Alastair Crooke on the Iran war, Hormuz, and the unraveling of the US-led world order
Glenn Diesen interviews British diplomat and conflict negotiator Alastair Crooke on the Iran war and its global implications.
Summary
Glenn Diesen interviews Alastair Crooke, founder and director of Conflicts Forum and a veteran British diplomat and Middle East negotiator, on April 27th, 2026. Crooke argues that Iran has fundamentally shifted its negotiating position — refusing to discuss the nuclear issue until the US ends its military attacks, lifts the naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, and halts sanctions enforcement — making a return to any JCPOA-style agreement effectively impossible. He identifies two major barriers to a negotiated settlement: Trump's psychological need for a personal win that surpasses Obama's JCPOA, and Israel's increasingly messianic-apocalyptic political culture, which he argues actively seeks a major regional war rather than restraint. Crooke also highlights a striking shift in the domestic mood inside Iran, with large columns of young Iranians — particularly women — publicly supporting the state and opposing negotiations with the US, which he describes as a new revolutionary energy with long-term regional implications. Crooke contends that time is firmly on Iran's side economically, that the Western world is within weeks of feeling severe supply-chain consequences from the Hormuz situation, and that the war is ultimately a contest over the entire post-1973 financial architecture — including dollar hegemony and the petrodollar system — not merely a bilateral dispute over nuclear enrichment.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Introduction and the state of Iran negotiations
Glenn Diesen: Welcome back. Today is April 27th, 2026, and I had the great pleasure of being joined by Alastair Crooke, who is a renowned British diplomat and negotiator who worked for decades addressing conflicts in the Middle East. He is also the founder and director of the Conflicts Forum, and the link to his Substack can be found in the description. Thank you very much for coming back on the program.
Alastair Crooke: Thank you. Always a pleasure joining you.
Glenn Diesen: It seems that we are at risk of a greater war with both Iran and Russia. I thought we could start with Iran. There is a lot of confusion here — are the peace negotiations still going on? Is the ceasefire actually still holding? But overall I also see the problem of whether the United States is actually seeking an end to the Iran war, and if so, what do you think is the possible off-ramp or exit strategy for the United States?
Alastair Crooke: There is a lot of propaganda and a lot of confusion — and most of it is propaganda. There has been a substantive change take place and we ought to try and understand that.
First of all, to say that there was never a proposal for Araghchi to meet with Kushner or Witkoff in Islamabad. This was a fantasy created by Trump — it doesn't refer to any actual plans or proposals. Trump has said very clearly, "Well, there was really no point to having any talks with them until they get their act together and produce a plan of what they want. We don't know what they want." But of course he does, because what Iran wants was spelled out very clearly in the ten-point plan that was given to the Americans for the Islamabad talks — and which Trump said at the time was a realistic basis for discussion, if you recall. So they have put out very clearly in those ten points their negotiating position.
And they haven't changed from it, except now — and for some time I've been saying this — I reread the JCPOA, even though I've been one way or another dealing with it for more than twenty years. I reread it and I looked at it and I thought: why on earth would Iran want to go back to that? It's like being on parole from prison. You've been on parole for a few weeks' leave, and then the prison gate is opening and you're going to go back into your cage. Not a literal cage, but a cage of being surrounded by American military bases everywhere — the cage of sanctions, of tariffs, of UN resolutions, of IAEA inspections. Would you want to go back to that?
And what's happened over the last few days — what Araghchi went to Pakistan to do — was to tell them their new negotiating principles, which are basically not that different, except for one bombshell difference: they are not prepared to discuss the nuclear issue. They are not prepared to discuss it until they have resolved the points about the war, about the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, about the attacks on them and on Iranians, and also the sanctions being imposed — tankers being seized and arrested by US officials. So they said: this is it for the moment. These are the things we are going to discuss. We are going to discuss Hormuz, and we are going to discuss a ceasefire or not, and we are going to discuss the ending of the attacks on us and on others like Hezbollah in Lebanon. We will deal with that. Maybe later we will talk about material issues. That is what they say.
And Khamenei did a tweet, I think last night, and he said Iran — Trump keeps saying he has all the cards, but listen to our cards. One is: we control, and we will continue to be able to control, Bab-el-Mandeb and the Red Sea, and we can control pipelines. And what does the other side have? Well, they have a naval blockade. And the question really — he didn't put it in these terms, but I am saying it — which is the shorter timeline? The timeline between the Iranian blockade, which is passable — it is open to specific vessels — but what is the timeline between that creating serious damage in the Western economy? And the timeline of the Trump American naval blockade, which is not very much observed, which is really quite porous — vessels have been passing through, including from China. How long before that puts real pressure on Iran?
And the answer is, contrary to what Trump believes — that after the 26th of April, yesterday, Iran's oil supplies would all crash and they would be broke — it is not true. Iran is continuing to get tankers out by following the coast very closely into territorial waters, getting their loaded tankers out. They have been earning more in a month of the war than they ever earned in the best years beforehand. Just one day, four tankers leaving Kharg Island a little while ago produced an income of just under a billion — $815 million. They have oil at sea. Before the war they put 200 million barrels at sea; they have around 130 million left. So they can go on for months, really.
And in any case, it is a misunderstanding of the nature of Iran and the nature of their strategy to think they are about to capitulate or surrender. Iran is in many ways a very different vehicle. It started as a revolt against Western modernity, with the influence of Shariati and others. But it was always a civilizational state — civilizational and revolutionary — and not just a sort of nineteenth-century linear autocratic nation that tried to enforce a national identity. They deliberately did not enforce a national identity, and they felt Islam was a civilizational element in it.
So I don't think the calculation favors the Americans. The Iranians feel it is in their favor. And I don't know — I admit clearly I don't know — whether they intend ultimately, if they get the right deal, to talk about the nuclear issue. I don't think there is any chance of Iran handing over 430 kilos of enriched uranium to the Americans ever. So we are in a slightly new era, which is why I think there is confusion going on in Washington, because Trump's hopes of finding a quick solution to this conflict are evaporating. I know there are people who feel that a solution could be put together. I don't see a path to the solution, and I can explain why if you would like.
The two major barriers to a negotiated settlement
Glenn Diesen: Yeah, that's actually my next question — I was going to ask what prospects there are for a negotiated settlement. But first, you described returning to the JCPOA as almost a prison, and it does feel like this is the war objective of Iran — that it is a prison break in which Hormuz, the control of the Strait of Hormuz, is essentially the main instrument towards this end. Because if they have the Strait of Hormuz, where they can set up a toll and set conditions for transit, essentially the countries who put sanctions on Iran, who threaten it with war by hosting bases or actually attacking it — all of them can be to some extent disciplined if they want proper access. So it seems very critical for Iran, if they don't want to go back to the past decades of crippling sanctions and the threat of war, that the Strait of Hormuz is non-negotiable. So I want to ask how you see the possibility of an actual negotiated settlement — and to make matters more complicated, you can throw in Israel's territorial ambitions and of course the desire to crack Lebanon as it did Syria. How do you see the possibility of actually meeting halfway somewhere in a negotiation?
Alastair Crooke: Going back to what you just said — I would just add to it. We have seen supply lines beginning to show a sort of rumbling of catastrophe already, because various crucial elements that pass through Hormuz include not just oil and gas but helium, sulfuric acid, gallium — all of these things pass through. And what happens is that they get slightly worse and then they break. And when they break, we in the West are going to feel the consequences directly. There will not be fuel at the petrol stations. There will be difficulty getting children to school. There will not be the food that you want. You will not have aluminum foil in the shops any longer — aluminum comes through Hormuz overwhelmingly. So we are at the moment that we have all heard about, that it is going to be so serious, yet it hasn't fully impacted. It has in Ireland, where there are protests about not being able to get cars fueled. But it is coming, and all the economic experts of the West are saying so.
What I am trying to say is that I don't think there is a path through this — certainly not one that is going to be very easily achieved — because there are two major roadblocks in this process.
The first major roadblock is Trump. I am not just talking about his mental state, which we all know is a contributory — indeed a dominant — factor, because he still runs the show at the White House. He has not been removed from it like Biden was largely removed. He is very much in control of it — loosely in control, but nonetheless he likes to present himself as being there. But more than that, the roots of this in many ways lie in his feeling about Iran, which has been his dislike of Obama and the sense of rivalry he has always felt with Obama. What he has always said was that Obama's JCPOA was terrible, it was awful, it was imperfect, and he could do much better. He needs something like that — a better JCPOA than Obama's — to prove that he, Trump, was the better negotiator. There is a long history to this sort of bitter rivalry.
And when you look at this, even before what I said at the beginning about the change in tactics — there was not going to be a better JCPOA coming out of this. If there was a JCPOA 2, it would be more favorable for the Iranians than the first one. Otherwise there would be none. So it would have to be more favorable, and that would not go well with Trump, nor would it go well with Netanyahu.
So the first thing is: the only thing that could really satisfy Trump — and he in advance recognized this — was that the Iranians would suddenly hand over 430 kilos of enriched uranium and he would hold it up like a football trophy at the end of a game and say, "Look, I won, we succeeded, there will never be a nuclear weapon." Well, I don't think Iran is going to do that, because they realize this is their great asset in these negotiations and they are not going to hand it over.
Also, Trump did not like it when Vance started talking from Islamabad. By all the reports we hear, when Vance was saying, "Well, yes, they will continue to charge a fee on Hormuz and they will have control over it and they will share it with Oman and so on, but then Iran will become more popular — Iran will become one of the big states, because if they control Hormuz and get fees for the next half year or a year, they will have money rolling in." So supposing Vance went back to these talks with his two minders, Kushner and Witkoff, and he came back and said, "Look, we have got a deal on 3.67% enrichment and the timeline would be extended and there would be monitoring and all of that" — would Trump say okay? Or would he say, "But this isn't a win for me, because this is just the JCPOA, this is Obama's JCPOA, and this doesn't show that I've achieved anything"?
So I think there is a real problem there. And of course there is still the other problem of his mental condition. Various people who have got more direct knowledge — Robert Barr and others — have explained how it is more than just being erratic. It is a sense of confabulation taking place, of huge anger, of being unable to take criticism, unable to really understand what is going on. Very serious. And so one question is: how would the team manage this if things get worse? How would they manage Trump — not the conflict, but Trump?
It seems from the reporting that not this Saturday but the Saturday before, General Kash Patel said no. And it seems even on this last Saturday, when there was a meeting about Iran, there was some sort of agreement by the team when there was a proposal for further mass bombing of electricity and infrastructure — all of them, or maybe all but one, said no, this is a war crime, this is not a miss, we cannot accept this. Can this continue? I don't know. You would have to ask someone better equipped in the American field how long this can go on, because there is no real pathway I can see for them to change that so easily. The 25th Amendment is unlikely to be possible. Are we going to go down the route of some sort of indictment? I don't know.
But this is the first barrier I describe to coming to some sort of agreement. If it is not about the nuclear issue, what would it be? The only next stage then would be possibly another attempt to go to Isfahan and take out the enriched material from the Fordow facility — after what happened. I mean, Joe Kent keeps telling Trump: well, if you go on like this, you end up being like Jimmy Carter after Carter's disastrous attempt to rescue the hostages from Iran, when the helicopters crashed. You remember it was a disaster, and it cost Carter the presidency. So I don't know whether they will do that.
Well, that only leaves bombing — carpet bombing — and it hasn't succeeded in destroying Iran's missile capabilities. So we are talking about either just repeating the bombing of mountains, pretty pointlessly, or more likely just bombing civilian infrastructure, killing people, knocking down apartments — which you have to ask the lawyers whether that is going to be considered a war crime or not. Anyway, maybe Trump will double down and say, "Well, I have got to put pressure on. They have got to agree, because otherwise my polling and my chances for the midterms are fading very far. We have really got to put pressure." And so I don't really see what it is that Trump could obtain from these events.
Iran is not about to fully open the Strait. I was listening to some of the Gulf states and they said, "We can't have tolls, it must be open, it must be without tolls, we can't accept that." Which is one of the reasons why the Pakistanis — who are of course very close to Saudi Arabia — and Saudi Arabia say: oh, it can't have tolls, it has got to be as it used to be before the 27th of February. Come on. I mean, you don't like tolls? Nor do I. I used to be able to read newspapers without paying anything — you went online and you could read them, and then suddenly there was a subscription and a toll posted on it, and of course you got used to reading them for free, and it is always a painful adjustment when you have to pay. If I drive a car on a motorway here I have to pay a toll. I mean, grow up — this is how things are. And that proposal to put a toll is, I am not a lawyer, but I think it is legal under the UN treaty on the law of the sea, because all of the Strait of Hormuz — the actual strait — is within Iran's territorial waters or Oman's territorial waters on the other side. There is no international portion at all. It is too narrow. So they will continue with this.
And the US naval blockade is porous — Iranian vessels are going in and coming out. We have seen that voyage shipping data put in the Financial Times, and I think Trump was rather angry that instead of some 30 Iranian ships in the last few days having been stopped, they had in fact traversed the straits. So where is the solution? Other than bombing, which will not be a solution because it will not cause the Iranians to come back.
One of the things that is so clear is the change in atmosphere in Iran. There is a new energy, a new sense of the revolution updating. It is the young more than the older generations who participated in the revolution. These are the youngsters. There are great columns of young women, armed, going out onto the streets every night in support of the Iranian state. It is something that is going to have long-term impacts, I believe, beyond Iran — in places like Russia and China too. This sort of robust expression of a rejection of one reality and a determination to find and achieve their own sovereignty.
And that mood is also acting against agreement with America. You ask the young — you can see it on the videos. You ask them about what they see, and they say: why are we in negotiation with America? Why is our leadership talking to them when they are bombing our houses, our schools, our hospitals? No. The mood is hardening at another level as well, which is important. It is not reflected in the Western media and their understanding. But you have only got to look at the videos — you see these columns of women going out to defend bridges and power stations that they feel are threatened.
Israel's messianic politics as a barrier to peace
Alastair Crooke: And then you come to the second barrier. Supposing you find a solution with Trump — how do you find a solution with Israel?
I wrote a paper for my Substack about how Israel had changed. Some fifteen years ago I said you cannot understand Israel through secular, rational, Enlightenment-type structures. You have to understand that it is becoming a conflict of religious poles in the Middle East, and it really has changed further in that direction, because what we are seeing is that Israel has now become much more messianic, apocalyptic, and eschatological. Seventy percent, basically, of Israeli Jewish Israelis support this direction. And the most important thing, I think, is that it is not some passing moment that is going to come and go with the elections and then we will have back an Ashkenazi secular regime — because, as the great Jewish historian Gershom Scholem has written, messianism has been a very important impulse in the Jewish faith over the years, from the 1600s and the nineteenth century with the Sabbatean branch and others. And he predicted from some years ago that religious Zionism — which he said in recent decades has aligned with Likud and the settlement movement — operates as a militant, apocalyptic, and radical messianic movement that tries to force the end by demanding that the state engage in, for example, massive territorial control — i.e., this is heaven. They demand territorial conquest for end-of-times reasons. So forcing Zion is about forcing redemption and the messianic age coming into being.
So my point about this was: if you go back to the Reagan administration, when they tried to impose a certain restraint on Israel — is that likely in the new atmosphere of Israel? Are they going to accept restraint because it might be in America's interest? And it is in America's interest — let us be quite clear. Of course it is in America's interest. They don't want the whole Middle East set alight in a sort of move towards Armageddon. They don't want that. So they call for restraint. But is it reasonable to think that is going to happen? I think not. And if you listen to the latest statement by Katz threatening everything against Iran — "Israel will attack this disgusting country of Iran, will move it" — the language was extraordinary. It was purely apocalyptic language coming from the defense minister of Israel.
So I don't think restraint is going to be possible. And it is not possible because Netanyahu is under huge pressure — the people are saying: your war on Iran failed, it didn't achieve any of its objectives, and your war on Hezbollah, which you told us was so successful that Hezbollah had been eliminated, we now find was never true. And you tell us therefore that the war on Iran is going to be a great success. It is not true. So he is in double trouble. He needs a success. And so what you see in the Israeli press even this morning is: we have to get the Americans to continue the war. Is this in the American interest? I doubt it. But this is in the messianic interest of Israel — to get the US to continue the war.
And so what is going to happen? When there is a divergence of interest — and I would argue the interest of the Republican Party, the interest of Trump personally, is to find a solution and an end to the war, and that is the American interest largely, not everyone in America agrees with that, Mark Levin being one — but if you put that aside, I would say actually at the end of the day on this, Israel doesn't give a damn about America and it doesn't give a damn for the Gulf states either. It has something which surpasses all those rational, mechanistic strategies of saying, "But surely it is not in Israel's interest to go to a major war with Iran."
Well, I remember Smotrich six or seven years ago in a video to the Likud, which I watched then, and he said: listen, this was the plan — we are going to get rid of all the Arabs from the land of Israel. But I have to tell you, to do this, to complete the plan, we need a major crisis or a big war, and then we will finish the plan. In other words, they are telling you that if you do something, you will get Armageddon — and they want Armageddon. They want it either through the path towards salvation and redemption. So I find it very difficult to see a simple path. I don't think the idea that Iran can be persuaded by Russia and China to go back to a JCPOA-type prison is now on the cards. Iran has said on the record, publicly: no, we are not talking about the nuclear issue now. We are talking about economic costs, we are talking about sanctions and tariffs. This is going to be the discussion. Maybe if all that is resolved, who knows, we can talk about the nuclear issue again.
The West's failure to adapt to a multipolar world
Glenn Diesen: Well, that's not the United States, but I saw Von der Leyen from the European Union making the point that sanctions will not come off Iran because of values — the regime has to change, this and that. And it is intended to sound very principled, but it also comes off as delusional at times. They do the same with China and Russia. If they fail to achieve anything, I think part of it is because there is difficulty in transitioning to a multipolar world — because they want to get what they want, it prevents them from seeing what they actually can get, or how they want the world to be. They fail to see how the world actually is, and they often frame it in morality.
Alastair Crooke: That is my point about mechanistic, secular thinking that is so embedded in their particular grasp of reality that they are completely incapable of seeing that others have different ways of seeing and experience reality from a different perspective. And they can't understand that. And of course this is why I said I can't see Iran going back to the JCPOA agreement, because they know — I mean, we are talking 47 years of the first sanctions put on — they are never going to be lifted, not while Israel has any say. And of course Von der Leyen is representing Israel as much as anyone else in this process. You know, of course, the containment, the sanctions, the siege on Iran — break the Iranian spirit — and that gets also some support from Gulf states, but principally from Israel and from elements within the United States. So this is why I keep saying Iran's aim in this war is to break the whole paradigm of putting Iran in — as you put it in words of the jail — exactly.
The war of attrition and the global financial architecture
Glenn Diesen: Just a final question then — it seems like this is then a war of attrition, both in the military sense but also economic. That is, who can absorb the most pain and of course inflict pain on the other side. Do you think it is clear that time is on the side of the Iranians, or how do you see it? Because it seems all sides are under great pressure now.
Alastair Crooke: No, the time is on the side of the Iranians in an unqualified way. They have been making more money during this war. Revenues to the state have come in far higher since they have had control of the Strait and have been charging passage fees. Iran isn't short of money, and it has probably 130 million barrels of oil still at sea that they will sell gradually. They can keep going for a long time. They may start charging fees for passage through the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait as well.
Whereas we in the West are closer to the edge, and as I say, I don't think people have appreciated that we have about two weeks before it is going to really hit. And when it hits, people won't be able to afford to fly, they won't be able to easily get their cars refueled — there are many things, costs of electricity and so on, that are going to shoot up. And Europe is going to be in dark pain. I live here in Italy, and there is a huge cost-of-living crisis. There has been no increase in real wages since Italy joined the euro — no increase in real incomes since then. That is a long, long time to squeeze and squeeze and squeeze down. And people, when there are protests, say: how do you expect people to go on when the income they are getting has run out by week three of a month and they have four weeks in a month? It is just not working.
So I think the pain is going to come very much to the economic elites, the ones that are trading. But I just want to say one thing before we finish — this is also something much bigger. It is part of a global war. The other thing that Iran is fighting in this war is, if you like, the financial architecture — not just dollar hegemony, not just the petrodollar, but the whole structure by which the Gulf states were set up in 1973: keep the oil price high and transfer the enormous excess savings that came from it into Wall Street. And this underpinned the financialized world that we live in, which incidentally is the source of much of our problems, because it has come at the price of depressing or suppressing the real economy in favor of an economy that is all about trading, about making instant money on markets — not by actually producing things. In the real world, it is much quicker — you can make a few hundred million in an afternoon by insider trading on the markets.
And one of the things that I think is going to be a long-term consequence of this war is the complete destruction of markets and pricing that is taking place as a result of all of this insider trading, these complete disparities that people can see for themselves. You pick up the paper and they say, "Oh, oil has just gone down from $98 to $93." Try buying a barrel of oil at that price. It is completely manipulated. If you want to buy a barrel of oil, you are going to have to pay over $200. Sri Lanka has just been paying well over $200 to get oil just to keep going. So what is pricing? What are markets? What is this market that says the price of oil is X when you actually have to pay double that price to get a real, physical barrel of oil that you can put into the system and keep it running?
This is going to have a huge impact. So Iran — that is why the Iranians are saying: if you want to have relations with Iran, you have got to get rid of the Microsoft and Amazon and all of your links. We don't want that type of economic umbrella which has suffocated us and been antagonistic to us for 47 years — the umbrella of dollar hegemony, the hegemony of the military coupled with the hegemony of a financialized world, coupled with the sense of control of the UN, the IAEA, and all these structures that are employed against Iran. So I think that is the global aspect of this.
Glenn Diesen: No, that is interesting. I don't think Trump expected that this war, which was supposed to be a quick Venezuela-like operation, would turn out to be a war which could bring down the American world order. It is quite a dramatic development. Anyway, thank you very much as always for taking the time.
Alastair Crooke: Always a pleasure to join you.