by BAQAR HASAN
For forty years Washington has known what Tehran is doing but it still didn’t find the right moves.
On Friday, April 11, while Pakistani officials were arranging the seating plan for ceasefire talks in Islamabad, the USS Frank E. Peterson and USS Michael Murphy entered the Strait of Hormuz. Murphy switched on her Automatic Identification System, a deliberate broadcast, visible to every vessel and coastal radar in the Gulf, announcing her presence in a waterway no American warship had entered since Operation Epic Fury began on 28 February.
A radio exchange recorded by a civilian vessel captured the Iranian warning to them: “This is the last warning. This is the last warning.” The American reply invoked the rules of the ceasefire. The same ceasefire whose negotiation was being prepared, at that moment, in a conference room in Islamabad.
Three days later, Vice President J.D. Vance walked out of the Islamabad Marriott after twenty-one hours of talks. He told reporters Iran had “chosen not to accept our terms”. By 9am on Sunday — nine hours and thirteen minutes later — President Donald Trump announced that the United States Navy would block all maritime traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, effective 14:00 GMT. In the hours between Vance’s departure and the blockade order, Trump told reporters the ceasefire was “holding well”.
Holding well. Naval blockade. Same man, same morning. Two destroyers probing Hormuz while the talks were still live.
This is coffeehouse chess. Tricks, traps, and psychological pressure instead of sound positional logic. It works against weaker opponents who panic, but collapses against a prepared opponent.
The trick and the board
A ceasefire operates on a shared premise: both sides have agreed to stop fighting while they talk. A naval blockade is, however, an act of war. Not metaphorically. It is classified as a belligerent act requiring formal declaration, notification to all affected states, and proportionality review, according to the San Remo Manual on International Law Applicable to Armed Conflicts at Sea, which incidentally is the same framework the US has cited for 40 years when criticising Iranian conduct in the Gulf. There is no legal or doctrinal framework in which a ceasefire and a blockade coexist. There is a simple binary; you are either negotiating with your enemy or you are besieging them. In this case, Washington chose a siege.
We need to look no further than the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 to find an example of the care with which the word ‘blockade’ was used, since it is defined as an act of war. That 13-day standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union was the closest the Cold War ever came to nuclear conflict. President John F. Kennedy’s advisers warned him never to use blockade to describe US actions against Cuba. His team instead chose to use “defensive quarantine” (as framed under the Rio Treaty), with multilateral authorisation secured before the first ship was turned. The President’s brother and Attorney General, Robert F. Kennedy, argued against the air strike option and pushed for the framework that gave Khrushchev space to climb down. Every word was chosen to limit escalation, maintain legal cover, and preserve the coalition.
Another Kennedy now sits on the Trump cabinet. The name that once defined the most careful exercise of American executive restraint in the nuclear age now belongs to a man in an administration that used the word his grandfather’s advisers refused to say and even posted it on social media. This was done without any UN mandate or coalition, and the United Kingdom explicitly refused to participate.
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