What Happens After April 6 if Iran Doesn't Open Hormuz? The Scenarios Nobody Wants to Think About

Trump has set April 6 as the deadline for Iran to open Hormuz. Here are the scenarios that analysts are modeling for what happens if they don't — and they are alarming.

Trump's repeated deadline extensions for Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz have created a specific psychological and diplomatic dynamic: each extension makes the next deadline slightly less credible, and slightly less credible deadlines are slightly easier to call. But the underlying credibility problem has a hard floor: there are things that a US administration cannot fail to respond to without suffering political consequences that transcend any specific foreign policy calculation.

Striking Iranian power plants — which Trump has explicitly threatened — would be a dramatic escalation with global consequences. Power plants are dual-use civilian infrastructure whose destruction produces mass civilian suffering well beyond any military effect: hospitals stop functioning, water treatment fails, heating and cooling disappear. International humanitarian law strictly limits attacks on infrastructure of this kind, and several US treaty obligations and alliance relationships would be strained by such strikes.

The scenario that military planners in Washington are now required to model — because their institutional function requires modeling scenarios that political leadership hopes to avoid — involves a Hormuz that remains restricted beyond April 6 and a Trump administration that must choose between credibility-preserving escalation and credibility-damaging extension.

In the escalation scenario: strikes on Iranian power infrastructure, Iranian retaliation against Saudi and UAE energy facilities, potential closure of the strait deepening, oil prices reaching $150-180 per barrel, European gas prices exceeding the 2022 peak, and the global economy entering a recession of a severity not seen since the 2008-2009 financial crisis.

In the extension scenario: continued high energy prices in Europe, erosion of the US credibility that is the foundation of the deterrence architecture protecting Taiwan, South Korea, and NATO, and a domestic political cost for Trump that his strategists are calculating with increasing urgency.

There is a third scenario — a deal that allows Trump to claim credibility, Iran to preserve sufficient nuclear capability, and energy prices to begin normalizing — that is what everyone wants and that nobody can guarantee will be achievable before April 6 runs out.