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Former Undersecretary of Defense Robert Wilkie and foreign policy expert Walid Phares warned on Newsmax that the tentative U.S.-Iran negotiations cannot be allowed to reward a regime that openly threatens the world’s energy lifelines. They made clear that Tehran’s recent moves around the Strait of Hormuz are not mere bluster but part of a strategy to coerce concessions from the West while testing American resolve. Americans should be alarmed that this brinkmanship could become normalized if the U.S. signals weakness.
What Wilkie and Phares rightly stress is that control of the Strait of Hormuz is leverage of global consequence — roughly a quarter of seaborne oil flows through that choke point, and any disruption would ripple into households at the pump. Allowing Iran to maintain a stranglehold, even indirectly, hands Tehran the power to blackmail our allies and raise energy prices on working families. This is not abstract geopolitics; it is an immediate economic threat to American prosperity.
Worse still, Wilkie warned the West must consider the domino effect: Tehran’s safe success in coercing Western concessions could embolden Beijing to adopt similar tactics in other maritime chokepoints or to expand its gray-zone coercion worldwide. If authoritarian regimes see the United States negotiate under pressure, they will be incentivized to escalate rather than restrain, and America’s historic deterrence will be compromised. We should not forget that strength and credibility are the currency of peace; surrendering them invites disorder.
The conservative case is clear: negotiations that fail to strip Iran of its ability to threaten global transit routes are not diplomacy — they are capitulation. Our leaders must demand verifiable restraints on Iranian naval harassment and concrete safeguards for commercial shipping before any deal that eases sanctions or provides relief. A deal that leaves the mullahs’ chokehold intact will be sold as “peace,” while in reality it rewards bad actors and punishes the free world.
America must also remember that military options exist and that credible military posture underpins successful diplomacy. Wilkie has pointed out that repositioning forces to secure key Persian Gulf points is part of ensuring negotiations happen from strength rather than surrender, and that posture has historically deterred worse outcomes. Our policymakers should pair firm diplomacy with undeniable readiness so adversaries know coercion carries a price.
To hardworking Americans paying more for groceries and gas, this is not elite theorizing — it is common-sense national security. We do not negotiate away our leverage or our allies’ security for temporary headlines or political theater. If Washington wants peace and stable energy markets, it must stand with strength, not appeasement; any other path hands the world over to regimes that respect only force and resolve.
