The U.S. military began a blockade of Iran’s ports on Monday, President Donald Trump said, and Tehran threatened to retaliate against its Gulf neighbors’ ports after weekend talks in Islamabad on ending the war broke down.
A U.S. official said there was continued engagement with Iran, and forward motion on trying to get to an agreement. Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif also said efforts were still under way to resolve the conflict.
But oil prices climbed back to $100 per barrel, with no sign of a swift reopening of the Strait of Hormuz to ease the biggest ever disruption in supplies and broader concerns over the durability of a two-week ceasefire agreement reached last week.
Trump said Iran had been in touch on Monday and wanted to make a deal but that he would not sanction any agreement allowing Tehran to have a nuclear weapon.
“Iran will not have a nuclear weapon,” Trump told reporters at the White House. “We can’t let a country blackmail or extort the world.”
Since the United States and Israel began the war on February 28, Iran effectively shut the Strait of Hormuz to all vessels except its own, saying passage would be permitted only under Iranian control and subject to a fee.
Trump has said Washington would block Iranian vessels and any ships that paid such tolls and that any Iranian “fast-attack” ships that went near the blockade would be eliminated.
Brigadier General Reza Talaei-Nik, a spokesperson for Iran’s Ministry of Defense, warned that foreign military efforts to police the strait would escalate the crisis and instability in global energy security.
NATO allies including Britain and France said they would not be drawn into the conflict by taking part in the blockade, stressing instead the need to reopen the waterway, through which about one-fifth of the world’s oil normally passes.
The talks between the U.S. and Iran in Pakistan, the first direct meeting in more than a decade and the highest-level discussions since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, ended on Sunday without an agreement.
Despite that, Vice President JD Vance, who led the U.S. delegation, told Fox News on Monday the U.S. “made a lot of progress” by communicating to Tehran where the U.S. “could make some accommodation” and where it would remain inflexible.
He said Trump was adamant that any enriched nuclear material must be removed from Iran and a mechanism must be established to verify that Iran is not developing nuclear weapons.
Tehran “moved in our direction, which is why I think we would say that we had some good signs, but they didn’t move far enough,” Vance said, without disclosing details.
CEASEFIRE UNDER STRAIN
The ceasefire that halted six weeks of U.S. and Israeli airstrikes looked in jeopardy, with only a week left to run.
The U.S. military’s Central Command said the blockade would be “enforced impartially against vessels of all nations” entering or leaving Iranian ports in the Gulf and Gulf of Oman.
“The blockade will not impede neutral transit passage through the Strait of Hormuz to or from non-Iranian destinations,” Central Command said in a note to seafarers seen by Reuters on Monday.
An Iranian military spokesperson called any U.S. restrictions on international shipping “piracy,” warning that if Iranian ports were threatened, no port in the Gulf or Gulf of Oman would be secure. Any military vessels approaching the strait would violate the ceasefire, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said.
Trump said Iran’s navy had been “completely obliterated” during the war, adding that only a small number of “fast-attack ships” remained.
“Warning: If any of these ships come anywhere close to our BLOCKADE, they will be immediately ELIMINATED, using the same system of kill that we use against the drug dealers on boats at Sea. It is quick and brutal,” Trump said on social media.
He was apparently referring to the U.S. strikes carried out against suspected drug boats in the Caribbean and Pacific. The strikes, which began in September, killed more than 160 people. The U.S. military has not provided evidence that the vessels were ferrying drugs.
LEBANON FACES ATTACKS
Trump has also lashed out at U.S.-born Pope Leo, who has spoken out against the war, denouncing him as “terrible” in a rare direct attack by a U.S. president on a pontiff.
With the war unpopular at home and rising energy prices causing political blowback, Trump paused the U.S.-Israeli bombing campaign last week after threatening to destroy Iran’s “whole civilisation” unless it reopened the strait.
In a letter to the United Nations, Iran’s UN delegation on Monday asked for reparations from Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, Qatar and Jordan, alleging they have allowed their territory to be used in the US-Israeli war against Iran.
Israel has continued to bombard Lebanon and on Monday Israeli troops launched an attack it said was intended to seize a key south Lebanon town from Iran-backed Hezbollah. Israel and the U.S. have said the campaign against Hezbollah was not part of the ceasefire, while Iran has insisted it is.
Source: Reuters
