Iranian officials warned on Sunday that US President Donald Trump’s newly announced plan to help “guide” ships blocked through the Strait of Hormuz is an attempted provocation intended to justify additional military action against the Middle Eastern country.
An unidentified senior Iranian official said Drop Site that Trump’s plan, DESIGNATED on social truth and confirmed BY the US military“is primarily intended to provoke Iran into taking an initial step toward confrontation, thus creating a pretext for escalation and enabling it to justify further military action in response to an Iranian initiative.”
The official added that “our final position is that any merchant vessel attempting to transit through designated restricted routes without prior coordination will be immediately seized by Iranian forces.”
“If US warships do respond, such actions will be met with an immediate and appropriate response from Iran,” the official continued. “US military ships are far from the corridor area. If merchant ships attempt to move, they will be engaged long before they reach any US ships,” the official added. “Trump has effectively turned them into bargaining chips in his political game.”
Ebrahim Azizi, who heads the national security committee of the Iranian Parliament, warned in response to Trump’s plan that “any American intervention in the new maritime regime of the Strait of Hormuz will be considered a violation of the ceasefire” that went into effect in early April.
“The Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf will not be managed by Trump’s delusional posts,” Azizi added.
Trump wrote in his social media platform on Sunday that his administration has told countries with ships stuck in the vital strait that “we will guide their ships safely out of these restricted waterways so they can continue freely and able to do their business.”
Iran closed the strait – through which about 25% of the world’s sea oil trade and one-third of the global trash trade flows each year – in response to the US-Israeli war as well as the Trump administration’s naval blockade against Iran.
The US president characterized his plan, which is titled Project Freedom and will take effect on Monday, as a “humanitarian gesture on behalf of United Statesbut gave few details on how it would work.
US Central Command (CENTCOM) said in a statement on Sunday that military support for Project Freedom will “include guided missile destroyers, over 100 land- and sea-based aircraft, multi-domain unmanned platforms and 15,000 service members.”
“Last week, the US State Department announced a new initiative, in partnership with the Department of War, to improve coordination and information sharing among international partners in support of maritime security in the strait,” CENTCOM said. “The Naval Freedom Construct aims to combine diplomatic action with military coordination, which will be critical during Project Freedom.”
Brian Finucane, senior advisor to the US Program at the International Crisis Group, has written that CENTCOM’s statement makes the president’s plan “sound like information sharing backed by a vague threat of military action.”
The president’s scheme attracted immediate support from one of Iran’s most vocal warmongers, US Sen Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who said he “totally” agrees with Trump’s decision to launch Project Freedom.
“I hope this conflict can be ended diplomatically,” Graham said, “but now is the time to regain freedom of navigation and respond forcefully to Iran if they insist on terrorizing the world.”
“No nuclear negotiations” are happening at this stage, Iran says
A spokesman for Iran’s Foreign Ministry said on Sunday that the Iranian leadership was considering the response issued by the US government over the weekend following a 14-point plan offered by Tehran to end the war – now in its third month.
“The Americans have given their response to the Pakistani side on Iran’s 14-point plan and we are currently reviewing it,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei said in an interview with Iranian television.
Baghaei said the framework offered is strictly focused on ending immediate hostilities and that the plan contains “absolutely no details regarding the country’s nuclear issues”, which he suggested could be discussed at a later time.
“We are not currently engaged in any negotiations on the nuclear issue and decisions about the future will be made at the appropriate time,” he said, even as Trump and US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have continued to claim they are preventing the Iranians from having a nuclear weapons the program – which Tehran denies it has and US intelligence assessments have shown does not exist in the way US officials describe it – is essential to their war aims.
“I will soon review the plan that Iran has just sent us,” Trump said in a message social media post on Saturday, “but I can’t imagine that would be acceptable as they have yet to pay a big enough price for what they have done to Mankind and the World over the past 47 years.”
Despite several reports examining what is supposedly in the Iranian proposal, the exact details of the 14-point plan remain unclear or disputed, depending on who you ask. Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for the Responsible State, gave her assessment of the current situation Sunday from saying:
In general, Iranians seem to be chasing a grand bargain – without labeling it as such. This is not simply a proposal aimed at securing a ceasefire, or even a formal end to the current conflict, but rather an attempt to resolve the broader US-Iran antagonism that has been ongoing for the past 47 years. Implicit in this approach is an expectation that both sides will also restrain their respective regional partners and proxies (Israel, Hezbollahetc.). In many respects, framing the proposal this way may more effectively align with Trump’s instincts and psychology.
Meanwhile, a poll taken on Friday showed that 61% of Americans believe Trump’s launch of the war was a mistake, and an even larger number (66%) disapprove of the way he is handling the conflict. The same ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll also showed Trump now facing the lowest approval ratings of his presidency.
Speaking to Al-Jazeera over the weekend, Parsi explained that Trump’s maximalist demands, including the blockade he has tried to impose on Iran near the Strait of Hormuz, have made negotiations much more difficult.
Over the weekend, archival footage from the 1990s shared online by journalist Séamus Malekafzali showed former Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps commander Hossein Salami, who was killed by US-Israeli forces last year, speaking to the IRGC’s staff college about the country’s strategy for “confronting an asymmetric adversary to counter-superiority and military warfare”. that.
“The possibility of conflict with American forces is very likely,” Salami says in the video, according to English subtitles provided, but “the possibility of victory really exists” if the Iranians are able to shift the conflict to “the area of our capabilities to the area of America’s weaknesses.”
This strategy, as Malekafzali paraphrases it, is “to drag out a war with the US by driving up economic costs and political unrest,” thus draining the US and weakening its power by causing economic pain and political pressure.
As many foreign policy observers have noted since Trump began the war, Iran’s strategy to inflict pain on US allies in the region and economic pain globally — as achieved by closing the Strait of Hormuz — is very much what Salami describes.
As geopolitical analyst Misbah Qasemi explained, Salam’s point was essentially this: “Don’t match their strength (air power, technology). Attack their weaknesses (economic sustainability, political will, internal opinion). Draw them into your turf – maritime, cyber, proxy networks – where their advantages are neutralized.”
This point was made explicitly by Harrison Mann, a contributor to the advocacy group Win Without War, during an appearance Sunday on CNN, where he explained how this happens in practical terms.
“Iran can actually cause pain in the US,” Mann said. “In this case, through economic warfare, which is not sustainable for Trump in the long term.”
