Playing The Strait
Six weeks of war. One day of talks. Neither side planned for more.
It makes no sense to me. There was no deadline forcing a single session. The ceasefire had time on it. They could have planned a week of talks, staffed them properly, worked through the technical layers the way you actually have to. The 2015 nuclear deal took years. Instead they flew into Islamabad, talked for twenty-one consecutive hours like exhaustion produces wisdom, and left without a deal.
Are the hotels that bad in Pakistan?
Twenty-one hours is not a negotiation. It's a performance. Iran is playing its second hand after being dealt shitty cards to begin with.
Iran's foreign ministry said so plainly afterward: no one should have expected to reach an agreement in a single session. Vance boarded Air Force Two, flashed a thumbs up at the cameras, and flew home.
Look at the delegations. Iran sent seventy officials and experts — diplomatic, military, economic. The United States sent Vance, Witkoff, and Kushner. A vice president, a real estate developer, and the president's son-in-law. Veteran diplomats noted this openly, that the administration had leaned on trusted allies with business ties instead of experienced foreign policy professionals. The gap between the two delegations is the gap between a country that takes the negotiation seriously and a country that's staging one.
Before they sat down, the Iranian delegation posted photographs from the plane. A row of empty seats. On each seat, photos and bloodied belongings of the schoolchildren killed in the US missile strike in March. The children Trump said the Iranians killed themselves.
I said on March 29 that Trump has no plan. What I'm watching now is that the no-plan extends seamlessly into the diplomacy. The same structure. Ultimatums with fabricated deadlines. Claims of productive conversations that the other side denies happened. Motion as purpose. The 21-hour format has the same logic as the 48-hour ultimatums — it projects urgency without producing it. Full nuclear dismantlement, Strait sovereignty, reparations, Lebanon — aren't 21-hour problems.
Iran's foreign minister said afterward they were inches from an understanding when they "encountered maximalism, shifting goalposts, and blockade." Vance said it was Iran's fault. Trump said it was a really good meeting except for one issue: “they want to have nuclear weapons.”
Of course they do. But it would be unwise to let them have them. Theocracies should not have weapons of mass destruction. For them, the world is filled with heathen and heretics. The approach is too primitive compared with the power it can wield.
Sorry. There is no sovereign right to build a nuclear weapon which you plan to use against the enemy of your god.
There is a ceasefire. Technically. Pakistan brokered it on April 7-8, which is the most Pakistani sentence I have ever written. The ceasefire has been violated by both sides. Iran's new Supreme Leader says the Strait should remain closed. Trump declared the Strait fully open at a rally in Arizona while ships tried to exit the waterway and turned back. "This will be a great and brilliant day for the world," he said. Vessel tracking showed those ships hadn't been given approval to pass. They turned around.
He declared victory over something still not open. Called it a brilliant day. In Phoenix.
The ceasefire expires four days from now.
My March 1 post said decapitation doesn't automatically equal disintegration. Sometimes it accelerates consolidation. The evidence is in.
The IRGC moved within hours to install a successor, applying what one report called "repeated contacts and psychological and political pressure" on the Assembly of Experts to install Mojtaba Khamenei, the son. The regime closed ranks in days. But it is noteworthy that nearly two weeks after the war began, the new Supreme Leader had not appeared in public once. No video. No audio. His first message was read aloud by a television anchor while a still photograph was displayed on screen.
A regime projecting continuity through a ghost.
According to the statement attributed to him, Mojtaba learned of his own appointment from state television.
The decapitation produced a successor who may be injured, is certainly invisible, and whose first public act was a written message read by someone else. The regime is intact. The system reconstituted. The theology of succession held. What it produced is a leader who functions, for now, as a voice without a face. That is not collapse. That is, in its strange way, exactly what I said to watch for.
Israel recently killed more than 350 people in Lebanon in a single day. A day after the US-Iran ceasefire was announced. A third of them were women and children.
This is what broke Islamabad. Iran demanded the ceasefire extend to Lebanon. The US said Lebanon wasn't part of the deal. Netanyahu kept bombing. The architects don't stop building because the contractor declared a work break.
I've argued across three posts that Netanyahu engineered the conditions for this confrontation over decades, identified Trump as the vehicle, and got what he wanted. The post-ceasefire bombing in Lebanon is the same thesis from a different angle. The vehicle agreed to a pause. The architect kept going. Lebanon demonstrates it plainly.
Now. China.
Iran sells eighty to ninety percent of its oil to China. Iran cannot close the Strait to China without strangling itself. So it didn't. Chinese tankers kept moving throughout. Ships from other nations started broadcasting fake ownership signals, claiming Chinese identity to get through. That ships were gaming their own nationality markers tells you exactly what kind of enforcement this is. Not a blockade. A selective tollbooth operated by the party we just spent billions of dollars bombing.
We keep talking about blockades like they solve this problem. They don't. A blockade is a perimeter tool. You stop ships from getting in or out. You seize cargo. You apply pressure. The United States can do that all day long. What Iran is doing is something else. They are exercising control. Not total closure, control. They decide who passes, when, and under what conditions. That's cheaper, more flexible, and in this specific geography, more powerful.
You don't need to win a naval battle to control the Strait. You just need to make the risk high enough that nobody wants to sail through it without your permission.
Once that happens, the Strait is functionally closed whether anyone formally says it is or not.
Remember a couple of weeks ago when Trump said the Strait will "open up naturally" when the war was over. Well, he forgot to mention the blockade. But that's only because he had no plan for one back then just as he still has no plan for anything after the present crisis evolves into something else.
The United States, meanwhile, temporarily lifted sanctions on Iranian oil to push more supply into global markets and dampen the price spike.
That absurdity bears repeating. In the middle of a war against Iran, the United States lifted sanctions on Iranian oil.
China has the Strait open. For China. An international agreement mandating free passage for everyone would end the selective access arrangement that currently benefits China specifically. Why on earth would China vote for that?
Which brings us to the UN Security Council, where last week Russia and China vetoed a resolution aimed at reopening the Strait. The resolution had been watered down repeatedly — stripped of authorization for force, stripped of any reference to Security Council authority, trimmed down to "strongly encourages states to coordinate defensive efforts." The most toothless possible language. Eleven countries voted yes.
China vetoed it anyway.
China's ambassador said the draft failed to "capture the root causes and the full picture of the conflict in a comprehensive and balanced manner." Russia said the resolution presented Iranian actions as the sole source of regional tensions while the illegal attacks by the United States and Israel were not mentioned at all.
Both of those statements are accurate as far as they go. Both also describe a veto that serves the vetoing party's strategic interests. China already has access. Russia has every incentive to let a crisis of American making stay unresolved. The stated reasons and the actual reasons point in the same direction, which is unusual enough to be worth noting.
The United States handed every authoritarian government on earth a portable template. I wrote that on March 1. Call it armed conflict. Identify the target as a destabilizing force. Execute. The language is portable. The precedent is durable. Russia and China are now using the same logic at the UN. We started a war outside the Security Council. Now the Security Council can't help us clean it up. The institution we bypassed is the same institution we're now asking to function.
Who is playing the Strait?
Iran is playing the Strait. For Iran it is the most powerful projection of “control.” Iran in control is an Iranian victory. So, we hopefully won’t let that happen. But, without a plan, I don't know how we are going to do that. Iran closes it any time they want. The US cannot open it. That is the war in a nutshell by now. Yeah, you blew the guy’s heads off and it was spectacular but now we have this fucking mess on our hands.
China is playing the Strait. Getting its oil through while the rest of the world waits. Vetoing international solutions that would end its advantage. Watching an American-made crisis generate leverage it didn't have to manufacture.
The United States is not playing the Strait. The United States is reacting to it. Expensively. Without a coalition. Against an adversary that spent decades building a cheap, dispersed, redundant toolkit precisely for this scenario.
Today, Iran has reasserted "strict control" of the Strait of Hormuz. Yesterday Iran's foreign minister declared it fully open to all commercial shipping. Oil prices dropped 11% in the immediate aftermath. Trump posted on Truth Social that the Strait was "completely open" and declared it a brilliant day for the world. Ships attempted to transit. They turned back. They hadn't been given approval to pass.
The Strait was “open” for one day.
Iranian state TV quoted a military spokesperson saying the waterway has "returned to its previous state" — under strict management and control by Iran's military. The reason given: the United States failed to uphold its commitments and continued what Iran called "piracy and maritime robbery under the so-called blockade."
Iran is winning the war as long as the Strait remains closed.
Epic Fury was the most spectacular opening strike in Israeli military history. And Iran is winning.
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