President Donald Trump on Sunday said that the U.S. Navy would block the Strait of Hormuz to prevent Iranian ships from transiting it unless Iran opens the Strait and agrees to a peace deal with the United States. File Photo by Ali Haider/EPA-EFE
April 12 (UPI) — President Donald Trump on Sunday said the U.S. Navy will block the Strait of Hormuz to cut off Iran’s shipping lanes after peace talks in Pakistan failed to produce a deal.
Vice President J.D. Vance, who Trump sent to negotiate a deal to end the U.S.-Israeli war in Iran, said Saturday that the talks were not successful because the two sides cannot agree on what to do about the Iranian nuclear stockpile and who will control the Strait, CNN and The Washington Post reported.
Trump told Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo that the United States was going to block the Strait — it will “take a little while, but it’ll be effective pretty soon,” he said — and that nations in the Gulf region have agreed to help in the effort.
The blockade, he said, will prevent “any and all ships” from entering or leaving the the waterway, including vessels belonging to Iran, which have been shipping its oil to other countries and reportedly been bringing weapons parts from China to the Middle Eastern nation.
Vance told reporters early Sunday morning that while Iran had not yet accepted the United States’ “final and best offer,” he expressed optimism that a deal can be reached.
“We just could not get to a situation where the Iranians were willing to accept our terms,” Vance said. “I think that we were quite flexible.”
In a post on X, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, who is Iran’s leading negotiator in the talks, said that he and his colleagues had “raised forward looking initiatives, but the opposing side ultimately failed to gain the trust of the Iranian delegation in this round of negotiations.”
“Before the negotiations, I emphasized that we have the necessary good faith and will, but due to the experiences of the two previous wars, we have no trust in the opposing side,” he said.
