August 26th, 2026: Trump Calls Iran’s Bluff in the Strait of Hormuz & Armenia’s Break With Moscow

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**Mike Baker** (0:50)
It's Wednesday, the 26th of August. Welcome to The President's Daily Brief. I'm Mike Baker. Your eyes and ears on the world stage. All right, let's get briefed. First up, a months-long American operation has reportedly cleared the principal shipping lanes through the Strait of Hormuz. Undercutting Iran's effort to use the mines they laid as leverage. Traffic through the Strait still remains well below pre-conflict levels.
Later in the show, Russia risks losing one of its oldest allies as Armenia moves to abandon Moscow's answer to NATO and seek membership in the European Union. Plus, the trade war with Canada escalates as Ottawa retaliates with tariffs on $20 billion in American goods following the collapse of talks with Washington. And here I was, worried that we didn't have enough conflict in the world today.
And in today's Back of the Brief, CIA Director John Ratcliffe makes a secret trip to Moscow for undisclosed talks with Russian officials, although to be fair, it's not so secret anymore, nor undisclosed. But first, today's PDB Spotlight.
The US may have just stripped Iran of one of its most important bargaining chips in the Strait of Hormuz. President Trump announced Tuesday that the US Navy has cleared the mines from the international shipping lanes running through the Strait. Two American officials, with direct knowledge of the operation, confirmed to Axios that the Navy has cleared what is known as the Traffic Separation Scheme. It's the internationally recognized shipping corridor that runs between Iran and Oman. A separate US official told the Jerusalem Post that CENTCOM had cleared both the inbound and outbound lanes. Now, the Traffic Separation Scheme is essentially a divided highway for commercial ships. One lane carries vessels into the Persian Gulf while the other carries them out. It's designed to keep some of the world's largest tankers moving safely through one of the narrowest and most heavily traveled waterways on earth. Iran mined that central corridor during the war, forcing American protected tankers to use a narrower southern route close to Oman. The mine clearing operation apparently took place quietly over several months. CENTCOM publicly announced back in April that it had begun setting the conditions for clearing the strait. American underwater drones then systematically scanned the central corridor and identified more than 100 objects suspected of being mines. According to Axios, the military brought in private contractors to remove or detonate them. And as you might imagine, that was no small undertaking. Early in the operation, Pentagon officials reportedly warned lawmakers that clearing the mines could take as long as six months. It also had to be done while Iran continued threatening commercial ships and while American forces maintained their blockade of Iranian ports.
Now that the central lanes have been cleared, ships should be able to travel simultaneously in both directions under American air protection. That could substantially increase the amount of oil moving through the strait. Now, that's the hoped-for result of the mine clearing effort, obviously. But obviously, the shipping and insurance industries have to agree that the conditions have improved. And that's important because traffic remains severely depressed in the strait. According to Reuters, roughly 5 million barrels of oil passed through Hormuz on Monday. Now, before the war, that number routinely exceeded 20 million barrels per day, roughly one out of every five barrels consumed worldwide. But the larger significance here is what this does to Iran's leverage. The regime had been treating the mines as a negotiating tool. Iranian officials previously rejected Oman's proposal to divide shipping traffic equally between the two countries. Instead, Tehran demanded that all inbound traffic and at least some outbound traffic be routed through Iranian waters. Iran also declared that it no longer recognized the established central shipping corridor, which it claimed gave Oman too much control and did not adequately address Iranian security concerns following the American and Israeli attacks earlier this year.
The regime warned that the strait would remain closed unless its conditions were accepted. It also said that it would not permit any outside country to clear the mines, even if that country had been invited by Oman. Well, the US appears to have gone ahead and done it anyway. What do you think about that? On Tuesday, the foreign ministers of Iran and Oman met in Tehran to discuss a temporary joint shipping corridor, a cooperative mine clearing project, and a possible permanent arrangement for administrating navigation through the Hormuz. Seems like that's overtaken by events. The proposed framework would also include intelligence sharing, traffic management, and joint security services. But Iran and Oman did not reach an agreement, and depending on how quickly commercial shipping returns, they may now be negotiating over a problem that the US has largely resolved without them.