Putting the screws in Hormuz (04-13-2026–Hour2)

What's going on. Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon to three on WBT Radio in Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily show prep with all the links, become a patron, go to vpekclendershow dot com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button, get every episode for free, rite to your smartphone or tablet, and again, thank you so much for your support. Alrighty, so let's talk about Horror Moves. First off, Sentcom about an hour ago issued a formal notice saying vessels entering the Strait of Horror Moves without authorization are subject to interception, diversion, and capture by the US military. The blockade will not impede neutral transit passage through the Strait of Horror Moves to or from non Iranian destinations. So this blockcase is just against the Iranians who have been surviving off of the revenue off their oil that they've been shipping to China. Basically before the news I mentioned that the CIA used spyware in their deception operation during the effort to rescue a downed US airman in Iran. This was Israeli spyware called Pegasus. They sent fake messages to Iranian officials and IRGC operatives claiming the pilot had already been recovered. We're texting them, oh my goodness, like it really is amazing. There was another report surfaced over the weekend of a blow up between Iran's Foreign Minister and the IRGC because the IRGC people were itching to pull the trigger on US warships in the Strait. They were saying that we should just start hitting them. Now, let's hit those hit those boats, and the Foreign minister was overheard by a journalist in Pakistan absolutely losing it on the phone, saying, you don't touch those US warships, the IRGC navy or what's left of it, I guess, says the straight of Hormones remains open for civilian vessels under quote smart control. Military vessels approaching the Strait will be considered cease fire violation and met with severe response. Now, Saudi Arabia just announced over the weekend that they have restored their East West oil pipeline. What does that mean, Well, that means they don't need the straight of horm moves. They're pumping seven million barrels per day through this pipeline. The bigger picture, according to open source Intel, Iran's main leverage is the Strait of Hormus, with roughly twenty percent of global oil flows passing through it. By flexing control, the regime is playing its strongest card, but that move comes with massive consequences. The US began its efforts to deprive Iran of this leverage right since the Horrmuz is weaponized, the world will now accelerate its workarounds right Saudi Arabia with the East West pipeline, They'll probably look to expand that capacity. Gulf states will begin to invest heavily in alternative export routes. Israel will actually emerge as a potential corridor for energy transit. These shifts won't happen overnight, but they are now inevitable. Or Iran leans on Horrormus, the faster the global energy flows will reroute around it, and over time that erodes Tehran's leverage and it cuts into their long term power. They say, we will see some short term pressure on the regime as it plays its strongest hand, but long term, this is a massive strategic failure of historic scale that will come back to bite them very hard. Will Chamberlain from the Article three project. He said, the Emirades and the Saudis can bypass the Straight of Horrmus to sell their oil, but you know who can't Iran. They cannot Iran international reporting that the UK wait. Do we care what they have to say about any of this anyway? The UK is working with France and other partners to form a wide coalition to ensure passage through the Strait of Hormos. This is according to a UK government spokesperson, who said, we continue to support freedom of navigation and the opening of the Strait of Hormuz, which is urgently needed to support the global economy and the cost of living back home. The Strait of Hormones must not be subject to tolling. We are urgently working with France and other partners to put together a wide coalition to protect freedom of navigation. But the UK said it's not going to take part in the us L blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. We continue to support freedom of navigation and the opening of the strait, which is urgently needed to support the global economy. Yes, we support the reopening of the strait but we are not going to help reopen. The strait and they are suffering for it. Europe is hurt by the Strait being extorted and they still can't bring well, they don't really have a navy so much anymore. So I guess that makes sense in response to Trump's naval blockade. By the way, that's nava l just for people who may not know. A navel blockade is like when your belly button gets filled with like shirt lint or something that's different and the spellcheck is not going to catch it before you send that out. In like a Facebook post. Okay, so, naval blockade. The parliament speaker Bager Gallibath from Iran. He says Americans must decide whether they are ready to earn Iran's trust or not. Okay, show of hands, who here would like to earn Iran's trust? Anybody? Anyone? Okay, Trump's recent threats have no effect on the Iranian nation. We have proven it. Okay, show of hands. Have they proven that Trump's threats have no impact on the Iranian nation? Because I can see a whole bunch of smoldering craters that would indicate effect on the Iranian nation. Okay, we had very intensive, serious and challenging talks. We presented strong initiatives that showed goodwill and led to progress. We do not trust the Americans. They must earn our trust and that is difficult due to their past actions. The Iranian nation is advancing on its path and relies on its own capabilities. Our delegation was united, serious and creative in defending Iran's rights. This is talking about the right to enrichment, the right to build a nuclear bomb. Regarding the naval blockade, these threats have no effect. This is not a slogan. The world has seen it. If America wants a way out, it must earn the trust of the Iranian nation. If you fight, we will fight, and if you come with logic, we will respond with logic. I believe Donald Trump said they've never won a single military victory, but they haven't failed in diplomacy. Like that's where they get everything that they get through concessions, through weak American deals. The jcpoa right. That's how they are allowed to get stronger is because diplomatically they tell Americans what they know. Americans want to hear. Americans treat them like good faith actors, like they're not going to gain whatever system the deal puts in place. Zineb Rebua. I've read her work quite a bit over the last five weeks. She's with the Hudson Institute. She said, I said it before, and I'll say it again. Iran's move to weaponize the straight ranks among its most strategically reckless decisions. They cannot sustain control over it. Their military position does not allow for prolonged enforcement against determined opposition. More importantly, it was never a credible bargaining chip. Once escalated, it has to be relinquished without meaningful concessions. The only asset that has ever carried real negotiating weight is the nuclear program. The logic behind the move is also flawed. The expectation was to trigger a global economic shock large enough to force a halt in US operations. That outcome, though, has not materialized. Instead, it has accelerated the opposite dynamic. Regional and global actors are now investing in roots and infrastructure designed to bypass the Strait altogether. In trying to turn hormos into leverage, Iran is diminishing its long term strategic value. Very stupid of the IRGC. You know, stories are powerful. They help us make sense of things, to understand experiences. Stories connect us to the people of our past while transcending generations. They help us process the meaning of life and our stories are told through images and videos. Preserve your stories with Creative Video. Started in nineteen ninety seven in mint Hill, North Carolina. It was the first come, but I need to provide this valuable service converting images, photos and videos into high quality produced slide shows, videos and albums. The trusted, talented and dedicated team at Creative Video will go over all of the details with you to create a perfect project. Satisfaction guaranteed. Drop them off in person or mail them. They'll be ready in a week or two. Memorial videos for your loved ones, videos for rehearsal, dinners, weddings, graduations, Christmas, family vacations, birthdays, or just your family stories all told through images. That's what your photos and videos are. They are your life told through the eyes of everyone around you and all who came before you, and they will tell others to come who you are. Visit creative video dot com. From the text line seven oh four number says when does Israel give up their nukes? Uh? Never? Hopefully that is what I wrote back, never why would they? Oh okay, maybe maybe I should let me back up, maybe go up like a ten thousand foot level. Here in the world, there are things called adversaries and allies, and so when you have an adversary, you don't want them to become militarily more powerful than you, because then they can kill you and take over your country. Right. And if you have allies, then those are countries that are friendly with you, and then you can work with them to repel the adversaries. Right, So our allies, we want them to be strong militarily, and that's sort of the rip on Europe right now, and a lot of the NATO countries right that they haven't been keeping up their end of the bargain militarily. They're not. They haven't replaced their fleets of ships. The British Navy has three boats, Like this is a nation that ruled the world through their fleets, right and now like they just put one in the water and it had to turn around because it's water, purrefire whatever broke to go back to port. It's embarrassing. So yeah, I want allied countries friendly countries. I want them to be powerful because I believe, And look, your mile mileage may vary on this, but I believe that America and Western civilization generally speaking, has been a great benefit to humankind. I do. I believe that. I think the evidence is pretty stark too, Like, look at the amount of people living in abject poverty. It has. I mean, we're approaching a point where it will be like zero. You look at the charts and it just craters. Since our founding and the unleashing of free markets, freedom right allowing people to pursue the things they want to pursue. Capital following those pursuits, and we have by and large eliminated global poverty. I mean, there is still work to be done to be sure. Like we live better than royalty that came before us, we have a higher standard of living, Like, we live longer, we're healthier, like all of these metrics. We are better off now, and I would submit that is largely due to Western civilization. So any nation that is a Western civilization nation I view as friendly and I would want to empower those nations against adversarial ones. But that's just me again. You may have a different opinion. You may want, you know, accelerate the fall of America, so you can implement something afterwards or whatever. I don't know, but. I'm a conservative. I wish to conserve the thing that we have that is so great. Daniel Lecale is the chief economist at Tressi's Wealth Management. He lays out the blocking the blockade by America of the Iranian ships in the Strait of Hormuz with the support of Oman as well as other Gulf nations. There So, like Iran's neighbors want us to do this too. So it has two objectives. One, block Iran's exports and the inflow of hard currency, right makes sense. Number two, make China force Iran to negotiate in realistic terms. Being a strategic partner of Iran and the most impacted by any shutdown of the strait, right, China has an interest in this, and so they need to lean on their Iranian pals and say you need to stop enrichment, you need to negotiate more realistically. The reason to do it now and not before this may be because eighty percent of the crude supply of the Strait of Horrmus has already been replaced or re routed, so the impact on supply and demand for most OPEC partners and customers is as small as possible with the highest negative impact for the Iranian regime. Also, OPEK has already agreed to lift quotas by exactly the amount that Iran exports, so Opek is going to open up the oil flows even more. So I keep getting this message as well, similar messages like it. Steve says, Explain to me why our gas prices are out the roof when we don't need Iran's oil and we are selling our oil to all those ships in the Gulf of America. I just don't get it, Pete, Thank you, Steve. Oil is a commodity that's traded on the global market, and so people are speculating about the price the price of oil based on events that are happening and what it's going to do to you know, to supply, and what it's going to do to you know, the path the ship's passage through the strait and if they can't go there, then what and all this And so if you reroute the oil and you offer new supplies from America for example, right then you will start seeing that price come down, which Opek just announced, increasing the flows. Sarry Arabia got their East West pipeline back up and running, and America is selling all this oil out of the Gulf of America. Like all of those things will have an impact on the pricing, but it's a globally traded commodity. Let me go back over to the old text line. Tom says, how depete being told oil going up here has nothing to do with the conflict in Iran is teetering very close to whizzing on your boots and telling you it's raining. Who's telling you the price of oil going up has nothing to do with the conflict in Iran. I haven't said that. I said oil is traded on the global market. And remember it's futures. So the price of oil is determined by you know, people making trades on what they think the price of oil will be. Right. So when it goes you know, when you have a constriction of supply, right, then the price goes up, which the conflict in Iran created that condition. Prices went up right because you're I mean. You're paying for the next shipment of oil. You're not like you've already bought the oil that's you know, in the gas pumps, and you've already bought that, so you're you're buying the next shipment to come in. And if you know the Strait of Hormoves gets shut down by Iran, then you're thinking, I'm not going to be able to get another shipment in that constrict supply, and so the price goes up, and that's a global marketplace phenomena. Look, I don't like that OPEC controls so much of the oil supply. I do like the fact that we are now producing a lot of oil ourselves, and Venezuela's oil is going to get into the marketplace and we've been paying essentially an Iran tax on oil for almost fifty years. The amount of instability that they have created in that region where everybody gets their energy from has like that has an impact on the prices too. And Trump told everybody this, Yeah, prices are going to go up and then they'll come back down. That's the idea. So I mean, like again, like if you want a panic, you can go ahead and panic. I'm I'm taking a little bit more of a cautious approach, like I am a wait and see kind of a guy. I'm we'll see what happens with this. Now, if the price of oil goes to you know, four hundred dollars a barrel, then i'let me say this is a big problem. But it went to you know, went up four percent. You know's I didn't see what it's trading at today. But it's kind of like, yes, this is volatility. So I've never said that what's going on in Iran has no impact on the price of oil. That I have never uttered those words, because that's not true. Let me see here, Allen says, how about when Israel decides it needs to set the world on fire to get some bad dude to climb up out of a well, then we can worry about Israel. Yeah, because that's the that's the apocalyptic vision of these Shia twelvers. They're called the twelfth Themam and it rises out of a well, and you know, after they destroy Israel and the Great Satan because like remember the Mollahs, the Ayatola when he you know, created his government and then you know, came in through the Revolution of seventy nine, like he fused Marxism oppress or oppressed, you know, and they put Western civilization into the oppressor category. And he fused that that Marxism with the twelfth thema Eschatology, and you put those things together, and so it's like, okay, yeah, we we just we speak in these terms oppressor, oppressed, and we create all these proxy armies, this ring of fire. We destabilize Lebanon, we destabilize other countries around us, and we direct all of the fire towards Israel. We take them off the map, and then we go after Great Satan in America. Right Like, that's that's been the plan. Now is does not have that plan. Israel would very much like to avoid that kind of thing. So I look for countries that wish to remain stable because that is better for uh, for the world, that's better for people, do do, Okay Joseph's on Ataire, Oh my goodness, dude, I can't read all of these messages. I'm gonna have to come back to that. Gabby says, I learned about commodities on the Eddie Murphy movie Trading Places. Commodities are coffee like what you had for breakfast, wheat which is used to make bread, pork bellies, which is used to make bacon, bacon, which you might find in a bacon lettuce, and tomato sandwich. True enough, Gabby Kevin says, who will be the first NC lawmaker to introduce legislation that the Trump as Jesus image be displayed in every NC public school. That's a silly question. People do have a hard time hearing words actually spoken. Yes, Vince Cokeley as a saying that I love, which is, do not hear what I'm not saying? It's so true? Okay. So what's Trump's gambit with the Strait of Hormuz? As a conservative commentator goes by the name of Gummy and he says, the blockade means that US assumes naval control of the strait. Afterwards they open it to non Iranian traffic, meaning probably escorted convoys. Also, the ceasefire is still in effect, so Iran can't do a thing to stop this without inviting renewed US as rarely strikes. So Trump effectively reopens the strait and freezes the conflict, and he can prolong the ceasefire indefinitely while allowing the regime to collapse economically. Right, We've talked about this very point that very early on there were reports coming out of Iran between the civilian leadership and the IRGC and the civilian leadership was saying, we only have like three to four weeks here before, like we have no money, can't pay anybody, and everything collapses. Their currency was already in crisis. You're about to see the total and complete collapse of their currency. Or Trump dares Iran to break the ceasefire and then has cause to restart hostilities and follow through on past threats of escalation, and this time it would be seen as retaliation. In either scenario, the objective is to impose maximum economic pressure on the regime, leading to internal unrest. Right, That to me has always been the thing, like boots on the ground are going to be Iranians. Right. We went over this last week the deposed Shaw's sun, the Prince Pa Lavill hanging out and I think he's in America actually, and he's been issuing messages and stuff. He's been telling the Iranian people, you know, telling the Iranian military, not the IRGC folks, but the national army, like, you guys need to defend the Iranian people when they rise up, because they will be rising up. And we talked about the weapons shipment that Trump said had been diverted. He was very mad about it. But then the next day or four days later, we had an attack on an IRGC checkpoint and they took out two of these besieged thugs. Well, who got the weapons? How did they get them? Maybe Trump was lying when he said they were diverted. Maybe they actually did make it through three two three number. I think this is the first message in the Yeah, just explain to people that ninety percent of the oil overseas is used to make all the plastic crap we buy from China. If they don't understand that, tell them to go watch Landman on Paramount. Yes, I think it was the first episode where he breaks down what's his name, Billy Bob Thornton. I knew it was three names, And Billy Bob Thornton breaks down to this like California liberal lawyer who comes to work for the oil company and she's like, we need windmills or whatever, and he just goes through and he's like, you don't understand how any of this works, and then he just boom boom boom boom boom. He talks about oil is in everything. Eight oh three Numbers says a good discussion would would be should large institutions that cannot take possession of oil, be able to trade oil. Remember when the oil price went negative during COVID, that meant you could get paid to take oil. I don't uh, I'm not sure I follow the question there. I'm sorry. Let me do this now. Lebanon. Let's talk about Lebanon real quickly, because Lebanon borders Israel. When the ceasefire took hold, Israel went and started mopping the floor with Hesbala because Hesbala and Iranian proxy funded by Iran, trained, supplied by Iran in order to destabilize and try, you know, to take down Israel from the northern side. And Hesbola kept firing rockets into Israel. They're still doing it, and so Israel is like, you know what, time to mop the floor with these guys. And so they have moved into southern Lebanon, which is the area that is controlled by Hesbola. The north part of Lebanon Hesbola does not like fully controlled, but the national government has members of Hesbala in the government, okay, And so so Lebanon is basically a failed state, okay. And they you know, they were supposed to have started disarming Hesblah and policing Hesbelah like I don't know, a decade ago or something as part of some agreement, and they haven't been doing it. So here's Hesbela now just getting creamed. I think the last count I saw was two hundred and fifty Hesbala commanders taken out in the last week since the Israeli operations began. And what Israel is doing is pushing basically their border up and clearing out that whole zone to the Latani River, I think is what it's called. And that river is sort of a natural buffer between you know, Lebanon and Israel, and so that would be basically like a yellow zone, much like they did to Gaza. They're like, we can't have you right on our border, so we're going to push you back, and you're gonna you're going to be you know, I think eight to ten kilometers back, I think is what they're looking to do. Now. Raises the question then also of what becomes of that zone. I've seen people saying, you know, Israel should occupy it, Israel should annex it. Israel could buy it, right, they could buy it. That would help Lebanon with a bunch of money to rebuild or whatever. But this is like this is what happens in war, right, when somebody defeats somebody else and they take control of the land, then they control the land. I don't think that's what Israel's intending to do. If Lebanon is serious, and it seems like maybe they are approaching seriousness, they are going to meet with Israel and they're going to have to actually work with the Israelis to disarm as well, and we'll see if they do it. Leban's Prime Minister Nawaf Salam called for unity and warned against another civil war in a speech marking fifty one years since the Lebanese Civil War as Beirut prepares to engage Israel in direct negotiations in Washington this week. Salam admitted Lebanon has failed since nineteen ninety one to implement the Taith Agreement, which calls for extending state authority over all territories and a monopoly on bearing arms. During a Lebanese cabinet meeting, the Prime Minister of Lebanon said that Israel did not carry out any strike on any building in Beyroute without a reason. It was because Hesbela stores weapons there or because Hesbela leaders were hiding there. That's based on testimonies from cabinet members given directly to a Hesbelah journalist. Okay, so if you've got the Lebanese government talking this way in their cabinet meetings and going to talk with Israel, and when Israel started their attack on Hesbelah during the ceasefire, remember the Iranians were like, no, the ceasefire has to cover our terrorist proxy Hesbelah, and Israel and the US were like, no, it doesn't, this is just for us. They're doing something else over there. And I said at the time, like, wow, that's an admission that Iran is their patron right. So that laid bear that lie that they haven't been operationally allied with Hesbala at the time, and so Iran saying no, no, no, you got to stop that bombing, and we want that to be part of our negotiations. And what did Lebanon say. They were like, hey, we'll negotiate ourselves. Nobody speaks for Lebanon here where the Lebanese government, We'll do the speaking. And that goes for you too, UK and EU. You don't negotiate for us. All right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much. For listening. I could not do the show about your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast, so if you'd like, please support them too and tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to dpetecleanershow dot com. Again, thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything while I'm gone.