“The blockade scares them even more than the bombing — they’ve been bombed for years, but the blockade they hate.” That’s President Trump talking to Fox News’ Martha MacCallum in a very telling statement.

And it may well be that the factionalized Iranians simply cannot come up with any kind of unified agreement to present American negotiators.

It also may well be that there’s no such thing as an agreement, other than unconditional surrender. All nuclear activity stops. Enriched uranium must be transferred from Iran to America.

All proxy and other forms of terrorism must be stopped. The Strait of Hormuz must be completely open. And frankly whatever other American demands are placed on a badly defeated Iran.

In a sense, there is a ceasefire now, but American military combat operations, which are even stronger today than at the beginning of the war, may be resumed at any moment. And perhaps most importantly, the United States Navy’s blockade of Iranian ports continues.

That’s the state of play and the state of war right now. No oil, no money. That’s Iran’s dilemma.

America presumably will control the entire Persian Gulf theatre, including the Strait of Hormuz.

It’s probably costing Iran something near $450 million a day, annualizing to nearly $160 billion a year, for a budget that’s estimated at only $100 billion annually. Put simply, there’s no money to meet payroll or retirement.

All the thugs, and barbarians, and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the rest of the government, and all the businesses that they have stolen and looted, and all kinds of fanatics who are just not going to get paid.

If we actually took out Kharg Island, that would knock out an additional 1.5 million barrels a day, worth about $140 million at current prices, covering 190,000 personnel, according to a NY Post op-ed by a retired United States Navy captain, Lance B. Gordon.

And there may be roughly 200 million barrels a day of Iranian oil floating on the high seas mostly near Communist China, that could be worth about $20 billion.

Yet the economic crunch from the blockade is the biggest and most powerful financial weapon; we’ve never tried this before, and it just might work.

I’d love to see the United States Treasury seize all the bank accounts of the criminals running Iran, but that’s a separate story.

The point is for the moment, Mr. Trump is content to let the blockade inflict its punishment on Iran for the foreseeable future, perhaps as long as it takes to just bring them to their unconditional knees.

Larry Kudlow is a columnist for the New York Sun. From Mr. Kudlow’s broadcast on Fox Business Network.

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https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2026/04/23/the_blockade_scares_them_even_more_than_the_bombing_154060.html