“What they have done is engage in this act of economic terrorism against the entire world,” J.D. Vance said of Iran on Monday. “They’ve basically threatened any ship that’s moving through the Strait of Hormuz.”
Indeed, as the president demonstrated, two can play at that game.
To beat terrorists, we must out-terrorist them is a striking line to hear from the second-in-command in the federal government. Yet it remains undeniably aligned with the spirit of Trumpism.
The “game” the U.S. military is now pursuing is a targeted blockade of vessels entering or leaving Iranian ports. Iran has obstructed oil shipments from its partners through the Strait, so Washington is taking steps to prevent Iran from doing the same. Hostage for hostage: with its revenue stream cut off and its economy strangled, the regime may be left with little choice but to bow to pressure and loosen its grip on the Hormuz corridor.
Under the circumstances, this move reads as unusually sane for the president and his team.
Primarily, it accomplishes in practice what an invasion of Kharg Island would have achieved—without exposing American troops to danger. Rather than waging a bloody ground war to seize that island’s oil infrastructure, the White House has neutralized it from a distance. Iran can continue processing crude, but that crude isn’t finding its way to international markets.
And by one estimate, this could morph into a major crisis for the regime within as little as 13 days. Once storage capacity for the oil no longer exported is exhausted, Iran would need to begin shutting down wells, which can cause severe damage and cost it billions of dollars in annual revenue—indefinitely. That would deal a heavy blow to the Revolutionary Guard, which is said to skim roughly half the proceeds of oil sales for its own uses.
Given the current diplomatic posture, the blockade also seems less likely to provoke a fresh round of escalation than it would have been, say, three weeks ago.
Iran’s military has issued tough talk, threatening to “completely block exports and imports across the Persian Gulf region, the Sea of Oman and the Red Sea” if the blockade remains in place, but Tehran’s negotiators have quietly made notable concessions in talks with the U.S. According to the New York Times, they offered to suspend nuclear activity entirely for five years (the White House demanded twenty), a level of freeze that echoed more closely to Barack Obama’s 2015 deal with Tehran than any prior arrangement. They also indicated a willingness to dilute the enriched uranium currently buried under rubble at sites like Isfahan, rendering it—temporarily—unusable for a bomb.
It’s unusually prudent, in my view, for the White House to believe that economic pressure paired with a conciliatory ceasefire gesture might nudge the regime toward additional concessions aimed at ending the conflict rather than prolonging it.
