US Should Get Paid For Strait Of Hormuz, Says Trump

By Chidinma Onwuchekwa

United States President Donald Trump has said the US will probably take over the Strait of Hormuz and should be reimbursed for controlling the waterway, as Washington and Tehran assert competing claims over the strategic passage.

“We’re going to keep the strait, and we’ll probably run it. We’ll become the guardian of the strait. Maybe we’ll call it the guardian angel of the strait.

And we should be reimbursed for that,” Trump said in a phone interview on Fox News’s “Fox & Friends” programme on Monday.

He said the US had guarded the strait for free for many years and should now be compensated, adding that other nations benefiting from safe passage through the waterway are wealthy enough to pay for it.

Trump disputed Iran’s claims of having blocked the strait, saying the US was “taking over” it and that Iran had “nothing.”

His comments come as control of the Strait of Hormuz, a critical route for global oil supplies, has become one of the main battlegrounds of the renewed conflict between the two countries.

Iran’s effective blockade of the strait has driven up energy prices and stoked concerns about inflation globally.

Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said in a statement on Monday that the only way to restore regular shipping traffic through the strait was to end US military interventions there, warning that continued interference could lead to greater incidents in the global oil and gas sector.

US and Iranian forces exchanged heavy missile and drone attacks over the weekend and into Monday, with Tehran saying it had struck US military facilities across the Gulf while keeping the strait closed.

The exchanges mark a sharp escalation in both the pace and geographic reach of attacks over the past week, casting doubt on an interim US-Iranian agreement signed last month to reopen the strait and halt hostilities while both sides pursued a further 60 days of negotiations.