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Yesterday, President Trump he wrote on the Social Reality that the United States will be the “GUARDIAN OF THE GATE OF HORMUZ,” blocking Iranian ports and ensuring safe passage for non-Iranian ships. And in the spirit of “JUSTICE,” he added, the United States will charge the ship a fee for the trouble.
Then, this morning, a correction: Trump dismissed the idea of tariffs while still signaling that he intends to control the ocean current and re-establish the blockade. Now, Trump says, the Gulf states will be making “Trade and Investment Agreements” with the United States as a form of compensation. But the details of the agreements (and which countries will participate) are still unclear.
Today is the fourth consecutive day of attacks across Iran. The ceasefire has broken down—Trump formally notified Congress yesterday that the war has resumed—and negotiations have broken down. If US forces try to reassert power in the strait, they will face a difficult path. Iran is still struggling with shipping traffic, and recent heavy fighting in the waterway has once again significantly reduced the number of ships entering and leaving the Persian Gulf. The ability of the United States to control the sea may depend on its ability to destroy the system of governance that Iran has established in recent months.
Governance in the Persian Gulf has never been so clear. At the beginning of the 16th century, Portuguese sailors brought theirs poster permit system for the Strait of Hormuz, managing the waterway for more than a century. In 1622, the combined forces of Persia and the British East India Company captured it. The Strait of Hormuz is now widely understood as international territory, and yet parts of the waterway remain contested. Its narrowest width is only 21 miles – meaning that, according to a United Nations Charterit is entirely within the territorial waters of Iran and adjacent Oman. Neither Iran nor the United States is part of the UN treaty, but the United States nonetheless recognizes it as international law, Michael Poznansky, a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told me.
The US has assumed some responsibility for the Strait of Hormuz in the past. Defense of the Persian Gulf was at the heart of the Carter Doctrine—Jimmy Carter’s attempt, in 1980, to respond to the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan. Iran repeatedly attacked foreign ships in the strait during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s; in 1987, the US Navy launched Operation Earnest Will, escorting Kuwaiti oil tankers through the channel for over a year. At that time warThe Iranian regime threatened to completely close the channel but decided against it, realizing that the damage to its economy would be too great. Iran has repeated this threat in the past two decadesbut it did not follow again until February, in retaliation for US and Israeli attacks on its soil and the assassination of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
Despite the constant threat of Iranian interference in the maritime domain over the past half century, its leadership has never been assured of the ability to implement effective deterrence. But what remains of Iran’s military, depleted by months of war, has yet to prove capable of maintaining the export restrictions the government announced in the summer. The constant threat of mines, and his Smart boats which may disturb or attack other vessels, has kept ship traffic to a minimum; The number of crossings on Sunday was at the very bottom it was within a month.
Previous efforts to break Iran’s alliance during this war have failed. In May, US forces began escorting some ships through the strait as part of a program called Project Freedom; it ended after just two days, partly because Saudi Arabia he refused allowing the United States to use its military and air bases. European allies can provide support to the US mission in the Gulf, as they did then Operation Love Guaranteebut Trump has now destroyed many of those relationships.
Given Iran’s demonstrated ability to influence shipping traffic, the project to ensure freedom of navigation in the high seas may require sustained U.S. efforts, Ray Takeyh, senior fellow for Middle East studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, told me. This could end up being dangerous and dangerous, Takeyh explained, given the military assets involved in the escort mission and the inevitability of Iranian interference. And even then, shipping traffic may never return to pre-war levels.
Trump’s social media posts over the past few days have shown a strong desire for American presence and persistence in the face of adversity — a stark change for a president who has spent years on the sidelines. to cry the role of the country as “police of the world.” He may soon realize that tending the ocean current does not always mean controlling it.
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Today’s news
- ICE has for a while it ended mass arrests across the country The aftermath of two fatal shootings involving immigration officers in Houston and Maine has led to increased scrutiny of ICE’s use of force and response to those incidents.
- E. Jean Carroll he has received more than 5 million dollars from Donald Trump after the federal court released the money awarded to him when the court found him guilty in 2023 for sexually abusing him and defaming him. The payment came after the Supreme Court refused to hear Trump’s appeal earlier this month and despite efforts by his lawyers to block the payment.
- Mahmoud Khalil, a former Columbia University graduate student faces the possibility of deportation, has filed a lawsuit against Trump administration officialsThe Heritage Foundation, and pro-Israel advocacy groups, allegedly conspired to target him and other pro-Palestinian activists against their constitutional rights.
Evening Read
Punctuation: The Generational Divide
By Judith Shulevitz
I was the beginning editor, he was an experienced writer, and the first article he opened revealed the commandment of correct comma placement. He opened in long, slow passages; it took faster and shorter; has omitted all commas for the statement of the grand theory; and then, an accident! A mass casualty pile of acceptable expressions. Grammarians, I married him.
Now our son is the family authority on abortion. His expertise lies in using it in writing and on social media, where commas and periods die. Semicolonies too, decades after Kurt Vonnegut tried to drive them out. “The first rule: Do not use semicolons,” he pronounced in 2005. “All they do is show you went to college.” Exclamation marks and emojis dominate. (Do emojis count as punctuation or approximate as a paralinguistic feature—that is, a relative of a wink or a wink? My son shrugs.) Punctuation online is for emotional suppression, he told me, not for self-expression: “The goal is not efficiency but heightened attention.”
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Rafaela Jinich contributed to this magazine.
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