Trump says the US controls the Strait of Hormuz and should get paid for it | Hacker News Reader

Trump says the US controls the Strait of Hormuz and should get paid for it

reuters.com

23 pointsjustacrow23 comments

Denying traffic is easy. Ensuring safe passage is harder. Especially because maritime insurers have the last say. Every vessel stuck in the gulf continues to pay premiums. Every vessel that risks the transit has the potential of being struck by a missile. What does the insurer choose?

“Control” is ambiguous.

This will go down GREAT... Gulf oil will have to handle a 20% tariff vs. the rest of the world to get to market. Fertilizer, etc, anything made in the Gulf will be hit with this tariff independent of any trade agreement that might be in place with the US. Great, great way to encourage production from other regions of the world and with substitute products.

Although to be honest, oil companies will just charge everybody the tariff and pocket the profits.

That'll work until Iran starts sinking ships trusting Trump's word for them "controlling" Hormuz. Which should be more or less the first time a ship tries to cross without an Iranian blessing.

In the end, they'll pay extortion fees to two parties.

BTW, what will the US do? Sink oil carriers? Board them and take them by force regardless of their flag?

The US has already killed a few Indian sailors, I am not sure they would blink at causing an oil slick.

The Golden Age of Piracy lasted between 1650s and the 1730s, and it involved most of the oceans and most ocean trading nations.

Board or sink anyone who don't surrender to the extortion. Flags only work if nations respect them, and nations that are willing to pirate ships is very unlikely to respect flags.

The Hormuz strait is now basically the same as coast of Somalia, except that now the pirates has missiles, rockets and torpedoes.

Whilst I'm glad I got myself an EV, I'm entirely aware of the society-wide effects this will have on, literally, almost everything, from general inflation to food insecurity due to the fertilizer situation.

How much money has this single bad decision cost the population of the planet?

Straight up $5,000 my parents had to pay extra for their flight to Europe which was already booked. And that was just for changed flights due to Emirates (I think) being grounded.

Trump will be richer just by dint of having made everyone else poorer by a measurable amount.

    "The U.S.A... will be reimbursed, at the rate of 20% on all cargo shipped, for any and all costs necessary to do the job of providing safety and security to  this very volatile section of the World," he said.

Wasn't Iran only considering 1 or 2% (less than 5%) as the toll ...? Iran, right now, has a slight advantage over the Trump and Netanyahu administration as both are under pressure from their electorate, due to the looming elections. However, that also means both have very little diplomatic room as any concession they make to Iran will be showcased as "weakness" by their domestic opposition (whether it is or isn't). Which is exactly what happened when the "ceasefire" was signed, causing Trump to up his rhetoric.

Due to the huge trust deficit between the American and Iranian leaders, best course for Iran maybe to hold of all diplomatic engagements till the elections, even if that means they will have to bear the brunt of the American military for a few months more. It's a very risky approach as military escalation is very much possible (Trump has already managed to get NATO members approval for this current escalation) and they will also have to watch out for the Trump administration trying to revive the Abraham Accords and try and normalise relations between the Saudis and the Israelis (that seems to one of the options Trump and Netanyahu are considering as a way to politically salvage something from this middle-eastern mess they created - https://www.axios.com/2026/05/24/trump-iran-war-israel-musli... ).

I'm getting the popcorn ready. This will be interesting.

I hope you're popping that corn over a camp fire.

Curious if this is a grid down innuendo.. And more so, curious of your more direct insight on the probability of such... if I am going in the right direction.

I've been building a strong case to be concerned on this topic. I am in Florida, which is as far as I know, a power island with no adjacent state agreements for grid resilience. And I think we know the CIA's perspective on this, which is grim, and severe. There's the component vulnerability, the supply chain with its delays and such, and now, a geopolitical scenario kind of making bad things a bit more plausible.

The US grid (even in Florida) doesn't depend on oil that went through Hormuz, does it?

It depends on an extensive network of foreign-made components, with very little security or resilience built in, and transformer wait-times exceeding two years. If anything, the straight issues and Iran situation only add more stress where the opposite was needed. The scale of infrastructure damage in Iran could, conceivably, motivate retaliation here.

And then we have n amount of CVEs in the wild with yet to be discovered exploits on SCADA, ICS systems and much more. I was actually in Pinellas during the water facility hack of 2021. Maybe not a terrific example, but if you truly think we're locked down and secure, by all means, share the confidence, as I could use it. The U.S. grid depends on long‑lead, foreign-sourced critical components and has documented ICS/SCADA vulnerabilities; resilience is not as strong as typically assumed.

Otherwise, I guess I fail to catch your point. I'm wrong, is it?

I suppose, considering you are not the one I asked, yet imposed a veiled answer, indicates an unconditional on the above, nu?

My point was that you failed to supply any plausible cause-and-effect that would cause electrical disruptions in Florida. In your reply here, you supplied one. A plausible one, too. I don't know if they would open that can of worms, but they might. (Why would they not? Because they are pretty sure that the US has counter-threats to Iranian infrastructure that are at least as good. On the other hand, if the US simply bombs their infrastructure into oblivion, that counter-threat disappears.)

Your last paragraph reads like veiled innuendo, but is so veiled that it's hard to be sure. At a minimum, your post would be stronger without it.

I hope to meet you some day, before I am withered altogether. If you could not identify me, I am sure we could have some fascinating conversations.

Take care. Thanks for the insight.

It was a stupid throw away comment about how expensive power could become in the near future, such that popping corn becomes a 'lifestyle choice'.

Having said that, throughout the years I have made the odd comment about how fragile the grid is, and how fragile society is in its dependence upon the grid. My favourite way to demonstrate the fragility of the grid is referencing CyberSquirrel1: https://www.cybersquirrel1.com/

If small furry animals can accidentally take down segments of the grid for hours at a time, the scope for intentional (human) sabotage must be pretty darn broad. I feel like I don't want to call much attention to it because it feels like it would be both easy and effective at the same time as requiring essentially no direct violence against another human (it's just a direct violence against a community, but that's a more vague concept).

My favourite example from cybersquirrel1 was an eagle that dropped a sheep skull on <some critical part> of an electrical substation that shorted out a whole regional area for a time.

A friendly reply, and surprise which I rarely see here.

Despite my misinterpretation of your original comment, somehow I managed to be wrong but still right, and indeed you admit to having considered similar grid vulnerabilities.

I can imagine someone having a sip of radiofeisty tea on the Euphrates, musing that in the end, it was no bearded hero, no throbbing missile, no ornery atom, but a perfectly normal pigeon, or more poetically/biblically, the vacant head of a lamb that took down the great superpower.

On a sober note, we may soon be facing such strange times where popping corn by campfire is the more economically prudent culinary method, where not prohibited (Oregon?). Or maybe just grope in the eternal darkness for a slingshot and hurl a copper wire through the blinding electropustule of whatever inevitable datacenter happens to be humming nearby.

You vastly overestimate the ability of the US to win wars.

Have they won this one yet?

This looks like seeing the Iranian demands to be paid for transit, and saying "Nice business model; let's steal it".

But there's a larger point here. Iran has been using the ability to close the Strait as leverage. "We can deny the transit of oil, so you have to not trample on our interests." Well, the US also has the capability to close the Strait, and therefore the same leverage - including that leverage over Iranian oil.

And by Trump saying this, he's pointing that out. Pointing it out in a way the Iranians should understand, because it's the same language that they used.

I don't know if Trump is deliberately doing that, or just doing an extortion threat.

What about showing the U.S. had the capacity to close the strait, requires charging a toll?

In case you didn't know, the US had already been blockading the Iranian Gulf before the "deal" (surrender) that lifted sanctions on Iran.

Perhaps one day we’ll have a government not made up of dementia patients who can’t seem to remember what they just said and did the previous week.

You're a democracy. You're getting the government you ask for.

The option was on the table, and Americans doubled down on the dementia patient.

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