Trump’s Risky Strategy to Blockade Iran’s Blockade

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**Michael Barbaro** (0:37)
From the New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily.

**SPEAKER_4** (0:47)
It is a high-stakes game of blockade chicken.

**Eric Schmitt** (0:51)
The US asserts control over the Strait of Hormuz. Iran, for its part, threatens retaliation.

**Michael Barbaro** (0:56)
For the past two days, the United States has enforced a risky naval blockade of Iran, designed to end the war on American terms.

**SPEAKER_4** (1:06)
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.

**Michael Barbaro** (1:16)
Today, a look at the strategy behind the blockade, the dangers that it poses, and whether or not it's actually working.

**SPEAKER_6** (1:27)
We can't let a country blackmail or extort the world because that's what they're doing. They're really blackmailing the world. We're not going to let that happen.

**Michael Barbaro** (1:38)
I spoke with White House correspondent David Sanger, energy reporter Rebecca Elliott, and military correspondent Eric Schmitt. It's Wednesday, April 15th.
David, Rebecca, Eric, thank you for joining us for this roundtable discussion. We appreciate it.

**David Sanger** (2:10)
Great to be here.

**Rebecca Elliott** (2:11)
Thanks for having me.

**Michael Barbaro** (2:12)
Thank you. David, I wanna 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?

**David Sanger** (2:50)
You're absolutely right, Michael, that 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.

**Michael Barbaro** (3:26)
Literally, when we say tolls, literally like the one you pass on the highway.

**David Sanger** (3:30)
Yeah, $2 million. Imagine every time your easy pass went through, it put $2 million bucks 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.

**Michael Barbaro** (4:02)
Okay. So Eric, just define this pretty brute force military concept of a naval blockade, because it's its own act of aggression.

**Eric Schmitt** (4:14)
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.

**Michael Barbaro** (4:58)
Basically, the idea is to strangle Iran's economy, but specifically, Rebecca, to strangle its oil.

**Rebecca Elliott** (5:05)
That's right. And what's so interesting is that Iran has been able to maintain oil going through the Strait in a way that its neighbors have not. So it's exerting this control over the waterway by attacks and threats of attacks.