Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council of Iran Razaee says Strait of Hormuz will not open until the US changes its behavior and accepts Iran's conditions

Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council of Iran Razaee says Strait of Hormuz will not open until the US changes its behavior and accepts Iran's conditions.

Conditional statements of this kind from Iranian security officials sit within an established pattern in which Hormuz functions as leverage in US-Iran negotiations rather than as an operational blockade scenario; historically, rhetoric tied to demands on Washington has preceded either de-escalatory talks or tit-for-tat maritime incidents, rarely a sustained closure, since a genuinely blocked strait cuts against Iran's own crude exports and its largest buyer relationships. The speaker's role matters: the Supreme National Security Council is the body through which such positions are formalised, so remarks from its secretary carry more weight than IRGC commander commentary, which has tended to be the more inflammatory channel. The mechanism for markets runs through freight rates, war-risk insurance premia and tanker routing before it touches physical supply, and past episodes have shown those cost channels repricing on rhetoric alone while spot crude waits for evidence of actual interference with shipping. The case distinction worth drawing is between harassment of individual vessels, which has been recurrent and short-lived in its pricing, and mining or seizure campaigns, which have historically drawn a US naval response and a sharper but still mean-reverting crude premium. The follow-ons are any shift in insurance pricing at the strait, tanker traffic data, and whether Washington responds through sanctions or through back-channel contacts, the latter being the usual route by which these standoffs have unwound.