and mistaking a pause in the current crisis for a resolution.

A Familiar Cycle

The pattern has repeated with consistency since the ceasefire framework was signed in June. The regime strikes at commercial shipping or tests the boundaries of the agreement, the US responds, and within days both sides are back at the table. Even after a major exchange of fire in early July, the US said it had agreed to continue negotiations at the regime’s request, hours after declaring the ceasefire itself was finished. That has become routine.

Around the same period, it became clear the regime was far more interested in demonstrating its control over Hormuz than in genuinely engaging with Washington. With the prospect of sanctions relief on the table, the regime had little incentive to change course. That is the core problem with this negotiation: it rewards the crazy side!

And even as US strikes on the regime’s military and energy infrastructure continued into late July, the regime’s own negotiators described the strait’s security as impossible without a complete American withdrawal from the region, which is hardly the language of an honest and reasonable negotiation (which is wrong anyway).

Why These Talks Keep Failing to Deliver

None of this should be surprising. It’s a reason to be honest about what hasn’t worked. Sanctions relief, extended negotiation windows, and repeated ceasefires have not changed the regime’s underlying behavior. They have given it more time, more room to maneuver, and more leverage to use the strait itself as a bargaining chip. Every round of talks that ends without resolving the main issue isn’t progress. It’s a delay before the next crisis.

It is understandable that wars are costly, publics grow tired, and any de-escalation looks like relief. But a simple discipline applies here just as it would anywhere else:

• A project that stops before solving the core problem has not succeeded, no matter how the interim result is packaged.
• Reducing the scope of what “success” means, moving the finish line to claim an early win, or presenting an unfinished outcome as completion may look like progress in the moment. Still, each of those shortcuts guarantees the same problem resurfaces later, usually at a higher cost.

 Why This Is Bigger Than the Current Crisis

The deeper reason Hormuz keeps igniting isn’t tactical; it’s strategic and structural. As long as the Islamic regime exists, the strait will keep being used as leverage, because holding global shipping hostage is one of the few cards the regime has left. Managing that threat indefinitely, one ceasefire at a time, isn’t a good strategy.

That’s exactly why the work being done through the Iran Prosperity Project (IPP) deserves far more attention than it currently gets in this conversation. IPP is the transition framework developed by a big team of highly qualified and highly educated experts and championed by Prince Reza Pahlavi, built specifically around the question that almost no one else is answering: what governs Iran, and how, in the months immediately after the regime falls. The plan lays out a transitional system meant to stabilize and manage the country, support its rebuilding, and guide it toward a referendum and fair elections, with the explicit goal of preventing any vacuum.

That distinction matters for Hormuz specifically. A negotiated pause with the regime only ever produces a temporary, revocable arrangement, because the regime’s incentives never actually change. A genuine change and transition (one with a real plan for security, governance, and the economy already in place before the moment arrives) is the only scenario in which an Iran that doesn’t cause this kind of problem in the future becomes realistic. Planning for that outcome isn’t a distraction from the current crisis. It’s the only way the current crisis stops repeating itself every few months.

A Framework for Getting the Transition Right

This is also where the discipline behind the Crisis-Reconstruction-Change framework becomes directly useful as a model for how a transition like this actually has to work if it’s going to hold. The framework’s central argument is that recovery from crisis happens in distinct phases, and skipping any one of them is what causes reconstructions to collapse: first stabilizing the immediate crisis without cutting corners, then rebuilding the underlying institutions and capacity that were damaged or never existed, and only then locking in durable change so the system doesn’t slide back into the conditions that caused the crisis in the first place.

Applying that to Iran, that sequencing maps almost exactly onto what IPP is trying to design for: an emergency phase focused purely on stopping the bleeding (security, basic services, avoiding chaos) followed by a reconstruction phase that rebuilds functioning institutions, followed by a change phase that locks in an accountable system. The framework’s core warning – that a project which stops before solving the core problem hasn’t succeeded, no matter how good the launch looked – is the trap a post-regime transition must avoid.

The Right Solution

The right solution is refusing to treat a pause as a finish line. In the near term, that means not rewarding the regime with money, legitimacy, or time it can convert into renewed leverage, and being honest that oil revenue and sanctions relief are enough for the regime to fund repression regardless of how a deal is packaged. In the mid-term, the real solution means taking the work of moving towards a credible change and transition seriously, through Prince Reza Pahlavi’s plans such as IPP.

Real success, in a crisis of this scale, is measured the same way it’s measured anywhere else: not by how strong the opening looked, or how the story is told along the way, but by whether the actual objective is achieved. The existence of a regime that still controls Hormuz, still funds its terrorist proxies, still maintains a nuclear program, and still kills Iranians, is not a solution.

The right path forward isn’t more talks that reset the clock. It’s staying the course until the actual problem is genuinely solved.