After President Donald Trump described his capitulation as a military victory, the successful Iranian regime announced that the Strait of Hormuz is closed.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps made it official today, warning every vessel in the Persian Gulf to keep its distance or risk its safety. That is the plain, unvarnished fact of it.
The reason given is as clear as the waterway is narrow: Israel’s ongoing aggression against Lebanon, and the United States’ failure to stop it in accordance with itspromises.
The interim deal signed this week between Washington and Tehran was supposed to end the fighting on all fronts.
It was supposed to reopen the strait and launch sixty days of nuclear negotiations. Instead, Israeli airstrikes hammered southern Lebanon today. Hezbollah fired back. And Iran, citing a “clear breach” of American commitments, shut the gate.
Now, one might ask: how did we get from “unconditional surrender” to this? That is a fair question, and the answer requires a short visit to the fever swamps of political rhetoric.
In March, at the height of the bombing, the President declared there would be no deal with Iran except unconditional surrender. This week, he signed a memorandum of understanding.
When asked about the gap between the promise and the paper, he allowed that the deal “really probably is unconditional surrender.” Probably. That is the word he chose. Probably unconditional surrender.
It is the kind of certainty one associates with a weather forecast or a horse race, not with the ending of a war.
The President, at eighty years of age, sat for an interview and told the interviewer there are no limits to his power.
He said the United States defeated Iran totally militarily. He said he effected regime change, because the new supreme leader is the old supreme leader’s son, and that makes him “different.”
And yet, here we are. The strait is closed. The Iranian negotiating team is on its way to Switzerland.
The American envoys are there too. But the Iranians have already warned that not much will happen if the fighting doesn’t stop. The fighting hasn’t stopped. The strait is closed.
The President responded today by threatening to impose American tolls on the strait if a final deal isn’t reached in sixty days. He called the United States the “Guardian Angel” of the Middle East.
That is a curious title for a nation that just agreed to let Iran sell its oil freely and lift all sanctions, concessions that exceed even the 2015 nuclear deal the President once called the worst ever.
It is also a curious title for a nation whose own military command says the strait remains open and traffic continues to flow.
Either Iran controls the strait or it does not. Either it is closed or it is open. The President says one thing. The Pentagon says another. The Iranians say a third.
And the world watches, uncertain, while the price of oil trembles.
The Strait of Hormuz is a narrow ribbon of water through which one-fifth of the world’s oil passes. When Iran closed it in February, global prices spiked.
Today, it is closed again. The reasons are disputed. The facts are not. Ships are being warned away. Their safety is at risk.
A President who promised unconditional surrender now offers a memorandum, a threat of tolls, and the uneasy feeling that the whole business has been conducted with less gravity than a game of three-card monte. Trump’s out of his depth and the world is paying a price.
The talks in Switzerland may yet produce something. They may not. But one thing is certain: the gate is shut, the oil is stopped, and the man who said there were no limits to his power has discovered, perhaps for the first time, that there are limits to his words.
They do not move ships. They do not stop bombs. They do not open straits. They only echo, hollow and uncertain, in the space between what was promised and what was delivered.
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