Chris Barrow

He could say something that extraordinary.

I think it will be very difficult for the Israelis to continue if Washington decided to call a halt.

But quite when that moment will be and what exactly the circumstances will be are unclear.

And of course, the other crucial question is, well, the Americans might say they're going to stop.

Will Iran stop?

Will it release its chokehold?

on the Straits of Hormuz, for example, and allow energy supplies to keep moving again?

So many questions as ever, and at the moment, very few clear answers.

Jonathan Marcus.

Mr Trump's request for help clearing the Strait of Hormuz was an implicit acknowledgement that the US doesn't have the resources it needs to demine the crucial waterway by itself.

Emma Salisbury is from the Foreign Policy Research Institute.

She's been speaking to my colleague Owen Bennett-Jones.

The United States had really good minesweeping capability during most of the Cold War.

So its capabilities were really strong throughout most of the Cold War.

Once the Cold War ended, the US, along with a lot of other countries, dialed down its defence spending, drew down a lot of its capabilities, and minesweeping was one of those.

So the capability actually feed steadily until about 2006.

And that is when the United States got rid of mine warfare command, which was the centralised point for all of their mine warfare capabilities.

So those capabilities got sort of split up and ploughed off into different parts of the US Navy, which meant that they weren't being centrally organised and they didn't have a champion in the budget process anymore.

So that meant mine warfare capabilities still existed, but they just weren't as good as they were prior to that period.

Right.