Iranian Major General Safavi says Tehran's main strategy is the intelligent management of the Strait of Hormuz against the US' naval blockade, Defapress reports

Rhetoric invoking the Strait of Hormuz is a recurring feature of Iranian messaging during periods of elevated tension with the US, and episodes of this kind have historically been read first as signalling rather than intent: the strait has been threatened repeatedly over decades without a full closure, in part because Iran's own crude exports depend on it and any sustained disruption invites a direct military response. The transmission channel in past episodes has run through freight and insurance costs and the front of the crude curve rather than immediate physical supply loss; war-risk premia and tanker rates have typically re-priced well before any barrel actually stopped moving, and faded quickly when threats remained rhetorical. The distinction worth drawing is between harassment of individual tankers, which has occurred repeatedly and been absorbed by the market, and mining or blockade of the strait itself, which has not. The messenger matters here: Safavi is a former IRGC commander serving as a senior adviser rather than the operational chain of command, and commentary of this kind from senior but non-operational figures has tended to be lower-signal than statements from the IRGC Navy or the Supreme Leader's office. Worth watching is whether the language migrates to official channels, any change in tanker traffic or AIS behaviour through the strait, and the parallel track of any US-Iran negotiation, since Hormuz rhetoric has historically escalated and de-escalated with the state of those talks.