Michael Froman President CFR
The World This Week
April 10, 2026
By Michael Froman
President, Council on Foreign Relations
This week, President Donald Trump declared victory in Iran, and, on Wednesday, after the announcement of a two-week ceasefire brokered by Pakistan, he heralded a “big day for World Peace!”
People are now asking whether the war was worth it. The truth is that it’s simply too soon to tell. The success or failure of the war to advance the United States’ national interest hinges as much on what happens next as it does on what happened over the course of the past forty-one days.
In the Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s telling, Operation Epic Fury was a “capital V military victory.” Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine framed this victory in the context of “three distinct military objectives: destroy Iran’s ballistic missile and drone capabilities, destroy the Iranian navy, and destroy their defense industrial base to ensure that Iran cannot reconstitute the ability to project power outside their borders.” This is consistent with the objectives Under Secretary of War for Policy Elbridge Colby described during a conversation at CFR at the start of the war.
We certainly made significant progress towards achieving these objectives. The United States severely degraded Iran’s ability to employ and produce ballistic missiles, in addition to drones. More than 90 percent of Iran’s navy has been sunk or rendered combat-ineffective by U.S. warfighters. High-value military targets—from air defense systems to industrial plants to base infrastructure—were severely compromised. In total, more than thirteen thousand targets were hit by U.S. forces alone. And, while the top echelons of Iran’s military and security apparatuses were killed by U.S. and Israeli strikes, it might be more accurate to characterize the Iranian regime as being forcibly rearranged, not changed.
But there’s a gulf, no pun intended, between the achievement of these objectives and the reality in the Strait of Hormuz. If Iran proved anything over the course of Operation Epic Fury, it was the remarkable resilience and effectiveness of a relatively modest cache of capabilities in closing one of the world’s most critical maritime chokepoints.
Iran has successfully weaponized interdependence—or at least its own variation on the concept first mooted by Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman. Farrell and Newman described how great powers could exploit other countries’ dependence on networks in which they too were embedded. In this case, Iran realized they could weaponize the world’s dependence not only on the products being exported through the Strait but on the global energy market itself.
The United States played an important role in developing this concept in practice with its weaponization of the U.S. financial system starting back in the early 2000s—using its control over the dollar and dollar-based payment systems and financial institutions to impose sanctions and squeeze adversaries dependent on those assets for trade, investment, and other money flows. Now, as my CFR colleague Eddie Fishman has written extensively, every country is searching for chokepoints, be they financial, technological, or geographical.
China took a page from the U.S. playbook with its weaponization of supply chains. Starting back in 2010, it used its control over access to rare earths to impose retribution on Japan over a maritime dispute. Last year, by threatening to impose a worldwide export control and licensing regime on critical minerals, magnets, and other important inputs into global manufacturing—from missile cones to car seats—China demonstrated its capacity to use chokepoints as a source of powerful leverage—in this case to get the Trump administration to back away from maximalist tariffs.
Iran has written the next chapter in this drama, weaponizing geography and turning its capacity to control the Strait of Hormuz into a chokepoint, literally, through which it can titrate the flow of oil, gas, fertilizer, helium, and other critical inputs—all the while threatening to impose a toll for safe passage. This has exacted a significant cost on the global economy—increasing inflation and reducing growth—with the most significant adverse consequences reserved for those countries least able to absorb them.
As in the case of China’s demonstration of its willingness to use its centrality to global supply chains as a source of leverage last year, Iran’s demonstrated capacity to wreak havoc on the global economy over the last month was a wake-up call for the rest of the world. And, as in the case of the China analog, it will take years, maybe decades, and billions if not trillions of dollars for countries to reduce their dependence on the Strait of Hormuz, whether it is through the construction of pipelines to circumvent it (and hopefully not just to the Red Sea where the Houthis can cause similar widespread disruptions) or the diversification of energy sources away from oil and gas altogether. China has taken steps in that direction through the increased electrification of its economy (e.g., cars and trucks), some of which is being accomplished through green sources of energy (e.g., renewables and nuclear power) and some of which is being generated through sustained use of coal.
All of this is to say that it is a difficult, expensive, and long-term project to avoid chokepoints—whether it is through the creation of an alternative to the dollar-based financial system, the development of diverse sources of critical minerals, semiconductor chips and other important supply chain components, or the reduction in reliance on the shipping of oil, gas and other significant products through the Strait of Hormuz. That’s why they are called chokepoints. They are not just bumps in the road. They enjoy moats—at least for a while.
And that brings us back to Iran and at least one of the major motivations for the war: its nuclear program. Ostensibly, the main motivation for Iran to pursue a nuclear weapons program was to deter Israel and the United States (and conceivably others) from attacking it. (Let’s leave aside for now whether Iran also wanted to pursue a nuclear weapon to proactively wipe out Israel.) Coming on the heels of this conflict, one could imagine Iranians drawing two lessons. On one hand, Iran might feel that, now more than ever, it needs a nuclear weapon to prevent these sorts of attacks from occurring in the future. On the other hand, Iran’s capacity to use relatively few missiles and drones to bring the global economy to its knees suggests that it doesn’t need nuclear weapons to deter future attacks: it just needs to weaponize its chokepoint. Iran may have found a conventional—that is, non-nuclear—means for deterring great powers, which may prove quite difficult to suppress and can be employed, repeatedly, frequently, at relatively low material cost and without the opprobrium of becoming a nuclear proliferator.
The Iranian leadership might not buy that, particularly as a sufficient deterrent against Israel, which faces a distinct set of existential calculations about the Iranian threat and, therefore, has a lower threshold for striking Iran. That said, one of the outcomes of the conflict could well be a rebalancing in the calculations around escalation dominance and deterrence in favor of Iran.
Was it worth it?
Much will depend on its duration—whether the ceasefire is fully implemented and how long it lasts—and whether that leads to a longer-term resolution or to a frozen conflict with cycles of renewed attacks and repeated closings.
That, in turn, will depend on the negotiations this weekend in Islamabad, Pakistan. The U.S. side will be led by Vice President JD Vance and special envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner with Iran sending its foreign minister Abbas Araghchi and parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf. Will Iran abandon its nuclear ambitions and, as Trump has claimed, forfeit what remains of its stockpile of highly enriched uranium? Will Iran agree to restrictions on rebuilding its missile capabilities? Will Iran agree not to support violent proxies throughout the region—including Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Iran-aligned militias in Iraq? And, if Iran agrees to all these demands, will there be a mechanism for verification and enforcement?
History may judge this war favorably, but only if its consequences are positive and prove durable. Iran must emerge equal measures weakened and chastened, the strait must reopen in line with the pre-war status quo, and the region must recover the stability and security required to continue its progress toward greater economic development and integration. None of that is guaranteed, nor appears particularly imminent—though it remains one of a few possible outcomes.
Short of those outcomes, many will say it should not have been started. Others will say it didn’t go far enough, failing, in the words of the former Saudi King Abdullah, to “cut off the head of the snake.” For now, both critiques are very much alive.
One thing is certain: Iran opened Pandora’s box by demonstrating its capacity and willingness to weaponize the world’s most vital energy chokepoint. Conflict with Iran will never be viewed again in quite the same way.
Let me know what you think about the war in Iran and what this column should cover next by replying to president@cfr.org.
Find this edition insightful and want to share it? You can find it at CFR.org.
What I’m tuning into this week:
My interview in TIME with Edward Felsenthal and appearance on Fox News’s “The Big Weekend Show”
Ray Takeyh and Reuel Marc Gerecht’s op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, “How Trump Miscalculated in Iran”
Liana Fix and Leo Bader’s article for CFR.org, “Europe Has Leverage in the Iran War. It Should Use It.”
Matthew Bornholt and Benedict Springbett’s essay for Works in Progress, “Why Japan Has Such Good Railways”
The Spillover podcast featuring Sebastian Mallaby, “The Modern Oppenheimer + Mailbag Contest Winners”
Jim Lindsay’s CFR.org article, “Trump Secured a Ceasefire With Iran. Will It Last?”
The Foreign Affairs Interview podcast with Suzanne Maloney, “Will the Cease-Fire With Iran Hold?”
Dean Ball’s latest musing, “New Sages Unrivalled,” on Anthropic’s latest model, Claude Mythos
The latest iteration of the CFR.org series, “How I Got My Career in Foreign Policy,” featuring Carla Anne Robbins
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