For 30 years, analysts warned that Iran could close the Strait of Hormuz. For 30 years, Iran did not. It threatened to close the Strait, but it never pulled the trigger. The US and its Gulf allies assumed Iran was jive-talking. That changed on February 28 when the US and Israel thought they could bomb the Islamic Republic out of power. America wants oil. Israel wants to extinguish an existential threat.

In the days that followed Iran has delivered surprise after surprise. It immediately closed the straits to traffic, something that strategic planners thought it could not do. It has since taken complete control of the waterway and turned it into a toll road. It has stood eye to eye with the US navy, the most powerful flotilla in the world, and the US blinked.

It’s a similar story with the exchange of missiles. The US and Israel unleashed some of the most powerful missiles in the world but in a David and Goliath exchange, Iran met the bombardment and overwhelmed the coalition's defences with its own barrage of cheap but plentiful drones.

China and Russia are emerging as superpowers able to face down the US, but now people are starting to wonder if by attacking Iran, US President Donald Trump has awakened a sleeping giant that could be the world’s fourth superpower.

The Strait of Hormuz has been shut for over five weeks. The US is powerless to force its reopening. Tehran walked into the Islamabad peace talks with its negotiating leverage intact, its core deterrent enhanced, and its oil exports running higher than the pre-war monthly average. This is not how a regional irritant behaves. It is not how a middle power behaves either.

But superpower? The case against is straightforward. Iran falls into last place in any direct like-with-like comparison with the US, China or Russia. Its conventional military is degraded. Its air force is a museum. Iranians lived with inflation above 40% in 2025, and the rial traded at levels that in any other economy would signify total collapse.

None of that is in dispute. But the alternative framing, that Iran is a middle power, a regional troublemaker, a problem to be managed with the right combination of pressure and incentive, has been emptied of meaning by the events of the past two months. Roughly 20% of seaborne crude and a quarter of global LNG passes through a 33-kilometre chokepoint that Iran physically dominates from its northern shore. No carrier strike group changes the geography. No sanctions regime changes it. The Islamic Republic can be brought to its economic knees and still close the strait on its way down. It has a stranglehold over one of the world’s most important energy chokepoints and that gives it immense raw power. And lets face it, superpowers are not in the business of making the world a better place. Their lifeblood is raw power.

Qatari Energy Minister Saad Sherida al-Kaabi warned on March 6 that prolonged conflict could force Gulf producers to declare force majeure, and that this "will bring down economies of the world." He was not exaggerating for effect. War-risk insurance premiums for tanker transits rose four to five times their previous levels, the Congressional Research Service reported in March.

The ability to destroy stuff is the hallmark of a superpower and the ability to cripple the global economy is pretty destructive. The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, better known as FRED, calculated that a complete cessation of Gulf oil exports amounts to "removing close to 20% of global oil supplies from the market, about 80% of which is shipped to Asia." The Solability Hormuz Economic Impact Model put the daily damage at roughly $20bn in global GDP losses, with cumulative damage projected at $3.57 trillion under the most likely ceasefire scenario.

What is more striking is what Iran did in response to the disruption. According to Al Jazeera, Iranian crude exports actually rose in March and early April, with shipments routed predominantly to China. From March 15 to April 14, Iran exported 55.22mn barrels at prices that did not fall below $90, generating roughly $4.97bn in a single month.

The Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs observed in early March that "as the conflict radiates across the Middle East, Iran confronts a narrowing strategic space," noting that for the UAE "the central question is no longer whether instability can be avoided entirely, but how its scope can be contained.” Read that quote twice. The Gulf states are not asking how to defeat Iran. They are asking how to live with what Iran can do.

The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, no friend of Tehran, conceded in its post-war analysis that the conflict had revealed a deeper truth. "Insurgents win by not losing," it wrote, observing that "Iran in many respects is running an insurgency against the rest of the region." The same analysis acknowledged that "even high-value scarce systems such as THAAD missile defence radars" had been targeted and depleted by cheap Iranian drones, exposing the limits of Western defence architecture against a determined asymmetric adversary. The UAE now wants the US to get out of its country, according to tweets by people close to the authorities on April 20.

Critics will respond that the ability to inflict global economic damage is not the same as the ability to project power. They are correct. Iran cannot land a marine division in Madagascar. It cannot blockade Taiwan. It cannot do any of the things we associate with great power status in the post-1945 sense. But the post-1945 definition of power no longer holds. Power in 2026 is increasingly the ability to deny, to disrupt, to impose costs that other states cannot afford to absorb. Iran has been denied access to the global system for nearly 50 years, yet has somehow managed to make weight loss jabs in recent months, leading to Israel bombing its medicine factories. Quite odd targeting.

By that measure, Iran sits in a category occupied by very few states. In fact, no other state has been at once suffocated and managed to dodge the collapse bullet. Call it asymmetric survival. States whose influence vastly exceeds their conventional weight because of a single structural advantage that cannot be neutralised by force. Iran has it in Hormuz. North Korea has a smaller version in its proximity to Seoul. Russia retains a degraded version in its nuclear arsenal.

The Islamabad peace talks, now in their second week (but Iran also says it's not going), make the point clearly enough. Iran arrived at the table not as a defeated belligerent suing for terms, but as a participant whose acquiescence is required for the regional order to function. Pakistani facilitation, an Omani backchannel, quiet Chinese diplomatic underwriting, none of it would be assembled for a middle power.

Turkey has never commanded this level of attention, despite its Nato membership and economic heft. Saudi Arabia has not either, despite the kingdom's vastly superior fiscal position. And allegedly better weapons that did not hold much in recent weeks from Iranian low-cost drones.

But the Islamic Republic's economy will continue to deteriorate. Case in point, the dollar is still trading at IRR1,530,500 on the black market on April 20, according to IntelliNews tracking data from inside the country. But the Soviet Union was dysfunctional in a plethora of ways symbolised by the exploding TVs and opaque sunglasses, yet it soldiered on for decades until Mikhail Gorbachev unleashed the tectonic forces of perestroika and glasnost that quickly ran out of control and brought the empire down.

So is Iran a superpower? No, not by any conventional understanding of the term. To call it one would be to empty the word of meaning, with Iran's new de facto power, Iranian Speaker of Parliament Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf, now believed to be the country's unofficial leader, saying as much in an interview with state television. Grinning as he always does, he said that “diplomacy of power,” adding that "Iran had achieved its objectives while the enemy failed to meet its own."