In November 1979, Iranian students stormed the American embassy in Tehran and held its diplomats hostage for more than a year. The crisis became a heavy political burden for then-US President Jimmy Carter and helped Ronald Reagan defeat him in the 1980 election.
Forty-seven years later, in a congressional election season, another American president faces a hostage crisis of a different kind. This time the hostages are oil tankers, merchant vessels and a strait through which energy supplies flow to the United States and the wider world.
Then, Ayatollah Khomeini faced Jimmy Carter; now, Mojtaba Khamenei faces Donald Trump. The Supreme Leader has changed, and so has the president. The geography, the region and the world have all shifted. Yet "hostage diplomacy" remains one of the Islamic Republic's instruments of leverage. During the 1980s, armed groups linked to Iran abducted dozens of Westerners in Lebanon and used them as bargaining chips. Tehran later detained Western nationals inside Iran to strike deals with their governments.
The Strait of Hormuz crisis is the latest chapter in this history. For more than eight months, Tehran has held the strait hostage, while Iran itself remains captive to a naval blockade. Mojtaba Khamenei has taken a page from the playbook of the Islamic Republic's founding leader. He deliberately delayed reopening the strait, hoping that mounting economic pressure on Trump would cost his party the elections. That is precisely what happened: both the president and his vice president, JD Vance, acknowledged that the war with Iran had contributed to the Republicans' resounding defeat.
