Trump scraps threat of 20% fee on Hormuz cargo

**Charlotte Gallagher** (0:00)
This is The Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Charlotte Gallagher, and in the early hours of Wednesday, the 15th of July, these are our main stories. President Trump scraps the threat of 20% tolls on ships using the Strait of Hormuz. US immigration enforcement agents have been told to halt vehicle stops after two fatal shootings at their hands in the past week. And a record-breaking heat wave in the US.
Also in this podcast, Spain beats France in their World Cup semifinal.
On Monday, President Trump declared the US was the guardian of the Strait of Hormuz, and announced plans to charge ships millions of dollars to pass through the waterway. But after pressure from Gulf nations, Donald Trump has now gone back on that threat. Instead, the president says he'll sign massive trade and investment deals with those nations.

**Donald Trump** (1:06)
So when I put that out yesterday, because we've been doing that for many, many years, it was never fair to me that we would be guarding the strait when we basically don't take anything. We don't need the oil at all.
And it wasn't important for us, but it was important for allies. It was important for people that we get along with very well, including the major Gulf state countries. So I put it out yesterday, I thought it was good. I was called by different people, different countries, kings and emirs and all of the people that we all know and we all love and they've been frankly, they've been very strong partners. And they said, we'd love to do it a different way. We'd love to invest in the United States with billions and billions of dollars.

**Charlotte Gallagher** (1:51)
All this, as last month's Memorandum of Understanding seems to survive only on paper. The US has resumed bombing Iran and blockading its ports. Iran, which says it controls the Strait, has resumed targeting oil tankers and US military facilities. And traffic through the waterway has once again ground virtually to a halt. Our Washington correspondent David Willis told me more about the latest strikes on Iran.

**David Willis** (2:20)
Well, President Trump has said, Charlotte, that the US will expand its strikes against Iran next week. This was in a telephone interview with Fox News. And he said that the strikes were going to get, as he put it, really bad and that among the targets would be bridges and power plants. And indeed, the head of US Central Command, Admiral Brad Cooper, has issued a statement of his own accusing Iran of intentionally targeting civilians across the region by attacking seven commercial ships, resulting, he said, in nearly a dozen civilian crew members being either killed or injured. And that statement goes on to say that Iranian forces have also launched dozens of missiles and drones towards neighboring countries in the Gulf and that US forces are, as Brad Cooper put it, holding Iran accountable for unwarranted aggression that continues to endanger innocent lives. Now, Iran's Deputy Foreign Minister has said that Iran will exercise full sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz, no matter the cost. So what we have now is a fourth day of an exchange of fire in the Strait of Hormuz between the United States and Iran.

**Charlotte Gallagher** (3:40)
And tell us about President Trump's plan to charge tariffs, because this lasted only for 24 hours, and then he rode back on it.

**David Willis** (3:48)
He did. He backtracked on that earlier today, that plan to collect a 20% toll from ships transiting the Strait of Hormuz. Instead, he said Gulf states would make major investments in the United States. Mr. Trump told reporters that he had received calls from, as he put it, kings and emirs asking him not to impose tolls on traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. And that toll announcement had already been deemed illegal, of course, by the United Nations Maritime Agency, as well as shocking many US allies in the Gulf.
It also, of course, validated an Iranian demand to collect service fees in the Strait of Hormuz, something that Donald Trump had himself rejected previously. And the president added today, I don't think anybody should charge a fee for the Strait or any other strait in the world.
Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain had already committed to investing more than $2 trillion in the United States over the next several years, even before the war with Iran. And Donald Trump said in his post that new investments on top of that would make the number even larger, Charlotte.

**Charlotte Gallagher** (5:11)
David Willis America's war with Iran is putting strain on industries and businesses around the world. But not everyone seems to be affected. US banks are still doing well. The latest reported profits are extraordinary.