What Does the President Take Every Day? - The Open Blockade

There are sentences that carry their own rebuttal with them. On Monday, Donald Trump declared at the White House that the Strait of Hormuz was now open, controlled entirely by the U.S. Navy, secured by a blockade that was infallible, a wall of steel. Anyone listening closely could hear the holes appearing in that wall during the very same answer. The strait was open to everyone, he said, just not to Iran, which would not be allowed through, and every now and then, he conceded, the enemy drops a mine that they then find, even though the entire passage has supposedly already been cleared. An infallible blockade that keeps everyone from reaching Iran while mines are still floating around is a remarkable interpretation of the word open.

Trump: "It’s open now. We control the strait. Can Iran make trouble? Yeah."

Can the Iranians cause trouble? Yes, Trump admitted, they can. And with that, the sentence was complete, making the claim and taking it back at the same time: 100 percent control, with the small caveat that the enemy can disrupt things at any moment. Anyone who decides for himself who gets through and who does not is not describing an open waterway, but a chokepoint in his own hands, and nobody dictated that language to him. Whoever grants or denies passage holds the key, and a place you can open and close whenever you please has always been called controlled, not open.

While Washington was invoking its wall of steel, Tehran was speaking a very different language that same day. Esmail Baghaei, spokesman for Iran's Foreign Ministry, said the talks with Oman were solely about finding a way to ensure the safe passage of ships, and that this was separate from reopening the Strait. It would only be opened once the United States dropped the conditions it had imposed on Iran, starting with the naval blockade. Just two days earlier, Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi had said they were very close to an agreement with Oman, but that reopening still depended on further conditions. The two accounts are mutually exclusive: here, an open Strait under American control, there, a closed one that Iran is guarding as its most effective means of pressure. The fact that anyone is negotiating a safe shipping lane at all is the real joke, because a corridor through a body of water presupposes that the waterway is blocked, which one side denies.

The dispute has a history. Ever since the United States and Israel began their campaign against Iran at the end of February, Tehran has effectively kept the narrow passage between Iran and Oman closed, a route through which a major share of the world's oil and gas trade passes; negotiations and fighting have alternated ever since. The closure has driven up energy prices in the United States, which is inconvenient for Trump, because support for this already unpopular war is falling and the midterm elections are coming up in November. The hardliners in Tehran see the blockade as their strength for exactly that reason and are advising against concessions.

Their conditions are out in the open. Last week, a senior Iranian security official laid out what Washington would have to do: lift the naval blockade and sanctions, withdraw American troops from the region, pay war reparations, release frozen assets and end attacks on Iran's allies. Most of that was already included in the Islamabad memorandum signed by both sides in June, although under that agreement the sanctions were only supposed to be lifted once a final deal on the nuclear program had been reached. Within weeks, most of it had been broken, and Trump declared the agreement dead.

An English thinker of the 17th century once observed that words are wise men's counters, but the money of fools. Few thoughts better capture what is happening here. Trump mints the word open like a coin and spends it as though it were backed by value it simply does not have. It is a devaluation of language that closely resembles the currency devaluation he accuses his opponent of: 300 percent, 309 since the night before, he shouted about Iran, a country he said was broke and could no longer pay its soldiers. There is a certain appeal to the comparison, because while he mocks the collapse of the rial, he is printing without backing himself, and no central bank in the world can prop up the value of a word that promises more every day and delivers less.

The rest of the appearance went in the usual fashion. Iran had been the bully of the Middle East for 47, actually 50 years, had killed hundreds of thousands of people and maimed people with roadside bombs, and had even been proud of it; now it was paying the price. He did not mention that Tehran, for its part, believes it can withstand the economic pressure longer than a president with an election date hanging over him. The day before, he had said in an interview that hardship and rising prices would soon force Iran back to the table anyway; he did not threaten new violence, saying they were taking things calmly.

The two sides are not talking directly to each other, even though Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the talks through Oman were taking place with American participation. Baghaei, meanwhile, made clear that it was up to the American side to stop and make amends for what he called its unlawful and destructive actions before there could be any discussion of the next steps. And so two accounts stand against each other, only one of which can be true, and the louder one is rarely the one shouting the loudest about infallibility.

A strait that is open and blockaded at the same time, 100 percent controlled and yet still mined, ultimately remains worth exactly what a word is worth once a fool spends it: a claim that holds only as long as nobody starts counting. Until then, what Washington calls open remains closed in Tehran, and the tankers take their instructions from the water, not from the speech. Meanwhile, the ships on the horizon are waiting for the wall of steel to decide whether it is a door.