Confused Closures and Opaque Openings: Continuing Dramas in the Hormuz Strait |
Reading messages from President Donald J. Trump is an exercise in taunting masochism. It is one inflicted on commentators and the press corps the world over, and they are not better for it. The latest – and here, the latest will become distant and dated shortly – is that the Strait of Hormuz, predictably controlled by Iran with devastating global effect, was to be reopened for commercial traffic under certain conditions. Trump thought this undertaking absolute and indefinite, a rich suggestion coming from a man with such a fair-weather mind. “Iran has agreed to never close the Strait of Hormuz again. It will no longer be used as a weapon against the World!”
This proved typically premature: within a matter of hours, Iran’s decision was, if not reversed then heavily qualified. (The Strait technically always remained open to vessels favoured by the Iranian authorities.) On April 17, Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Eshmaeil Baghaei affirmed two key principles in Tehran’s policies: Iran retained the right to control traffic moving through the Strait, and that it would not surrender enriched uranium, an issue “sacred to us as Iranian soil” and non-negotiable. The latter was certainly aimed at Trump’s dotty claim that Washington and Tehran would jointly deploy “lots of excavators” to remove fissile material (“nuclear dust”) and shift it to the US. On CBS News, the president claimed that “Our people, together with the Iranians, are going to work together to get it.” This all suggested much confusion on the part of the Americans.
Iran’s moves on the Strait were........