President Donald Trump’s announcement on Tuesday evening that the United States would suspend “Project Freedom” — the naval escort operation launched only days earlier to reopen the Strait of Hormuz — came wrapped in the usual language of strength. “Great progress” had been made, he said. Toward a deal, Pakistan had asked, “tremendous military success.”  The blockade of Iranian ports would remain. And the decision directly contradicted the message his own senior officials had spent the day delivering: that the ceasefire held, that Iranian actions remained below the threshold for renewed fighting, and that the operation was both limited and necessary to free 20,000 stranded sailors and restore the flow of one-fifth of the world’s oil. This is not the decisive leadership the administration projected when it joined Israel in Operation Epic Fury in late February. A superpower that helped kill a supreme leader and promised generational destruction of Iran’s capabilities has now blinked after one day of real pushback in the Strait. It is the acknowledgment, however reluctant, that military pressure has run into the hard limits of geography, economics, and politics.  The Strait of Hormuz still carries one-fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas. Iran’s threat to mine it, patrol it with fast boats, and harass shipping has turned that waterway into the single most effective lever Tehran possesses. The United States, for all its air power and naval presence, has been unable to break that grip without risking the very global economic disruption it set out to prevent.

Read more