President Donald Trump on Sunday announced a U.S. naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz and threatened to destroy “the little that is left of Iran” after peace talks in Islamabad fell apart overnight.
In a pair of Truth Social posts, Trump said the U.S. military would begin blockading ships entering or leaving the strait, and would also intercept any vessel that has paid tolls to Iran to transit it safely. He also said that any Iranian who fires on the U.S. military or other, peaceful vessels will be “BLOWN TO HELL” while the Navy works to de-mine the strait.
“THIS IS WORLD EXTORTION,” Trump wrote in one of the posts, “and Leaders of Countries, especially the United States of America, will never be extorted.”
The weekend talks, which were brokered by Pakistan and represented the highest-level engagement between an American official and Iranians since the 1979 Islamic revolution, were aimed at reopening the Strait of Hormuz and resuming the flow of roughly a fifth of the world’s oil through it. Reopening the strait has become an economic imperative for Trump, whose approval ratings have sagged amid spiking oil prices and growing anxiety about the war’s toll on an already turbulent global economy.
But the talks ended early Sunday morning without movement on the question Trump said rendered the rest of the discussion moot.
“They have chosen not to accept our terms,” Vice President JD Vance told reporters in Islamabad before departing for Washington. “The simple fact is that we need to see an affirmative commitment that they will not seek a nuclear weapon and they will not seek the tools that would enable them to quickly achieve a nuclear weapon.”
A U.S. official, granted anonymity to speak candidly, said that no members of the negotiating team remain in Islamabad, including Jared Kushner, Steve Witkoff or members of the technical teams.
The announcement of the blockade, which Trump said would begin “shortly,” also comes a day after CENTCOM confirmed that two U.S. destroyers transited the strait as part of a mine-clearing mission, the first such passage since fighting began six weeks ago. Iran declared the move a ceasefire violation and has separately moved forward with its plans to charge ships $1 per barrel of oil for safe passage through the strait.
Vance did not say whether the United States and Israel would resume strikes on Iran or escalate them to target civilian infrastructure, like power plants and bridges.
Still, the president sought to frame the meeting as a productive one, saying that “the points that were agreed to” were better than the U.S. carrying out its plans to, as Trump has said, bomb Iran into the “stone ages.” Already, some of the president’s allies are already arguing that the blockade represents a negotiating tactic — not an end to the fragile two-week ceasefire the president announced last week.
“I think he’s calling Iran’s bluff,” Nikki Haley, Trump’s former ambassador to the United Nations, said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday morning. “This is a game of chicken. It’s who caves first. The Iranian regime is hoping that Trump will cave. Today, he showed he’s not.”
Cheyanne Daniels contributed to this report.
