President Donald Trump said that the United States will not be “blackmailed” after the Iranian military has once again proclaimed that the Strait of Hormuz will be closed and allegedly fired on multiple vessels on Saturday.
Speaking from the Oval Office on Saturday morning, President Trump said that while his administration is having “very good conversations” with Tehran, he said that the Islamist regime was trying to act “a little cute” by attempting to close down the Strait of Hormuz just hours after agreeing to open the critical waterway.
“They can’t blackmail us,” Trump said, noting that many international shipping firms have re-routed their traffic to purchase energy from the United States in the Gulf of America rather than in the Persian Gulf.
The president added that more information about the state of negotiations with Iran would be released later on Saturday.
Separately on Saturday, Iran’s deputy foreign minister, Saeed Khatibzadeh, said there was no date set for further peace negotiations, adding that both sides must agree to a “framework” before sitting down again.
“We hope that as soon as we can finalise that, then we can move on to the next step,” he said on the sidelines of a forum in Turkey.
It comes after a spokesman for the Iranian military announced on Saturday that Tehran would not allow safe passage for vessels through the Strait of Hormuz until the United States lifts its blockade of Iranian ships.
The blockade has the potential to seriously wound the Iranian economy, with some noting that the country may be forced to permanently shut down some oil wells because they are running out of storage space and cannot pause crude oil production without seriously damaging extraction equipment.
Following their threats to shut down the Strait again, multiple vessels came under attack on Saturday, including a container ship that was hit “by an unknown projectile which caused damage to some of the containers” off the coast of Oman, according to the UK Maritime Trade Operations (UKMTO).
This came after two merchant vessels said that they had been attacked by gunfire, the Times of London reported.
It remains to be seen how the apparent Iranian attacks will impact negotiations with Washington, with President Trump having claimed on Friday that Tehran was desperate to come to the table and had agreed in principal to giving up its nuclear ambitions.
It also remains to be seen if the incidents on Saturday morning will impact the move by European NATO allies to finally send their ships to the Strait of Hormuz, including from Britain, France, Germany, and Italy. The announcement of a peacekeeping mission was made on Friday; however, this was under the assumption that hostilities in the region had ceased.
Speaking at a Turning Point USA event after the announcement, President Trump mocked the showing from the Europeans, saying that he only received calls from supposed allies once the fighting had stopped.
“Now that the Hormuz Strait situation is nearly over, I received a call from NATO asking if we would like some help,” Trump said. “I told them I would have liked your help two months ago, but now I really don’t want your help anymore, because they were absolutely useless when we needed them… But actually, we never needed them. They needed us.”
“If it teaches us any one thing, we have to rely on ourselves,” the president added, “We can’t rely on outside countries and outside sources.”
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