In keeping with the way US President Donald Trump is managing this war, his first reaction to the failure of the talks in Islamabad was to announce a measure that helps Iran more than it hurts it.
Trump's own announcement of a blockade of the Strait of Hormuz and his threat to hunt down tankers passing through it would immediately halt oil exports from Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.
Three tankers from these countries passed through the strait during the ceasefire. According to shipping data, a supertanker carrying crude oil loaded by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates in early March is expected to arrive at the port of Malacca in Malaysia on April 21.
Another tanker, the Ocean Thunder, loaded with Iraqi crude and chartered by a unit of Malaysian state energy company Petronas, passed through the strait last week.
Yet Trump has instructed the US Navy to bar any ship in international waters that has paid a fee to Iran: "No one paying an illegal fee will be allowed to safely transit the high seas".
US Central Command tried to bring some order to its commander-in-chief's latest order, specifying that the US Navy "will not impede the freedom of navigation of ships transiting the Strait of Hormuz to and from ports that are not Iranian".
However, it is these ships that are currently paying Iran the tariffs. The idiocy of this move has oil market experts scratching their heads.
A strange escalation
Since the US started the war, Iran has allowed about 100 ships through the Strait of Hormuz. Meanwhile, Trump has shifted from a policy of lifting sanctions on Iranian oil to ease global pressure on supplies to an attempt to cut it off completely.
"A complete closure of the strait would push oil prices even higher than before and put more pressure on the US from the international community," he warned the "Financial Times" Jennifer Kavanagh, director of military analysis at Defense Priorities, a Washington think tank.
Vali Nasser, a former US official and professor at Johns Hopkins University, noted: "This is good for the Iranians - it prolongs the stranglehold on the global economy... The Iranians could close the Bab el-Mandeb Strait and then the US would have to come clean".
Hassan Ahmadian, an Iranian academic and political commentator, said the blockade assumes that Iran cannot break through by force and that it will take a short time for the US to break through Iran and control energy prices.
Both assumptions are risky.
After 39 days of war, Ahmadian noted that US aircraft carriers remained at a safe distance and added: "It is enough for Iran to simply hold out - even without war - for energy prices to rise significantly. markets".
It is not unusual that the immediate reaction to Trump's latest announcement was an 8% increase in the price of a barrel, with Brent Crude rising from $70 to $119 over the course of the war.
The latest escalation in and around the Strait is all the more strange because, according to Trump and Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, negotiations are going well.
Trump announced that they were making enough progress to prevent further military action.
"In many ways, the points that have been agreed upon are better than continuing our military operations to the end, but all of those points pale in comparison to allowing nuclear power to be in the hands of such unstable, difficult, and unpredictable people," he wrote in Truth Social.
If Trump were talking about Israel, which has 90 nuclear weapons and not a party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), most of the world would have agreed wholeheartedly. But that was not the case. He was talking about a country that has no weapons program, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and is still a member of the NPT, although if this war were to resume, it probably wouldn't be for long.
The Israel Factor
Trump mentioned Iran's offer to dilute its 60% enriched uranium and continue only low-grade enrichment under international supervision.
Araghchi wrote in X: "Just inches away from the "Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding" we were faced with maximalism, shifting goals, and a blockade."
Hirst points out in his commentary that the claim Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made at the cabinet meeting was that US Vice President J.D. Vance reported to him, as the administration does every day.
"This supports my view that Trump was in communication with Netanyahu during the talks".
Israel did not take kindly to his exclusion from the talks in Islamabad, which led to direct talks, and would do everything in its power to get back into the process by sabotaging it. The end result is that Trump has abandoned all ten of Iran's points that he had agreed to as a basis for negotiations.
Having been fully aware that Iran would never give up uranium enrichment, nor surrender control of its most effective asset, the Strait of Hormuz, nor stop funding the Lebanese group "Hezbollah", "Hamas" and the Yemeni "Ansar Allah" (the Houthis), Trump has taken a position that would require Iran to capitulate on all three fronts.
There was indeed a fundamental asymmetry in the negotiations in Islamabad. The Iranian side sent over 70 specialists with its team of negotiators and was ready to negotiate, while the American side, which had already abandoned its promise to stop the war in Lebanon, met after 9 p.m.
Rob Malley, the head of the U.S. negotiating team with Iran under former President Joe Biden, categorically stated this. He wrote: "21 hours was too long if the goal was to repeat a demand that Iran had already rejected. It was also too short if the goal was to negotiate".
So now we are again on the verge of a new major escalation in this conflict. Iran's Revolutionary Guard has warned that any warship approaching the strait will be attacked.
Trump, on the other hand, seems ready to help the Guard expand the scope of this conflict. He threatened China with a 50% tariff if the US found evidence that Beijing was providing military aid to Iran. Trump stressed: "We will not allow Iran to make money selling oil to people they like".
This latest tariff threat is likely his preparation for a summit with President Xi Jinping next month.
"I could eliminate Iran in one day. I could destroy all of their energy, everything, every single one of their power plants, which is a big deal," Trump boasted, continuing to believe that Iran was defeated.
A stronger position
Outside the fantasy bubble in which Trump lives, most analysts agree that Iran is in a stronger position to confront the US than it was at the start of the war.
It has established control of the Strait of Hormuz. A U.S. intelligence assessment suggests that Iran has half its missile launchers and drones and retains thousands of missiles that it can launch from underground launchers.
After 13,000 strikes by U.S. and Israeli bombers, Iran has proven its ability to recover.
It has the increasingly obvious support of China and Russia, and again, U.S. intelligence says, this is more than just verbal support. China is preparing to deliver new air defense systems to Iran.
This has caused the biggest shock to energy supplies in decades, cutting global oil production by up to nine million barrels a day and a fifth of the world's gas supplies.
The Houthis are ready to step in. "Hezbollah" is fighting an Israeli invasion like never before, and Kuwait is being hit by missiles and drones from Iranian allies in Iraq.
Furthermore, Iran has another card to play - closing the other bottleneck in world trade, the Bab el-Mandeb, which would block traffic through the Red Sea and the Suez Canal.
It has already hit a pumping station for an east-west pipeline carrying Saudi oil to the Red Sea. Any attempt by the US military to reverse any of these gains would be difficult and bloody.
As Brandon Carr and Trita Parsi explained, gaining physical control of the Strait of Hormuz would mean US forces seizing three Iranian islands - Abu Musa, Larak and Kharg - in the Persian Gulf.
They made it clear that the main difficulty is not landing Marines or seizing these islands. Rather, the problem would be to hold the islands once the American forces are there.
"Without prepared, fortified fortifications to provide cover, even with close naval air support, protecting the forces would be a formidable challenge."
The Marines would likely suffer heavy casualties from Iranian ballistic missiles and drones relentlessly targeting the island, whether from nearby islands, including Qeshm, or from the Iranian coast itself, severely limiting their ability to project force into the strait. Providing logistical support would be extremely labor-intensive.
"Marine expeditionary units are typically capable of sustaining themselves for 15 days, but after that they need to be resupplied. Any attempt to resupply, depending on the remaining threat Iran poses in the strait at that time, would be subject to intense fire".
Quite apart from this battlefield, it is hard to believe that Iran would not shell every other oil terminal in the Persian Gulf if its main terminal on Kharg Island were attacked.
The price of liberating the islands in and around Hormuz could be a smoldering mass of rubble along the Persian Gulf, which would halt oil and gas exports for the foreseeable future. Even if a massive American force were to seize Hormuz, there might be no refined oil left to transport through it.
A new round
The prospect of a new and even more violent round in this war has divided not only the Gulf Cooperation Council countries but also the mutual defense agreement that Saudi Arabia and Pakistan signed after Israel attacked Hamas negotiators in Doha last year.
The UAE and Bahrain, Israel's closest allies in the Gulf, are firmly in favor of "finishing the job" and may have already begun attacking Iran directly. Qatar and Oman are in the "peace now" camp.
Kuwait and Saudi Arabia are vacillating between the two, but Riyadh has no intention of making peace with Abu Dhabi over its rift with Yemen. If anything, Riyadh and Abu Dhabi want to conduct their counteroffensive against the steady stream of Iranian drones separately.
With Iran, Trump now finds himself in much the same position that Netanyahu found himself in after the Gaza war. Gaza’s refusal to raise the white flag both angered and weakened Netanyahu.
The moment the war stopped, Netanyahu found himself inundated with internal criticism that the war’s objectives had not been achieved.
The same is happening in MAGA regarding the Iran war. The only response Netanyahu and Trump can give to this protest is to continue the war.
Even worse, other voices are reaching Trump’s ears. Like his friend Mark Levin, who constantly draws comparisons to Japan’s surrender after World War II. "To get the Japanese to surrender, we dropped two atomic bombs," Levin pointed out.
"I think it would be very useful to go back and read the terms of surrender to the Japanese, because they were dug in even after we dropped two atomic bombs, and it took a lot of pressure - even after that - to get them to surrender," he noted.
The madness is underway and is becoming a global problem. Europe is out of the game, and China is watching from a distance.
Meanwhile, the arguments for impeaching Trump because he is simply not mentally fit to do the job are growing. Trump's madness is no longer a joke. It is a major cause of global instability.