The USS Spruance blew a hole in the engine room of the Touska and Marines rappelled onto the deck. Trump crowed on Truth Social. Iran called it piracy and cancelled the peace talks. Urban Wronski on why the seizure of an Iranian cargo ship was never about a ship — and what is actually being prepared while the cameras watch the theatre.
Trump’s Hormuz blockade is live. Oil is at $102. China’s Defence Minister says the strait is open for Chinese ships and dares the US to stop them. A forty-nation coalition is forming against the blockade. And one of the last two tankers carrying pre-war oil on earth is heading to Australia. Urban Wronski on the war Trump cannot win.
The war now has the smell of salt, oil, and old empires trying to defy the tide. Thirty-three kilometres. That is the width of the Strait of Hormuz at its narrowest navigable point: two shipping lanes, each two miles wide, one in, one out, with … Continue reading Hormuz Dateline
JD Vance has just returned from negotiations with Iran. The Strait of Hormuz is still closed. Two C-130s are still on a dirt strip outside Isfahan. And the Vice President would like to explain, in his own words, why this is going tremendously. Urban Wronski channels Clarke and Dawe. Stand by.
Trump burned two C-130s on an Iranian runway, declared total victory, and is now threatening to demolish the power grid of 92 million people. Tonight is the deadline. Urban Wronski on the Easter debacle built on assumption, sustained by bluster, and ending in wreckage that no quantity of “WE GOT HIM!” can unbog.
Thirty days in, Operation Epic Fury has achieved something genuinely historic: it has made the world less safe, energy more expensive, American alliances more threadbare, Iran more unified, and the US military more fractured — all simultaneously. Pete Hegseth is praying for Armageddon. His troops are filing conscientious objector applications. And in the Strait of Hormuz, the tankers stay put. Urban Wronski on the stalemate that no ground invasion can break and no prayer can win.
Trump’s April 6 deadline is not diplomacy. It is a ten-day window. The Marines are not sailing toward the Persian Gulf for a holiday.
TAGS: Operation Epic Fury, Iran war, Trump, Pete Hegseth, Rupert Murdoch, Strait of Hormuz, ground invasion, Kharg Island, US Marines, 82nd Airborne, Michael Wolff, Netanyahu, doublespeak, Australian complicity
To make sense of Trump’s war on Iran, imagine a Russian
babushka doll. The outer layer is the story the Pentagon feeds
us. Inside it: petrodollar entanglements, Kharg Island
war-gaming, the strategic patience of Moscow and Beijing,
Netanyahu’s fantasy of the purifying blow. At the very centre,
smaller than it should be, is Australia. Urban Wronski opens
all six layers and does not like what he finds.
Lindsey Graham is evoking Iwo Jima. Iran is mining Kharg Island’s shoreline. Seven thousand five hundred US Marines are days away from the Persian Gulf. The war is 26 days old, has cost $18 billion, and the White House’s official position is that they need about a month to “get Iran by the balls.” Australia is calling for de-escalation. The crease in the trousers remains arrow-straight.
On the eve of a diplomatic breakthrough, the bombs fell. What followed was not a war of necessity but a war of choice, lobbied into existence, launched in bad faith, and paid for in civilian lives.
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