United States President Donald Trump has said “many countries” will dispatch warships to keep the Strait of Hormuz open, without offering details about which states are on board.

This comes as the waterway that carries a fifth of global oil and liquefied natural gas remains effectively closed on the 15th day of the US and Israel’s war on Iran.

Writing on Truth Social on Saturday, Trump said nations “especially those affected by Iran’s attempted closure” of the strait would be sending warships “in conjunction with the United States of America, to keep the Strait open and safe,” naming China, France, Japan, South Korea and the United Kingdom among those he hoped would contribute.

In the post, Trump asserted that the US had “already destroyed 100% of Iran’s Military capability,” while conceding in the same breath that Tehran could still “send a drone or two, drop a mine, or deliver a close range missile” along the waterway.

He pledged that in the meantime, the US would be “bombing the hell out of the shoreline, and continually shooting Iranian Boats and Ships out of the water,” promising to get the strait “OPEN, SAFE, and FREE.”

US Energy Secretary Chris Wright told US news outlet CNBC last week that the US was not ready to do escorts for ships through the strait itself.

Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi clarified that the strait was only closed to “tankers and ships of enemies and their allies,” not all shipping, while Mohsen Rezaee, a member of Iran’s Expediency Discernment Council, an influential body close to the supreme leader, said, “No American ship has the right to enter the Gulf.”

Two Indian-flagged tankers carrying liquefied petroleum gas crossed the strait safely on Saturday morning, Rajesh Kumar Sinha, special secretary of India’s Ministry of Ports, Shipping and Waterways, said.

Iran’s ambassador to India, Mohammad Fathali, confirmed that Tehran had granted Indian vessels a rare exemption, the result of direct talks between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian on Thursday.

A Turkish-owned vessel was similarly allowed through earlier this week after Ankara negotiated passage directly with Tehran, with 14 more Turkish vessels still awaiting clearance.

The US is reinforcing its presence in the region, with some 2,500 Marines and the USS Tripoli amphibious assault ship en route to the Middle East following a request by CENTCOM approved by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Al Jazeera’s Kimberly Halkett, reporting from the White House, said Iran’s most powerful remaining weapon was not military but economic, adding that the threat of damage alone to US ships is paralysing the strait and the goods that flow through it.

“That is why we see the US president suggesting this coalition needs to be broadened,” Halkett said.

The closure is also threatening global food security, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The strait is a critical conduit for LNG exports, the primary feedstock for the nitrogen-based fertilisers used to grow the staple grains and cereals that provide more than 40 percent of global caloric intake.

India, facing a critical cooking gas shortage, has invoked emergency powers to protect 333 million LPG-dependent homes.

UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher has warned that “millions of people are at risk” if humanitarian cargo cannot pass safely through the strait.

Hegseth dismissed suggestions that the Pentagon had been caught off guard by the strait’s closure on Saturday. “We have been dealing with it, and don’t need to worry about it,” he said.

At least 1,444 people have been killed in Iran since the war began on February 28, with Lebanon’s death toll also mounting and Gulf states facing sustained drone and missile fire.

Andreas Krieg of King’s College London’s School of Security Studies described Trump’s coalition call to Al Jazeera as “a desperate move in an information campaign to calm markets.” Krieg said there was no quick military solution to reopening the strait, as all Iran needed to do was strike occasionally to keep insurers away.

“It doesn’t seem like they had a plan for the Strait of Hormuz to be closed, and it seems like a desperate move in an information campaign to calm markets and that something magical will happen to open the straits short of actually engaging with the Iranian regime,” he said.

Sending naval vessels without a diplomatic agreement, he said, would only expose “very, very expensive military vessels to very cheap but potentially very effective projectiles”.

Since the 1920s, Iran has lived through two defining political moments that have reflected two distinct civilisational identities. They have shaped not only the country’s internal character but also its relationship with the wider world.

Today, with the Islamic republic under unprecedented strain, a third Iranian moment may be approaching.

Modernity on the shah’s terms

The first Iranian moment was the reign of the Pahlavi monarchy, which began in 1925 with Reza Khan Pahlavi, an army officer, being instated to the throne and ended in 1979 with the outbreak of the Iranian Revolution. It was built around a particular vision of Iran: secular, modernising, and firmly anchored in the dominion of the Western-led camp during the Cold War.

Tehran recognised Israel after it was created in 1948, supplied oil to Western markets, and served as Washington’s chosen guardian of the Gulf. The shah projected power across a region fraught with ethnic and sectarian rivalries, leading a country that posed a challenge to its Arab neighbours, but also served as a model of state-driven development.

Central to the Pahlavi project was a deliberate attempt to anchor the monarchy’s legitimacy not in Islam, but in the Persian imperial past. Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi consciously linked his rule to the ancient Achaemenid Empire — the dynasty of Cyrus and Darius that forged the first great Persian civilisation in the fifth century BC.

The grandiose celebrations of 1971 at the ruins of the ancient capital of Persepolis, marking 2,500 years of Persian monarchy, were the most theatrical expression of this claim: a declaration that the Pahlavi throne was not a modern construction but the inheritor of an unbroken imperial tradition. In doing so, the shah sought to place himself above religion — a king of kings in a lineage older than Islam itself.

Yet beneath the surface of modernisation and imperial grandeur, the monarch was nakedly authoritarian. SAVAK, the feared secret police, was synonymous with torture and repression. When the mass protests of 1978 and 1979 erupted, every geopolitical partnership the shah had cultivated proved worthless.

No foreign ally moved a muscle to save him. A monarch that had prioritised strategic utility over popular legitimacy found himself entirely alone. The first Iranian moment ended not with a war, but with a revolution — and the lesson went unlearned by those who followed.

The Islamic republic

From the ashes of the shah’s rule emerged something genuinely novel: the Islamic Republic of Iran, founded under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s doctrine of velayat-e faqih — the guardianship of the Islamic jurist. It became only the second Shia state since the Safavid Empire (1501-1736), which had itself made Twelver Shiism Iran’s defining identity.

The new republic was built on the premise that Islamic principles should govern not just religious life, but also politics, economics and even social life. The public sphere was to be controlled, morality enforced, and Iran’s cultural identity explicitly de-Westernised.

Where the Pahlavis had embraced the United States and Israel, the Islamic republic constructed its identity in explicit opposition to both. Its foreign policy became defined by resistance: support for Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, the Houthis in Yemen, and Shia militias across Iraq and Syria — a web of proxies Tehran called the “axis of resistance”. This eventually caused the ongoing crisis in Iran’s neighbourhood.

In terms of economic governance, the regime looked eastwards, aspiring to a model not unlike China’s: authoritarian in politics, state-directed in economics, independent of Western institutions.

That independence came at an enormous price. More than 3,600 different sanctions have been imposed on the republic — a cumulative siege that devastated the lives of ordinary Iranians. The decline of the regional influence of Iran emerged following two major shocking events: the Arab Spring, which raised questions about the credibility of Iran’s claim of defending the oppressed, and the October 7 attacks, which set up Iran as a potential military target for Israel.

Three major armed conflicts scarred its existence: the Iran-Iraq War of 1980–1988, in which hundreds of thousands died; the 12-day war involving Israel and the United States in June 2025; and the ongoing conflict beginning on February 28.

Each war deepened the siege mentality at the core of the regime’s identity — the conviction that today’s Iran is perpetually encircled and its very survival is under threat.

Moment of precarity

One can understand, in retrospect, how the first moment ended. The Pahlavi monarchy lost its domestic legitimacy, and its foreign patrons looked away. The revolution followed. But the trajectory of the second Iranian moment is far less clear — and that opacity is itself a source of regional and global anxiety.

The Islamic republic today is neither the confident revolutionary power it was in the 1980s, nor a stable religious state capable of indefinitely managing its contradictions. Mass protests over the past two decades have raised social, economic and political questions about the nature of the social contract that the Islamic republic offers.

Simultaneously, its regional influence is declining, its nuclear programme has brought about direct military confrontation, and its economy – devastated by sanctions and endemic corruption – cannot deliver the prosperity needed to buy popular acquiescence.

There are several scenarios for what happens next. The regime could survive in its current form. A reformed Islamic republic might retain its Shia theological identity, while abandoning its most confrontational postures, though such a transition would require a political class willing to negotiate, and an opposition capable of receiving and holding onto power responsibly; neither condition is clearly present.

There is also a more turbulent scenario: fragmentation, civil conflict and a power vacuum. This cannot be ruled out in a country that encompasses Persians, Azeris, Kurds, Arabs, and Baluchis, held together increasingly by coercion alone.

Iran’s next chapter will not be written by foreign powers alone, or by the clerical establishment alone, or by the protest movement alone. It will emerge from the collision of all these forces — internal and external, historical and immediate.

This new Iranian moment is a leap into the unknown: for Iranians most of all, but also for the region and the world that will feel its consequences. Precarious and perplexed, Iran stands at the edge. What lies beyond remains to be seen.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

Alex Vatanka, director of the Iran Program at the Middle East Institute, says Israeli strikes on Iranian security forces may be aimed at weakening the regime’s ability to suppress protests, though the broader goal remains unclear.

Follow our live build-up, with team news coverage as it drops, before our text commentary stream of the La Liga match.

Authorities say a local communist party office was lit on fire during rare antigovernment demonstration on the island.

Protesters in central Cuba have torched a local communist party office, as conditions on the island continue to deteriorate under severe restrictions from the United States meant to squeeze the economy.

Authorities said on Saturday that five people were arrested amid what the government called “vandalism acts” in the city of Moron.

“What began peacefully, after an exchange with the authorities in the area, degenerated into vandalism against the headquarters of the municipal committee of the Communist Party,” the state-run newspaper Invasor said of the incident.

Unverified videos of the incident show protesters breaking into the office and throwing stones at a burning building. Shouts of “liberty” could be heard in one of the videos, according to the news agency Reuters.

Other government buildings were also reportedly damaged overnight. No injuries have been confirmed so far, though the details of the protest and its aftermath remain unclear.

The human rights group Justicia11 said that gunfire was heard in the area and a man may have been shot, but a state-run news outlet, Vanguardia de Cuba, meanwhile, denied those reports.

Protests are relatively rare in Cuba, given the threat of government repression. But in recent weeks, Cubans have expressed growing frustration with food and electricity shortages.

Some have taken to banging pots and pans at night — a protest tradition called “cacerolazo” — to express anger over the lack of food. Students, meanwhile, at the University of Havana held a sit-in on Monday after their classes were suspended due to energy restrictions.

Economic conditions on the island, already strained, have worsened since United States President Donald Trump cut off its access to oil as he seeks to topple the government in Havana, a longtime target of US ire.

Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel said on Friday that he had held talks with US officials and that no petroleum shipments have arrived in Cuba for three months.

Trump ordered an end to transfers of Venezuelan oil and funds to Cuba after the US carried out an attack on Venezuela on January 3. That attack culminated in the abduction of former Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, who had maintained friendly relations with Cuba.

On January 29, Trump upped the ante, issuing an executive order that effectively severed Cuba’s ability to import fossil fuels from other countries. The order threatened economic penalties against any country that supplied Cuba with oil, whether directly or indirectly.

Cuba’s ageing energy grid, however, largely relies on fossil fuel, as do everyday tools like cars and generators.

During remarks earlier this month, Trump said that Cuba would be “next” after the US war against Iran concludes.

“Cuba’s at the end of the line,” Trump told a group of Latin American leaders at his estate, Mar-a-Lago, on March 7.

“As we achieve a historic transformation in Venezuela, we’re also looking forward to the great change that will soon be coming to Cuba.”