The most consequential shifts in US foreign policy don’t always arrive with a prime-time speech. They show up in agency language and the kind of technical guidance that compliance teams quietly build their budgets around. Early February delivered two such signals: a White House executive order establishing a process to impose additional US duties—“for example, 25 percent”—on imports from any country judged to be acquiring Iranian goods or services, directly or indirectly. Around the same time, the US Maritime Administration (MARAD) issued an advisory urging US-flagged vessels to keep as far as safely possible from Iranian waters while transiting the Strait of Hormuz and nearby routes.

Neither move is a battlefield step. Both are bureaucratic steps. But together they reflect a broader drift: Washington is expanding economic pressure while pushing commercial risk outward—onto shippers, insurers, banks, and third countries. It can feel cleaner than kinetic escalation. But in practice, it behaves like a slow, compounding levy on global commerce, one that can narrow options and make crisis management more brittle.

Tariffs: Foreign Policy by Other Means

The February 6 order doesn’t impose a universal tariff overnight; it builds an adjustable mechanism. Commerce makes an initial determination about whether a country is acquiring Iranian goods or services; State then decides whether and to what extent an additional duty applies. That design matters because it widens the compliance perimeter. The risk is no longer confined to US firms or US ports. It spreads into foreign supply chains that touch dollars, shipping, insurance, or end markets—often in ways companies only discover when a transaction gets flagged.

This is the logic of secondary pressure: deter behavior beyond your jurisdiction by threatening costs that are hard to contest and expensive to absorb. The predictable side effect is overcompliance. Research on sanctions compliance describes how banks and firms frequently adopt overly conservative interpretations to avoid reputational and legal exposure, even when that goes beyond what rules strictly require. UN human rights guidance on sanctions and business similarly warns that “over-compliance” can widen harm and distort legitimate activity.

From Washington’s perspective, that extra caution can look like leverage. From a systems perspective, it can look like fog: counterparties disappear, routes reroute, and policymakers lose visibility into what’s actually happening.

Maritime Guidance as an Economic Lever

Maritime advisories are usually framed as safety measures—and in a narrow sense they are. But in chokepoints, they also operate like policy signals. MARAD’s advisory highlights the risk of illegal boarding, detention, or seizure; it recommends that US-flagged vessels steer close to Oman when eastbound and verbally decline boarding requests, while also advising crews not to forcibly resist if boarded.

The stakes are structural. The US Energy Information Administration estimates that oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz averaged about 20 million barrels per day in 2024—roughly 20% of global petroleum liquids consumption. It also estimates that about 20% of global LNG trade transited the strait in 2024, largely from Qatar. A Congressional Research Service report underscores how disruptions in Hormuz can quickly translate into market impacts.

Once official guidance raises perceived risk, insurers and charterers reprice. Freight rates and war-risk premiums become a real-time barometer of geopolitical tension—one paid by consumers far from the Gulf.

The Energy-Price Contradiction

Here’s where the approach starts to look less like strategy and more like improvisation. In the same week that Washington increased pressure tied to Iran-linked trade and shipping risk, Reuters reported a major shift in Venezuela policy: the U.S. eased energy sanctions and issued broad licenses allowing major oil companies to resume operations and negotiate new projects. However one judges Venezuela’s politics, the signal is hard to miss: US policy is trying to squeeze risk with one hand and stabilize prices with the other.

Meanwhile, the International Energy Agency’s February 2026 oil market report forecasts global oil demand growth of about 850 kb/d in 2026 and expects supply to exceed demand by a wide margin—conditions that should, in theory, reduce price pressure. Yet Reuters reporting around the Hormuz advisory captured how quickly crude prices can move on geopolitical headlines even when fundamentals point to a cushion.

That gap—between fundamentals and price behavior—is a diagnostic. It suggests markets are reacting less to barrels and more to policy uncertainty.

A Domestic Governance Problem Hiding in Plain Sight

There is another vulnerability in this model: process. More high-impact foreign policy is being executed via executive action and agency determinations—fast enough to outpace congressional debate and public scrutiny. Even when the tool is “non-military,” the governance question remains: who is setting thresholds, and how is success defined?

The war powers debate offers a clear example of the underlying tension. The National Constitution Center has summarized bipartisan efforts to constrain presidential military action against Iran without congressional approval under the War Powers Resolution framework. Congress.gov also records joint resolutions that would direct the removal of US forces from unauthorized hostilities involving Iran—evidence that the constitutional question stays live across sessions.

The point isn’t to relitigate war powers here. It’s that a foreign policy built on fast-moving technical levers can become reactive and opaque—and, in a crisis, brittle.

The Bottom Line

A non-military pressure campaign can still be escalation. It can still impose diffuse costs, push allies into costly avoidance behavior, and create incentives Washington cannot easily reverse. Policy institutions have been urging more deliberate sanctions design and review mechanisms precisely to reduce unintended consequences and maintain effectiveness over time.

If the goal is sustainable leverage rather than permanent turbulence, Washington needs clearer thresholds: what success looks like, what off-ramps exist, and how commercial risk will be managed so deterrence doesn’t become a self-inflicted drag on global trade. Otherwise, the U.S. will keep learning the same lesson in different forms: tightening screws is easy; controlling what breaks downstream is not.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author(s) alone and do not necessarily reflect those of Geopoliticalmonitor.com.