Transcript of Trump’s Risky Strategy to Blockade Iran’s Blockade New

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily.

It is a high-stakes game of blockade chicken. The US asserts control over the Strait of Hormuz. Iran, for its part, threatens retaliation.

For the past 2 days, the United States has enforced a risky naval blockade of Iran. Designed to end the war on American terms.

So what are we doing? We're blockading the ports in Iran where they get oil and gas shipments. Without oil and gas money, Iran has no economy.

Today, a look at the strategy behind the blockade, the dangers that it poses, and whether or not it's actually working.

We can't let a country blackmail or extort, uh, the world, because that's what they're doing. They're really blackmailing the world. We're not going to let that happen.

I spoke with White House correspondent David Sanger, energy reporter Rebecca Elliott, and military correspondent Eric Schmidt. It's Wednesday, April 15th.

David, Rebecca, Eric, thank you for joining us for this roundtable discussion.

We appreciate it.

Great to be here.

Thanks for having me.

Thank you.

David, I want to start with where the idea for this blockade comes from. It emerges right after Iran basically sent Vice President JD Vance packing, sends him home from negotiations in Pakistan with no deal. And suddenly, the Trump administration is confronting a pretty messy situation, a ceasefire without Iran letting go of control over the Strait of Hormuz, this huge, important shipping channel. And so that seems to be where this blockade begins, right?

[Speaker:JOSH FARLEY] You're absolutely right, Michael. It seemed intolerable to the administration that you could end this war or move toward an end of it with the Iranians exercising control over who gets through the strait. Because through the whole 47 years of the Islamic revolutionary government in place since 1979, they basically let all traffic go through without tolls. And now all of a sudden they managed to stop traffic. They managed to declare that there would be tolls. We're still trying to figure out how much they actually collected.

Literally, when we say tolls, literally like the one you pass on the highway.

Yeah, $2 million. Imagine every time your E-ZPass went through, it put $2 million on your credit card. Right. This was not a situation the US could live with. So what the US Navy needed to do was reverse the dynamic. Make sure that it wasn't the Iranians who were controlling traffic through the strait, but that it was the US Navy that was. And that sounds like a fairly straightforward process given the size of the US Navy, but in fact, it turns out it's looking like it will be pretty complicated to execute.

Okay, so Eric, just define this pretty brute force military concept of a naval blockade, because it's its own act of aggression.

That's right. By definition, a blockade is an act of war. And what it means is one country is basically going to use its military might, its forces, to block the transit of ships from other countries. That can either be through the threat of force or actual boarding of ships and seizing them. And in this case, the United States Navy has shown up with some 10,000 sailors aboard more than a dozen warships, from aircraft carriers to destroyers to the ships that carry Marines, and they're essentially parked outside of the Strait of Hormuz, basically waiting for any ships to come either from the Persian Gulf or trying to get from where they are in the Arabian Sea into the Gulf itself.

Basically, the idea is to strangle Iran's economy, but specifically, Rebecca, to strangle its oil.

That's right. And what's so interesting is that Iran has been able to maintain oil going through the in a way that its neighbors have not. So it's exerting this control over the waterway by attacks and threats of attacks. So the vast majority of the oil that has been getting through has come from Iran.

So it's continuing, Iran, to make money from oil to, in a sense, I assume, fund its own war efforts.

Exactly.

And just to add to Rebecca's point here, It's not only the overall Iranian economy that's dependent on this revenue, it's particularly the government, and within that, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which gets almost all of its revenue and thus its ability to pursue the war from oil exports.

Got it. And just to be sure we're all on the same page here, is the goal ultimately to wrest back control of the strait Or is the goal to create a blockade that would bring Iran back to the negotiating table so that this war actually never reignites?

Well, as I understand it, it's really both. I mean, they don't want to live in a world in which the Iranians step out at any moment to control the strait. If that's the case, then the US has to be prepared for a lengthy presence around the Strait of Hormuz. But the real goal here is to get the Iranians to move in the negotiations. Remember, this got announced announced right after Vice President Pence left Islamabad fundamentally empty-handed. We've since learned that they are in a pretty high-stakes negotiation on a number of points, but the biggest difference is whether or not Iran has to give up its nuclear stockpiles and whether it's got to agree to give up all enrichment of uranium. But whatever it is, the Strait and control over it is the leverage President Trump's trying to exercise here.

Okay. A final question about the blockade before we get to how it's actually going so far, which is if you're the president and you're deciding to operationalize this theoretical blockade, what are the risks that you're assessing as you're thinking about making this real? I put that to all three of you. What kind of blowback, boomeranging can you expect as you imagine suddenly creating this naval barrier around the strait?

Well, one major risk, of course, is that the IRGC, that Iran itself lashes out. They have threatened to attack these US Navy ships. And so you could have a major escalation of the fighting again, based over the ships coming into the strait or even standing back outside. So that would be one major risk that the president would have to weigh.

There's a second one I can think of, and I'm sure Rebecca's got a long list as well. It's China. So 90% of the oil that Iran ships out is headed to China. Much of it is on Chinese crude, Chinese-flagged ships. The president's supposed to go to Beijing in about 4 weeks, and what he was hoping was going to be this meeting all about sort of a new détente between China and the United States. There were supposed to be trade deals and security understandings and so forth. And all of a sudden what's looming over it, whether or not these Chinese ships that pick up their oil in Iran get turned back by the US Navy. That is not the kind of scene they want to be confronting, especially at a moment when there are reports, as Eric and others have reported in The Times, that the Chinese have been considering aiding the Iranians with some kind of arms, right?

A simple, efficient way to really piss off your superpower adversary is to start to systematically deprive them of oil. Rebecca, any risks you want to identify?

Yes, I'd say a third big category of risk is that Iran responds by restarting attacks on energy infrastructure throughout the Persian Gulf. And that is one that carries really long-term risks for the global energy system and the global economy, because as you do more damage to the region's infrastructure, prevent refineries from operating, you risk taking energy offline for a long period of time.

Right.

And already the International Energy Agency has estimated that more than 80 energy sites in the region have been damaged, and that bringing production back to pre-war levels could take up to 2 years.

Wow. So this blockade has now gone from strategic theory to reality. So let's turn to what it's looked like over the past 48 hours or so, and whether it's working for the US or creating a bunch of strategic boomeranging blowbacks that were perhaps unintended but now problematic. Eric, to start, can you describe the blockade as it now stands around the strait?

So as I mentioned before, the US Navy is positioned outside the Strait of Hormuz, kind of waiting for any ships bound for Iranian ports. So what President Trump is calling a blockade is really more of a quarantine. They're monitoring these ships using drones, using other open-source information about where these ships are coming from or where they're going to. And if there's a suspect ship, they can get on the radio and basically call and determine if that's a ship that they might need to board. And if it got to that point, they could actually send boarding parties aboard. These would be Marines or specially trained Navy personnel, could be Navy SEALs. They could arrive by boat, they could come by helicopter and fast rope down onto these ships to inspect the cargo. This would really be only if the ships continue apace. One of the reasons why you have this blockade or quarantine is really to set a deterrent. The idea that the US Navy is out there and do the shipping companies whose cargo is moving, do they really want to have the United States seize this cargo? Do they really want to challenge the United States?

I think most of the hundreds of ships that are already on scene, whether they're inside the Persian Gulf or outside, are kind of staying put. And what we're now waiting for to see if there's any Iranian-backed ships that dare them.

Well, so far, are any ships carrying Iranian oil, the thing the US blockade is meant to stop, Are any of those ships getting through the strait since this blockade started?

The short answer, Michael, is it appears not. The Central Command, which oversees the US military operations in this part of the world, issued a statement 24 hours into the blockade saying that there had been no interdictions, there'd been no violations of the blockade. And in fact, there had been 6 vessels coming out of Iranian ports on the Gulf of Oman, on the Iranian coast, that had turned around after they'd been contacted by US Navy ships. So the US military is pointing to that to say, "Look, this is working so far for the ships that we want it to affect." So in these very early hours, and I guess few days of this blockade, this is succeeding if you're President Trump and the US military.

Well, I'd say it's succeeding halfway. It looks like for now he has stopped the Iranians from shipping oil out and thus fueling their economy and their government. What we don't know yet, Michael, is, can the commerce that's been bottled up in the Gulf, ships that belong to the UAE or other Arab states who are trying to ship their oil and cargo out, can they get past the Iranians so that the US can free them out to the rest of the world? And that's what the future of the global economy in the next few months may depend on.

Right, because at the end of the day— and this is going to sound like a head-spinning tongue twister— this is ultimately a blockade by the US of a blockade by Iran, which makes it really messy.

Exactly. And a big question for the global economy is, does this mean that no oil is going to be getting out of the Persian Gulf, or Does it allow and does it give shippers the confidence to make that run?

Okay, we'll discuss that right after we take a very short break. So let's talk about what's happening to everyone else in the world when it comes to this blockade? So far, as you all just established before the break, the Iranian oil seems to be bottled up because of this blockade, a success strategically if you're the US trying to disrupt the Iranian economy and get the Iranians back to the negotiating table to end this war. But if you are the UAE, if you are the United States, if you're Russia, what does this blockade mean for you so far, Eric? Do we have any intelligence about whether cargo ships are seeing the US blockade as a safety net that lets them get through the strait.

Well, just before coming on the program, a US official told me that as many as 20 commercial vessels have now been able to transit through the strait in the first 24 hours or so. Now, the official didn't describe exactly what kind of ships, but it's assumed this is a combination of tankers, of cargo ships, and other things. But we really need more detail to see if this is an early indication an indication of a broader stream, like as Rebecca said, of shippers who are now more confident that they can run the gauntlet that they weren't before, or if this is just a momentary spurt of getting through with the US Navy standing by that really doesn't have a long-term effect.

Mm-hmm.

Rebecca, what are your sources telling you about the trepidation level of the captains of these ships and the companies that own them and have to pay the insurance levels that they're paying now to try to go through the strait?

[Speaker:KATIE ZUCKERMAN] I would say it's very high. And increasingly, the people I speak with are starting to ask not what is it going to take to reopen the strait, but will the strait ever go back to the way it was before the war, when there was free passage, no toll, and relatively little risk of being attacked? And many people think probably not.

Let's now turn to that question. Basically, the long-term future of the strait and what it's gonna look like. Is it going to be something that over time the Iranians just control, perhaps in a peace deal? Or does this become some sort of a joint operation over time? Does the strait ever get restored to its pre-war operations? Can that genie ever be put back into the bottle, David?

So I'm with Rebecca. I don't think that you're going to see it go back to the way it was anytime soon because the Iranians have discovered this kind of superpower they have. They had never before tried to control the strait, and suddenly they discovered that after much of their military has been destroyed, they have the ability just by dropping a few mines or threatening ships with shoulder-fired missiles to basically bottle up everything that's in the Persian Gulf. So we have heard a couple of proposals. At one point, President Trump just briefly suggested that maybe it would be run by him and the new Ayatollah Khamenei. That would be a business partnership I'd like to go cover. There have been more serious proposals about creating a kind of international consortium that not only monitored what was going through, but maybe charged and divided up the tolls. You could imagine Iran would be a part of that. Mm-hmm. Oman, which is straight across the other side of the strait, the United States, which would be providing security. And then you could imagine bringing in any number of countries that are dependent on what's traveling through the strait, starting with China, maybe with India, and of course the Europeans.

Now that would require a level of international cooperation and diplomatic sharing of power that so far the Trump administration has not shown a great interest in around the world.

Right.

And so this would be a really interesting test of building an international coalition.

So, David and Rebecca, what you seem to both be saying is that at the end of this conflict, the Strait will never again be like the Atlantic Ocean or like the Pacific Ocean and be a free international waterway in which commerce occurs pretty much unimpeded and free.

Never say never, but that is certainly something that more and more people are facing at this moment. And when we're talking about the oil market and energy demand, that leads in a few different directions.

Yeah, how do you start to plan around a world where maybe the Strait is told to a degree that's not tolerable? Doesn't that require a whole new level of alternatives?

I would divide it into 3 general buckets. One is the possibility of building more alternative routes from Gulf countries to world markets that get around the Strait of Hormuz. We already have a couple of those options in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, and they have been helping to get oil out to a very big degree during this war.

Those are shipping alternatives or pipelines?

Pipelines.

Hmm.

Now, that is complicated as well. There are only a certain number of countries that are able to get oil from one coast to another without running across another country's territory.

Right.

So then you get into the cooperation conversation again. That's one bucket. Another bucket is, does this increase demand for oil elsewhere in the world? That you can get without running the risk of going through the Strait. And the third is whenever oil is more expensive, it makes alternatives more attractive. And those alternatives include nuclear energy, solar power, batteries. And we're already seeing many of those conversations pick up around the world. Hmm.

So the entire world of energy and energy infrastructure could end up changing because of this war and to a degree because of this blockade, and that could end up long outlasting the conflict itself.

In the long term, Michael, I think that's exactly what could happen. And of course, it's been different wars, different conflicts that have shaped our energy status in the past. But the way I try to think about this in the short term is that we are now entering a contest over Which country, the United States or Iran, can endure the pain of this blockade over the next few months? The Iranians are betting that it's Trump who is going to have to back off because the closer we get to the midterm elections with gas prices going up and now the president saying and the energy secretary saying they may stay up through the rest of the year.

Right.

That's a big political problem for the Republican Party and for Donald Trump and for his remaining term. Because if he loses both the House and the Senate, in part because of high energy prices, his domestic agenda is basically going to be over. Right.

And Iran knows this. I mean, their leadership in internet memes taunts Trump about gas prices.

In fact, their lead negotiator, the speaker of the Iranian parliament, basically said as he left Islamabad, "You could be nostalgic for $5 or $6 a gallon gas." The US has a different bet, which is what they failed to do militarily in 38 or 39 days of war, they can finish off economically by cutting off Iran's main source of revenue, by specifically cutting off the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and that they will in the end come back to the negotiating table, and as President Trump put it, cry uncle, say, "We're going to do whatever you want to do." So far, that hasn't happened, but the president is testing to see where that point is. And the fact of the matter is, if anybody tells you they know which side is not going to be able to withstand the pain first, I'm not sure I'd believe them yet.

Eric, final question to you. How sustainable is this blockade if it lasts for a while? The next negotiation session between the US and Iran is on Thursday, but the gap between the two countries on all the major sticking points, whether that's the nuclear program or Israel's ongoing war in Lebanon, remains enormous. How sustainable is the blockade if it keeps being required by the US?

Well, the Pentagon has said that it can sustain this blockade as long as the president needs to. The problem is it would come at a cost of what the military has to do elsewhere around the world. It has already drawn away ships and munitions that are badly needed in the Indo-Pacific to possibly counter China, to deal with North Korea in a conflict there. They're also pulling away interceptors and other bombs and missiles from the European Command, which could possibly have gone to Ukraine. This blockade operation alone has drawn in some 10,000 US Navy, Marine Corps, and other service personnel. The overall operation has caught about more than 50,000 if they have to remain focused on this region, because we don't know for sure that hostilities won't break out and the president won't resume dropping bombs and missiles on Iran.

Mm-hmm.

Well, David, that actually makes me want to ask you the very last question. Is this war, as a full-on war, as we think about that word, likely over? Because yes, we're talking about a ceasefire that hasn't solved all the major problems, and we're talking about a blockade, but for the most part, these two sides are not shooting at each other right now. And I imagine there's a lot of pressure for it to stay that way.

I think there is. I think it would be very hard for President Trump to go back in and conduct the kind of military operation that he ran for 38 days. His base was fragmenting over it. Congress was clearly frustrated that they had never been consulted, much less asked for a war declaration. Allies were not coming to America's aid. But it's not only President Trump who understands that. The Iranians understand it too. They also want to have this war over because the effects on them and on an economy that was fragile before the fighting started has got to be huge. And so now the question is not whether or not the war ends, but on whose terms it ends.

David, Eric, Rebecca, thank you all.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

On Tuesday afternoon, the leaders of France and Britain said they would develop their own plan to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. The plan, involving a broad coalition of governments, is expected to begin only after the war is over. And may exclude the United States.

We'll be right back.

Here's what else you need to know today.

My name is Lana Drews. In 2018, while I was living and working Working as a model in Beverly Hills, I had contact with Eric Swalwell on 3 separate occasions after meeting him socially.

On Tuesday, a woman said that Democratic Representative Eric Swalwell raped her in a California hotel room, the latest in a series of accusations that have ended Swalwell's campaign for governor of California. And his career in Congress.

My delay in taking action against Eric was driven by fear, not doubt. Fear of his political power, his background as an attorney, and his family law enforcement ties.

During a news conference, Lana Drewes said that after promising to take her to a political event, Swalwell instead drugged her and then assaulted her.

Swalwell has denied sexually assaulting women, but has apologized for, quote, "mistakes in judgment." I stand with the other women who have come forward, and I will be making a report to law enforcement shortly with my attorneys.

This episode was produced by Caitlin O'Keefe, Ricky Nowetzki, and Jack DeSidero. It was edited by Lisa Chow. Contains music by Elisheba Itube and Dan Powell. Our theme music is by Wonderly. This episode was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. That's it for the day. I'm Michael Babar.

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