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After US officials ended peace talks with Iran in Pakistan, Trump sought to exert more strategic control over the waterway responsible for the transportation of 20% of global oil supplies — hoping to takeaway Iran’s key source of economic leverage in the war.
“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,” Trump posted.
The president added that he has “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.”
The president stressed that Iran’s nuclear ambitions were at the core of the failure to end the war and that the US was prepared to finish the war.
“(A)t an appropriate moment, we are fully ‘LOCKED AND LOADED,’ and our Military will finish up the little that is left of Iran!” Trump posted.
Trump says that Nato has offered to help "clean out" the Strait of Hormuz, in comments made to Fox News shortly after he announced plans to blockade the key shipping lane.
He says the US was "very disappointed with Nato", but that "now they want to come and they want to help with the strait".
"It won't take long to clean it out, so we're gonna clean out the strait", he tells the outlet, adding that he thinks it will be free to use again "in not too long a distance".
He also says that the US is bringing in minesweepers, and that the UK - a member of Nato - will too. "I understand the UK and a couple of other countries are sending minesweepers", he tells the outlet.The BBC has approached the UK Ministry of Defence for comment.
US President Donald Trump’s threat to blockade the Strait of Hormuz will only affect a small handful of vessels that are still navigating the waterway, shipping expert Lars Jensen says.
“If this is actually done by the Americans, it will halt a very tiny trickle of vessels. In the greater scheme of things, it doesn't really change anything,” he says.
Jensen, chief executive of Vespucci Maritime, says Trump's threat of preventing safe passage for any ships paying tolls to Iran would also have little impact, as any company doing so would already face sanctions for paying the regime.
“First of all, there's very few ships that pass. There's even fewer of those that pay, and those that pay will already be subject to American sanctions,” he says.
Most shipping companies will continue to wait and see if there is a tentative peace agreement and whether that might hold, Jensen says, and if that occurs, a slow ramping up of shipping may resume.
As for what it would take shipping lines to decide whether it was safe to transit the strait again, he says the honest answer from those firms would be that they don’t know.
“Because at the end of it, it boils down to trust: trust that any agreement between the US and Iranians will hold for a significant portion of time, and that's a subjective feeling, there is nothing hard and tangible you can point to,” he says.