Trump Tells Aides He’s Willing to End War Without Reopening Hormuz
President Trump told aides he’s willing to end the U.S. military campaign against Iran even if the Strait of Hormuz remains largely closed, administration officials said, likely extending Tehran’s firm grip on the waterway and leaving a complex operation to reopen it for a later date.
In recent days, Trump and his aides assessed that a mission to pry open the chokepoint would push the conflict beyond his timeline of four to six weeks. He decided that the U.S. should achieve its main goals of hobbling Iran’s navy and its missile stocks and wind down current hostilities while pressuring Tehran diplomatically to resume the free flow of trade. If that fails, Washington would press allies in Europe and the Gulf to take the lead on reopening the strait, the officials said.
There are also military options the president could decide on, but they aren’t his immediate priority, they said. (…)
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, speaking Monday to Al Jazeera, said the current campaign to complete U.S. military objectives will be finished within weeks.
“Then we’ll be confronted with this issue of the Straits of Hormuz, and it will be up to Iran to decide,” said Rubio, who is also Trump’s national-security adviser, “or a coalition of nations from around the world and the region, with the participation of the United States, we’ll make sure that it’s open, one way or the other.” (…)
Suzanne Maloney, an Iran expert and vice president at the Brookings Institution in Washington, called ending military operations before the strait is open “unbelievably irresponsible.”
The U.S. and Israel started the war together and can’t walk away from the fallout, Maloney said. “Energy markets are inherently global, and there is no possibility of insulating the U.S. from the economic damage that is already occurring and will become exponentially worse if the closure of the strait continues.” (…)
Trump and his team say the strait matters far more to countries in Europe, the Middle East and Asia than to the U.S., insisting it isn’t vital to America’s energy needs. (…)
Bloomberg suggests this catalyst:
US gasoline climbed above an average of $4 a gallon for the first time since August 2022, one of the most visible measures of consumer pain in the world’s largest economy resulting from the war in Iran.
The nationwide average retail price for regular unleaded gas rose to $4.018 a gallon on Monday, according to the American Automobile Association. Prices have surged by more than $1 since the start of the war, up from $2.98 on the day before the US and Israel launched attacks against Tehran.
In a post on Truth Social, the US president, Donald Trump, has suggested that countries like the UK should build up the “courage” to go to the strait of Hormuz and “just take” fuel.
“You’ll have to start learning how to fight for yourself, the USA won’t be there to help you anymore, just like you weren’t there for us,” Trump said as he criticised countries who “refused to get involved in the decapitation of Iran”.
He said these countries could buy “jet fuel” from the US, where there is “plenty”, if they are running low on supplies.
“Iran has been, essentially, decimated. The hard part is done. Go get your own oil!” Trump concluded his social media post by saying. More details soon…
Did you miss yesterday’s Judgement Call?
Trump could ask Gulf states to contribute to war costs, says White House
The White House has raised the prospect that President Donald Trump could ask Gulf states to help pay to cover the costs of the US and Israel’s war with Iran.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked by a reporter on Monday whether countries such as Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates would “step up” to pay for “the vast majority of the cost of the war”, which the reporter claimed they did during the first Gulf war in 1990-91.
“Well, I think it’s something the president would be quite interested in calling them to do,” Leavitt said. “I won’t get ahead of him on that, but certainly, it’s an idea that I know that he has, and something that I think you’ll hear more from him on.” (…)
The US launched the current conflict with Iran against the urging of the Gulf states, whose leaders were concerned about bearing the brunt of the economic fallout.
Analysts estimate they have each sustained millions of dollars in lost revenues and structural damage from Tehran’s retaliatory strikes. (…)
Leavitt on Monday said the US has bombed more than 11,000 targets in Iran in the four weeks since the war started.
Eurozone Inflation Jumps as Iran War Cranks Energy Prices Higher Prices were 2.5% higher than a year earlier, the fastest increase since January 2025
The annual rate of inflation was 1.9% in February.
The rebound in inflation was expected, propelled by energy prices rising by 4.9%. That was the first annual increase since February 2025. (…)
Brent crude prices have climbed more than 50% to more than $100 a barrel since the first U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran on Feb. 28. Oil prices fell a little overnight Monday on hopes the conflict would be short-lived. (…)
China PMIs Signal Resilience as Mideast War Raises Uncertainty Nonmanufacturing PMI, which covers both service and construction activity, also bounced back to growth territory
China’s official manufacturing purchasing managers index rose to 50.4 this month from February’s 49.0, ending two straight months of contraction, according to data released by the National Bureau of Statistics. (…)
Meanwhile, China’s nonmanufacturing PMI, which covers both service and construction activity, also bounced back to growth territory, rising to 50.1 from 49.5 in February.
The subindex tracking service activity edged up to 50.2 from 49.7, while the construction subindex improved to 49.3 from 48.2, but continued to signal stress in China’s beleaguered property sector. (…)
Chinese manufacturers are feeling the sting of rising production costs.
Huo Lihui, a senior statistician at the National Bureau of Statistics, noted on Tuesday that factors including the conflict in the Middle East have spurred a sharp uptick in the cost of crude oil, chemicals, and other industrial raw materials this month.
The commodity price surge, compounded by rising global freight rates, is pressuring the manufacturing sector. According to Huo, a growing share of enterprises reported higher raw material and logistics expenses compared to the previous month. (…)
Over the medium term, the recent energy shock and heightened geopolitical uncertainty are likely to push more countries to prioritize energy security—a pivot that plays to Beijing’s strengths.
Achieving that security will require building nuclear power plants, rolling out renewable energy and accelerating the adoption of electric vehicles, according to Goldman Sachs economists.
“As China dominates many of these sectors, it stands to gain from this global shift,” the GS economists noted.
China’s Pivot to Vietnam Blows Hole in Trump’s Made-in-USA Plan A year on from “Liberation Day,” Trump’s tariffs have fueled a change in global supply chains — just not in the way he envisioned.
(…) A Bloomberg analysis of shipment-level customs data shows a shift in manufacturing toward Vietnam that begun under Trump’s first term has accelerated, with the country last year surpassing neighboring China as the leading supplier to the US of laptops and game consoles for the first time.
What’s more, the findings showed that the core production of those electronics is still happening in China. Faced with unpredictable tariffs, Chinese manufacturers found a cost-effective workaround: moving low-skilled, final assembly lines across the border to Vietnam, where they have faced lower levies. Vietnamese factories that screw together Chinese-made components and ship them onward added less than 8% of the export value in some cases, the Bloomberg analysis showed. (…)
The data also shows the US still bought $130 billion worth of seven big-ticket electronics from overseas last year, falling just over 1% compared with 2024. (…)
Bloomberg analysis of 2025 data found Fukang Technology Co., a subsidiary of Foxconn, exported $8.6 billion worth of MacBooks, iPads and motherboards for both products and servers, while importing $7.9 billion of various components from China, South Korea and Taiwan. That means at most 7.8% of the export value was created in Vietnam, if all final products at Fukang were exported.
BYD Co., although better known for its electric cars, also makes iPads for Apple Inc. and follows a similar strategy. From its factory in Phu Tho, 100 kilometers (62 miles) outside of Hanoi, it exported $5.1 billion worth of iPads and other products, and imported $4.9 billion of components, generating only 4.5% of the export value in Vietnam. Imports from China accounted for 61% of its inward shipments, almost the same share as Foxconn.
The hiring sprees in Vietnam deal a blow to the “Made in USA” agenda touted by Trump, who wants to bring back manufacturing and blue-collar jobs to America. (…)
“The optics of being the country with the largest trade surplus against the US means Vietnam is now a bigger target for the administration. It is a strong risk to Vietnam’s economy,” said Jian Xin Heng, senior Asia analyst at BMI. (…)
FYI:
Via Callum Thomas:
- Geopolitical Pathways: the typical pathway through geopolitical panics is to plunge and then eventually rebound… But is this a typical geopolitical issue? I’d say there are probably more parallels with 2022 than some of the other relative non-event geopolitical flare-ups over the years. Especially given the starting point of relative euphoria and overvaluation. Still it’s a useful map for how things might unfold.
Source: @SamRo
- Tech or Treat: although this is using forward PE ratios (which rely on forward earnings, which themselves can be overinflated), we have seen a significant reset in Tech sector forward PE ratios down to the lower end of the range (albeit not quite to 2020 or 2018 levels as yet). Still, unless we’re going to go through a classic big bad bear, this is another thing saying we’re getting closer.
Source: @TheShortBear
- Midterm Malaise & Magic: back on the “getting close” theme, this table is a good reminder that Midterm Malaise is a real thing (and p.s. there are plenty of examples where it got materially worse than our ~9% down so far) —— But also, don’t forget the magic that follows. Subsequent 1-year returns off the Midterm lows had a habit of rewarding those who managed to get in at the bottom.
Source: @adamkhootrader
New book: Trump’s 10 leadership commandments
(…) Based on all those years of studying Trump, Sonnenfeld says the tactics include “divide and conquer, the sleeper effect of constantly repeating false information with unshakable confidence, starting negotiations by giving the other side a bloody nose rather than a handshake of trust, centralizing all power [in your own hands], personal grandiose branding on everything.”
“The key insight about how Donald Trump leads is that he is the sun around which all else must revolve in the Trump solar system,” Sonnenfeld concludes. “Power must not reside in institutions, collectives, or equals; all power must radiate from Trump himself. If he is not at the center of an event, then in his retelling, it is not important, or it did not happen.”
BTW: Trump library reveal
President Trump last night unveiled the first renderings of the presidential library he plans to build on prime Miami real estate after he leaves office.
A nearly two-minute video on Truth Social depicts it towering over the city’s existing skyscrapers, suggesting the shrine could become the tallest building in South Florida.
The mock-ups show space for an Air Force One 747 jet, a Marine One helicopter and several other aircraft.
Plans also include a large golden statue of Trump in an auditorium (pictured below) and a golden escalator reminiscent of the one the president famously descended in 2015 at Trump Tower in Manhattan.
Local officials will have little say over the project — including its height — after Florida barred cities and counties from regulating presidential libraries, Axios’ Marc Caputo notes.
The state handed over the 2.63-acre plot of land, formerly a parking lot for Miami Dade College, to Trump’s library foundation last year for $10.
Also yesterday, the pro-Trump state lawmakers who control Tallahassee gave Trump another gift when Gov. Ron DeSantis signed legislation officially renaming Palm Beach International Airport to “the President Donald J. Trump International Airport.”