Iranians would have laid quite a bit of those dumb mines as well. Plus the sea currents that probably made those mines drift away from their initial location.
It’s very difficult to account for a country which uses a mix of the modern mines which can have the geolocation located and the old dumb mines which are basically pressure mines.
Apparently there’s mines that are remote controlled so they can select which passing ships to explode.
Not saying they don’t have advanced mines. But majority will be dumb legacy mines.
You can’t deal with assymetric warfare on the national level. Israel has only faced proxies in hesbollah and Hamas before. The likes of Iran would take the learnings from those and better then for sure.
I don’t think the control of the Straits is actually a firm demand, it is rather ‘a card’ to use the Mango Mussolini’s parlance. The idea of setting up a toll system would have been inconceivable in Tehran 6 months ago, it is very unlikely to have morphed into a sine qua non since.
I stated about a month ago that Iran would happily take a ceasefire (having no bombs falling not a bad thing), but would not let the US simply revert to the status quo ex ante. Any restock is just taking advantage of the opportunity.
For the US, on the other hand, I don’t think their purpose was to buy time. They desperately need an off ramp, and were hoping to intimidate Iran into some concessions to dress up a reversion to something like JCPOA as a huge victory for Trump. Time is not in their favour, and any escalation involving risk to American troops would be politically disastrous for the Republicans.
The conventional wisdom in the US is that the political campaign season begins after Memorial Day (May 25 this year), and the plan was to have safely brought this non-war to a close before that. That looks less and likely each day, and that has the Trump White House terrified. There are now polls showing the real chance that they could lose control of the House and possibly even the Senate (the slate of Senate seats up in this cycle made that seem very unlikely, still is unlikely). If the Republicans lose control of the House, they will be in real trouble, the number of impeachment motions will become staggering (not just Trump)
It seems that Vance arrived in Islamabad without the full authority to reach an agreement with Iran, unlike Ghalibaf.
— Ehsan Taghadosi (@demokracy) April 12, 2026
According to his own account, he called Trump more than 12 times during 21 hours of negotiations to discuss the issues. And according to Araghchi, he spoke with… pic.twitter.com/6dwONhP2bM
The US military said it would block shipping traffic in and out of Iran’s ports starting at 10am ET (6pm local time) on Monday, a move that would prevent roughly two million barrels of Iranian oil a day from entering the world’s markets, further tightening global supply.
Even UAE gets it 
I see China’s foreign minister has said it’s an irresponsible and dangerous escalation. Kind of obvious I guess.
What the BBC are reporting is that the US will actually intercept ships out in the Indian Ocean and that is basically piracy.
Interesting interview
so China is of the opinion that this war launched by the US and Israel should be stopped right away because its in violation of International War,
Meanwhile in Ukraine, Russia attacks it daily and is supported by China…
I never said they were innocent in this. Far from it, they support Iran too.
But it’s fascinating that they are moving tankers through the Strait of Hormuz in pure defiance of the US. It’s another layer of escalation.
However, I do believe that this whole thing, and Ukraine too, ultimately benefits them more than anyone else in the world. They’ve set themselves up, sat back and watched dictators pushing the self destruct button for their respective nations.
Trump’s bleating his arse saying that Iran has agreed to surrender their “nuclear dust”
Let’s see it when it comes
And Ukraine supports Israel.
The countries which remained aloof of this are the ones who will benefit from the entire shitshow
Not sure, I do think China has prepared themselves extremely well for something like this, and they’ve gone about things quietly with very little fuss.
They didn’t kick up too much of a stink when Trump was throwing tariffs round willy nilly either.
Its the quiet ones you have to watch…
https://x.com/araghchi/status/2045121573124759713
Congratulations to the despots in Iran are in order now.
No coincidence that Iran takes this step when they have the ceasefire in Lebanon they demanded.
