It turns out there’s a remarkably simple way to get oil flowing through the Strait of Hormuz again, but Donald Trump, angsty, petty, and not at all impressed with how fake news media has been covering his war, is having absolutely none of it.
Iran has been telling this to anyone who’ll listen for weeks: all you need to do is pay a toll, get a stamp, and sail through. Some tankers have quietly done exactly that, reportedly forking over up to $2 million per vessel to cross the waterway that handles roughly a fifth of the world’s seaborne crude.
The path looks simple enough, right? Many countries would much rather just pay the toll, allowing the global economy to exhale after this harmful interlude. Well, not if Trump has anything to say about it.
The president has presided over a war that is causing the world a considerable amount of financial woe. Now, this Friday, the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control issued a formal alert warning it that paying Iran’s toll exposes them to “punitive sanctions.”
They’ve been very thorough, too. Cash deposits, crypto exchanges, transfers in any currencies, and even charitable donations routed through the Iranian Red Crescent or the Bonyad Mostazafan (an organization controlled by the Iranian state) will get flagged. OFAC thought of everything and the message to shippers is crystal clear.
All of this comes as gas prices hit a national average of $4.43 a gallon according to AAA, with some places like California going as high as $6.08. Inflation also hit 3.3 percent in March, the highest annual rate in nearly two years. China, Japan, India, South Korea, are all suffering as a result, and even Europe is contemplating another energy crisis, if not a recession.
The European Central Bank has warned that a prolonged conflict will likely trigger stagflation and push Germany and Italy into technical recession by year’s end.
And Trump’s idea of addressing all these concerns is to just put more pressure on global finance chains.
It’s utterly baffling how we got here. Let’s forget for a moment that the Strait was open before the U.S. launched this war. And let’s forget that the Trump administration has failed to address the elephant in the room for more than two months. Iran’s most recent proposal was straightforward: reopen the Strait of Hormuz in exchange for the United States lifting its naval blockade of Iranian ports.
You know, exactly like how we had it before February 28. Washington rejected it, with Trump claiming that the concessions were still not good enough.
And sure, if you don’t want the public embarrassment, there was always a quiet way out of this. Let them pay the toll and save their economies.
Trump prefers the alternative, and it involves punishing the world, rejecting a peace offer, and watching as the global economy takes a punch in the face every day.
The art of the deal, folks.
