The NPR Politics Podcast - How does a blockade in the Strait of Hormuz help Trump?

Episode Date: April 13, 2026

Negotiations with Iran over the weekend ended without a deal. In response, President Trump announced that the U.S. military would effectively close the Strait of Hormuz to all shipping traffic. We discuss how the blockade affects the ongoing war in Iran and the possible political consequences for Republicans.This episode: voting correspondent Miles Parks, national security correspondent Greg Myre, and senior political correspondent Tamara Keith.This podcast was produced by Casey Morell and Bria Suggs, and edited by Rachel Baye.Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi.Listen to every episode of the NPR Politics Podcast sponsor-free, unlock access to bonus episodes with more from the NPR Politics team, and support public media when you sign up for The NPR Politics Podcast+ at plus.npr.org/politics.To manage podcast ad preferences, review the links below:See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. I'm Greg Myrie. I cover national security. And I'm Tamara Keith, senior political correspondent. And today on the show, President Trump has announced a blockade against ships traveling through the Strait of Hormuz. How is this going to impact the ongoing war in Iran? Greg, let's just start with the basics here. Trump announced this blockade on Sunday. It was slated to go into effect this morning, Eastern time. Can you explain? what's going on? Yeah, so there were the peace talks between Iran and the U.S. Saturday and into Sunday morning in Pakistan. They didn't reach a deal. It looked like all of a sudden it might kind of be stuck, not clear what would happen next. So Trump posts online saying he's going to impose a blockade on ships coming through the Strait of Hormuz. So the U.S. Navy is in charge of this. It will prevent ships that come out of the strait or going into the strait. The U.S. does have a

naval presence, maybe 15 ships or so, including an aircraft carrier, which has dozens of jet fighters aboard. So it wouldn't be hard necessarily for the U.S. to do this because it's only going to stop a small number of big, massive, slow-moving commercial ships that were coming out of the strait. And those U.S. ships, some of them at least, are outside the southern entrance of the Strait of Hormuz, which is at the southern end of the Gulf. Right. So, I mean, Iran had already basically closed the Strait of Hormuz for weeks for most ships. There were only a few ships traveling before this blockade. So what is actually really going to change from this policy change? Yeah, very fair question, Miles. And the answer is maybe not a whole lot. I don't want to try to predict because this could go in a lot of different ways, but I will offer one scenario, perhaps even the most likely scenario at this point. And that is, we may well see. a tense standoff. Before the war, more than 100 ships a day, many of them oil tankers were going

back and forth through the Strait of Hormuz. A little while after the war started, Iran said it was closing off traffic in the strait, and we've seen that go down to just a few ships a day. These are ships that Iran says are friendly or at least neutral. They may be taking Iranian oil out, and so Iran is allowing three, four, five ships a day. to go out through the strait. Some of these ships are reportedly being charged up to two million dollars by Iran so that they can pass safely through the strait. So Iran's making money off this, but it was a very, very small number, and it was ships that were friendly toward Iran. The U.S. tolerated this and allowed this to go. We've heard the U.S. say any additional oil on the world

market eases pressure on upward prices. So the U.S. wasn't trying to stop this, even if it was Iranian oil and Iran was making money. But in his remarks yesterday, Trump said, we're not going to let Iran make any more money off this. So I think the way to look at this is really an economic squeeze on Iran, try to pressure Iran to make bigger concessions at the negotiating table. Yeah, I think the president wants to be able to say the U.S. is in total control. The U.S. is winning. Iran is the one who doesn't have the cards. But Iran did have a card, which it didn't have before the start of the war, which was the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Iran was controlling this strait that is incredibly important for the world economy. And so Trump is sort of coming in and saying, you thought you the cards. Now I hold the cards. We've got the blockade. You don't have the blockade. We do. How this ends is much less clear. Do we have any sense at all at this point, how this is going to further impact the global economy? Well, what we know in the short term is that oil prices

rose on this news. It's a global market. So even though the U.S. is energy independent, because it is a global market, the U.S. is affected and gas prices are expected to potentially rise more if the traffic in the strait continues to be blocked. Miles, I mean, everybody is going to feel the ongoing economic pressure, which is only going to increase as long as the strait stays closed. The Arab Gulf countries are being hurt. They can't export their oil. global oil prices are going up. Some countries are not able to get enough oil. The price is going up for everybody. And of course, Iran needs the straight open to export its own oil in the quantities it's done in the past. So literally, it'd be hard to find any country in the world that's not facing some sort of economic pressure. So in a sense, what we're seeing is a sort of showdown,

particularly between the U.S. and Iran, but affecting everybody. And we're going to who blinks first when it comes to the economic pressure here of the straight being essentially closed 100%. And just to give you a sense of how the White House is thinking about this, both the president and the press secretary have posted an editorial in the New York Post with the headline, Trump brilliantly calls Iran's bluff with his own straight of Hormuz blockade. So they are seeing this as really about positioning. So it almost feels like, Greg, tell me if I'm understanding this correctly. When Iran closed the straight initially, like you said, most of the world has felt that economically. But this idea,

this blockade from Trump feels like an effort to make sure Iran is also feeling it, that it's not being felt just by everybody else, for instance. Exactly. I mean, it was quite strange a few weeks ago. The U.S. announced it was temporarily lifting sanctions on Iran so it could export its oil. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said this would perhaps moderate oil prices a little bit. So the U.S. is taking this unusual step of letting Iran sell whatever oil it could get out of the Gulf, make money on it, in fact, make more money than before, because prices were higher, hoping this would have an impact globally. But Trump has now decided, no, we're not going to let Iran get benefits out of the straight while everybody else is paying the price.

He clearly wants to try to increase any kind of pressure, but in this case, economic pressure on Iran. And we'll have to see who feels the pain the most and who blinks first. But every day is going to inflict additional pain on essentially everyone. So, Greg, I also just have to admit I was a little confused when I saw this news yesterday. Wasn't one of the goals of the ceasefire when it was announced last week to get the straight open again? it feels like this is moving in the wrong direction. Oh, yeah. I mean, you know, Iran has essentially closed the straits. So wait a minute. How is Trump closing the strait if it's already being closed by Iran? But yes, you know, but you essentially

have to think of as there's two types of ships that have been coming out of the straits. It's ships that are going to Iran and picking up Iranian oil or delivering goods to Iran and coming out. And then ships on the other side, the Arab side of the Gulf, that we're taking out. Saudi oil, Kuwaiti oil, liquefied natural gas from Qatar. So basically, Trump said, if Iran is going to keep the Arab countries from exporting that oil and getting it onto world markets, we're going to keep Iran from exporting its oil getting onto world markets. President Trump also talks a lot, and in recent days has especially talked a lot about how energy independent the United States is and how much oil the United States is producing. Never mind the fact that it is, as I said before, a global

market. Trump was asked yesterday by Maria Bardo on Fox News Channel. So do you believe the price of oil and gas will be lower before the midterm elections? I hope so. I mean, I think so. It could be. It could be or the same or maybe a little bit higher. But it should be around the same. I think this won't be that much longer. So he seems to accept. that for him politically, at least for now, this is a cost of a war that he believes was necessary because of Iran's nuclear program. All right. We're going to take a quick break and more in just a moment.

And we're back. And Greg, Vice President J.D. Vance was in Pakistan negotiating with the Iranians all weekend. Can we talk a little bit more about how those talks went? I have to imagine if we're at a point where a blockade is being announced that they did not go really well. Yeah, Miles, well, we can certainly say they didn't reach an agreement because J.D. Vance came out and said that afterwards. But these talks went on for 21 hours, and Vance led the U.S. delegation, which was significant because this is the highest level meeting between the Iranians and the Americans literally since the 1979 Iranian Revolution 47 years ago. Iran also had a high-level

delegation. And so while they had these marathon negotiations Saturday and into the early hours of Sunday, they didn't reach a deal. And quite frankly, it seemed pretty unrealistic that they were going to sort out all of these big issues, the shipping and the Strait of Hormuz, Iran's nuclear program, put a permanent end to the war in just one negotiating session, even a marathon session. So they They broke up without an agreement. The negotiators have returned home. They haven't ruled out additional talks. So it certainly seemed that that's possible. In fact, today Trump has said that the Iranians got in touch and do want to have more talks. So I wouldn't rule that out. In fact, I'd probably expect some more talks as this ceasefire plays out. But they didn't resolve anything

over the weekend. Yeah, I feel like 21 hours sounds like a lot of time. But didn't the Obama era Iran deal talks like take more than a year? Two years. That shows you how difficult these negotiations are. And also very technical, though I don't think they're at this point yet. But in disposing with or figuring out how to keep an eye on Iran's nuclear program is a highly technical conversation. Can you tell me a little bit more, Tam, about what both President Trump and Vance said after these negotiations, how they're talking about how they went? Yeah. So the most recent information we have is what President Trump said, where he said that the administration has heard from the other side and they'd like to make a deal very badly. That said, President Trump has frequently in recent weeks said that Iran wants to make a deal very badly. So this may not be breaking news. In terms of Vance, he came out of this 21 hours of negotiations and said that, you know, they, you know, they.

did have good discussions. They made progress on a lot of things. But when it came right down to it, they didn't make progress on the biggest thing, which is Iran's nuclear program. We've made very clear what our red lines are, what things we're willing to accommodate them on, and what things we're not willing to accommodate them on. And we've made that as clear as we possibly could. And they have chosen not to accept our terms. And I think that's some key language there. the Iranians would not accept our terms. The terms that the United States wants, and you know, it's not totally clear at the granular level, but the thing President Trump has been saying since before he was president is that Iran can never have a nuclear weapon. And Vance is saying

that they needed to see an affirmative commitment that Iran wouldn't seek a nuclear weapon. So So the nuclear issue is at this point the red line in negotiations. And Iran, of course, has held for a very long time that they should be allowed to have a nuclear program. They should be allowed to have nuclear energy. And in the past, they had agreed not to develop it to the level of a weapon. Greg, has the U.S. moved closer through this war towards making it harder or decreasing the likelihood that Iran can make a nuclear? nuclear weapon? Yeah, I think we saw, actually, the biggest move was last June when the U.S. and Israel bombed Iran for 12 days. The U.S. just joined in for a day, but unleashed some pretty powerful strikes on Iranian nuclear sites. So that caused some real damage and seemingly buried a thousand pounds of highly enriched uranium inside a mountain near Isfahan or Isfahan and perhaps in other place as well. So that was a real setback. We don't know the exact details because the UN's nuclear watchdog agency, which was going into Iran and keeping tabs on their nuclear program, has not been back. So we don't have all the details. We have heard of some additional attacks on nuclear facilities in the past five plus weeks of war. But no real detailed information. In fact, it's not clear how much more damage could.

be done since these were hit last year as well. So Iran's nuclear program is not gone. There's some remnants of it are still there. It certainly has the knowledge. It could redevelop it. At this point, though, I think there is pretty broad consensus that the most important part of that is this thousand or so pounds of highly enriched uranium. These are probably in very, very heavy cases, and there's probably a few dozen of these cases that hold all this nuclear material, which is obviously radioactive, highly toxic, very dangerous. But it's, and we don't know what condition it's in, but it's believed to be pretty much buried in rubble in a mountainside nuclear facility.

If you still have that, you could work to put the other pieces together and move toward a nuclear weapon. And thinking about kind of these negotiations breaking down this weekend, Tam, it's also hard for me not to see this as a tough couple days for the vice president who was also, you know, in Hungary, stumping for Victor Orban a couple days before he got absolutely wiped out in the national elections there this weekend. I guess do you, do you see it that way as well? I mean, he's got a lot of jet lag and not a whole lot to show for it between the trip to Hungary and then the trip to Pakistan. You know, being a vice president is an impossible job, but Vance had a pretty rough week as vice president. Because as you say, Victor Orban of Hungary, you know, Vance campaign for him was on stage with him saying vote for this guy. And he lost. Obviously, President Trump had also endorsed him. And then with the negotiations with Iran, you know, it's not clear that any. would have had any more success than the vice president. And it's not clear that a deal was really

possible in a marathon negotiating session without a lot of groundwork being laid in advance. But Vance has a stamp on this now, which is something President Trump had joked about, that by putting Vance in charge, he was either going to take credit if Vance was successful or blame the vice president if he wasn't. Yeah, it's hard for me not to think of the Kamala Harris being put in charge of the border a few years ago moment where I'm like, deeply unpopular issue, vice president, go deal with this thing, you know? Go own it. Please.

Yeah. I mean, it's tough. It's really tough to be vice president. The thing, though, is J.D. Vance is very likely going to run for president in 28. Trump has talked about that. And everything he does now has to be seen through the lens of what would this mean for his campaign for president in 2020.

you know, having some foreign policy experience would be good. Having foreign policy experience that doesn't work out very well, less good. Thinking about the next couple of weeks, Greg, where do you think this goes from here? I mean, are there other ways that the United States can exert leverage in the ways that President Trump is clearly trying to with this blockade? Sure. The U.S. does have other options. None of them guarantee success. I think looking at this blockade of the straight, you could look at how this might play out. out the U.S. could go to countries that buy Iranian oil and can't get it now. I'm talking about

China, India, Pakistan, for example, and say to those countries, put pressure on Iran. Tell them to make a deal. You need their oil. And it's true. Those countries are going to face increasingly difficult problems if they can't get oil from Iran or elsewhere. So that's what Trump is betting, that Iran will feel economic pressure from not being able to sell its oil. It may feel diplomatic pressure from countries urging it to make a deal. So that would probably be Trump's preferred option. Of course, he could always return to war. But after five weeks of heavy bombing, the U.S. certainly inflicted a lot of damage, a lot of pain on Iran, but it didn't get the political things that it wanted. The straight is closed. The nuclear issue hasn't been resolved. Trump's

signals seem to be clearer and clearer that he doesn't want to return to war, that that would be difficult and problematic and no guarantee of success. But that remains on the table. The U.S. forces are still very much in the region and could ramp up the war again if called on. All right. Well, let's leave it there for today. The political news changes very quickly, but this podcast can help you make sense of it. Do not miss an episode. Hit the follow button wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. I'm Greg Mirey. I'm cover national security. And I'm Tamara Keith's senior political correspondent. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.