Tuna
4.4K posts
@tuna3452
you cannot swim for new horizons until you have the courage to lose sight of the shore.
🇺🇸🇮🇷 Trump just drew a hard red line on the Iran deal. Reporter: “Must Iran stop funding Hezbollah?” Trump: "Yes, that is a must." He isn't just asking for a nuclear deal. He's asking Iran to defund its most powerful regional weapon.
🇮🇷 Iran just passed a law charging tolls to use the world's most important waterway. And there's almost nothing anyone can do about it. The bill is called "The Law on Establishing Iran's Sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz." Tolls in Iranian rials. Extra fees for nations that participated in the war. Permanent ban on Israeli-linked vessels, sanctioning countries, and U.S. military ships. Ships that disobey will be seized, 20% of cargo confiscated. The first toll payment has already been deposited into Iran's central bank. Is it legal? No. Under international law, the Strait is a transit passage and cannot be tolled. But Iran never signed UNCLOS, the convention that says so. And the country enforcing that convention would need to be willing to go to war to do it. After five weeks of Operation Epic Fury, a downed F-15, a closed strait, and $100+ oil... that appetite is gone. China and Russia's role Neither formally recognized Iranian sovereignty. But when Bahrain brought a UN resolution to protect Strait shipping, both vetoed it, calling it "biased against Iran." That veto is the functional equivalent of a green light. What can the world do? Realistically, pay or reroute. The U.S. tried six weeks of the most intensive air campaign since Iraq and couldn't force the strait open. No one is launching another military operation into Iranian waters right now. Europe is rationing diesel. Asia is buying U.S. oil at an 82% premium. Nobody has leverage. The precedent This is the part that outlasts the war. Iran just demonstrated that a determined regional power can convert a chokepoint into sovereign revenue: toll the world's oil supply, get vetoed into protection at the UN, and walk away with a law on the books. Every nation sitting on a strategic waterway is watching. The Panama Canal. The Turkish Straits. The South China Sea. Iran introduced a toll at a strait and thus rewrote what's possible.
🇺🇸🇮🇷 The U.S. blockade will not break Iran, and Washington may be the last to accept that. Iran has absorbed sanctions, assassinations, airstrikes, and now a naval blockade, and each time the expectation was that the pressure would eventually force capitulation, and each time it did not. The regime does not calculate the way Washington assumes it does: Economic pain gets absorbed, deflected onto the population, and reframed as foreign aggression, so it does not translate into political concessions. What Iran is doing right now is not stalling, it is positioning, seizing ships, closing the strait, and calibrating harassment to shift the pressure back onto Washington and the world economy. The blockade is not a stable strategy, it is a transitional phase that ends in one of two places: a negotiated deal that requires U.S. concessions, or military escalation that risks a broader regional war. There is no third option where Iran simply “breaks.” The U.S. must make the same decision they have faced in this region for decades: Escalate or concede, and find a way to call whichever one you choose a victory.
🇺🇸🇮🇷 Oil surged past $93/barrel Iran says they have “no plans” to attend peace talks with the US on Friday. Prices going wild again 👀 Source: @KobeissiLetter
