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Before walking out of a volatile interview on NBC's "Meet The Press" this weekend, President Trump defended his progress in the war with Iran. He said a ceasefire has proven effective and that the conflict is only three months old. Meanwhile, Iran and Israel traded strikes overnight, and one of the main stumbling blocks of the war, Iran's control of the Strait of Hormuz, remains unresolved. NPR's Kat Lonsdorf looks at the state of the strait.
KAT LONSDORF, BYLINE: Richard Meade is the editor in chief of Lloyd's List Intelligence...
RICHARD MEADE: We track ships.
LONSDORF: ...A noted authority on global shipping activity. Meade and his colleagues have spent a lot of time in the past three months tracking ships around the Strait of Hormuz, and something recently caught their attention.
MEADE: There has been over the last three weeks, a fairly steady flow of ships that are moving.
LONSDORF: U.S. forces have been quietly guiding a handful of ships through the strait, away from Iran and near the coast of Oman. When asked by NPR, U.S. Central Command did not dispute that assessment. But this is not an official operation like the short-lived Project Freedom that the Trump administration announced at the beginning of last month only to pause days later, which would have seen the U.S. Navy physically escort stranded ships through the strait. Meade says ship operators tell him there is no central coordination. The journey is still extremely risky, seen as kind of a last resort. Over several weeks, only a few ships a day have gotten out this way, a far cry from the more than 120 daily that passed through the strait before the war.
MEADE: This is not a normalization of trade.
LONSDORF: The Strait of Hormuz is a critical global choke point. Its closure has led to a significant disruption in energy supplies worldwide, and it's become a key focus of any talks about ending the war in Iran. Secretary of State Marco Rubio was questioned about it several times last week as he made his rounds on Capitol Hill. But both the U.S. and Iran have recently dug in their heels about their respective blockades on the strait. Here's President Trump in that "Meet The Press" interview over the weekend with Kristen Welker.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "MEET THE PRESS")
KRISTEN WELKER: There is a naval blockade in place...
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Yeah.
WELKER: ...Which technically is an act of war under international law. So is this a war as long as there's a naval blockade in place?
TRUMP: Well, we have a blockade. It's been extremely effective. And the reason we have it is they tried to blockade, and now we blockaded them.
LONSDORF: Trump eventually walked out of that interview. And even when or if the strait does reopen, it will take a while to fix the mess that's been made.
TOM BARTOSAK-HARLOW: There's around probably 1,000 ships at the moment that need to get out.
LONSDORF: Tom Bartosak-Harlow is a spokesperson for the International Chamber of Shipping, the global trade association for ship owners and operators. He says just getting the ships that are currently stuck out will take days, maybe weeks. And getting trade back to where it was back in early February, before Israel and the U.S. attacked Iran, will likely take months.
BARTOSAK-HARLOW: We need to see a return to the situation that we had before the start of this war, where ships had unimpeded access through the Strait of Hormuz.
LONSDORF: Not just for the global economy, but because that's what's expected under international law.
BARTOSAK-HARLOW: By definition, freedom of navigation is free.
LONSDORF: Anything short of that would set a new and dangerous precedent. But others, like Meade at Lloyd's List, worry that new precedent has already been set.
MEADE: The reality is that once the strait has been closed once, it can be closed again.
LONSDORF: Meaning that countries and companies are already rerouting to rely on it less. And this weaponization of trade has implications for other crucial waterways too. In April, Indonesia's finance minister floated the idea of tolling ships transiting the Strait of Malacca, another massively important global shipping route. He later walked that back after pressure from Indonesia's foreign minister. And over the weekend, the Iran-backed Houthi militia in Yemen threatened to stop Israeli ships from operating in the Red Sea. As Meade puts it...
MEADE: What happens in Hormuz does not stay in Hormuz.
LONSDORF: How this all ends will have ripple effects around the world. Kat Lonsdorf, NPR News, Washington. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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