Patrick Wintour

Yes, I mean, I think the ghastly phrase, the kinetic activity has switched from land to sea, and there are these two different blockades, one laid over the other.

There's the US blockade on Iranian ports, and the purpose behind that is to, in effect, make it impossible for Iran to continue to produce oil within a matter of a fortnight, it's been estimated today.

If they can't get their oil out, then the oil production will have to come to a halt.

And that could cause some permanent damage to some of the oil installations in Iran.

So they lose revenue and their industry, which is the most important revenue generating industry, gets crippled.

I mean, that's the American plan and obviously the Iranian plan, which they're stepping up by now.

seizing ships is to keep the chokehold on the strait and 20% of oil and most commodities go through that strait.

So the Iranians are continuing to use this metric of what is the price of oil.

As long as it's going up, they're happy.

But I think it is significant they're now starting to seize ships because

They need to really ram home to the Americans that they feel they're winning this war, or at least they're not losing this war, and that they're in a totally resolute position.

That then will feed back into what the both sides feel they should do in terms of returning to talks in Islamabad, because they're just both strengthening their hands ahead of those talks ever happening.

It's not just the Iranians.

I mean, for some strange reasons, I was with some diplomats last night from the Caucasus and they were just saying that and they've got their own kind of peace agreement.

deal going on which Trump's supposed to be engineering and they find it very very difficult because they get conflicting messages from the White House about the kind of agreement they're supposed to be striking.

It's not just an Iranian problem but particularly over the weekend there was a selection of tweets which were very triumphalist by Trump and I think it's now become a self-standing problem the way in which Trump is using the media and trying to suggest that he's already won this

when I think it's very deep in the Iranian psyche, and it might be in many countries' psyche, they're not going to feel trampled upon or going to negotiate when they're under threat.

And there's a school of thought inside Iran that they've now proved themselves, they've gone up the league table of great powers, and they've proved themselves to be capable of standing up to Trump time and again.

Well, I think we're in a difficulty, to be honest.

I mean, I think the key Iranian demand is that the American blockade ends and the key US demand is the Iranian blockade ends.