Strait of Hormuz

Wednesday

Roger Kimball

Sorry, but America still holds all the cards

“Negotiations.” Are you heartened or dismayed by that word? Those who remember or who have read up on the seemingly interminable Paris Peace Talks designed to bring an end to the Vietnam War have reason to be dubious. A negotiation, if it is to be successful, requires that both sides be candid and in earnest. The Vietnamese were not candid participants. They stalled. They prevaricated. They acted out. It seems that the Iranians are hoping to reprise that melodrama. They will be profoundly disappointed. On the second weekend in April, Vice President J.D. Vance, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner met some 70 Iranian representatives in Islamabad to hammer out a

Iran negotiations

Tuesday

Tom Switzer

If Trump hates the Wall Street Journal, why is its editorial board dictating Iran policy?

For the better part of a decade, Donald Trump has been an avid, if irascible, reader of the Wall Street Journal – particularly the columns overseen by its long-time editor Paul Gigot. Because the Journal is among the few American conservative outlets willing to criticize Trump – on everything from tariffs to temperament – he has developed a habit of denouncing it in public while devouring it in private. The Journal, Trump recently declared on Truth Social, is “one of the worst and most inaccurate editorial boards in the world.” The ritual extends to annotated hard copies – margins filled with indignant scrawl – before the offending pages are FedExed

wall street journal

Thursday

Michael Evans

Get ready for Epic Fury Part II

It could be the shortest negotiation in history. The United States and Iran, with their respective peace plans, are so far apart that it’s difficult to see how their differences can ever be squared.  A two-week ceasefire, which has already been broken, brought relief after five weeks of war and steadied the oil and stock markets. But the agreed ceasefire is looking fragile, as US Vice President J.D. Vance admitted. There had been “legitimate misunderstanding,” he said yesterday, over whether the ceasefire extended to Israeli action in Lebanon. Iran is beginning the peace negotiations by ignoring the realities of what Trump has achieved in the past five weeks If there

Wednesday

Paul Wood

Trump’s fantasy of victory

Among the many gifts the Watergate scandal gave us was Nixon’s White House press secretary declaring: “This is the operative statement. The others are inoperative.” That was after months of sticking to increasingly threadbare denials. In Donald Trump’s White House, operative statements become inoperative from one day to the next. That’s especially true of Iran. In 24 hours, from Tuesday to Wednesday this week, Trump went from “a whole civilization will die tonight” to “this could be the Golden Age of the Middle East!!!” TACO: Trump Always Chickens Out, as the meme has it.  The two-week ceasefire agreed this week with Iran is a lesson that you can win every

Sunday

Jacob Heilbrunn

Will Trump really obliterate Iran on Tuesday?

Was Donald Trump’s profane and threatening tweet, which included an F-bomb and an allusion to Iran’s leaders as “crazy bastards,” on Easter Sunday itself a bunch of BS? Trump is riding high after the daring rescue of an American airman from Iran, but its leadership doesn’t appear to be overly impressed by his tweet threatening a major attack on Tuesday if the Strait of Hormuz is not reopened. On Saturday, Iran’s military leadership indicated that it had no intention of complying with Trump’s demands, dismissing his vow to destroy its infrastructure as a “helpless, nervous, unbalanced and stupid action.” One of Iran’s media outlets suggested that if anyone is a

Trump

Friday

Freddy Gray

Iran and America’s new protection racket

“Whoever rules the waves rules the world” – Alfred Thayer Mahan. Would Donald Trump have attacked Iran on February 28 if the Supreme Court had not ruled against his tariffs on February 20? The two issues may seem unrelated. Yet, as a fascinating piece by Captain John Konrad has pointed out, a closer inspection of Trump’s international agenda reveals his administration’s intense focus on trade, energy and maritime control – and that might help explain the otherwise inexplicable folly of the situation in the Strait of Hormuz.  Trump is determined to bring about an American Golden Age. That involves controlling gas and oil, aggressively reducing China’s expanding control of shipping lanes, and

Strait of Hormuz

Tuesday

Joshua Treviño

Iran and the crisis in the European mind

The politics of the Iranian war feature an observable gap between interest and action for nearly all parties. The Americans possessed overwhelming casus belli versus Iran for nearly half a century, and did not act upon it until three weeks past. The Iranians possessed none against America for just as long, but exerted themselves with religious fanaticism to bring this war upon themselves. The Arab autocracies of the Persian-Gulf region find themselves under direct attack from the Iranians, but do not respond in kind. The Chinese observe a core strategic proxy and key commodities supplier taken off the chessboard – for the second time in under 90 days – and

Europe

Monday

Eliot Wilson

Should NATO help America defend the Strait of Hormuz?

As soon as Operation Epic Fury, America’s latest campaign against the Islamic Republic of Iran, got underway on the last day of February, political, military and economic minds around the world should have turned their attention to the Strait of Hormuz. The waterway provided the only shipping route from the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Oman and the open seas beyond. That has long made the strait the dagger Iran holds at the throat of the world. At its narrowest, it is less than 25 miles across, and Iran controls the northern shore; to the south is the Musandam Peninsula, shared by the United Arab Emirates and an exclave

NATO STRAIT

Friday

Freddy Gray

What Signalgate tells us about Iran

Remember Signalgate? It was quite the story, and worth revisiting now in light of Operation Epic Fury, the ongoing crisis in the Strait of Hormuz and its dire implications for the global economy.  In March last year, Donald Trump’s then National Security Advisor, Mike Waltz, somehow added Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of the Atlantic, to a Signal messaging group for senior government officials to discuss top secret military action against the Houthis in Yemen. The group included the Vice President J.D. Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller,

hegseth signalgate walt

Thursday

Maurizio Geri

The Iran war has exposed the world’s maritime chokepoint

The war with Iran is exposing a vulnerability at the heart of the global gas market: the extraordinary concentration of liquefied natural gas supply in the Persian Gulf. Qatar alone accounts for roughly a fifth of global LNG exports, almost all of it passing through the narrow Strait of Hormuz. The conflict has illustrated how easily a single maritime chokepoint could interrupt a significant share of the world’s gas trade. Even if the war ends soon, the vulnerability it has exposed will not disappear President Donald Trump has suggested the conflict may soon end, describing the campaign as largely achieved and possibly over “very soon.” The Gulf monarchies also appear eager for a quick

Wednesday

Jacob Heilbrunn

Trump has been caught flat-footed on Iran

Donald Trump has become something of a sole man. His cabinet members and White House visitors report that the president has developed a penchant for handing out $145 Florsheim shoes in an effort to up their sartorial game. In his Life of Johnson, Boswell reported that Dr. Johnson recoiled at an “eleemosynary supply” of shoes as an impecunious student at Christ Church, Oxford and threw them away with indignation. Trump’s followers have no such freedom of action. “All the boys have them,” one official told the Wall Street Journal, which ran a picture of his administration leaders obediently lined up and wearing the same shiny black leather numbers. The war increasingly resembles a prolonged exercise in folie de

Monday

Tom Switzer

Will the war in Iran really weaken China?

Analogies in international politics are tricky and easily abused, yet they remain irresistible because they can illuminate patterns that are otherwise hard to see. Consider the present moment.  Just as Ukraine has become a growing burden for Washington and its Western allies, Iran is now a strategic burden for Moscow and Beijing. The US, particularly under the Trump administration, appears to be placing less emphasis on supporting Ukraine. Something similar may be happening in reverse with Iran.  Moscow continues to provide Tehran with assistance – most notably intelligence on US military targets – but the broader pattern suggests caution rather than deep commitment. Beijing, despite its close ties with Iran,

China Iran

Saturday

Spectator Editorial

The Iran war has exacerbated the failure of European energy policies

The history of the global trading system is a story of narrow and vulnerable waterways: the Suez and Panama Canals, the St. Lawrence Seaway, the Straits of Dover and the Skagerrak, which defends the entrance to the Baltic. But none has the power to seize up the global economy as much as the Strait of Hormuz. Barely 30 miles wide at the narrowest point and bounded on one side by the state of Iran, this passage is used for a quarter of the world’s oil supplies and a fifth of its liquified natural gas (LNG). As we have now discovered, the consequences of disruption are severe: on the day that

energy