Trump’s Risky Strategy to Blockade Iran’s Blockade

This podcast is supported by Californians for energy independence. Iran halting oil shipments. Fuel prices surging. When crisis hits overseas, our state gets punched harder at the pump. That's because California's policies are pushing our refineries to close, forcing us to import fuel, handing control of our energy supply to volatile foreign countries. And as global conflict erupts, our access to energy is threatened and our prices spike. Californians are paying the price for our state's failed energy policies. From New York Times, I'm Michael Bavaro. This is The Daily. It is a high stakes game of blockade chicken. The US asserts control over the Strait Of Hormuz. Iran, for its part, threatens retaliation. For the past two days, The United States has enforced a risky naval blockade of Iran designed to end the war on American terms. 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. Today, a look at the strategy behind the blockade, the dangers that it poses, and whether or not it's actually working. 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 gonna let that happen. I spoke with White House correspondent David Sanger, energy reporter Rebecca Elliott, and military correspondent Eric Schmidt. It's Wednesday, April 15. David, Rebecca, Eric, thank you for joining us for this roundtable discussion. We appreciate it. Great to be here. Thanks for having me. 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? 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 forty seven 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. Literally. When we say tolls, literally, like, the one you pass on the highway. Yeah. $2,000,000. Imagine every time your E ZPass went through, it put $2,000,000 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 …