DAY 44. OPERATION EPIC FURY.
The Valve Turns: America's Blockade and the Reckoning That NATO Built
From Confusion to Clarity
"Effective immediately, the United States Navy, the Finest in the World, will begin the process of BLOCKADING any and all Ships trying to enter, or leave, the Strait of Hormuz."
That sentence, posted to Truth Social by President Donald Trump today, April 12, 2026, is the most consequential single act of American strategic power since the war began on February 28. It requires careful explanation, because what it means and what most of the press will say it means are not the same thing.
Let me start at the beginning of this particular story, because the ending cannot be understood without it.
I. The Story the Press Will Not Tell: Europe Had Its Chance
On March 15, with the strait already effectively closed and global oil prices surging past one hundred dollars a barrel, President Trump did something remarkable. He called on the countries of the world that receive their oil through the Strait of Hormuz to take care of that passage militarily. He was not asking for charity. He was offering a straightforward proposition: this is your oil, this is your economy, here is your opportunity to stand alongside the United States and do something about it.
The response from America's NATO allies was immediate and nearly unanimous. Germany said it was not their war. Spain declined. Italy declined. Estonia declined. The United Kingdom said it was "intensively looking" at options and then kept looking without acting. Japan ruled out sending naval vessels. Australia said no. South Korea said no. The European Union talked about studying whether to expand existing naval missions, which is the diplomatic equivalent of asking for more time to find a reason not to show up.
German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius stated it bluntly: "This is not our war, we have not started it."
Trump called their decision a "very foolish mistake" and said the United States "does not need the help of anyone." He was right on both counts, but the full weight of the second statement was not yet clear. It is clear now.
Trump then tried a different approach. On March 20, after American forces began the aerial campaign to suppress Iranian naval assets in the strait, he announced publicly that the Hormuz Strait would have to be guarded and policed by the nations that use it. He said the United States does not use it. He said if asked, the US would help, but it should not be necessary once Iran's threat was eradicated. He was handing the problem back to the countries whose economies depended on the solution.
Five large European nations and Japan eventually issued a statement in late March declaring support for opening the strait, but the condition attached was revealing: they would contribute only after a truce was established and a multilateral naval coalition was built. In other words, they wanted America to do the dangerous work, reach the ceasefire, and then invite them in for the orderly part. They wanted to police a peace they had declined to help create.
Russia and China vetoed a UN Security Council resolution that would have authorized military force to open the strait, blocking any international legal framework for what needed to be done. That veto, on April 7, was the last act before the ceasefire was announced.
Now hold all of that in your mind as you read what happened today.
II. Twenty-One Hours, No Deal, and a Turned Valve
The Islamabad talks were the highest level direct engagement between the United States and Iran in forty seven years. JD Vance, Steve Witkoff, and Jared Kushner sat across from Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi for twenty one hours over Saturday and Sunday.
You got to see on social media the people who were cheering for the side that slaughtered tens of thousands of its civilians here in 2026, because they couldn't help praising the credentials of the murderers from the regime who showed up.
Pakistan's army chief mediated. Technical papers were exchanged. The sun went down in Islamabad and came back up.
The central breakdown was the nuclear question. Vance said the core American demand was a fundamental commitment from Iran not to develop nuclear weapons and not to pursue the tools that would enable them to quickly achieve one. Iran would not give that commitment. Its officials accused Washington of excessive demands, of overreach, of a failure to earn Iran's trust. Tehran's parliament speaker said the American side had failed to gain the confidence of the Iranian government.
Vance was direct at the press conference. "The bad news is that we have not reached an agreement. And I think that's bad news for Iran much more than it's bad news for the United States of America."
He said the offer was final and best. He said Iran had chosen not to accept American terms. He said the ball was in Tehran's court.
Within hours, Trump posted the blockade announcement.
This is not a tantrum. This is not escalation for its own sake. This is the logical consequence of a strategy that has been building for forty-three days and that the entire world had the opportunity to avoid.
III. What the Blockade Actually Is
The press will cover this as a dramatic escalation. It is something more precise than that.
Iran closed the strait to hurt American allies. The IRGC issued warnings forbidding passage, launched twenty-one confirmed attacks on merchant ships, and laid mines in the shipping lanes. Iran approved passage for a select list of vessels, primarily petroleum ships bound for China and India, and in some cases charged tolls exceeding one million dollars per ship. Tehran was running a tollbooth on the world's most critical waterway, extracting revenue from some nations while punishing others, all while negotiating with the country whose military had spent six weeks destroying its capacity to sustain this posture.
What Trump has now done is take the tollbooth.
An American naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz is not the same as Iran's closure. Iran's closure was enforced by mines, drone boats, and threats, from a navy that no longer meaningfully exists. All twenty eight of Iran's mine dropper boats are at the bottom of the sea. The IRGC Navy has been described by Trump himself as obliterated. What remains of Iran's capacity to threaten shipping is the residual mine field, which Iran cannot locate in its entirety, in a corridor that American destroyers are actively clearing.
The American blockade is enforced by the finest naval force in the history of warfare, operating from a position of total air and sea superiority, with the mine clearing already underway. The difference in capability between Iran's closure and America's blockade is the difference between a padlock on a chain link fence and a vault door made of steel. They both try to deter invaders, only one is capable of resisting all but the most determined and well equipped.
And here is the strategic dimension that transforms this from a military act into a geopolitical lever of the first order. The United States does not depend on the Strait of Hormuz. America is the world's largest oil producer. American LNG flows from Gulf Coast terminals to buyers across the world under long term contracts that are more valuable by the hour as alternatives vanish. Canada produces its own energy. Venezuela, whatever its other problems, is not standing in line for Gulf crude. Russia is a petrostate that benefits from high prices and has no stake in the strait's opening.
The countries that cannot survive this blockade are exactly the countries that refused to help open the strait when they had the chance. China receives a third of its oil through Hormuz. Japan and South Korea are heavily dependent on Gulf crude, and both declined Trump's invitation to join the naval effort. Germany said it was not their war. France and Italy kept studying their options. Egypt depends on remittances from workers in Gulf states whose economies are fracturing. Pakistan is running emergency austerity on a four day work week with a nuclear arsenal it cannot afford to maintain. Turkey is watching its trade routes constrict.
Every one of those countries now has to ask the United States Navy for permission to move their energy supply.
That is the valve. And Trump has turned it.
IV. The Pressure Map That Changes Everything
The strategic logic here is worth stating explicitly, because it is powerful and the media coverage may largely miss it.
A blockade that the United States sustains for sixty to ninety days does not hurt America in any meaningful way. American energy markets are insulated by domestic production. The political geography of American oil is tilted toward the states that sent Trump back to Washington. The voters most exposed to Gulf price disruptions, concentrated in coastal blue states with policies that restricted domestic extraction and pipeline capacity, have less representation in the electoral coalition that matters to this administration. I wrote about this already, and some of it is based on even in a global market, Japan's increased oil bids hurting California prices more than Texas. It is the energy map of the United States colliding with its political map.
But sixty to ninety days of a full American blockade has a significant negative impact on the economies of every country that either opposed the war, refused to help open the strait, or actively undermined the American position. China's manufacturing sector runs on the oil that flows through Hormuz. Its reserve buffer is measured in months, not years. The yuan denominated oil purchase architecture that Beijing has spent years constructing as an alternative to dollar denominated energy trade goes dark when the oil itself cannot move. China loses not just the physical supply but the entire monetary strategy that has been built around accessing it cheaply.
Pakistan, which brokered the ceasefire and hosted the talks, is now in an excruciating position. It cannot pressure Iran to accept a deal if the blockade has already made Iran's leverage over the strait irrelevant. It cannot ignore the economic consequences for its own population. It has a nuclear arsenal and a government running emergency austerity. When the American blockade makes clear that Iran's continued intransigence is costing Pakistan directly, the nature of Pakistan's "mediation" will shift.
Turkey negotiated passage for its ships directly with Tehran during the early weeks of the conflict. Fourteen Turkish vessels were awaiting Iranian clearance as of mid March. Turkey's trade corridors, already stressed by regional instability, tighten further under an American blockade that it has no capacity to challenge. Ankara's incentive to pressure Tehran is now existential rather than diplomatic.
Western Europe, which told Trump this was not their war, is staring at an energy crisis that the head of the International Energy Agency called more serious than the crises of 1973, 1979, and 2002 combined. European nations that denied the United States airspace access, refused to deploy naval vessels, and issued press releases about dangerous escalation while American sailors cleared mines in the strait are now entirely dependent on a Navy whose protection they declined to share. The irony is precise and deserved.
V. What the Blockade Does to Iran
For Iran, the American blockade completes something the war has been building toward. The IRGC's strategy was to use the strait as leverage: keep it closed to extract concessions, charge tolls to preferred buyers, and maintain at least some economic lifeline while negotiations dragged on. That strategy depended on Iran having meaningful control of the waterway.
Iran no longer has meaningful control of the waterway. It has mines it cannot fully locate in a corridor where American destroyers are already operating. It has no navy capable of enforcing its own closure against American surface combatants. Its air defenses have been systematically degraded over six weeks of sustained strikes. The IRGC's crypto based shadow economy collapsed by roughly eighty percent when internet connectivity went dark under the bombardments.
The billboards in Tehran today still read: "The Strait of Hormuz remains closed." A woman was photographed walking past one at Revolution Square this morning. That billboard is the regime telling its population a story about who controls the strait. The American blockade announcement is the end of that story. The regime that tried to use the strait as a weapon is watching the weapon be taken from its hands and turned against it.
The economic pressure on the IRGC's internal cohesion, which I have tracked across these essays, does not improve under a blockade. It worsens drastically. Soldiers who were already watching their pay become unreliable are now watching the regime's last negotiating card disappear. The preference cascade I have described does not reverse under these conditions. It accelerates.
China cannot save Iran from this. Beijing can apply diplomatic pressure, but it cannot project naval force that challenges American surface combatants in a strait where Iran's own military has been obliterated. The leverage China held over Tehran during the ceasefire negotiations, the ability to say "take the deal because we cannot keep buying your oil if the strait stays closed," now runs in the opposite direction. China needs the blockade lifted. The United States is the only party that can lift it. That conversation does not happen through Tehran.
VI. The Sequence I Expected, and Where We Are
I have been wrong about timing in this conflict, and I said so clearly in the Day 39 update and the version of this essay I wrote earlier today. I want to revisit that honestly now that the situation has moved again.
The blockade was the option I identified as the "control, not destruction" doctrine at work. When I wrote the Kharg analysis in March, I argued that the United States was positioning to hold the valve, not blow up the pipe. A blockade is the valve turned to the American position. It is consistent with everything the White House has signaled since the first day of the operation: preserve the infrastructure that a post regime Iran will need, destroy the military capacity that defends the regime, and use economic pressure to accelerate the internal collapse.
The sequence I described in "The Next Week" essay on March 18 remains the framework. The fires phase may still happen soon. The Iranian small ship arsenal has been somewhat destroyed, but they still have island bases I would not be surprised to see entirely destroyed. The 3 islands Iran took from the UAE illegally would make a clean base of ongoing control of the strait by whoever the Gulf States pay to do the work their military cannot.
The naval superiority is established. The mine clearing is underway. The blockade is now announced and, as of this writing, beginning.
What I did not anticipate was the precise form of the final pressure instrument. I assumed the Kharg seizure would come before the blockade option. It is possible Kharg still comes. But it is also possible that the blockade is the instrument that produces the political transition without requiring an amphibious operation, if the internal pressure it generates, combined with the Kurdish movement in the north and the weapons flowing to opposition forces, is sufficient to break the regime's coherence before a landing is necessary.
Watch the next seventy two hours. The blockade creates immediate, catastrophic pressure on China, which is the party most capable of forcing a regime decision. If Beijing concludes, within the next few days, that the American blockade is not a bluff and will not be lifted without a real Iranian commitment on nuclear weapons, the phone calls Beijing makes to Tehran will be different from any phone call Tehran has received in this war. Not a request.
The signal I am still watching for inside Iran remains the same: the lion flag unfurled publicly by a coordinated opposition group, the Kurdish forces moving on IRGC positions in the north, the weapons flowing from the airfield nodes that the 82nd would secure. None of those signals have gone out yet. The blockade increases the pressure under which any of those signals would travel.
VII. A Word About the Ingratitude That Built This Moment
I want to say something plainly that will not appear in major European newspapers and will be mostly ignored by the American press.
The nations that are now most desperate for the Strait of Hormuz to reopen are the same nations that told the United States, when given the opportunity to help, that this was not their war.
Germany, whose defense minister announced it was not their war, gets twelve to fourteen percent of its LNG from Qatar through the strait. It spent decades underfunding NATO while sheltering under American security guarantees. It said no when asked to stand alongside the country whose military deterred the Soviet Union from the Fulda Gap for forty years. Germany has the most absurd energy policy of any important nation on Earth. They increased their reliance on Russian oil and gas while pretending that they were shutting down their domestic production to save the Earth. Closing nuclear power in Germany to buy more oil from Russia is inconsistent even from the framework of climate change cultists.
Japan, which operates the most capable AEGIS fleet outside the United States, ruled out sending naval vessels. Japan, whose southwestern island chain sits astride the Taiwan Strait, which depends entirely on American military commitment for its security against China, looked at a request to send ships to a waterway it depends on for its own energy supply and said no.
France and Italy and Spain issued statements about dangerous escalation. France opened talks with Iranian officials to negotiate passage for French vessels, dealing directly with the regime that was attacking global shipping, rather than standing with the country clearing the mines.
The UN Security Council resolution that would have provided legal authorization for force to open the strait was vetoed by Russia and China. The nations that could have supported it did not fight hard enough for it.
Russia as I have written previously is in the awkward position of not really wanting the strait open. Catastrophically high oil and gas prices are a windfall to their battered war time economy. There are only two consequential geopolitical foes to the United States and they are at odds about this blockade. Russia may harrumph for the media, but China needs the strait open, and Russia is happy for it to stay closed.
Now the Navy Japan and Western Europe declined to join is the gatekeeper to the energy they cannot live without.
Trump said on March 20 that other nations would need to police the strait because the United States does not need it. He was giving them notice. They did not take it. The blockade is the consequence.
You were offered a chance to help open the door. You said it was not your door. Now it is our door, and we decide who gets through.
That is not cruelty. That is the logical end of forty years of freeloading on American power while lecturing Washington about the rules based international order.
VIII. A Pastoral Word, Because None of This Exists Apart from Human Beings
People are dying. Iranian civilians who never voted for the IRGC, never chose to close the strait, never asked to be born into a regime that tried to assassinate the American president have been buried under rubble. Lebanese families are living through an Israeli campaign against Hezbollah that has killed over two thousand people in their country since March. Israel is in Lebanon because attacks never stopped on their civilians through every cease fire. American service members, thirteen of them confirmed killed, have families who pray every night that the phone does not ring.
The analysis I write attempts to be clear eyed about strategic reality. I do not pretend that clarity is the same thing as comfort. A blockade that crushes China's economy and forces a regime decision from Tehran will also crush the livelihoods of Egyptians who cannot afford the fertilizer that feeds their children, of Pakistani families already on emergency rations, of workers across the developing world whose daily existence runs on affordable energy.
I pray for the Iranian people most of all. They have not known freedom in nearly fifty years. The regime that has governed them has used their country as a weapons platform and their children as cannon fodder for proxy wars in Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq, and Syria. The door that this blockade is meant to push open is the door to their freedom, not just to American strategic advantage.
Pray for the Kurds, who have been promised things before and betrayed before, and who deserve the formal recognition their decades of partnership and suffering have earned. Pray for the people inside Iran who are watching the lights go off and asking whether the regime that promised to protect them has spent their entire lives lying.
Pray for the American sailors and Marines who are going to be standing watch in a strait that still has mines, in waters where a desperate regime may still attempt one last act of violence before it loses the capacity to act at all.
And give thanks this morning as many of us head off to church, even in the uncertainty, that the country standing at the valve is one that, for all its flaws, wrote a Constitution that begins with the words We the People, that abolished slavery, that rebuilt its enemies after World War II, that has been the indispensable nation in every genuine crisis of the last eighty years.
We are still that nation. What happens in the next seventy two hours will say a great deal about whether the world that comes out of this conflict understands that.
The Picture Right Now, as of This Afternoon
Day 44. The Islamabad talks have collapsed. The ceasefire is in name only, with Iran's billboards still declaring the strait closed even as American destroyers clear its mines. The blockade is announced and beginning.
China has a few months of oil reserves and a manufacturing economy that runs on crude. They have been buying it at a discount from Iran. They have plentiful coal reserves, but they cannot just switch over quickly. Germany is staring at an energy crisis its own defense minister said was not its war. Japan declined to send ships and now cannot get ships through without American permission. Pakistan brokered a ceasefire that produced no agreement and now hosts a population paying emergency prices for fuel it cannot easily replace. Turkey negotiated its own passage with Tehran and now depends on an arrangement with a navy that no longer exists to enforce it.
Iran has billboards. America has the valve.
The fireworks show is not over. The finale has not yet begun. But the crowd that laughed during the pauses is starting to understand something about who controls when the next one goes up.
From Confusion to Clarity
Pictured is the Boxer, which is scheduled to arrive in a little over a week
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