US begins blockade of Iran’s ports, Tehran threatens retaliation

(Reuters)

WASHINGTON/DUBAI, April 13 – The U.S. military began a blockade of Iran’s ports on Monday, President Donald Trump said, and Tehran threatened to ​retaliate against its Gulf neighbors’ ports after weekend talks in Islamabad on ending the war broke down.

A U.S. official said there was continued engagement with Iran, and forward motion on ‌trying to get to an agreement. Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif also said efforts were still under way to resolve the conflict.

But oil prices climbed back to $100 per barrel, with no sign of a swift reopening of the Strait of Hormuz to ease the biggest ever disruption in supplies and broader concerns over the durability of a two-week ceasefire agreement reached last week.

Trump said Iran had been in touch on Monday and wanted to make a deal but that he would not sanction any ​agreement allowing Tehran to have a nuclear weapon.

“Iran will not have a nuclear weapon,” Trump told reporters at the White House. “We can’t let a country blackmail or extort the world.”

Since the United States ​and Israel began the war on February 28, Iran effectively shut the Strait of Hormuz to all vessels except its own, saying passage would be permitted ⁠only under Iranian control and subject to a fee.

Trump has said Washington would block Iranian vessels and any ships that paid such tolls and that any Iranian “fast-attack” ships that went near the blockade would be eliminated.

Brigadier ​General Reza Talaei-Nik, a spokesperson for Iran’s Ministry of Defense, warned that foreign military efforts to police the strait would escalate the crisis and instability in global energy security.

NATO allies including Britain and France said they would not ​be drawn into the conflict by taking part in the blockade, stressing instead the need to reopen the waterway, through which about one-fifth of the world’s oil normally passes.

The talks between the U.S. and Iran in Pakistan, the first direct meeting in more than a decade and the highest-level discussions since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, ended on Sunday without an agreement.