Trump Orders Naval Blockade of Iran After Failed Talks, Iran Threatens Retaliation in Gulf

April 13, 2026
Ship traffic has been halted again in the Strait of Hormuz after President Trump ordered the U.S. military to begin a naval blockade of all Iranian ports and coastal areas starting Monday at 10 a.m. ET. Iran denounced Trump’s move as an illegal act amounting to “piracy” and has threatened to strike Gulf ports in retaliation. Trump ordered the blockade after the U.S. and Iran failed to reach a deal to end the war following 21 hours of talks in Islamabad, Pakistan. Global oil prices jumped after Trump announced the blockade.

Ervand Abrahamian, professor emeritus of history at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York, predicts “the U.S. will start bombing Iranian oil installations. Iran will retaliate by bombing the Gulf oil installations, gas installations. The oil prices then could really zoom up. Some people expect it to reach $200 a barrel.” Abrahamian warns that soaring energy prices will have long-term implications for the world economy.
AMY GOODMAN: Ship traffic has halted again in the Strait of Hormuz after President Trump ordered the U.S. military to begin a naval blockade of all Iranian ports and coastal areas starting today at 10 a.m. Eastern. Iran denounced Trump’s move as an illegal act amounting to piracy. Iran has threatened to strike Gulf ports in retaliation.
Trump ordered the blockade after the U.S. and Iran failed to reach a deal to end the war following 21 hours of talks in Islamabad, Pakistan. The negotiations marked the highest-level talks between the two countries since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. U.S. Vice President JD Vance headed the U.S. delegation, which included U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.
Iranian negotiators had flown to Pakistan on a plane they called “Minab 168” as a tribute to the 168 people killed in a U.S. missile strike on an elementary school in the city of Minab on February 28th. The plane carried images of the dead schoolchildren, along with blood-stained school bags recovered beneath the rubble.
Global oil prices jumped after Trump announced the blockade.
We’re joined now by Ervand Abrahamian, professor emeritus of history at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York, the author of several books, most recently, Oil Crisis in Iran: From Nationalism to Coup d’État. His forthcoming book, 1979: An Inevitable Revolution.
So, your response to what transpired in Pakistan, the deal that was not reached between Iran and the United States, and what this means, Professor?
ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: Well, I think both sides actually presented, basically, ultimate demands which the other side couldn’t accept, so it was a false start. But the implications of the failure is going to be actually quite drastic on the United States, because Trump’s main concern has been to actually put a limit, a lid, on the oil prices going up, and they’ve already jumped from $88 a barrel to over $100. They’re going to increase more with the present crisis, with the embargo on the Straits of Hormuz. And as the crisis escalates, I think the U.S. will start bombing Iranian oil installations. Iran will retaliate by bombing the Gulf’s oil installations, gas installations. The oil prices then could really zoom up. Some people expect it to reach $200 a barrel. In that case, you know, it will have long-term implications for Wall Street and the whole American economy, not to mention the world economy. So, things that Trump has tried to avoid, he has got, actually, himself into the major crisis, economic crisis.
AMY GOODMAN: You have Robert Malley, who had previously been involved with talks with Iran, saying, quote, “Twenty-one hours was 20 hours too many if the goal was to reiterate a demand Iran had already rejected. It was many hours too few if the goal was to negotiate.” Your response?
ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: He’s exactly right. And I think, I mean, what Iran sees as the present crisis is an existential one, because although the talk has been regime change, the Israeli policy, clearly, in the last 10 years has been more than regime change. It’s basically been the destruction of the Iranian state, Iranian nation. So Iran sees this as an existential threat.
There was a speech that Trump made when he launched the attack on Iran a couple of weeks ago. It was actually quite interesting speech. He talked about various ethnic minorities being oppressed in Iran, and they were dying to be liberated from Iranian control. And he listed obvious ethnic groups, but then there was one ethnic group that, really, I’d never heard of. So I scratched my head. What is this group? And I did what most people do: You google. And lo and behold, this ethnic group actually exists in the other side of the Caucasus Mountains in Dagestan.
So you wonder what reason they had for putting this ethnic group that doesn’t exist in Iran as one of the ethnic groups, unless there’s some sinister idea the Israelis have of a civil war in Iran, where they will recruit, actually, mercenaries from the other side of the Caucasus to bring into Iran. Of course, this sounds far-fetched, but this is what actually happened in Syria. You had a lot of Chechens actually brought in to fight against Assad. So, the Israelis may be thinking in those terms of actually a long civil war in Iran, where they would be bringing in mercenaries from outside. So, for this reason, I think Iran sees this as a real, serious, existential war. It’s not just a question of a minor sort of fine tuning of relations with the United States.
AMY GOODMAN: You’ve written about oil in Iran a great deal. Ghalibaf, the speaker of Iran’s parliament, tweeted on Sunday, “Enjoy the current pump figures. With the so-called 'blockade', soon you’ll be nostalgic for $4-$5 [per gallon] gas.”
ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: Yeah, yeah. I mean, the price could go up to $200 a barrel, even more than that, if, basically, the Gulf oil — it’s not just Iranian oil, but the whole Gulf oil and gas — is actually cut off from the world market.
AMY GOODMAN: So, let’s talk about what Iran wants right now and what the U.S. wants. Ten o’clock a.m. — we’re broadcasting right before that — Eastern time is when the U.S. Navy blockades, apparently, the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz. What exactly this means? How will the Gulf nations be affected? How will Iran be affected? Because it both exports oil, but, of course, it needs oil and makes a great deal of its own oil.
ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: Yeah, I mean, it won’t break Iran, because it has — Iran has other ways of actually exporting oil. It’ll obviously be a hardship, but it’ll be a much worse hardship on the Gulf states, if Iran actually dismantles their oil installations. And that affects directly United States economy, because so much of Gulf oil money, gas money actually goes into high-tech United States. And much of the American, basically, modern technology is funded by subsidies from the various Gulf states. So it would have drastic repercussions on U.S. economy.
AMY GOODMAN: What does Trump want? His latest, and what Vance said — right? Vance leaves the Hungarian prime minister, campaigning for him, Orbán, who was soundly defeated, and then goes to Islamabad to lead this negotiation. He says it’s all about nuclear weapons. Vance said, “The simple fact is that we need to see an affirmative commitment that they will not seek a nuclear weapon and they will not seek the tools that would enable them [to quickly] achieve a nuclear weapon.” Your response?
ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: Exactly. I mean, that’s exactly what the Obama agreement was.
AMY GOODMAN: That Trump pulled out of.
ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: Yes, which Trump pulled out. But if you look at that agreement, basically, it said Iran had the right to enrich, but it had to be supervised to make sure it couldn’t enrich to the level of nuclear weapons. So, Netanyahu cries it was vague agreement. In fact, it was very precise. Iran could enrich to 3.67% of uranium. That’s as precise as you can get. It was limited to 200 grams of enriched uranium. And also, it was — everything was supervised. There were 140 international monitors, including American monitors. So, this was an incredibly tight procedure to make sure that Iran would actually fulfill its promise not to go into nuclear weapons.
When Trump pulled out of that, he basically unwound the whole system. And the best he can get is going back to that. So, demand that Iran should have no nuclear enrichment is a nonstarter. The best he could get is to go back, permit Iran to have enrichment, but with on monitoring that it would not be weapon enrichment.
AMY GOODMAN: We just have a minute. In a call with the Russian President Putin, Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian said a deal is, quote, “not out of reach.” So, if you can talk about whether — where you see this all headed?
ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: Well, there are people in Iran in the — basically, in the National Security Council, including Pezeshkian, who think that they can make a deal with the United States. And they’ve been there a long time. But there are also people now, I think, hard-liners, who are stronger now than before the war, who are arguing that you can’t make a deal with Trump. Even if he makes a deal with — if Trump makes a deal, he could, the following week, decide he’s going to pull out. So it’s a nonstarter, from their point of view, unless U.S. can actually make full commitments. And I don’t see how they can do that, because Trump is basically untrustworthy.
So, from their point of view, I think the hard-liners in Iran could argue, persuasively, the more the pressure they have, the more the prices are going to go up; the more it goes up, sooner or later, the patient will have a heart attack or a stroke. So they have an upper hand at the moment.
AMY GOODMAN: Ervand Abrahamian, I want to thank you so much for being with us, professor emeritus of history at the Graduate Center at City University of New York, author of several books, most recently, Oil Crisis in Iran, his forthcoming book, 1979: An Inevitable Revolution.