Vera Bergengruen

One of the most striking things to me about how the president has conducted this war is that he's often quite blunt about the costs.

And he kind of says that he's, you know, everyone should be willing to bear them.

So, so far, very few ships were going through.

So from speaking to analysts and military experts, they say that, you know, the handful of ships that have been going through, it's quite easy given that it's a very narrow waterway for the United States that has the assets in the region to basically position themselves to intercept those ships.

And we've seen them really use these capabilities last year, you know, more extensively.

We saw them do this in Venezuela.

They've got, you know, lots of assets in the region that allow them to, you know, go after these ships, potentially board them.

But they haven't really told us what they plan to do with them after.

So there's still a lot of questions about that.

But it isn't, you know, as massive as it might sound, given that traffic through the strait had already slowed to a trickle.

So from speaking with officials and analysts, what they say is that the United States doesn't even have to try and catch all of these ships.

No one's really going to risk it.

All it takes is one or two, and the rest of them are going to have this quote-unquote herd mentality and aren't even going to try.

How has Iran reacted to this blockade?

I think for Iran, it's almost been validation to an extent that they still have so much control over this critical global oil choice point that, you know, the United States would even bother wasting all these resources to do this.

And, you know, again, they still retain the ability to retaliate against Gulf states.

They still have everything that they had a week ago.

So for them, we've seen, you know, they've been really adept at kind of trolling the United States to an extent, kind of flaunting the fact that they still retain control and that that is why this is happening.

So the formal Navy has been pretty severely decimated by the U.S.

strikes.