One of the points of governing that Donald Trump has never grasped is that threats are not a form of policy. Trump’s Iran war has been characterized by the presidents and making threats to drop more bombs. Iran has responded to these threats by ignoring or mocking them.
Threats are only effective if they are taken seriously. Trump has been threatening for months, but he never follows through, so Iran doesn’t seem to believe him.
After bombing didn’t force Iran to surrender, and the Iranians responded by closing the Strait of Hormuz, Trump responded with a blockade of the Strait that he said as designed to force the Iranians to the negotiating table, because they would run out of storage capacity for their oil, and be forced to shut down production.
Javier Blas, a columnist at Bloomberg posted on X, that Trump’s new efforts to reopen the Strait are an admission that the blockade failed:
The push to re-open the Strait of Hormuz today, with two US warship crossing it and two US-flagged merchant vessels, signals the White House realises it can not keep waiting for the blockade to force Iran into the negotiation table.
Effectively, it’s an admission the blockade isn’t working (if the blockade is seen as a means to get Iranian concessions, rather than an end in itself). The timeline of what the blockade would do to the Iranian oil industry was completely wrong.
The blockade was intended to instill urgency in Iran to end the war by making it face the same pressures that the Trump administration had imposed, but since it didn’t work, Trump is returning to threatening Iran.
