US President Donald Trump has turned to an ultra-aggressive stance just a day ahead of talks with Iran set to be held in Pakistan, and barely two hours after Vice President JD Vance took off for Islamabad to sit down with Tehran’s representatives.
“The Iranians don’t seem to realize they have no cards, other than a short term extortion of the World by using International Waterways,” Trump wrote on the platform Truth Social on Friday.
“The only reason they are alive today is to negotiate!” he added.
This came after he also said that US warships are being reloaded with weaponry to strike Iran if the talks fail. “We have a reset going. We’re loading up the ships with the best ammunition, the best weapons ever made — even better than what we did previously, and we blew them apart,” Trump said in a telephonic interview with the New York Post.
Trump also claimed that Iran is getting rid of its alleged plans for nuclear weapons, adding “everything’s gone”. Iran has denied it agreed to any pre-condition on nuclear power.
Trump claimed the Iranians said “to our face, [that] they’re getting rid of all nuclear weapons”, but they later told the media they would want to continue with uranium-enrichment. The enrichment process is at the heart of nuclear energy, and Iran insists it’s intended for power-generation, not for a bomb.
Iran’s trump card
Trump’s Truth Social post soon after the interview acknowledged, though, that the Strait of Hormuz remains a central point.
Iran has locked up the strait since after the war was started by US and Israel with airstrikes on Tehran on February 28. Even after a two-week truce was reached this week, on Wednesday, April 8, the key oil shipping route has not been fully reopened. Iran, in fact, wants to or has put a toll on passage, with some reports saying it’s $2 million per ship.
The narrow sea passage between Iran and Oman, which connects the Persian Gulf with the Arabian Sea, thus remains a maritime chokepoint for vessels carrying oil, gas, and other commodities. It usually carries a fifth of all the world’s global oil supplies from the oil-rich region around the Persian Gulf.
Iran’s 10-point proposal on stopping the latest West Asia war reportedly includes formalisation of its de facto control over the strait.
Trump earlier said there could be a US-Iran “joint venture” managing it. Iran has not said anything like that. “It (joint management) is a way of securing it — also securing it from lots of other people,” Trump told ABC News when asked if he would “allow” Tehran to charge such a toll.
Does truce include Hormuz Strait?
The truce was reached on Wednesday just hours before Trump’s deadline for Iran to fully reopen the strait or “a civilization will die”.
Trump then said the truce was subject to Iran agreeing to “complete, immediate, and safe opening” of the Strait of Hormuz.
Iran’s foreign minister Abbas Araghchi, however, said on Wednesday that safe passage through the strait will be possible for two weeks but “via coordination with Iran’s Armed Forces and with due consideration of technical limitations”.
This triggered reports that Iran and Oman will charge shipping fees. The EU said Thursday that freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz must be ensured with “no payment or toll whatsoever”.
There is with little sign of complete normalcy also because Israel continues to bomb Lebanon, fighting a parallel war against the Iran-aligned Hezbollah militia.
Pakistani PM Shehbaz Sharif, the key mediator, initially said the truce included Lebanon, before US and Israeli officials stated the opposite.
Iran’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, whose father was killed in the early days of the war, said in a statement on Telegram that Iran “will definitely bring the management of the Strait of Hormuz to a new stage”.
