Last Friday, a senior US official gave a background briefing to the media and made some news. First, Iranian officials contacted the United States through mediators and essentially apologised for their recent attacks against shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. And second, the Trump administration expected Tehran to issue a formal statement reiterating that the chokepoint was open to all traffic. ‘We want them to publicly say that they will stop shooting at ships and explicitly, or at least implicitly, acknowledge that they screwed up,’ the official said. ‘We expect the Iranians to say… that every channel in the strait will be open and that it will be toll-free.’
Instead, what Washington and the Gulf Arab states got was more Iranian strikes on ships that, from Tehran’s vantage point, were conspiring with the US Navy to leave the strait under routes not approved by Iran’s newly enacted Persian Gulf Strait Authority.
The situation hasn’t gotten any better since. The Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that Washington and Tehran signed in mid-June, which was supposed to reopen the strait, granted Iran the ability to sell its crude oil without penalty and provided both sides with another two months to settle on a more comprehensive deal, has been torn to shreds in a matter of days. The US military has struck hundreds of Iranian targets since last Wednesday. The oil sanctions waiver the Americans provided was rescinded, locking in Tehran’s crude sales yet again. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps responded by expanding the scope of its drone and missile strikes; the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman and Jordan have all been attacked since the weekend, although damage has fortunately been minimal. On June 13, Trump, red-faced behind his keyboard, typed that the US Navy will be re-instituting its blockade of Iranian ports. In addition, Trump wrote, the United States would be claiming ownership of the strait, with the value of 20 per cent of all cargo handed over to Washington as compensation. The resumption of the blockade will begin on November 14.
How the US plans on implementing this new levy, or whether it’s even possible from a logistical standpoint, Trump didn’t say. It’s likely US officials were blindsided by the announcement, but being blindsided has long since become a regularity in Trump’s Washington. Trump didn’t bother to explain how his latest stance squared with the Trump administration’s long-held position throughout the war: the Strait of Hormuz is an international waterway that Iran has no right to toll. Nor does Trump seem to care that charging vessels for the right to transit this waterway would likely force companies to increase the cost of their own products in order to recoup their losses, exacerbating the very inflationary impacts Trump ostensibly wants to address.
Whether or not America’s 20 per cent toll is real, the US naval blockade most certainly is. Recall that the initial blockade was set in mid-April, when Trump, frustrated about the slow pace of diplomacy but unwilling to risk more damage to international oil markets by upending the ceasefire, believed he could squeeze the Iranian economy to a point where Supreme Leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei and the IRGC military brass would adopt a more reasonable negotiating position. Of course, Iran did nothing of the sort. Iranian officials remained adamant that the US pressure campaign was not only an act of aggression but a futile attempt to coerce the country into giving away its nuclear programme and eliminating its leverage over the region’s premier waterway.
The results were hardly impressive. Dozens of tankers managed to find their way out of the strait with the cooperation of the US Navy, but hardly at the rate of normal transit before the war. The ceasefire held despite the occasional tit-for-tat between US and Iranian forces, yet Trump was at least as desperate as the Iranians were to bring some peace and quiet to the region. The MOU was supposed to offer shippers and insurance companies the confidence to sail the channel without having to worry about drones and missiles potentially slamming into their hulls. The MOU succeeded in bringing crude prices down but not much else. Now, even that achievement is at risk of imploding as tankers who previously left the strait struggle to re-enter.
Above all, Trump’s latest policy U-turn tells us more about his state of mind and the sub-par options at his disposal than it does about anything else. In waging a war he didn’t need to fight and prefacing his strategy on completely ludicrous assumptions about the Iranian regime’s staying power, Trump increasingly resembles the man in the middle of the ocean clutching at the nearest lifeboat available. He projects realism, strength and resolve in all of his interviews and insists Iran’s part-rationale, part-crazy leaders desperately want to make a deal with the United States, yet is then forced to explain the next day why his predictions have failed to come to pass yet again. And usually, he doesn’t explain anything at all.
The longer the war goes on, the longer Trump will have this albatross around his neck. He refuses to end it. In the interim, he attempts to change the public narrative and literally adopts tactics that failed months earlier. Apparently, Trump is fresh out of ideas.
