A promising new stage in our six-week Iran “excursion” began Sunday with President Trump’s announcement that the US Navy, together with allies, will immediately begin to blockade “any and all Ships trying to enter, or leave, the Strait of Hormuz.”
In wrestling terms, it’s a classic “swerve” move by the president, flipping the tables on his opponent.
Iran thought they had the world over an (oil) barrel. Turns out they signed their own economic death warrant.
The blockade is an inspired tactic pushed by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and former Green Beret-turned-UN Ambassador Mike Waltz as the logical next step after the Chinese and Russians last week vetoed the UN Security Council resolution led by the Gulf States for international cooperation to reopen the Hormuz Strait.
With half the US Navy positioned just outside the narrow strait, everything is in place to stop the ships Tehran needs to serve its biggest customer, China, which buys about 90% of Iran’s oil.
President Trump announced Sunday that the US and its allies will immediately begin to blockade “any and all Ships trying to enter, or leave, the Strait of Hormuz.” AP And the blockade is just the beginning of the maximum economic pain Trump and his advisers are preparing to inflict on Iran, in what can be called “Operation Economic Epic Fury.”
As an ebullient Trump told Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo Sunday morning of the naval blockade: “It’s called all in, and all out. We think that numerous countries are going to be helping us with this also, but we’re putting on a complete blockade.
“We’re not going to let Iran make money on selling oil to people that they like, and not people that they don’t like or whatever it is. It’s going to be all or none,” he said. “I predict they come back and give us everything we want.”
Trump’s other masterstroke was sending the administration’s biggest peacenik, Vice President JD Vance, to lead talks with Iran in Islamabad, alongside special envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, so he could see for himself how deluded the Iranians are about the cards they hold, and so the Iranians could see that there are no cracks in the administration’s resolve.
After 21 hours of talks with the Iranian delegation, while Trump fittingly attended a UFC cage fight with Secretary of State Marco Rubio in Miami on Saturday night, Vance emerged to tell the world that there was no deal to end the war.
“The bad news is that we have not reached an agreement, and I think that’s bad news for Iran much more than it’s bad news for the United States of America . . . The simple question is: do we see a fundamental commitment of will for the Iranians not to develop a nuclear weapon — not just now, not just two years from now, but for the long term? We haven’t seen that yet. We hope that we will,” he said.
Trump, whom Vance said he called as many as a dozen times during the negotiations, told Bartiromo a few hours later that the Iranians “came in like they had the cards, but they don’t have the cards.
“Toward the end, it got very friendly, and we got just about every point we needed — except for the fact that they refuse to give up their nuclear ambition. And frankly, to me, that was the most important point by far,” he said. “They’re not going to have nuclear weapons. I’ve been saying that for 30 years.”
Trump also said that the US claims that two American Navy destroyers went through Hormuz Saturday and swept for mines.
The US is establishing dominance over what Iran thought was its “Trump” card, all without firing a shot.
While most of the media has (again) written off Trump for his inflammatory Truth Social posts and unorthodox approach, his attack on Iran is part of his central governing identity: Trump the protector.
The Islamic terrorist regime has threatened and attacked the US for decades. Trump is the first president who is not afraid of them.
Of course the Democrats are against him. All their party does now is threaten our safety and security, whether it’s with lax law enforcement, bail reform, decarceration, open borders, or kicking the can down the road on Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
Their media whisperers, who have been big Iran hawks for years, are now against the war because they hate Trump so much.
As The New York Times’ Tom Friedman told CNN last week, he very much wants “to see Iran defeated militarily because this regime is a terrible regime for its people and the region.”
But “the problem is I really don’t want to see Bibi Netanyahu or Donald Trump politically strengthened by this war because they are two awful human beings.”
Iran has been aggressively enriching uranium and ramping up its ability to produce weapons-grade material for a nuclear device, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency and US and Israeli intelligence.
Giving them truckloads of cash, as the Obama geniuses did, hasn’t deterred their Allah-ordained appetite for global nuclear Armageddon. So what would the naysayers prefer?
“You want to see a stock market go down? Let a couple of nuclear bombs be dropped on us,” Trump told Bartiromo when she pressed him on the effects of the war on the price of gas and the domestic economy before the midterms.
Trump said oil prices will go down “eventually,” but not in the short term.
“It might not happen initially, but it’s gonna go down when this is all over,” he said.
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In any case, he said the decline in the stock market and uptick in gas prices haven’t been as bad as expected, in a sign that he is more focused on safeguarding America’s security than short-term political advantage.
“The gas hasn’t gone up as much as I thought,” he said. “But regardless, even if it did . . . You can’t let them have a nuclear weapon.”
Trump said that he told his economic advisers before he launched Operation Epic Fury: “I’m sorry, fellas, we’re in great shape. We have to go and take a little journey down to Iran, and we have to stop them from having a nuclear weapon.’ They all said, ‘We agree.’ ”
Trump’s closest advisers note he has a high tolerance for risk, which makes for a white-knuckle ride for the rest of us.
His expletive-laden midnight Truth social posts promising to annihilate a “whole civilization” send the Trump-deranged into paroxysm of rage.
But there is a method to his madness, or as one of the few sensible CNN hosts, Michael Smerconish, put it, “the madness is his method.”
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Leaks from inside the Situation Room in the lead-up to the Iran attack show a consultative and serious commander in chief, taking legal advice, listening to all his advisers, clear-eyed about Israel’s rosy forecasts of regime change, and then taking the tough decision to launch Operation Epic Fury.
There is strategic intent in the president’s actions, along with a gut instinct for psychological conquest that more often than not serves him well, and a sort of genius social intelligence that schoolyard bullies possess of quickly identifying the vulnerability in an opponent.
He is quite happy to play a character and be thought badly of, as long as the US comes out on top in the end.
And he has some wickedly smart advisers sitting around the Cabinet table to help him.
This next stage of forcing Iran’s new leaders to see sense in their own self-interest will apply maximum pressure in every dimension to solve a problem that has bedeviled seven presidents.
