Hey there, it's the NPR Politics podcast. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. I'm Greg

Myrie. I cover national security. And I'm Tamara Keith, senior political correspondent. And today on the show,

President Trump has announced a blockade against ships traveling through the Strait of Hormuz. How is this going to impact the

ongoing war in Iran? Greg, let's just start with the basics here. Trump announced this

blockade on Sunday. It was slated to go into effect this morning Eastern time. Can you explain

what's going on? Yeah, so there were the peace talks between Iran and the U.S. Saturday and into Sunday morning in Pakistan. They didn't reach a deal. It looked like all of a sudden it might kind of be stuck, not clear what would happen next. So Trump posts online saying he's going to impose a blockade on ships coming through the Strait of Hormuz. So the U.S. Navy is in charge of

this. It will prevent ships that come out of the strait or going into the strait. The U.S. does have

a naval presence, maybe 15 ships or so, including an aircraft carrier, which has dozens of jet

fighters aboard. So it wouldn't be hard necessarily for the U.S.

to do this because it's only going to stop a small number of big, massive, slow-moving

commercial ships that were coming out of the strait. And those U.S. ships, some of them at least,

are outside the southern entrance of the Strait of Hormuz, which is at the southern end of the Gulf.

Right. So, I mean, Iran had already basically closed the Strait of Hormuz for weeks for most ships. There were only a few ships traveling before this blockade. So what is actually really going to change from this policy change?

Yeah, very fair question, Miles. And the answer is maybe not a whole lot. I don't want to try to

predict because this could go in a lot of different ways, but I will offer one scenario, perhaps

even the most likely scenario at this point. And that is we may well see a tense standoff.

Before the war, more than 100 ships a day, many of them oil tankers were going back and forth through the Strait of Hormuz.

A little while after the war started, Iran said it was closing off traffic in the strait, and we've seen that go down to just a few

ships a day. These are ships that Iran says are friendly or at least neutral. They may be taking

Iranian oil out, and so Iran is allowing three, four, five ships a day to go out through the

strait. Some of these ships are

reportedly being charged up to $2 million by Iran so that they can pass safely through the

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