11th April 2026 – (Washington) Washington wants to walk into talks in Islamabad with the posture of a winner. President Donald Trump’s message on Friday was blunt even by his standards. Iran, he wrote on Truth Social, has “no cards” beyond what he cast as “short-term extortion” through international waterways. He added that “the only reason they are alive today is to negotiate” and dismissed Tehran as better at “public relations” than war.
The rhetoric is familiar. It echoes the president’s February dressing-down of Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky, when Trump insisted the Ukrainian leader lacked leverage. It also fits a negotiating style that treats pressure and humiliation as instruments, rather than as accelerants of miscalculation. But in the case of Iran and the Strait of Hormuz, the “no cards” line is not just inflammatory. It is strategically careless, because it understates what Iran can credibly threaten and it overstates what the United States can control once the game turns ugly.
Hormuz is usually described as an oil chokepoint, and that alone should be enough to concentrate minds. Roughly a fifth of global crude shipments pass through the narrow waterway. In the current crisis, it is also the centre of the argument about whether the two-week truce announced on Tuesday is real or merely a pause to reload. Although both sides have signalled that channels should reopen, commercial traffic has remained thin amid Iranian warnings. Trump on Thursday said Tehran was doing “a very poor job” of allowing oil to pass, adding: “That is not the agreement we have.”
In other words, even the president concedes that Iran is already playing a meaningful card. It is not theoretical. It is visible in the shipping lanes.
Iran’s advantage in Hormuz has always been that it does not need to “win” a naval battle. It needs to make the strait feel unsafe. Modern commerce runs on confidence, insurance pricing, and tight schedules. A few incidents, a few threats, or a few ambiguous warnings can push shipowners to delay sailings and insurers to raise war-risk premiums. That dynamic creates leverage long before a single tanker is sunk. When Trump reduces this to “short-term extortion,” he frames it as a tantrum rather than a tool. The problem for Washington is that the tool works.
Yet oil is only the first-order fear. The second-order fear is the internet. Beneath the same waters that carry tankers sits the infrastructure of digital life. Undersea fibre-optic cables, laid along the seabed and connecting landing stations across regions, carry the vast majority of global data traffic. Undersea cables through the Red Sea and the Strait of Hormuz carry a large part of India’s internet traffic. One account points to a heavy dependence of India’s westward connectivity on routes running across the Red Sea corridor, and identifies multiple major cable systems that underpin links between Asia, Europe and Africa. Another section, citing researchers and a Bahrain-based strategic studies centre, argues that the Strait of Hormuz is not merely an oil passage but also a critical artery for submarine cables, with a risk profile that grows sharply in wartime conditions.
Trump is treating Iran’s leverage as a single valve, oil in or oil out, which America can answer by loading up warships with “the best ammunition” and threatening strikes if there is no deal. However, if the real bargaining chip is a dual chokepoint of energy and data, then the United States is not simply negotiating over barrels. It is negotiating over the stability of financial systems, cloud platforms, communications, and the digital backbone that underwrites everything from banking to AI training pipelines.
Subsea internet cables threading the Strait of Hormuz are a critical artery for Iran, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar and the UAE, carrying as much as 30% of global data flows between Europe and Asia and underpinning banking, financial markets, cloud services and government communications across the Middle East. Key landing points span the Gulf, with especially important links for data centres in the UAE and Saudi Arabia; Iran hosts major connections such as OMRAN and EPEG; and India routes a substantial share of its westbound traffic through these systems to reach Europe. International networks including AAE‑1, FALCON and Tata TGN‑Gulf tie Asia to Europe and Africa via this corridor, meaning any breakages could severely disrupt connectivity across the Gulf, India and Pakistan.
Cables are difficult to protect perfectly because they run for long distances across open water. Repairs can take time and specialised ships. Even when redundancy exists, congestion and re-routing degrade performance. Your material references prior regional incidents in which cable damage slowed connectivity across parts of Asia, Africa, and Europe, and notes that repair operations can take months and cost millions. In a high-tension environment, the private sector does not need certainty about blame. It needs only enough doubt to price in disruption, and enough delay to feel pain.
Trump’s own language raises the temperature around a technical vulnerability that benefits Iran precisely because it can be exploited with plausible deniability. A spike in outages can be blamed on anchoring accidents, collateral damage from military activity, or sabotage by third parties. Meanwhile, the strategic effects would be immediate. If you want to pressure governments quickly, you do not only target fuel. You target latency.
Trump has reason to fear sustained disruption because inflation travels faster than diplomacy. A prolonged squeeze in Hormuz lifts fuel costs, raises transport expenses, and pushes prices through supply chains. It is also a direct political threat ahead of elections. The president knows this. That is why he is publicly tying the truce to “the agreement we have,” and why he is simultaneously warning that if there is no deal, the United States will use its weapons “very effectively.”
However, maximalist threats collide with a basic problem. You can strike missile sites and ports. You can escort ships, if you are willing to accept risk. You cannot easily bomb your way to cheap insurance premiums. You cannot order global shipping confidence back into existence. And you cannot quickly replace a damaged cluster of fibre-optic cables in contested waters and pretend the shock will be local.
The Islamabad talks are therefore not only about reopening a passage. They are about lowering the perceived risk across two systems that the modern world cannot afford to lose at once. Vice-President JD Vance, heading the U.S. delegation, said Washington wants “a positive negotiation” and warned Iran not to “play” the United States. It is a fair warning. It is also an incomplete one because the uncomfortable truth is that Hormuz is designed to allow “playing” by any coastal power willing to weaponise uncertainty. Iran’s grip is not merely a hand on the oil tap. It is a hand near the throat of global connectivity, too. Trump can insist Tehran has “no cards.” In reality, the strait itself is a deck, and Iran is sitting closest to it.
