by Roger Kimball
As media hype falters and globalists posture, Trump’s campaign to secure the world’s chokepoints reshapes power—and leaves Iran and its allies with little leverage left.
Possibly the most amusing fake news item Saturday morning came from The New York Times. Under the rubric “Iran War Live Updates,” a headline screamed, “Iran’s Military Says It Has Reimposed ‘Strict Control’ of Strait of Hormuz.” To which an inquiring mind wants to know, “What Iran military?” It’s gone, Kemo Sabe. The floating bits are at the bottom of the sea. The terrestrial bits have been crushed, blasted, pulverized, or incinerated. Ditto most of the bits that flew. Which is why a healthy skepticism must severely discount the Times’s breathless comment that “A shipping monitor run by the British Navy said Saturday that it had received a report of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards firing at a tanker in the strait.” Click the link. What it says is that someone told someone else that something “was reported” to have happened, but no one and nothing was hit or damaged.
I don’t mean to single out the paper that President Trump accurately, if impolitely, calls “the failing New York Times.” About all things Trump, The Wall Street Journal is just as bad. Between February 28, when Operation Epic Fury began, and last week, when President Trump allowed Iran to lift its head out of the water briefly in order to surrender, the WSJ has run countless stories explaining how, despite appearances, Iran was actually winning the conflict. On Saturday, the Journal greeted Iran’s braggadocio about the Strait of Hormuz just as enthusiastically as did the Times. If your version of those papers came with a magic subtext mood reader, you would have been able to hear the excited Molly Bloom-like cries wafting off the page: “Yes! Yes! Yes! Please let it be so! Please let something bad happen to US forces so we can wipe that grin off Trump’s face! Please!”
So maybe some dead-enders in the IRGC are jumping up and down, making threats, or even lobbing missiles or other ordnance at ships in the Strait. They won’t be doing so for long.
On Friday, President Trump delivered a few status reports on Truth Social. (1) The Strait of Hormuz is fully open and “ready for business.” (2) The naval blockade will remain in full force until we are satisfied that Iran has complied 100 percent with our demands. (3) That should happen quickly because “most points” have been agreed on. The president also reported that Iran had promised never to close the Strait of Hormuz again. “It will no longer,” he wrote, “be used as a weapon against the World!”
It has been a merry few days. On Friday, Iran agreed to let America collect and remove its uranium, a key US demand going into the conflict. Also on Friday, Trump announced that the Strait was open for business. That was NATO’s cue to waddle into the limelight and offer to help. President Trump was not amused. But the rest of us can be. “Now that the Hormuz Strait situation is over,” President Trump wrote, “I received a call from NATO asking if we would need some help. I TOLD THEM TO STAY AWAY, UNLESS THEY JUST WANT TO LOAD UP THEIR SHIPS WITH OIL. They were useless when needed, a Paper Tiger!”
There, Trump goes again, telling unpalatable truths. Do you believe in coincidences? Within hours of President Trump’s announcement that the Strait of Hormuz was open, the British make-believe Prime Minister Keir Starmer went to Paris to co-host a 40-nation “virtual summit” with French President Emmanuel Macron. Their goal? To open the Strait of Hormuz. For those keeping track, the US Navy, which had actually opened the Strait, was not invited to this romper room play date. As one commentator put it,
This is 40 guys showing up to a house fire three hours late with a PowerPoint titled “Fire Response Coordination Initiative,” while the homeowner is already back inside watching TV.
Meanwhile, Iran’s foreign minister fully capitulated on camera today. Oil crashed 11 percent in minutes. Iran has reportedly agreed to suspend its nuclear program indefinitely and will not receive any frozen funds. Trump says the deal is mostly done.
The two-week ceasefire that President Trump called expires this Wednesday. What then? “What if there is no final deal by the deadline?” a reporter asked. “I don’t know,” President Trump said. “Maybe I won’t extend it—but the blockade is going to remain. . . . Unfortunately, we’ll have to start dropping bombs again.”
Understandably, the situation in Iran has mesmerized the world’s attention these last several weeks. But it is important to place that conflict in a broader strategic context. On Saturday, the US signed a defense agreement with Morocco concerning the Strait of Gibraltar, the chokepoint between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea. Just a few days ago, the US inked an agreement with Indonesia granting “expanded operational access” over the Strait of Malacca, through which nearly 80 percent of China’s oil imports flow. Last year, Trump negotiated the neutrality of the Panama Canal, sidelining the Chinese companies that had quietly stepped in to manage access to the canal. Gibraltar. Malacca. Hormuz. Panama. In just over a year, President Trump has opened the world’s major chokepoints under the aegis of American oversight.
In a couple of weeks, Trump will travel to Davos, Switzerland, to participate in—or to school—the globalist citadel at the World Economic Forum. “You could say he is walking into the lion’s den,” observed one commentator, “except that he is the lion.” Trump will be bringing his entire “demolition crew,” including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and Energy Secretary Chris Wright. This will not be a Kumbaya Summit. It will not be about some “Green New Deal,” forging an alternative to the US dollar, or proliferating international NGOs to further the globalist agenda. Operation Epic Fury includes what Scott Bessent called Operation Economic Fury, and it is being deployed not only in Iran but also wherever anti-American forces pool and fester.
Meanwhile, President Trump announced that Israel and Lebanon have agreed to a ceasefire. This comes in the wake of Lebanon essentially outlawing Hezbollah. The Middle East is reshaping itself before our eyes. It is good news for those interested in peace and prosperity. It is bad news for misogynistic mullahs and other members of the theocratic death cult that has been terrorizing the world for decades. There are still regime thugs prowling the streets of Iran looking for bare-headed women or protestors to hang or shoot. But there are also an increasing number of reports of the Iranian people ambushing the ambushers, taking out the Basij and IRGC terrorists. There will be cries and whispers for a short while from the dying Iranian regime. But for all intents and purposes, the story is over. We’re into the coda or epilogue now. There might be a few plot twists and turns yet, but we know how the saga ends. America wins, the mullahs lose, and so do the globalists at the trough in Davos, and China, with its dreams of a BRICS hegemony in tatters.
Photo: US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine speaks as a map of the Strait of Hormuz is displayed during a press briefing at the Pentagon in Washington, DC, on April 16, 2026. The United States will prevent all shipping from entering or exiting Iranian ports in the Strait of Hormuz for "as long as it takes," US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said on Thursday, the fourth day of the blockade. (Photo by SAUL LOEB / AFP)
Roger Kimball
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2026/04/19/the-geopolitics-of-epic-fury/
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