John A. Johnson

🇺🇸🇮🇷 The talks in Islamabad failed. Vance flew home. And within hours, CENTCOM announced the U.S. will blockade all exports from Iranian ports starting this morning. All vessels. All nations. Arabian Gulf and Gulf of Oman. No exceptions. Let's talk about what this actually means for your wallet, and everyone else's. The Strait of Hormuz has been effectively closed since March 4. Iran shut it down when the war started. That already removed 27% of the world's seaborne crude oil trade from the market overnight. Brent crude is sitting at $95 a barrel. Up 31% since February 28. US crude up 44%. And that was before today. Now you're adding a U.S. counter-blockade on top. There are an estimated 230 fully loaded oil tankers sitting inside the Gulf right now going nowhere. One energy analyst at Columbia put the shortage at 7 million barrels of crude and 4 million barrels of refined product per day not reaching markets. Every single day. The knock-on effects are already visible. QatarEnergy declared force majeure on all LNG exports. Qatar supplies a massive share of Europe and Asia's gas. Restarting LNG liquefaction once it shuts down takes weeks, not days. China, India, Japan and South Korea get 75% of their regional oil imports and 59% of their LNG through this corridor. Those are the four largest manufacturing economies on Earth. If you're wondering why your energy bill, your groceries, your shipping costs are about to move, this is why. And the threat doesn't stop at Hormuz. Iran's allies are openly floating shutting Bab al-Mandeb too, the other end of the Arabian Sea. If that closes alongside Hormuz, a full quarter of the world's energy supply is blocked simultaneously. One Columbia analyst said it plainly this weekend: oil prices will stay elevated "into the end of 2026" regardless of when the war ends, because even after a deal the infrastructure damage alone will take months to repair. This is a global supply shock in slow motion, and it just got a second act.

This is happening in Spain. This is what an invasion looks like. This should radicalize you.

NEW: Iran and the United States have fundamentally different interpretations of the ongoing negotiations, which will generate friction. Iran seeks an all-encompassing agreement that will end the threat of war with the United States, while the United States seeks a much narrower agreement centered on the current war. The US delegation, led by US Vice President JD Vance and including US Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, appears to be pursuing a narrow, issue-specific negotiation focused on de-escalatory mechanisms around the Strait of Hormuz, and reportedly secondary matters like detainees. Iran is using the existence of an unknown number of naval mines it laid in the Strait of Hormuz to force ships to use Iranian territorial waters to traverse the Strait, which enables Iran to shakedown these ships for fees while the ships are in Iranian territorial waters. This protection racket is illegal under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. Iran likely designed its threatening behavior and its shakedowns to disrupt the global economy, which Iran calculates will enable it to extract concessions from the United States. Iran warned merchant ships that mines could exist in a “hazardous area” that covers 1,394 sq km of the Strait, including the normal traffic separation scheme (shipping lanes) that ships use to transit the Strait. The current ceasefire will provide Iran an opportunity to reorganize its missile force and recover from the temporary disruption wrought to the missile force during constant US and Israeli operations. Consistent US and Israeli operations over Iran had suppressed Iran’s missile force by preventing Iran from digging out launchers, disrupting command-and-control, and creating pervasive fear in military units that made them unwilling or unable to conduct attacks, as ISW-CTP has previously assessed. Iranian Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei continues to recover from severe facial and leg injuries that he sustained in the February 28 strike on the supreme leader’s compound in Tehran Province. Three unspecified individuals close to Mojtaba’s inner circle told Reuters on April 11 that the strike disfigured Mojtaba’s face and injured one or both of his legs. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) may be helping Iran to reconstitute some of its degraded air defense capabilities during the current ceasefire. The PRC is preparing to deliver man-portable air-defense systems (MANPADS) to Iran within the coming weeks, according to three sources familiar with recent US intelligence assessments.

This is amazing 😍😍