Donald Trump is demanding other countries send warships to help the United States in the Strait of Hormuz. Most prefer diplomacy.
Diplomacy works
Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One last night, Trump said he was talking to seven countries about helping to protect ships in the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway controlled by Iran through which a fifth of the world’s oil is transported. A day earlier, he had called on countries including China, Japan, South Korea, France and Britain to send warships to the strait to help reopen the waterway.
“I’m demanding that these countries come in and protect their own territory because it is their territory,” he said last night.
“It’s the place from which they get their energy.”
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In an interview with the Financial Times, the president said a negative response “will be very bad for the future of Nato” and he warned that his visit to China planned for the end of this month might be delayed. Beijing has indicated, despite its condemnation of Washington’s war against Iran, it would like the visit to go ahead.
China will not be sending warships to the Strait of Hormuz, not least because some oil bound for the Chinese market is still coming through. Bloomberg reported yesterday that an Iranian supertanker with oil for China passed through the strait last Friday.
China enjoys friendly relations with Iran and Beijing made clear from the start of this conflict that it blames Washington for the disruption it has caused. But India, which appeared to side with the United States and Israel when they attacked Iran, has also managed to get two tankers carrying liquefied petroleum gas through the strait in the past few days.
Iran allowed the ships to pass after a deal between Tehran and New Delhi that also saw India agreeing to allow about 180 Iranian sailors who had been docked in the western port city of Kochi to return home. India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, spoke with Iranian president Masoud Pezeshkian last week and foreign minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar has spoken to his Iranian counterpart, Abbas Araghchi, at least four times since the war began.
“I am at the moment engaged in talking to them and my talking has yielded some results,” Jaishankar told the Financial Times.
“Certainly, from India’s perspective, it is better that we reason and we co-ordinate and we get a solution than we don’t. So if that sort of allows other people to engage, I think the world is better off for it.”
France and Italy have also been talking to Tehran about a diplomatic solution and Araghchi said on Sunday that Iran was open to talking to countries that want to discuss the safe passage of their vessels. Trump may yet persuade some countries to send warships but even Japan, Washington’s closest ally in Asia and a country that depends on ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz for 70 per cent of its oil, is wary.
“I regard the threshold as extremely high,” Takayuki Kobayashi, the policy chief of prime minister Sanae Takaichi’s Liberal Democratic Party, said on Sunday.
“Legally speaking, we do not rule out the possibility but given the current situation in which this conflict is ongoing, I believe this is something that must be considered with great caution”.
That is Japanese for no.
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