One of the points of government that Donald Trump has never understood is that threats are not a form of policy. Trump’s Iran war was marked by presidents threatening to drop more bombs. Iran has responded to these threats by ignoring or mocking them.
Threats are only effective if they are taken seriously. Trump has been threatening for months, but he never responds, so Iran does not seem to believe him.
After the bombings failed to force Iran to surrender and the Iranians responded by closing the Strait of Hormuz, Trump responded with a blockade of the Strait that he said was intended to force the Iranians to the negotiating table because they would no longer have storage capacity for their oil and would be forced to halt production.
Javier Blas, a columnist at Bloomberg, wrote on X that Trump’s new efforts to reopen the Strait are an admission that the blockade failed:
The push to reopen the Strait of Hormuz today, as two U.S. warships and two U.S.-flagged merchant ships pass through it, signals that the White House realizes it cannot continue to wait for the blockade to force Iran to the negotiating table.
In fact, it is an admission that the blockade is not working (if the blockade is seen as a means to obtain Iranian concessions, and not as an end in itself). The timeline of what the blockade would do to Iran’s oil industry was completely wrong.
The blockade was intended to give Iran the urgency to end the war by putting the same pressure on the country that the Trump administration had imposed, but since it did not work, Trump has returned to threatening Iran.
