The Stalemate That Continues

That distinction sits beneath Richard Haass and Carolyn Kissane’s September 23 Foreign Affairs argument for a diplomatic exit from the Iran war. They contend that the adjustments which contained the initial energy shock are losing their capacity to do so. Continued military and economic pressure, in their assessment, has not produced the concessions Washington sought. Meanwhile, attacks on alternative export routes threaten the arrangements that made continued confrontation appear tolerable.

Their essay is a policy argument, not an independently verified ledger of the conflict. Its accounts of recent attacks and negotiations are attributed here to the authors; the additional sources establish the geography and an earlier episode of disruption, not those September events. That boundary matters. A strong case for changing policy should not require pretending that every premise has been independently settled.

The structural warning nevertheless deserves examination: a system can keep functioning while consuming the reserves, alternative routes and household purchasing power that make its functioning possible. Survival is not replenishment. Nor is it consent.

The Detour Has a Bill

There is a documented precedent for confusing adaptation with resolution, and it does not require reaching for a distant empire.

In February 2024, the U.S. Energy Information Administration described how attacks by Yemen-based Houthi forces, beginning in November 2023, were diverting commercial vessels away from the Red Sea. Its illustrative tanker calculation put a Persian Gulf–to–Amsterdam-Rotterdam-Antwerp voyage at 19 days through Suez, compared with nearly 35 around the Cape of Good Hope. Those estimates assumed a laden Suezmax tanker traveling at 14 knots without extended chokepoint delays. They were not a timetable for every ship.

The mechanism was straightforward. Longer voyages consumed more fuel and occupied vessels for longer, meaning more ships were needed to maintain a delivery schedule. Elevated risk insurance premiums also fed into tanker rates. EIA reported that the average increase across four clean-product tanker routes passing through the Red Sea was 20 percent in December 2023 compared with November.

Yet the same report noted that Brent crude had traded within a range after the attacks began. A relatively contained benchmark price could coexist with significant disruption in the machinery of delivery.

That is the useful historical parallel—not that 2024 and 2026 are identical crises, but that a reassuring aggregate can conceal costs being moved elsewhere. The detour is a response to insecurity. It is not evidence that insecurity has become harmless.

Nor are all detours interchangeable. EIA’s world chokepoints assessment, updated March 3, 2026, explains that alternative routes could carry only part of the oil otherwise moving through Hormuz. Its estimate for the first half of 2025 was 20.9 million barrels a day through the strait, roughly one-fifth of global petroleum liquids consumption. This is a baseline, not a measurement of today’s traffic.

Going around Africa can avoid the Red Sea. It cannot, by itself, get a cargo out of a blocked Persian Gulf. Geography remains inconveniently resistant to the language of resilience.

When the Backup Becomes the Target

Haass and Kissane describe several buffers against the initial disruption: additional production outside the Gulf, inventory releases, reduced demand and export pipelines bypassing Hormuz. Their central claim is that these responses cannot indefinitely offset continuing losses of infrastructure and access.

They report that a drone launched by an Iranian-aligned militia in Iraq struck Saudi Arabia’s East–West pipeline, temporarily disabling it. They also describe an expanded Houthi position around the Bab el Mandeb and a growing threat to Saudi shipping. This article has not independently corroborated those recent operational details. They are the authors’ account of why the danger has intensified.

Their argument identifies a vulnerability that is more general than any one attack: an alternative route is not redundant capacity if it becomes the indispensable route. Once traffic concentrates there, damage to it can remove the very protection against failure elsewhere.

The categories of buffer also need separating. Additional production is a flow. Stored oil is a stock that diminishes when drawn down. Lower consumption may reflect efficiency, substitution or economic activity that people can no longer afford. These adjustments can produce a similar-looking balance between supply and demand while carrying very different consequences.

A government assessing whether to continue a confrontation therefore needs more than the observation that markets have not collapsed. It needs to know which adaptations remain available, who is financing them and what happens if the next disruption strikes the fallback rather than the original route.

Haass and Kissane warn that further supply interruptions could push oil to $150 or $200 a barrel. Those figures are scenarios in their argument, not established outcomes or a forecast adopted here. The decision problem does not require treating either number as inevitable. It requires asking whether the present strategy is improving the conditions for settlement faster than it is eroding the ability to absorb another shock.

Pressure Is Not the Same as Leverage

The authors’ proposed answer is renewed diplomacy: a cease-fire covering attacks on energy infrastructure by the principal states and affiliated armed groups, arrangements to restore passage, and conditional economic benefits for Iranian compliance. They also argue for a separate Saudi-Houthi settlement.

The strongest part of this prescription is its refusal to treat an agreement between Washington and Tehran as sufficient for every actor capable of disrupting the region. Haass and Kissane explicitly question whether Iran has enough influence over the relatively autonomous Houthis to secure an end to their attacks on Saudi Arabia.

That distinction prevents an attractive diplomatic fiction: one signature, complete control. An actor may influence another without being able to command it. A settlement that assumes otherwise can fail even while its signatories insist they are complying.

The same precision is needed for the word pressure. Damage imposed on a country does not automatically become leverage over its decision-makers. To work as leverage, a threatened cost or offered benefit must affect choices the relevant leadership is both willing and able to make.

The authors argue that the existing campaign has not induced capitulation. That does not prove no coercive measure could ever alter Iranian calculations. It does put the burden on advocates of continuing the campaign to identify a plausible mechanism beyond repeating the same tools for longer.

Diplomacy must meet the corresponding burden. Economic relief is not self-enforcing. A serious proposal needs to specify the actions that unlock benefits, the evidence used to verify those actions and the response to a breach. Otherwise, the agreement contains incentives in prose and disputes in operation.

A workable design should distinguish an isolated violation, a contested attribution and a sustained policy of noncompliance. That is an analytical requirement, not a claim that such a mechanism has been negotiated. Without a way to investigate and contain incidents, one ambiguous attack could become the administrative shortcut back to war.

An Open Strait Is Not Necessarily a Commons

The most politically revealing element of the essay is its proposal for governing Hormuz. Haass and Kissane prefer restored free transit but suggest a multilateral authority that would oversee passage and collect reasonable fees. They argue that a system including all Gulf countries would be preferable to the Iranian-Omani arrangement they describe as being advocated.

Their explanation partly rests on their account of a June agreement accepting Iranian collection of payments. No text of that agreement was retrieved for this article. That description should not be mistaken for an independently established legal entitlement, and the proposed authority is not an adopted institution.

As a policy design, however, it exposes a problem that survives the cease-fire: reopening infrastructure and deciding who may charge for using it are separate acts.

A regional authority could distribute decision-making more broadly than unilateral control. It could also turn a temporary capacity to obstruct trade into a durable claim on its proceeds. Multilateral ownership alone would not settle that question. Several governments can share an extraction mechanism quite efficiently.

The necessary tests are practical. How would charges be set? What would they fund? Would rules and receipts be public? Could users challenge discriminatory treatment? Who would prevent an administrative dispute from becoming another closure? How would the interests of importing countries and people dependent on affordable deliveries enter the arrangement?

These questions do not establish that every proposed fee is illegitimate. They distinguish payment for an accountable service from payment demanded because someone can interrupt an essential route. The difference lies in authority, constraints and recourse—not in whether the invoice has a multinational heading.

For coherenceism, this is the central institutional test. Order is not a public good merely because traffic moves through it. It becomes defensible when the people affected have meaningful ways to contest its burdens and correct its failures. A commons needs governance; governance is not permission to enclose it.

Who Gets Counted in the Endgame?

The authors warn that energy shortages impose unequal costs because wealthier countries can outbid poorer ones. Their account links fuel disruption to transport, agriculture, industry and public finances. Those are channels through which a regional conflict can burden people who have no influence over its conduct.

A settlement judged only by tanker movements and oil prices would therefore be too narrow. Those measures matter, but neither demonstrates that relief reaches a household or that people living near attacked infrastructure become safer.

An adequate public assessment should track several distinct outcomes: whether attacks stop, whether commercial passage becomes reliably available, whether essential supplies reach vulnerable populations and whether the institutions enforcing the agreement can explain their decisions. These are proposed standards for accountability, not results already achieved.

The same applies to Yemen. Haass and Kissane argue that a Saudi-Houthi agreement would likely require political participation and economic benefits for the Houthis. Recognizing an armed group’s capacity to obstruct a settlement is a practical necessity. Treating that capacity as sufficient representation of everyone living under its influence would be a different—and much weaker—claim.

Negotiators need ways to hear those who bear a bargain without being able to threaten it. Otherwise, the people best equipped to impose costs become the people best positioned to collect compensation. The violence ends, perhaps; the selection mechanism survives.

None of this supplies a painless alternative. The authors acknowledge that both Washington and Tehran may resist a settlement that fails to deliver a clear victory. Nor can the sources consulted here establish that a particular package would secure lasting compliance.

They do establish the need for a more demanding comparison. Continuing a war is not the neutral option against which diplomacy must justify every risk. Continued fighting has its own assumptions, exposure and distribution of costs. Those must be made visible alongside the compromises of negotiation.

The danger is not simply that a stalemate breaks. It is that the appearance of stability gives its managers permission to keep spending other people’s capacity to endure it. Unless policy counts that expenditure, the next successful adjustment will be mistaken for another reason not to change course.