Iran has given the United States four to five days to meet seven preconditions for reopening the Strait of Hormuz, and Brent crude is already trading at $107 a barrel. Every gallon you pump this week is being priced by a dictator in Tehran, because Washington spent years making sure America couldn't fill its own tank.

Mohsen Rezaei, the secretary of Iran's supreme national security council, delivered the deadline on Iranian television Wednesday evening. The terms are not negotiable. "There has been no discussion whatsoever that these conditions should change, that a new condition should be removed or added," Rezaei said. Iran's president, Masoud Pezeshkian, and foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, traveled to New York to convey those terms, not to bargain over new ones.

"Talk is enough. Negotiations are enough. Now we must act," Rezaei said. If the US does "not fulfil the conditions, we will neither open the strait of Hormuz nor is there any negotiation on the table." He said all seven conditions must be implemented "completely and all at once."

The Guardian reported that those conditions include the lifting of US sanctions and an end to war on all fronts — a reference to Israeli military activity in south Lebanon. US special envoy Steve Witkoff met Araghchi earlier this week to discuss the terms. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said it would be wrong to call the Witkoff talks a major breakthrough. European diplomats sensed no breakthrough either.

Meanwhile, 80 countries at the United Nations signed a joint statement demanding the urgent reopening of the strait and condemning both Iran and its Houthi allies for attacks disrupting international trade and energy security, according to Reuters. Bahrain's foreign minister read the statement, backed by Gulf Arab states and major Western powers. It also condemned the Houthis for resuming conflict in Yemen, striking Saudi Arabia, and launching what it called reckless attacks in the Red Sea.

The double chokepoint is the real story. IRGC officers have linked the Hormuz closure to the Bab al-Mandeb Strait off Yemen, now under Houthi control. Senior Iranian military figure Maj Gen Rahim Safavi reinforced that connection. Two of the world's critical oil transit routes are threatened simultaneously by Tehran and its proxies.

This is the bill for the war on American drilling. Every pipeline killed, every refinery regulated into obsolescence, every LNG permit stalled — each one was a vote to let foreign powers set the price of American energy. When you shut down energy independence at home, you hand leverage to the people who control the chokepoints abroad. Right now, Iran is using it.

A faction inside Iran is reportedly pushing to escalate against what it sees as a vulnerable American president, rather than let the crisis drift. The Guardian framed that detail as internal Iranian politics. What it actually means for Americans is that the people setting your gas prices have an incentive to make things worse, not better.

The open question is whether Washington remembers that the fastest way to strip Iran of its leverage is to produce the energy at home that Tehran is holding hostage abroad.