Antonio Navalón
When this war ends, which I hope will be soon, one of the two countries—Iran or Israel—will have had to change its political, military, or security structure substantially. What is at stake is not a minor adjustment, but the very survival of the Iranian regime or, at the extreme, the strategic viability of Israel in a regional environment that has become reactive.
The death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, confirmed by Iranian media after the attacks by the United States and Israel, fundamentally altered the internal balance of power in Tehran and opened up a succession marked by uncertainty. Added to this political decapitation was the hunt for senior commanders, with intelligence operations identifying and striking critical structures of the Iranian military apparatus. The result was a wave of bombings of an intensity that, in its scale and persistence, is reminiscent of the nights of the Blitz, when Hitler and Hermann Göring’s Luftwaffe punished London.
We have entered a phase where the question is no longer whether, but how far it will escalate. And, in many ways, we have reached a point of no return. Israel has demonstrated a capacity to neutralize adversaries—supported by intelligence, precision, and operational synchronization—that has few comparable precedents in the region’s recent history.
I suppose that, from that imaginary place where dictators rest, Stalin and Hitler would recognize what it means to have such technology at their disposal in real time. Because it’s not just about bombs, but about information, location, penetration, and speed of decision-making. And that combination changes the balance of power.
From here on, the global economy is also well-positioned to undergo structural change. Not because of a speech or a statement, but because of a geographical bottleneck that concentrates a decisive part of the planet’s energy. Everything depended, and still depends, on the Strait of Hormuz. The reason is simple. Whatever happens, the Strait of Hormuz is an artery. If it closes—or becomes unviable due to threats, attacks, or insurance costs—there will be a collective jump in oil supply interruptions that fuel the global economy.
Since he was elected president, Adolfo Suárez knew that the key to modern democracies and economies lay not only in domestic politics, but also in a remote, narrow, and vulnerable maritime bottleneck at the mouth of the Persian Gulf. It was surprising for the team close to the president—which, by one of those twists of fate, I was lucky enough to belong to when I was 27—to hear him, after reports on the transition and constitutional architecture, return again and again to Hormuz. He did not speak as an international commentator, but as someone who saw a major fracture coming. In 1979, moreover, the regional chessboard was already in turmoil: Iran had just undergone the Revolution, and the region was approaching a conflict that would soon erupt as the war between Iraq and Iran, which lasted eight years.
I confess that until then I had barely seen—other than in passing—a map of the Persian Gulf. And I certainly did not have Hormuz as a name that weighed heavily or constantly on my mind. I learned it, literally, during long, dense conversations, filled with cigarette smoke and the constant feeling that Spanish democracy could derail at any moment. Adolfo Suárez was a tireless smoker. And in those long conversations—which neither diplomats, ministers, nor foreign envoys, fascinated by the “Spanish miracle,” could quite understand—the same question always came up: why was someone who was building a transition from dictatorship to democracy, aware that he could suffer acoup d’état, devoting so much energy to a strait thousands of miles away? The answer was simple and brutal: because that was where the world we were trying to normalize could be broken.
The regime of Ruhollah Khomeini—which emerged after the fall of the Shah—turned the energy and political control of the Gulf into an instrument of strategic pressure, in part because of Washington’s clumsiness and divisions at the time. Jimmy Carter governed with a visible rift between Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, who fundamentally disagreed on how to respond to Iran and, later, on the attempt to rescue the hostages, a dispute that ultimately broke up the cabinet.
This context explains Adolfo Suárez’s urgency to speak with Washington. Suárez met with Carter at the White House on January 14, 1980, when the hostage crisis had already damaged the president’s authority and left the United States in an uncomfortable position with its allies. The wound was deepened by the failed rescue attempt, a military operation that ended in disaster and which Carter took as a personal and public defeat, not only because of what happened, but because of what it revealed: that the world’s center of gravity could suddenly shift to a narrow point on the map. Suárez’s intuition was well-founded. Hormuz was not a geographical detail or a curiosity of the Gulf: it was the nerve center of a global economy that depends on energy flow and logistical stability to sustain prices, inflation, supply chains, and, ultimately, governance.
What happened next was the trigger for Hormuz to become a latent threat. When the war between Iran and Iraq broke out, the possibility of making the passage unsafe—not necessarily blocking it completely, but making it more expensive, militarized, and unpredictable—became a tool for exerting pressure.
By that time, the world had already begun to understand the consequences of its growth model in the wake of the 1973 oil crisis. When you build your prosperity on cheap energy, one day you discover that the real price includes geopolitics, coercion, and fear. Oil was not just a resource: it was the epicenter of Western prosperity and, at the same time, the trigger for accumulated tensions in the Gulf and the Middle East. That is why, when I hear the Iranian government talk today about “closing” the Strait of Hormuz, those memories come back to me like wisps of smoke: it is not an abstract threat, it is a systemic lever.
Many years have passed, and in that time, the underlying problems have not diminished: they have accumulated. Today, in the configuration of the new world, the balance between Iran and what happens with Israel, the United States, and the rest is a key piece in “clearing the table” and beginning to build another stage. Because if Hormuz is effectively closed, the blow will be immediate and global, since about one-fifth of the world’s oil consumption passes through that strait, and any interruption will trigger prices and, in fact, everything related to the use or consumption of oil.
What U.S. forces call the “Epic Fury” mission is something that will remain etched in memory for a long time. Although this time, there should be no confusion. The United States has not had many alternatives, and Israel refuses to continue advancing in the nightmare—and also, in a sense, in the liberation—that began on October 7, 2023, with the massacre perpetrated by Hamas, the deadliest day for Jews since World War II. That point of no return was reached: Israel will not accept going back to where it was. And, from a strategic standpoint, the only way to truly change the balance of power in the Middle East—with all the costs that entails—is to confront the core of Iranian power and its regional projection.
That is why no one knows what we will be like in fifteen years, or what role Saudi Arabia and Mohammed bin Salman will play if he remains alive and maintains absolute control of his country. But today, Israel, the United States, bin Salman, and what remains of the Arab world agree on a mission and a goal: to contain and weaken the Ayatollah regime in Iran.
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