For weeks, the goal of the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran has been to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran had closed in response to the war. Now that there is a ceasefire, President Donald Trump has declared that U.S. policy is to keep the strait closed, to prevent Iran from extorting vessels that cross. If we can’t have it, he seems to be declaring, no one can.
“Effective immediately, the United States Navy, the Finest in the World, will begin the process of BLOCKADING any and all Ships trying to enter, or leave, the Strait of Hormuz,” Trump wrote in a social media rant on Sunday morning. “I have also instructed our Navy to seek and interdict every vessel in International Waters that has paid a toll to Iran. No one who pays an illegal toll will have safe passage on the high seas.”
The Strait of Hormuz is the only naval passage out of the Persian Gulf, and around 20 percent of the world’s oil and natural gas normally passes through it, along with many other key industrial inputs. The disruption to this trade due to the war has been Iran’s main point of leverage.
Last week, the Iranian military declared that the Strait of Hormuz was filled with sea mines and the only safe path is a corridor along the Iranian coast, which the Iranian government has been charging money to use. Trump admitted in his rant that Iran “may have” mined the strait, a point the U.S. government has been coy about, and promised to “begin destroying” those mines soon. Over the weekend, the U.S. Navy announced that it “began setting conditions for clearing mines” by sailing two ships through Hormuz, but Bloomberg reports that the ships turned back due to threats from an Iranian drone.
In response to Trump’s social media posts, the Iranian navy denied that Hormuz was closed to begin with, stating that the strait was “open for the harmless passage of non-military vessels in accordance with specific regulations, and any military vessels attempting to approach the strait of Hormuz under any pretext or excuse will be considered a violation of the ceasefire and will be dealt with harshly and decisively.”
Trump’s blockade threat came a few hours after Vice President J.D. Vance walked out of negotiations with Iran held in Pakistan. “We leave here with a very simple proposal, a method of understanding that is our final and best offer,” Vance told reporters. Trump, speaking to Fox News after his social media posts, was more blunt: “I told my people, I want everything. I don’t want 90 percent. I don’t want 95 percent. I told them, I want everything.”
In other words, Trump believed that Iran was coming to surrender to him. “They have no cards. Their navy is gone. Their air force is gone,” he told Fox News. Iran, however, came to the table believing that it had successfully exhausted the United States. The Iranian military still has thousands of missiles, American and Israeli officials tell The Wall Street Journal. And Israel’s stock of missile interceptors is down to the “double digits,” a Trump administration source told Drop Site News.
With neither side really feeling defeated, they are now locked in a game of chicken. The jury is still out on whether either side will swerve, or whether the war will resume in full force.
The game of chicken began over Lebanon, where the Hezbollah militia had joined the war on Iran’s side. When the ceasefire was signed, Pakistani mediators declared that it would apply “everywhere including Lebanon and elsewhere, EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY.” Hezbollah also halted its fire. Trump privately agreed to include Lebanon, but backtracked after a phone call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, reports CBS News.
Israel then launched Operational Eternal Darkness, a massive air raid on Beirut, the Lebanese capital. The bombings killed more than 300 people, including women and children. By the Israeli military’s count, only 180 of the victims were Hezbollah fighters.
Iranian negotiators initially threatened not to show up to negotiations in Pakistan if the war in Lebanon did not end. The two sides apparently came to a compromise when Israel agreed to stop bombing Beirut—limiting its attacks to the border regions—and sit down for peace talks with the Lebanese government, which itself has vowed to disarm Hezbollah. Iranian negotiators proceeded to Pakistan on Saturday.
According to Vance, the main obstacle in negotiations was Iran’s refusal to stop enriching uranium: “We need to see an affirmative commitment that they will not seek a nuclear weapon, and they will not seek the tools that would enable them to quickly achieve a nuclear weapon.” Iranian media has been more tight-lipped, claiming that the United States was making “excessive demands” without going into specific details.
Along with the nuclear program, Lebanon, and Hormuz, another issue at negotiations was the fate of $27 billion in frozen Iranian assets, mostly money that Iran earned from selling oil but was unable to withdraw from foreign bank accounts because of U.S. financial sanctions.
Trump’s threat to “to seek and interdict every vessel in International Waters that has paid a toll to Iran” was essentially a threat of more intense sanctions enforcement. Both the Biden and Trump administrations had used legal threats to get ship operators to surrender sanctioned oil. Late last year, the Trump administration escalated by sending troops to physically seize tankers carrying sanctioned oil from Venezuela.
Now, Trump is saying that any ship that even deals with the Iranian toll system, no matter its cargo, will be treated the same way. “You saw what we did with Venezuela. It will be something very similar to that but at a higher level,” Trump told Fox News.
For now, Trump sees this move as an escalation short of war. “I predict they come back and they give us everything we want,” he said in the Fox interview. But he emphasized that he is ready to return to war. So did Iran. The Iranian navy stated on Sunday that “all traffic and lack thereof is under the complete control of the Armed Forces. Any misstep in the strait will trap the enemy in a deadly vortex.”
The post Trump Responds to Iranian Blockade of Strait of Hormuz By Blockading It appeared first on Reason.com.
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