Iran's Hormuz leverage risks becoming a 'strategic liability' — will ultimately backfire, says Saudi Prince

In a sharply worded opinion piece, Prince Turki Al-Faisal, former head of Saudi intelligence and a prominent royal family voice, warned that Iran’s attempts to weaponise the Strait of Hormuz as diplomatic blackmail will ultimately "backfire".

“What Tehran regards as leverage could, over time, become a strategic liability,” he wrote, arguing that Iran must abandon revolutionary ideology in favor of conventional state behaviour.

“Iran must conduct itself as a nation-state rather than as an international revolutionary movement.”

The article, titled “Strait Diplomacy: Where Is It Heading,” published Wednesday in the Saudi Gazette and the Arab News, comes amid stalled US-Iran talks following the collapse of a June 17, 2026, Memorandum of Understanding (MOU).

That interim deal had offered a 60-day window to end hostilities that began with US and Israeli strikes on Iran on February 28, address the nuclear programme, reopen the Strait of Hormuz, ease sanctions, and lift a US blockade.

Mutual distrust and conflicting interpretations — particularly of Article 5 on the strait — doomed the process.

Prince Turki accused Tehran of treating the memorandum as granting it absolute sovereignty over the vital waterway, ignoring the rights of Oman and other Gulf states.

Iran then resumed interference with navigation in an international waterway protected under international law, even after the temporary lifting of the American blockade and the resumption of Iranian oil exports.

Iran's attacks on shipping eventually killed diplomacy.

On July 22, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that Iran’s continued attacks on commercial shipping have rendered a recent agreement with Tehran "invalid" — even as he stressed that Washington remains "open" to future diplomacy if Iran complies with its commitments.

“Iran’s renewed use of the Strait of Hormuz as a tool for international pressure and a means of blackmailing its neighbours and the wider world will ultimately work against it,” Prince Turki stated.

Parallel

He drew a parallel to Iran’s decades-long use of its nuclear programme as leverage, which failed to secure recognition as a normal state and instead led to isolation — and eventually the very war it sought to deter.

Applying the same “diplomacy of blackmail” to Hormuz, he argued, will produce no better outcome.

The international community will never recognise Iranian sovereignty over the strait; persistence only erodes Tehran’s credibility, invites isolation or future coalitions to protect global shipping, and accelerates Gulf states’ development of alternative trade routes that diminish Hormuz’s strategic value.

“The interests of the region and the wider world would be best served by an Iran that behaves as a normal state, pursuing national interests that advance peace, development and prosperity for its people, while grounding its foreign policy in international law and accepted international norms,” Prince Turki wrote.

Nearly five decades after the 1979 revolution should suffice for Iran’s leadership to accept that the world will not conform to its ideological vision.

China, he noted, retained its communist ideology while learning to operate within the international order — an example Iran could follow.

He praised Gulf leaders, especially Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, for skillful diplomacy that helped produce the original memorandum and later averted further escalation.

He also highlighted the emerging “Makkah Agreement,” a defensive pact among states committed to stability and open to others seeking lasting peace.