00:00Donald Trump posted on Truth Social, quote,
00:03effective immediately, the United States Navy, the finest in the world,
00:06will begin the process of blockading any and all ships trying to enter or leave the Strait of Hormuz.
00:12Additionally, at an appropriate moment, we are fully locked and loaded,
00:17and our military will finish up the little that is left of Iran.
00:22Let us try to understand how a blockade would work.
00:25I'm joined by Admiral James Stavridis, former NATO Supreme Commander.
00:33Jim, you've traversed these straits dozens, maybe hundreds of times.
00:38Tell us how a blockade would work and how much American naval power would be required to make it work.
00:47Well, I certainly agree with one thing the president said was,
00:51the United States Navy is the finest in the world.
00:54I'll take that.
00:55But this is not trivial work.
00:59Any blockade is difficult because it's an open seaway.
01:04Historically, we are enormous supporters of freedom of navigation.
01:09So when you conduct a blockade, it is an act of war,
01:14and it is something that has grave consequence in terms of how you execute it.
01:19As to how many ships you would need, I'd say if I were the admiral in command and Brad Cooper,
01:25Admiral Brad Cooper is the CENTCOM commander, he will probably want to put two aircraft carrier strike groups.
01:33So that's two carriers, so he has plenty of air cover up above him.
01:38And then he'll want about a dozen destroyers and frigates.
01:42All of this would be arrayed in the southern part of the Gulf.
01:47All the way down outside the Gulf would be the U.S. forces.
01:51And then inside the Gulf, Farid, you've got probably half a dozen American warships,
01:56and you'd want to bring in the Emirati Navy, the Saudi Navy.
02:01So you'd try and bottle it up on both sides.
02:05Bottom line, this is a big task, and it's a big gamble.
02:10So final thought here, what's the play?
02:14Why are we doing this, I think is going to be the question on most people's minds.
02:19And it's an economic squeeze.
02:21So if you think of this on a scale that runs from doing nothing, walking away from the table,
02:26ceasing hostilities, that runs to destroying the civilization of Iran.
02:32An economic blockade like this is right in the middle.
02:35It puts economic pressure on Tehran without destroying the oil facilities,
02:41which you'd want to preserve into the future.
02:45So big, complicated undertaking.
02:47Hardly a trivial move on the chessboard we've been watching.
02:52And so far, Jim, Iran has found asymmetrical ways, often quite cheap,
02:58to maintain its control of the strait by essentially just spooking insurance companies enough
03:05that there is no traffic.
03:07Is there an asymmetrical, is there something the Iranians can do?
03:11What do you imagine would be their kind of countermeasure?
03:16Let's do it from the inside out.
03:18So let's look at the strait itself.
03:20The asymmetric play there would be smuggling.
03:24It would be trying to run the blockade.
03:28Think what the Confederate South did in the United States when Abraham Lincoln put an enormous blockade
03:34around the entire southern states.
03:37It's pretty porous.
03:40And so they could certainly try smuggling.
03:43That'll be very difficult.
03:45Secondly, they could put more mines in the water.
03:49Fortunately, CENTCOM has destroyed, according to reports, 90-plus percent of the 5,000 pre-war mines.
03:56But Iran could put a lot more mines into the water, and they could come off small boats or dows,
04:02which are the ubiquitous indigenous craft of the Gulf.
04:06Moving out from the Gulf itself, I would start to really worry about cyber.
04:11And what I mean by that is here's China, an expert cyber nation, alongside Russia, another expert cyber nation.
04:22Here's a way that they could assist Iran by using cyber.
04:27And all of this, Fareed, as you've reported on over the last couple of months,
04:31comes at a time when AI is making cyber tools much more accessible and available.
04:37So this emerging strain of cyber threat is one stream, and then aid from Russia and China
04:45is another stream of threat.
04:47It's like in Ghostbusters.
04:49You don't want those streams to cross.
04:51So there are three things they could think about.
04:53I want to bring in now the president's first-term UN ambassador, Nikki Haley,
04:59who advised the president on Iran and many other things in that role.
05:03She is currently the Walter P. Stern chair at the Hudson Institute.
05:07Ambassador, thank you so much for being here.
05:09I, of course, want to start with what we just heard from the president,
05:12that he is going to start a blockade that any and all ships trying to enter or leave the Shrade
05:22of Hormuz.
05:23What do you make of that?
05:24Is that the right move?
05:26Good morning, Dana.
05:27Well, first, I think you look at where they were going into the negotiations.
05:30The U.S. had a 15-point plan.
05:33Iran had a 10-point plan.
05:35They really were miles apart.
05:37The Iranians were not willing to give up their nuclear production.
05:40They weren't willing to give up holding the Shrade of Hormuz hostage.
05:43And I think Vice President Vance did the right thing by walking away and saying,
05:47we're not going to continue talks.
05:49This isn't worth our time, and we'll finish the mission.
05:52And I think what you're seeing President Trump do is not pause at all
05:56and say, we're going to go after Iran where it hurts.
06:00I think if you look over the span of this war, CENTCOM has done a remarkable job by taking out
06:07the majority of their missile drone naval capabilities,
06:11which really was at the heart of the strategy of what Iran wanted to do.
06:15But the part to really bring Iran to its knees is to go after it economically.
06:20And, you know, I think making sure that the strait is open is the first part of that.
06:26I think the second part of that is going to be really important.
06:29It's finally dealing with Russia and China.
06:32You know, you look at Russia, and it was their intelligence that was used to hit our bases.
06:37You know, in Turkey and Qatar, the oil fields in Saudi Arabia, they gave the intelligence to Iran.
06:43Iran shot those.
06:46And China, hundreds of, you know, hundreds of ballistic missiles have been made because China has supplied them.
06:53And now we know that China is getting ready to give, you know, man pads,
06:57which is going to only give them more air defense systems to work with.
07:00So, look, I think Trump wasted no time.
07:03I think he's moving forward.
07:04And I think he's calling Iran's bluff, whether it's a blockade or some other military operation.
07:10Would you support that to reopen the strait?
07:15But I don't understand how blockading the strait is going to somehow push the Iranians into opening it.
07:23I don't get the connection there.
07:25I agree.
07:26I think actually Ambassador Haley underestimated the threat, the economic threat.
07:30We know we've got $4 a gallon gasoline.
07:32We know that 25 percent of the world's natural gas goes through the strait.
07:36We know a lot of aluminum does.
07:38We know that this is so devastated.
07:41Asian countries right now, they're shutting down their economies one day a week.
07:45Fertilizer costs up.
07:46You know, and the thing I was hoping was we could come to some negotiated truce or end.
07:52But even with that, you're going to see these energy prices continue at record levels, not for weeks, but months
07:59and years.
08:00And how blockading the strait gets it gets it open suddenly.
08:03I don't get that logic.
08:05Yeah.
08:06I mean, it sounds like and this is reading this lengthy post and not being able to ask the president
08:12at this moment.
08:13But it sounds like they're trying to extract economic pain on Iran the way Iran is trying to do on
08:20the world.
08:21I do want to ask you about what the president has said.
08:23But Dana, Dana, just one quick thing there.
08:26You know, here is the irony of this.
08:30When the president decided to release the sanctions on the Iranian oil that was already at sea, we literally gave
08:40Iran, the Iranian regime, $14 billion.
08:44We are paying, helping the Iranians fund their effort to attack us, to attack Israel and to attack our allies.
08:51That is the most crazy upside down kind of policy I can possibly imagine.
08:58So, you know, if you want to strangle Iran, why would we leave the sanctions on their oil?
09:03It's crazy.
09:05Even before these talks concluded without a deal, the president said, regardless of what happens, we win.
09:11We totally defeated that country.
09:17You have a lot of access to intelligence.
09:20You are one of the few people in this country who has at least presumably you know what's going on
09:26on the ground there.
09:27Given that, how do you think the U.S. gets out of this war?
09:34You know, it is an extraordinarily fair question.
09:37I know people have said, well, even though you may not like how we got there, what do we do
09:44now?
09:44Because, you know, the president can declare victory.
09:48And I think, you know, I don't know, I've not met an American yet who wants to send their son
09:52or daughter to another ground war in the Middle East, especially in Iran.
09:56But, you know, if we declare victory today, luckily we can maybe then reopen the straits and we can move
10:04forward.
10:04But Iran will claim with some vindication that they have taken on the two major military powers in the world,
10:12United States and Israel, and at least fought them to a draw.
10:15Our Gulf nation states who look to us for protection, we've seen that we've helped some, but take the UAE.
10:22The Emiratis actually has been bombed and missile attacked many more times than Israel.
10:28Or are they going to hedge their bets?
10:30And because we did this with Israel alone and no other allies, you know, this is where the kind of
10:36actions of, you know, President Trump threatening NATO or threatening Greenland hurts us when we look to those NATO allies
10:44for either assistance or support in this kind of action.
10:47Again, I shed no tears for the Iranian leadership that's been killed.
10:51They are awful, but I don't know how outside of the president's own bubble he can somehow claim that Iran
11:00has been totally destroyed when we see them continue to strike, when they have virtual control of the strait.
11:07And unfortunately, the regime is, if anything, filled with more radicals than before.
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