Aug. 22 (UPI) — President Donald Trump on Friday said he now considers the Strait of Hormuz to be “an American territory.”
“We don’t even know if we won, because I view the Strait of Hormuz as an American territory right now,” he told a crowd of supporters during a campaign event in South Carolina.
Trump first floated the idea of claiming the waterway last week, saying he would wait until the conclusion of the war in Iran to declare the strait a territory of the United States.
Then on Tuesday he posted an image on Truth Social showing the strait with the label “New U.S. Territory.”
He took his threats further on Friday during a campaign rally for Sen. Darline Graham, R-S.C., as she attempts to fill her late brother Lindsey Graham‘s Senate seat.
“It’s an American territory,” he said.
Iran’s deputy foreign minister, Kazem Gharibabadi, had previously called the president’s remarks “fanciful delusions.”
“The Strait of Hormuz has been Iranian, is Iranian, and will remain Iranian,” he said.
Trump this week said he would launch “economic warfare” against Iran as efforts to end the war continue to fail.
On Saturday, Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, said the economic operation was “bound to fail.”
“We have seen this movie before,” Araghchi wrote in a statement on X. “Same bull. Different bullies.”
As part of his economic warfare threat, Trump said institutions or governments providing any support to Iran would face “tremendous” consequences.
Esmaeil Baqaei, a spokesman for Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said Trump’s move “is an assertion of extraterritorial sovereignty over every independent member state of the United Nations.”
“The end result would be the complete erosion of sovereignty as the foundational basis of the UN-based inter-State system, and a recipe for an abysmal return to full-scale classic colonialism,” he added in a statement on X.