{"id":59125,"date":"2026-05-04T03:56:41","date_gmt":"2026-05-04T11:56:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=59125"},"modified":"2026-05-04T07:46:55","modified_gmt":"2026-05-04T15:46:55","slug":"president-trump-thinks-the-us-can-play-traffic-cop-in-the-persian-gulf","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2026\/05\/04\/president-trump-thinks-the-us-can-play-traffic-cop-in-the-persian-gulf\/","title":{"rendered":"John Mearsheimer &#038; Trita Parsi:  President Trump Thinks the US Can Play Traffic Cop in the Persian Gulf"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Reprinted from <a href=\"https:\/\/mearsheimer.substack.com\/p\/president-trump-thinks-the-us-can\">John&#8217;s Substack<\/a>:\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<p>On 3 May 2026, I was on \u201cSwitzerland\u201d with host Tom Switzer and Trita Parsi. Just before we did the podcast, President Trump put out a Truth Social post in which he said that starting the morning of 4 May, the US would begin to help neutral ships stranded in the Persian Gulf exit through the Strait of Hormuz. And if Iran interfered with those efforts, the US would deal with Tehran forcefully. Trita, Tom and I tried to make sense of this vague strategy, which came out of nowhere and does not seem workable. Surely, the Iranians will not like it! We also talked at some length about whether Iran is likely to cave into the enormous punishment the US is inflicting on it. Both Trita and I said no.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"YouTube video player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/o-a-Qe-RDQs?si=tfxZC7eTKWeEXH9j\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Reprinted from John&#8217;s Substack:\u00a0 On 3 May 2026, I was on \u201cSwitzerland\u201d with host Tom Switzer and Trita Parsi. Just before we did the podcast, President Trump put out a Truth Social post in which he said that starting the morning of 4 May, the US would begin to help neutral ships stranded in the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":308,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[1054],"class_list":["post-59125","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"0","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59125","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/308"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=59125"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59125\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59131,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59125\/revisions\/59131"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=59125"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=59125"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=59125"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=59125"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}