What does an “open” Strait of Hormuz look like, in Iran’s telling? This morning, we got some clarity. Iran is claiming that vessels can sail through as they wish—but that because they have heavily mined the main shipping channel, shippers must only transit while hugging the Iranian shore and in coordination with the Iranian military. You know, for safety. “We have to be very careful for the safety and security of those tankers and vessels,” Deputy Foreign Minister Saeed Khatibzadeh told ITV News.

Is this true? Who knows! But shippers will be unlikely to risk the main channel until they get more clarity. This is the shakedown America appears prepared to permit under our “ceasefire.” Happy Thursday.

The End of Madman Theory

by Andrew Egger

It’s a fundamental piece of MAGA mythology: None of the histrionic threats the president makes during his spasms of gangster negotiation should be taken seriously by Americans. If the president threatens a genocide against Iran, and that makes you worry that the president might order a genocide against Iran, you’re acting like an idiot or a rube. Somehow, Trump’s supporters insist, his threats are supposed to exist in some mythical space where we are permitted to discount them but they are expected to take them deadly seriously. This, in turn, is supposed to unlock for Trump devastating levels of negotiating pressure that only he can access.

But the last thirty-six hours have shown us the truth. Trump’s threats aren’t only a blot on America’s conscience and stain on our standing in the world, which now sees America as a country that might threaten the worst possible crimes to get what it wants. They’re also a total failure on their own terms. Far from maximizing America’s agency, Trump’s ultimatum and accompanying threats finally placed him in a negotiating straitjacket. He had to back down, and the Iranians knew it.

This backdown has landed America in a surreal place. For all intents and purposes, the ceasefire we announced with so much fanfare on Tuesday has already ceased to exist—indeed, never existed at all. All the belligerents, besides us, are still shooting. Yesterday, Israel conducted more extensive attacks against Lebanon, while the Gulf states reported that Iranian missile and drone attacks had not abated. Meanwhile, the Strait of Hormuz remains, despite the president’s assurances to the contrary, functionally closed: Iran continues to warn ships to transit the strait only in coordination with the Iranian military, threatening to attack vessels that disobey.

According to the MAGA mythology of the Trump threat, none of this should be happening at all. Iran is supposed to be scared straight, too terrified that Trump might drop the gloves and bomb them back to the Stone Age to keep acting out.

But it isn’t just that we’re back to the pre-ceasefire status quo. The White House now has a strong interest in pretending that a ceasefire is in effect even if it isn’t—because otherwise Trump’s threats achieved nothing, and they would have to admit he just chickened out. And so the whole White House messaging apparatus spent yesterday twisting themselves into pretzels to explain why none of these obvious provocations were really, truly violations of the ceasefire.

That bloody fighting in Lebanon? Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt and Vice President JD Vance insisted it had never been subject to the ceasefire in the first place.¹ The missiles and drones targeting the Gulf states? That, Leavitt suggested, was probably just because we’d bombed Iran’s military communications infrastructure too well: parts of Iran’s military maybe just hadn’t heard about the ceasefire yet. And Iran’s continued tolling of the Strait of Hormuz? Well, hey, that was a work in progress, and anyway the president was cooking up some ideas about how maybe America could get a kickback there, too, so why all the complaining?

Meanwhile, the White House was insisting—against all evidence—that the ten-point Iranian plan Trump had said Tuesday would serve as a basis for negotiation was not, in fact, the ten-point plan that had been publicly reported and which Iran was claiming Trump had agreed to consider. Leavitt insisted that that plan, which contained a host of ludicrous concessions that no American president would agree to, had been “literally thrown in the garbage” by Trump and his negotiating team. Leavitt further claimed that Iran had secretly communicated a different, far more acceptable ten-point plan, and that it was this plan that Trump had agreed to make the basis for further negotiations.²

“The president’s red lines, namely the end of uranium enrichment in Iran, have not changed,” Leavitt said (Trump contradicted this himself; more on that below), “and the idea that President Trump would ever accept an Iranian wish list as a deal is completely absurd.”

This, apparently, was news to the Iranians. In an angry statement after Leavitt’s press conference, Iranian Speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf accused America and Israel of already violating multiple clauses of the ceasefire, including by continuing to strike Lebanon and by denying Iran’s right to enrich uranium. “Now the very ‘workable basis on which to negotiate’ has been openly and clearly violated, even before the negotiations began,” Ghalibaf fumed. “In such a situation, a bilateral ceasefire or negotiations is unreasonable.”

I will repeat: Under the MAGA theory of Trump negotiation, all these roles should be reversed. It should be the Iranians who are desperate to maintain the ceasefire—because who knows what Trump would do?—and the Americans who are watching like hawks for any violation, warning Iran that the slightest deviation from the ceasefire terms would bring the wrath of Trump down on their heads.

Trump spent yesterday evening t