Trump & Israel Panic; Iran Adds To Their Hormuz Leverage

Trump tried to choke Iran through Hormuz, and Iran looked under the water and found the Gulf’s internet bill. Right, so Iran has just found a new switch under the Strait of Hormuz, a secret weapon you could say and Donald Trump helped put it within reach. But it’s not a missile switch, not an oil tanker switch, not another warship photo-op for the world’s most overfunded floating panic attack AKA the US Navy, but something quieter, buried, and far more awkward for the Gulf states that thought American protection made them safe. You see when Iranian military spokesman Ebrahim Zolfaghari brought this hidden asset up, he wasn’t talking about a big red button in a Bond villain bunker, because that would be very silly, though don’t put it past America to yet depict the Ayatollah stroking a white cat dressed up as Dr Evil, but unfortunately for Trump, what Iran is now pointing at is more practical than that. It is the undersea fibre-optic infrastructure running through and around Hormuz, the same narrow passage everybody talks about when oil tankers are involved, but somehow forgets when cloud services, banking traffic, Gulf data centres, telecoms operators and the shiny new artificial intelligence economy need somewhere to send their traffic. Iran is apparently laying out a plan to charge licence fees, require annual renewals, push foreign tech companies under Iranian law, and reserve cable repair and maintenance for Iranian companies. So the American blockade that was meant to squeeze Iran’s ports has now been answered with a very simple question from Tehran: if everybody else gets to price risk in Hormuz, why exactly should the cables under it not be priced in too?