It’s probably not intentional, but this sounds like the kind of retrospective justification for the war that much of right wing media is engaged in. Closing the strait was a desperate act from a country that was attacked by the world’s biggest military. The strait was completely open and free before Israel decided to start a war.
And it needs to be reopened now through negotiation. Unfortunately, now that the genie is out of the bottle and Iran knows the strait is easy leverage to invoke at any time, plus they have every reason to distrust the US, it’s an extremely challenging negotiation.
IMHO the only solution at this point is to give Iran everything they want, including reparations up front, on the singular proviso of a free and open strait. This will be hard to sell to Americans, but the real tough part will be getting Israel to stop.
Agreed. I don’t think the Iranian negotiators should trust the US one little bit. At this point, I don’t blame them for not wanting to be in the same room with Vance, Hegseth or whoever they send. It’s possible they’d just pull out a gun in the middle of negotiations and take hostages.
Trump is demonstrating that the reason governments normally don’t go around casually breaking agreements, ignoring treaties and so on is that when you do things like that, you can’t get agreements even when you want one. Not because they are all “losers” or whatever justification he uses in his head.
The fundamental barrier to any meaningful negotiations with Iran is that Trump is still there, so we can’t make any promises they can trust.
Brent has gone back up past $100/barrel in recent days. Also the national average seems to have stopped going down. It had maxed out around $4.17/gallon a couple weeks ago, then dropped a penny or two a day to about $4.02. Today it’s changed direction again and gone back up a penny.
I apologize if predictions have been made and my skim of this thread missed them: what will be the facts on the ground by, say, August, and what will be the path to get there?
Is the stand off just going to persist that long with all of the US, the world, and Iran in increasing pain? Does Trump find a way to accept complete capitulation and declare it the biggest bestest victory ever achieved? Does Iran actually give some small something that is enough that Trump has something to spin?
I’m not seeing off ramps but also can’t see the current circumstances as sustainable over Spring and Summer?
The US is continuing to move additional forces into the area, so I wouldn’t be surprised if hostilities resume or even escalate long before then. I’m mostly surprised that these negotiations have lasted this long considering how little substance there has been to them.
That’s a different statement than saying you predict it. I wouldn’t be surprised by a wide variety of possibilities. That one, wouldn’t surprise me … but wouldn’t think it is the most likely one.
I would be less unsurprised by Iran offering a token that leaves the hardliners in strong control, and in a stronger position than they were before Trump intervened, with Trump declaring it the best result ever in history. And his base eating it up.
Except he’d probably blow it by promptly announcing he got them to give something else that was not even discussed and that they have two weeks to make it be so.