President Donald Trump joins Maria Bartiromo on ‘Sunday Morning Futures’ to detail the Strait of Hormuz blockade, warn Iran on nuclear weapons, outline next U.S. military and economic steps after failed peace talks.
President Trump expands on the details of Operation Epic Fury as well as the ceasefire negotiations which have hit the impasse created by Iran’s demand to continue developing a nuclear weapon. WATCH:
"There is little reason to believe that a blockade would force Iranian capitulation," says fellow at Israel's Institute for National Security Studies
The failure of U.S.-Iran peace talks has left President Donald Trump with several unpalatable options, as analysts say his order to blockade the strategic Strait of Hormuz could further complicate his next move.
Any hopes that U.S. Vice President JD Vance would emerge from the marathon day of negotiations with top Iranian officials with a deal to end a war that has rippled across the Middle East were dashed when he left Pakistan empty-handed.
Protracted talks would undermine Trump’s insistence that Iran has “no cards” left to play, while ramping up military action would expose U.S. forces to heightened risk and could alienate voters — already angry with surging gas prices — ahead of midterm elections.
And the blockade of the strait through which a fifth of the world’s oil moves would do little to ease global economic jitters.
For Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, Trump’s propensity to talk off the cuff and make threats — what he called the president’s “carnival barker” style — leaves his close aides scrambling to chart a path forward.
“He may be simply buying more time to move in more military assets or because he doesn’t know what else to do. I wouldn’t call it a strategy; it is a military-centric approach without strategy,” Katulis told AFP.
Shibley Telhami, a professor of peace and development at the University of Maryland and a fellow at the Brookings Institution think tank, says the threat of a blockade was “bewildering and seems self-defeating.”
“Iran
already has no trust in Trump,” Telhami told AFP. “Hard to understate what this
makes of what’s left of America’s global credibility.”
‘Untrustworthy
and duplicitous’
Iran’s
powerful Revolutionary Guards on Sunday pledged that Tehran’s enemies would be
trapped in a “deadly vortex” if they were to make a wrong move in the strait.
Danny
Citrinowicz, a fellow at Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies, said
a naval blockade would indeed expose U.S. forces to increased risk.
“There is
little reason to believe that a blockade would force Iranian capitulation. If
anything, Iran’s demonstrated resilience thus far suggests the opposite,”
Citrinowicz wrote on X.
“Iran’s
geographic scale and military capabilities mean that sustaining such an
operation would demand substantial and prolonged allocation of American
resources.”
And such a
prolonged military engagement may not sit well with Americans who say they are
worried and stressed about the conflict, which began in late February.
A CBS News
poll published Sunday revealed that worry, stress and anger far outweigh safety
and confidence when those polled were asked how they feel about the war.
More than 80
percent of respondents said the United States should seek to reopen the strait
and improve global access to oil, which would bring gas prices down, and make
sure that the Iranian people are “free.”
But fewer
than 10 percent said they believed those goals had been achieved.
“I don’t see
how, 40-plus days into this war, that we are safer, that our allies are safer.
I’m not even sure Israel is safer,” Democratic U.S. Senator Mark Warner said
Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union” talk show.
“I don’t
understand how blockading the strait is going to somehow push the Iranians into
opening it. I don’t get the connection there.”
So if the
blockade is not an answer, what about more negotiations?
Democratic
Senator Tim Kaine suggested that would not be an easy path, given that Trump
removed the U.S. from a 2015 accord reached by Tehran and world powers on
restricting its nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief.
Turns Out the Elites Like the Administrative State Better than Democracy
If there is a mantra among progressive American political and media elites, it would be “our democracy,” usually preceded by what they believe to be a threat from the Right. For example, progressives deemed the recent reversal of Roe “a threat to our democracy” because it removed laws regulating abortion from Supreme Court jurisdiction and returned the issue to democratically elected legislatures.
It would seem inconsistent to invoke the democratic electoral process to deal with a contentious issue like abortion, but progressives are nothing if not inconsistent. But even in challenging logic on political issues, progressives at least try to stick to the language of democracy, and especially the language of “our democracy.”
However, occasionally progressive elites demonstrate their contempt for democracy because they realize that the democratic process is not going to have the desired progressive results because voters and their representatives do not want to knowingly harm themselves.
Recently, the New York Times, in a progressive moment of truth, reacted to the US Supreme Court’s decision in West Virginia v. EPA, in which the court ruled that because carbon dioxide is not among the pollutants regulated by the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments, the Environmental Protection Agency could not enforce CO2 emissions rules for electric power plants.
In its 6–3 ruling, the SCOTUS indicated that Congress was free to pass legislation to regulate carbon dioxide but that the EPA was not free to simply add it to its list of regulated power plant emissions on its own. In other words, the high court declared that democratically elected members of the US House and Senate are free to write (and pass) any anti–climate change legislation they choose. This is what the ancients once called democracy.
Not surprisingly, the NYT went ballistic, and in so doing exposed the progressive mentality, with its affinity for rule by “experts.” Declared the newspaper’s editorial board:
Thursday’s ruling also has consequences far beyond environmental regulation. It threatens the ability of federal agencies to issue rules of any kind, including the regulations that ensure the safety of food, medicines and other consumer products, that protect workers from injuries and that prevent financial panics.
The ruling did no such thing. Instead, the court said that federal regulatory agencies are not free to create and enforce rules outside of their statutory authority. The EPA had simply declared itself the official power plant CO2 emissions regulator under the Obama administration despite the fact that Democrats had a supermajority in the US Senate and a huge majority in the House and theoretically could have passed a law giving new regulatory powers to the EPA. That Congress did not do so is instructive.
In other words, this was an extralegal power grab but one approved by elites because, well, elites know more than everyone else. The NYTeditorial continued:
In 1984, an earlier generation of conservative Supreme Court justices formalized a doctrine of deference to the judgment of regulatory agencies, modestly concluding that judges were neither experts nor elected officials, and therefore ought to leave such decisions in other hands. In Thursday’s decision, the court asserted that the policy of deference applies only to supposedly unimportant regulations. When it comes to “major questions” of regulatory policy, the court said, it would not hesitate to second-guess regulators—and to strike rules that it decided did not have a clear congressional warrant.
The decision amounts to a warning shot across the bow of the administrative state. The court’s current conservative majority, engaged in a counterrevolution against the norms of American society, is seeking to curtail the efforts of federal regulators to protect the public’s health and safety. The court already invoked a similar logic during the Covid pandemic to strike down workplace Covid testing requirements and a federal moratorium on evictions. And by refraining from defining a threshold for what constitutes a “major question,” the court is leaving a sword hanging over every new rule. (emphasis mine)
The “administrative state,” of course, is anything but democratic; it is autocratic to the core. For all of their professed love for democracy, progressives have long demanded rule by experts, or at least rule by “experts” that meet progressive approval. As I pointed out last year, when actual scientists studied the effects of so-called acid rain and concluded that it was not causing lake and river acidification, progressives in the media, as well as EPA administrators, immediately tried to destroy the careers of scientists failing to echo the party line. Not surprisingly, one of the loudest antiscience voices in the acid rain affair was the New York Times.
Furthermore, for all the “experts know best” rhetoric in the NYT editorial, there is no proof that the administrative state governs as effectively as democracy, which elites pretend to love. The “experts” at the Federal Reserve believed they could substitute trillions of printed dollars for actual production of goods without creating monetary chaos. In western forests, the “experts” at the US Forest Service have had fire suppression policies in place for more than a century, and the result has been that what were once mere forest fires have become destructive conflagrations that burn so hot that they often destroy the scorched soil’s ability to generate postfire growth.
The ”experts” at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention imposed policies that precipitated massive job losses, caused unnecessary premature death from ailments other than covid-19, and still failed to promote adequate information about the virus and its origins. Education “experts” have created one educational crisis after another, and so on. Rule by experts—the administrative state—has caused destruction whenever it is invoked, yet the editors at the “newspaper of record” have failed to notice.
Instead, they proclaim eternal fealty to what only can be called a failed experiment in governance, not to mention that it is antidemocratic. Yet, the NYT editors cannot keep from claiming loyalty to both forms of governance, even when they contradict one another:
Congress has decided, and with good reason, that regulatory agencies staffed by experts are the best available mechanism for a representative democracy to make decisions in areas of technical complexity. The E.P.A. is the entity that Congress relies upon to figure out how clean the air should be, and how to get there. Asserting that it lacks the power to perform its basic responsibilities is simply sabotage.
There is much to dissect in those words, but suffice it to say that to assume that EPA decision makers have the kind of knowledge and expertise implied in that editorial is to foolishly demonstrate faith in something that inevitably fails. Far from being near-omniscient sages of science, the bureaucrats making life-altering decisions at the EPA are people who bear no costs if they impose unnecessary burdens on the lives of ordinary people but who also find that the more draconian their edicts, the greater the praise from environmental interest groups and, of course, the New York Times. What possibly could go wrong?
America awoke Sunday to find that President Trump had a contingency plan for the almost certain failure of Vice President JD Vance's diplomatic mission (see New: Peace Talks With Iranian Regime Have Failed, Vance Gives Details From Islamabad – RedState) to end the war with Iran on terms that are politically and militarily acceptable to the U.S. President Trump, using Truth Social as his platform, announced that the Hormuz Strait was closed:
So, there you have it, the meeting went well, most points were agreed to, but the only point that really mattered, NUCLEAR, was not. 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. At some point, we will reach an “ALL BEING ALLOWED TO GO IN, ALL BEING ALLOWED TO GO OUT” basis, but Iran has not allowed that to happen by merely saying, “There may be a mine out there somewhere,” that nobody knows about but them. THIS IS WORLD EXTORTION, and Leaders of Countries, especially the United States of America, will never be extorted. 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. We will also begin destroying the mines the Iranians laid in the Straits. Any Iranian who fires at us, or at peaceful vessels, will be BLOWN TO HELL! Iran knows, better than anyone, how to END this situation which has already devastated their Country. Their Navy is gone, their Air Force is gone, their Anti Aircraft and Radar are useless, Khamenei, and most of their “Leaders,” are dead, all because of their Nuclear ambition. The Blockade will begin shortly. Other Countries will be involved with this Blockade. Iran will not be allowed to profit off this Illegal Act of EXTORTION. They want money and, more importantly, they want Nuclear. Additionally and, at an appropriate moment, we are fully “LOCKED AND LOADED,” and our Military will finish up the little that is left of Iran! President DONALD J. TRUMP
My colleague Nick Arama covered the announcement in Here We Go: Trump Announces Major US Action in Strait to Shut Down Iran – RedState.
There are moving parts to this directive, and some of them seem confusing.
1. The U.S. Navy will blockade the Strait of Hormuz and prevent any ship from entering or leaving. From the perspective of scale, there are about 1,900 ships in the Persian Gulf waiting to leave and at least 800 ships in the Arabian Sea and Gulf of Oman waiting to pass through Hormuz.
2. Closing Hormuz means blockading ports in Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, and the UAE.
3. No one seems sure how to identify which ships paid a "toll" because the required currencies, crypto or renminbi, were chosen to allow anonymity.
4. The blockade also raises questions on how the U.S. might handle a ship from a friendly nation seeking to transit the Strait of Hormuz.
Sunday evening, U.S. Central Command published a public directive on how the blockade will be enforced.
U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) forces will begin implementing a blockade of all maritime traffic entering and exiting Iranian ports on April 13 at 10 a.m. ET, in accordance with the President’s proclamation.
The blockade will be enforced impartially against vessels of all nations entering or departing Iranian ports and coastal areas, including all Iranian ports on the Arabian Gulf and Gulf of Oman. CENTCOM forces will not impede freedom of navigation for vessels transiting the Strait of Hormuz to and from non-Iranian ports.
Additional information will be provided to commercial mariners through a formal notice prior to the start of the blockade. All mariners are advised to monitor Notice to Mariners broadcasts and contact U.S. naval forces on bridge-to-bridge channel 16 when operating in the Gulf of Oman and Strait of Hormuz approaches.
This provides much-needed clarity.
The Navy will enforce a blockade of Iranian ports in the "Arabian Gulf" and the Gulf of Oman starting at 10 a.m. Monday. Be aware that the U.S. Navy made the change of nomenclature, much as President Trump renamed the Gulf of Mexico, in 2010; however, it still chaps Iranian asses when they see it.
The announcement indicates that friendly ships will be blocked from entering Iranian ports along with the rogue tankers trading in bootleg Iranian crude oil.
The message implies that some kind of escort or patrol system will be established to coordinate passage with the U.S. Navy rather than the IRGC.
There are some other parts that haven't been defined yet. For instance, will Iranian tankers at sea be fair game for seizure?
Approximately 12 Iranian supertankers are filled and stationary in the Gulf of Oman awaiting dispatch. Will we leave them alone or round them up?
There is a growing consensus that Iran has not mined the Strait of Hormuz, and we'd like to keep it that way. My assumption is that we'll actively, kinetically prevent any attempt to mine the Strait, but that is not spelled out. U.S. demining efforts continue. To the best of my knowledge, that is being done by UH-60S helicopters with mine countermeasures packages being flown from destroyers in the area. President Trump has said some Gulf nations will join the demining effort, but there is no reliable information to confirm this.
How, exactly, will we enforce the blockade if a Chinese tanker decides to bull its way through? I'm assuming this contingency, as well as how to handle Chinese warships if this situation persists long enough, and I wouldn't expect USCENTCOM to announce them, but this is something we should be on the lookout for.
President Trump says, "Other Countries will be involved with this Blockade." At this time, the only takers seem to be the UAE and Bahrain. The UK, Germany, and Australia have refused to help, and France seems likely to join that group.
An added bonus is that a third Carrier Strike Group has entered the Eastern Mediterranean.
Anyway, go time is 10 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time on Monday, and we'll get answers to our questions then.
Oil and gas sales from Iran are under international sanction and not supposed to be taking place. However, oil and gas sales from Iran -violating the sanctions- have been taking place.
CENTCOM is announcing that the U.S. military will now ensure the oil and gas from Iran doesn’t move.
The U.S. will physically enforce the pre-existing global sanctions. A blockade begins tomorrow morning.
TAMPA, Fla. — U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) forces will begin implementing a blockade of all maritime traffic entering and exiting Iranian ports on April 13 at 10 a.m. ET, in accordance with the President’s proclamation.
The blockade will be enforced impartially against vessels of all nations entering or departing Iranian ports and coastal areas, including all Iranian ports on the Arabian Gulf and Gulf of Oman. CENTCOM forces will not impede freedom of navigation for vessels transiting the Strait of Hormuz to and from non-Iranian ports.
Additional information will be provided to commercial mariners through a formal notice prior to the start of the blockade.
All mariners are advised to monitor Notice to Mariners broadcasts and contact U.S. naval forces on bridge-to-bridge channel 16 when operating in the Gulf of Oman and Strait of Hormuz approaches. (SOURCE)
Oil and gas from Kuwait will be allowed transit and passage. Oil and gas from the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Qatar will also transit without issue. However, oil or gas from Iran will be blocked. China takes the biggest hit, again.
The target now is to cut off the Iranian money supply.
This blockade is happening against the little discussed backdrop of Dubai (UAE) targeting Iranian money changers.
DUBAI – The arrest of dozens of IRGC-linked money changers in the United Arab Emirates is one of the most serious blows yet to Tehran’s sanctions-evasion network, laying bare how heavily the Islamic Republic has depended on Dubai as an economic lifeline.
Sources familiar with the matter told Iran International that UAE authorities detained dozens of money changers tied to financial entities linked to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, shut down associated companies and closed their offices.
The crackdown follows days of mounting regional tensions and comes after other measures targeting Iranian nationals, including visa revocations and tighter travel restrictions through Dubai.
For years, Dubai has served as Iran’s main offshore financial artery, where oil proceeds, petrochemical revenues and rial conversions were turned into dollars, dirhams and euros beyond the reach of the country’s battered domestic banking system.
“This is going to be a real problem for Tehran because Dubai was an economic lung for the Iranian regime,” Jason Brodsky of United Against Nuclear Iran told Iran International.
“That is economic pressure and diplomatic isolation in a way that the UAE is able to employ against the Iranian regime, and it will have a very considerable impact.” (more)
The U.S. will start the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz on Monday at 10 a.m. ET.
President Donald Trump announced the blockade on Sunday morning after negotiations failed. Iran refused to stop seeking nuclear weapons, Trump said in a Truth Social post.
U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) forces will run the blockade of all maritime traffic entering and exiting Iranian ports on April 13 at 10 a.m. ET, in accordance with the President’s proclamation.
CENTCOM forces will activate the blockade of all maritime traffic entering and exiting Iranian ports on April 13 at 10 a.m. ET, in accordance with the President’s proclamation.
The blockade will be enforced impartially against vessels of all nations entering or departing Iranian ports and coastal areas, including all Iranian ports on the Arabian Gulf and Gulf of Oman.
CENTCOM forces won't impede freedom of navigation for vessels transiting the Strait of Hormuz to and from non-Iranian ports, the group said on social media.
Additional information will be provided to commercial mariners through a formal notice before the start of the blockade.
All mariners are advised to monitor Notice to Mariners broadcasts and contact U.S. naval forces on bridge-to-bridge channel 16 when operating in the Gulf of Oman and Strait of Hormuz approaches.
Well, that settles that. Democrat Rep. Eric Swalwell (CA-14) has now made it official: He's suspending his gubernatorial campaign.
Swalwell made the announcement in a Sunday evening post to X:
I am suspending my campaign for Governor.
To my family, staff, friends, and supporters, I am deeply sorry for mistakes in judgment I’ve made in my past.
I will fight the serious, false allegations that have been made — but that’s my fight, not a campaign’s.
So, it appears that perhaps Swalwell now understands that campaign funds aren't supposed to cover any and all expenses.
But the investigation doesn't go away... The Hits Keep Coming: New Allegations Against Eric Swalwell Now Being Looked Into by Homeland Security Investigations
In early and mid-March, Swalwell was riding high atop the polling in the race to succeed Gavin Newsom as the Golden State's chief executive. But the Friend-of-Fang-Fang's gubernatorial campaign has been taking on water — and fast — over the past several days.
First, there came the news that the FBI was ordering a China probe arising out of his relationship with the aforementioned suspected Chinese spy. Within a week, there came rumors of Swalwell having sexually harassed staffers and interns. Followed soon after by accusations that moved beyond harassment to outright assault.
It took barely a millisecond for his fellow Dems to start abandoning the SS Swalwell. And now, it seems he's taken the hint.
But don't worry — he's going to keep fighting those serious and false allegations!
