Saunders: To be honest, I think he just has no grasp of what the situation really is. I think he wants brave captains to run the Strait of Hormuz like in Star Wars—you know, the Kessel Run or whatever it is. And I don’t mean to make light of it, because it’s a dangerous state of affairs. He wants these ships to be taking on very dangerous journeys through this very narrow, very shallow strait that may now have mines.
As he said in that clip, he said they’ve destroyed all their mining ships. That’s absolutely not true. They may have distributed some of the mines around Iran so that they couldn’t be targeted directly in one go. They may have already laid some mines. We don’t fully know, but I would say that is not something we can just take on Trump’s say-so.
This is not something the world, and in particular the financial world that insures these ships, and the companies that run these ships, and the pilots and captains, you know, the people who crew these ships, can unsee. Iran struck these tankers—at least three, at last count, that I saw today, and I may already be out of date. And if you look at these images of tankers on fire, what captain, what company in their right mind would send a tanker laden with fuel through the Strait of Hormuz? It’s really dangerous.
