Iran Deputy FM Gharibabadi says "Just as Trump correctly wrote the name of the eternal Persian Gulf, his delusion regarding the Strait of Hormuz will soon be corrected too!"

Rhetoric of this kind from Iranian officials sits at the low-signal end of the Gulf escalation ladder: it references the Strait of Hormuz but contains no threat of action, no operational detail and no reference to shipping, which is the distinction that has historically mattered. Episodes in which Hormuz rhetoric has repriced crude, tanker rates and war-risk insurance are those where words were paired with concrete steps such as seizures of vessels, mining threats or naval deployments; pure invective of this sort has tended to fade from prices within the session. The naming dispute itself is a long-running sovereignty symbol rather than a policy lever, and its invocation reads as deflection aimed at a domestic audience. The actor's form matters: deputy foreign ministry figures are not the channel through which operational decisions on the strait have been signalled, which have come instead from the military and senior leadership. The follow-ons worth noting are whether the tone is echoed by those senior actors and any movement in physical markers such as insurance premia and freight quotes for Gulf loadings, which are the established tells that rhetoric is converting into perceived supply risk. Absent those, the transmission channel to WTI and the havens remains thin.