Scott Lucas

And the Iranians have said flat out no.

Now, if the U.S.

lifts its blockade –

then that's its leverage to try to get Iranian concessions in the talks.

Even as you mentioned, it's preventing the talks from resuming.

But there's a wider development here, David.

I'm not sure everyone has clocked on to.

Up until yesterday, I was saying, look, the Americans had two choices.

And that is either they continue in talks with the Iranians or they put ground troops back in.

And it looks like the Trump folks are backing away from any ground operations.

They're now opening up a third option, though.

Which is, all right, we're going to conduct economic warfare against the Iranians to force them to surrender.

So if we blockade these Iranian ports, they'll say, oh, it will deprive Iran of $500 million a day.

Iran will no longer be able to finance basic public services, will no longer be able to fund the government, and it will break down.

Two problems with that.

One is Iran's been under 47 years of sanctions of varying degrees, especially heavy sanctions since 2018, and the leadership still hasn't buckled.

Secondly, the Trump folks have contradicted themselves because only a few weeks ago, rather than imposing more economic pressure, they lifted sanctions on 140 million barrels of Iranian oil.

which gave the Iranians a $14 billion effective boost to their economy from selling metal oil.

I think what you're saying is that the Iranian regime is in a position where it just wants to survive.

Now, that kind of gives a coherence in terms of what it's trying to do.